Space – the final frontier.
Because apparently we keep coming back to it.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its premature mission – to journey to strange new worlds
To seek out new actors with new forehead makeup
To boldly go where we’ve already gone before.
Well, an Internet friend of mine pointed out that YouTube was given the rights to show the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, so I didn’t have to pay for Paramount Plus to watch it. And from what I’ve seen, it lives up to the hype.
It starts with Captain Christopher Pike still trying to process the mental fallout from Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, which has put a touch of grey into Anson Mount’s All-American Hero persona. When Admiral Robert April shows up at Pike’s ranch and orders him to get back on the Enterprise to rescue his Number One (Rebecca Romijn) from a first contact mission gone awry, Pike is reluctant to go. He’s going through what might be described as pre-traumatic stress syndrome, in which he keeps reliving the vision of the future where he sees his own death, “or as good as.” Spock (Ethan Peck), the only other crewman he can discuss those events with, quickly deduces what’s going on. Spock and a new crewman (Christina Chong) give Pike new and unique perspectives on living with the knowledge of death, and he reaches a kind of Zen approach to accepting his fate.
The problem that I (and a bunch of other people) had with Discovery (aka, DISCO, STD) is that it wanted to be all “progressive” and different even as it insisted on being set in the Star Trek history before Kirk. The much-maligned Enterprise series at least tried to appear as though it were part of the setting’s pre-Original Series past, but Discovery never bothered, creating all kinds of setting anachronisms that could only be resolved by chucking the entire cast and ship into the next millennium.
Strange New Worlds really isn’t that much like the Original Series. Unlike the James Cawley and Vic Mignogna fan projects, they don’t try to make the sets look just like the ’60s Enterprise, and the established characters don’t look or act like the original actors, even to the extent that the JJ Abrams cast did. But I think they’re getting the right tone. The cast has the kind of camaraderie and heroism that I remember from the original show, including Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who looks nothing like Nichelle Nichols but is immensely charming, especially in the pilot episode’s last scene.
But even if this cishet, conventional Star Trek goes in the opposite direction of Discovery, it confirms that old-school Trek was always more liberal and less conservative than some people want to believe. Because in the pilot episode, Strange New Worlds went there. When Pike rescues his Away Team they tell him that the natives of the planet in question reverse-engineered antimatter tech when their astronomers observed the Discovery’s warp jump into the future. And rather than use it to develop space travel, they’re using it to make strategic weapons. So Pike just says “screw General Order One” and appears at the peace talks between the squabbling factions. And he shows them footage from Earth’s history immediately after the 20th Century, including real footage of people marching on Washington with signs like “AUDIT THE VOTE.” The writers have retconned Trek’s Eugenics Wars to be just one stage of a larger conflict that included a second American Civil War and culminated in a nuclear exchange that led to the extinction of hundreds of animal and plant species and 30 percent of the human population. And Pike tells the diplomats that that’s where they’re headed.
I mean it seems like crazy science fiction, but when the main sponsor of fascism around the world just started a genocidal war, and threatens to launch nukes if the international community doesn’t let him win, cause apparently he’s deathly ill and doesn’t have anything to lose, and meanwhile his main protege in the United States makes his master look like Bertrand Russell, and he’s STILL got at least even odds of getting re-elected president, well, who knows what could happen?
With Strange New Worlds, what we’ve got so far is good enough that I want to see where it goes next. I’m still not sure I want to pay for another streaming service when I can’t make the time to watch what I have. If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch the show but you still have to get an add-on subscription to Paramount. However they do have a 7-day free trial offer. After a few weeks I may check that out to see some more episodes. I may also binge Discovery Season 4 and Star Trek: Picard Season 2, if only to see if they’re AS bad as everyone says they are.