Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 1

 

Based on: Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry

Created by: Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet

Executive producers: Eugene Roddenberry, Trevor Roth, Jenny Lumet, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Aaron Baiers, Heather Kadin, Henry Alonso Myers, Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman

Starring: Anson Mount (Capt. Pike), Ethan Peck (Spock), Jess Bush (Nurse Chapel), Christina Chong (La'an), Celia Rose Gooding (Nyota Uhura), Melissa Navia (Erica Ortegas), Babs Olusanmokun (Dr. M'Benga), Bruce Horak (Hemmer), Rebecca Romijn (Una/Number One)

This series has been important for me personally because it's the first Star Trek series I've ever caught on air! 

I only truly became aware of Star Trek as even a thing I might like back in college around 2013 when my best friend insisted I watch The Next Generation (TNG). (I loved it.) But even in the ensuing decade, it never occurred to me that the franchise was still up and running; I thought it was all done. Only in recent years I realized Discovery is still airing, and when Strange New Worlds was announced, I was thrilled to catch one from the get-go. I also tried Prodigy which aired around the same time, but felt it was a bit too childish; it is geared toward kids, haha. 

Aside of only a few minor complaints, I've been very happy and impressed with Strange New World (SNW). I watched the first season of the original series a few years back, so I've been able to recognize a few of the more major references in SNW and appreciate that a bit more. The minor complaints are just about modernization. I've consistently felt like SNW has tried hard to make itself modern, and the extra effort shows and feels awkward. The aesthetics of their Enterprise are overtly sparkly and shiny. The bridge kind of yells "CBS is pouring a lot of money into this to make it look really fancy and sci-fi, so you better like it!" There myriad of bright colors, LED lights, and glowing panels are everywhere. Every screen has very colorful diagrams shining brightly that are always shifting dynamically, with maps revolving or graphs shifting with data. If I were on the crew of that ship, I'd have a headache from overstimulation every day. 

Pike & Spock in front of a great example of the overly bright background!

More of the bridge and its commanding officers 

The characters also feel overtly modern. Many of them have hairstyles that feel sleek, edgy, and stylish. Finally, the character's personalities and communication. Especially Pike, Ortegas, and Nurse Chapel all feel like they can't take things too seriously without cracking a joke or making the situation feel a bit lighter. That's a very modern attitude and coping mechanism and I didn't see it in either the original series or in TNG. It's exacerbated by Pike's chosen slogan of "Hit it," a reference to Picard's "Make it so," which made me cringe when I first heard Pike use it. The season finale made it a bit better because the catch phrase melded more with Pike's personality and felt appropriate in the situation, but I don't think it should've taken the entire season to feel right! 

I wanted to mention those things because they bothered me and made it difficult to immerse myself as well as I could in TNG and the original series, but I don't want to dwell!! 

Spock and his fiancée T'Pring (Gia Sandhu); their relationship allowed the show to explore Spock in really interesting ways

SNW's first season succeeded in creating a place for itself in the Star Wars canon, paying great homage to the original series with familiar characters other easter eggs while paving its own way. It created some original, very intriguing character backgrounds and motivations, and the dynamics on the bridge are different and unique from other iterations. Some of my favorite character backgrounds where Pike having glimpsed the future before the series started, giving him a traumatizing view of character deaths to come. The other is Dr. M'Benga, whose young daughter is being held in stasis in a transporter frequency to stave off death from a terminal disease. The show does great service to known characters like Spock and Uhura, exploring their characters more and showing how they might have become the people we know and love in the original series. (SNW takes places a decade before the original series in world canon.) 

Uhura and Spock, I really enjoyed the portrayals in this series. 

An earlier episode involved exploring a sentient asteroid allowed Uhura to shine with her linguistics expertise

The show has also been largely episodic, true to the nature of the previous incarnations I've seen. There are a few episodes that carry over plot details, especially regarding those character backgrounds. I'm not usually a fan of very episodic shows because I tend to really prefer overarching storylines. But Star Trek manages to do this well, and I'm not even sure why! I suppose it's fun to see the same crew tackle different problems and to see how creative the writers get with their sci-fi, alien creations, and philosophy of alliances vs aggression. And they always succeed. There are very few episodes in all of the franchise I've seen that have truly bored me, and the ones that have usually involve silly adventures with fairy tales or western-inspired shenanigans. 

I'm very excited with how the season finale ended. It gave Pike a plethora of screen-time and explored his personal history of time travel and his ability to perform risky diplomatic maneuvers when confronting an aggressive alien ship. Both of these were fascinating to me and presented very nice break from the "can't be too serous" theme I complained about above, because the whole episode had very dire stakes. The crew rose to the occasion well and Pike performed even better, cementing his ability as captain. The show has already been renewed, so I'm really looking forward to where it goes next!