Streaming on: Paramount+
Episodes viewed: 3 of 10
From the outset, the agenda is clear: Anson Mount intoning the famous “five-year mission” speech over Alexander Courage’s classic Star Trek fanfare, followed by Jeff Russo’s devoted homage to the original theme. Where Discovery disappeared hundreds of years into the future for its third season, and Picard went dystopian, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is ‘Nostalgia Trek’: colourful, fun, and boldly going where everything’s comfortably familiar. A prequel to a show from the 1960s, but also a spin-off from another 2020s prequel to the same series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds beams in with a lot of baggage, but to its credit, you don’t need a degree from Starfleet Academy to keep up.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, specifically the version we encountered in Discovery, with some additional familiar faces (Jess Bush as an amusingly sadistic Nurse Chapel, Celia Rose Gooding as a confident and self-possessed Nyota Uhura) and some new characters (Christina Chong’s prickly La’an Noonien Singh, Bruce Horak’s blind Andorian engineer Hemmer). This is the Enterprise before Kirk, and nominally that of 1965 Star Trek’s unaired first pilot episode ‘The Cage’ (itself recycled as flashbacks in 1966 two-parter ‘The Menagerie’). The latter, of course, gave us Pike’s grim fate, which the Pike of Strange New Worlds is aware of, thanks to some Discovery foreshadowing. Haunted by the knowledge that he’ll be burned and paralysed in a decade’s time, Pike has retreated to snowy Montana, grey and shaggy and less than inclined to return to work. That is until Admiral Robert April (Adrian Holmes) shows up to pull him back in.
While visually stunning and never less than engaging, Strange New Worlds is, so far, content to play the Star Trek hits.
Deeper ’60s cuts include Spock’s fianceé T’Pring (Gia Sandu) — who hails from the 1967 episode ‘Amok Time’ — and Jim’s brother Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte), who was played by Shatner himself in ‘Operation – Annihilate!’. Also harking back to classic Trek is the refreshing return of a more episodic structure in contrast to the recent shows’ whole-season arcs. There are linking threads, but these are largely standalone episodes, with rotating character focus. Episode 2 has strong Uhura energy, for example, and a lovely performance from Gooding, subtly evoking Nichelle Nichols while making the character her own. Episode 3, meanwhile, has major revelations about Rebecca Romijn’s Number One, and the secret of what Babs Olusanmokun’s Dr M’Benga has buffering in the medical transporter.
Pike’s lively first mission is to a planet that’s mysteriously developed warp technology too early. Episodes 2 and 3 involve, respectively, tense negotiations with an irritable alien species that worships a destructive comet, and the compelling mystery of a missing colony of “augments”, in which La’an’s relationship to the more famous Khan Noonien Singh is spelled out. But that third episode is also an everyone-on-the-Enterprise-goes-crazy story, which, along with the Prime Directive-focused first episode and alien-brinkmanship second, give the impression that, while visually stunning and never less than engaging, Strange New Worlds is, so far, content to play the Star Trek hits.