Tag: star trek

Someone finally remembered to put the Trek back into Star Trek, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has arrived just in time for weary fans of the franchise. 

Star Trek has had a mixed decade or so – ever since the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies faded out with the underwhelming Nemesis, there’s been a growing sense that Star Trek isn’t quite sure what it wants to be.

Will it reboot and start over entirely, like the three Chris Pine-led movies? Will it boldly go in a new direction like the ballyhooed Star Trek: Discovery, or return to well-loved old friends like Star Trek: Picard? Will it make a hard swerve into animated satire like Lower Decks? With the latest spin-off – the eighth live-action Star Trek series, if you’re counting – Star Trek goes back to the basics, and Strange New Worlds is all the better for it.

Retro without being camp, Strange New Worlds is set on the USS Enterprise several years before Kirk became its captain. It follows Captain Christopher Pike (first seen in a few episodes of the ‘60s series) and his science officer Spock as the ship boldly goes to explore strange new… well, you get the idea.

Although it’s a prequel and weighed down by existing canon (including Pike’s grim ultimate fate), so far it’s a breezy ride that evokes the spirit of TOS – the original series – far more successfully than anything since The Next Generation. 

I maintain that one of the worst developments for television series was Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s embrace of the serialised “Big Bad,” in which the entire season leads up to a final confrontation with some menace. While Buffy was pretty great, it didn’t mean every single series needed to have a ‘Big Bad.’ The ‘Big Bad’ has become a plague on serialised television. Its bad influence can be seen in shows like the Arrow-verse superhero franchises, which were weakened by Big Bad envy and a constant desire to top themselves and up the menace. ST: Discovery and Picard are both guilty of this too (along with other flaws) and it’s kept these shows from living up to their predecessors.

I gave up on Discovery after the third season, where despite a lot of potential, the show seemed determined to be “the Michael Burnham Show” and never let any other characters have a chance to breathe, never let up from its bludgeoning insistence that it was deep and it mattered. It wasn’t fun. 

Strange New Worlds is fun. We’re only five episodes in, but already it feels like the best Trek in years. The rainbow-coloured uniforms inspired by the original series set the tone from the start.  Anson Mount’s Captain Pike is charismatic and stalwart, while Ethan Peck has the hard job of shadowing Leonard Nimoy’s inimitable Spock, but pulls it off pretty well. The crew is a mix of familiar characters – a very young Uhura, a spunky Nurse Chapel – and new, like Rebecca Romjin’s dynamic Number One and Christina Chong‘s La’an Noonien Singh, who shares an ancestry with a very famous Trek villain. 

Strange New Worlds is confident about what kind of Star Trek it wants to be from the word “engage.” Unlike Discovery, which flailed and reinvents itself each season, SNW is fully formed. In five episodes, we’ve already learned more about the crew’s bridge characters than I did over three seasons of Discovery. Star Trek is about the entire crew, not just a captain, and so far the old-school Enterprise’s team are an enjoyable group of well-worn Starfleet cliches and intriguing newcomers. 

What’s wrong with a good done-in-one story, anyway? So far, SNW has had a blast on the “mission of the week” stories The Next Generation and original series excelled at – miniature action movies with hefty doses of character development, humour and an epic sense of wonder. 

After 50-plus years, it’s hard to find new life in a franchise. While excavating the past and nostalgia are prime reason for Strange New Worlds’ existence, it wouldn’t work if the show itself wasn’t so darned endearing. It may stumble – after all, it’s only halfway through its first season – but at the moment, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is roaring along at warp speed. 

Look, I’m a Star Trek fan. I’m used to some mild disappointment mixed with pleasure. But I’m still a fan. At its best, the questing curiousity of Star Trek blows away the good vs. evil tropes of Star Wars in my mind. 

And so I watch Star Trek: Discovery, and I keep hoping for it to be better than it actually is. 

Star Trek: Discovery is a show that, three seasons on, has never quite figured out what it wants to be. Season 1 was a vast war and conspiracy epic that also managed to wrap in parallel universes. Season 2 combined crowd-pleasing returns for Spock and Captain Pike with an impenetrably complex time-travel apocalypse/evil robots arc. Season 3 has jettisoned all that and taken us 900 years into the future for another fresh start. 

Discovery has also spent far too much of the time focusing on Michael Burnham, played by Sonequa Martin-Green with a wide-eyed enthusiasm that often tips over into straight-out overacting. Sure, Captain Kirk overacted too, but it’s not 1967 any more. The more measured acting style of a Patrick Stewart or an Avery Brooks is sorely missed. 

The biggest problem with Discovery it that it goes for an 11 every time when a 6 or 7 would do. It’s a show that demands emotional bombast but doesn’t actually earn it most of the time. An overpowering soundtrack telegraphs every weepy epiphany, and the show is constantly telling us how much the characters love each other without really showing it much. 

Take the most recent episode, where a security officer who’s been relegated to the background for so long now I forgot she was still on the show gets an emotional farewell arc. The worst example of this was in Season 2 when a character, Airiam, who’d barely been more than a glorified robot-headed extra, died in a blaze of glory and got what felt like an episode-long funeral. It was filled with the worst of Discovery’s mawkish sentimentality, all for a character we barely even knew but the show wanted us to mourn like she was Spock.  

Three seasons on, too much of Discovery’s cast are still ciphers, with Burnham’s character taking up most of the oxygen. I don’t hate Burnham, like a lot of online fans do. I’m pleased to see a Black woman lead a Star Trek show. But her character is written as an annoyingly inconsistent cross between an impulsive rebel and a Starfleet true believer, elbowing aside all other characters.

Doug Jones’ Saru is my favourite, a fascinating contrast to previous starship captains, and he’s fortunately become more and more prominent over time. The relationship between Lt. Stamets and Dr. Culber also feels far more genuine than most of the show’s telegraphed “big moments.” Tig Notaro’s snarky Jet Reno is also a welcome addition. But three seasons on, most of the bridge crew are still not much advanced beyond “blonde girl” and “Asian man” and “person with stuff on her face.”

One of the biggest pleasures of Star Trek over the years has been its ensemble casts, something Discovery keeps losing sight of. Discovery’s choice to focus so much on Burnham has left it lacking the diverse storytelling that Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all had, where one week might focus on Worf and the next on Riker. It makes the show feel hobbled and far less widescreen than Star Trek should be. 

I’ll still boldly go where Discovery goes, because I’m a fan, and because there are plenty of good moments amid the wonky scripts and overwrought storytelling. But the voyage doesn’t have to be quite this bumpy.