I took the plunge and got Paramount Plus (since I could just add it to my existing Amazon Prime account) and eventually binged Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season One to see if it held to the standard it had in the publicly released pilot.
Some impressions:
The girl playing Spock’s fiancee (Gia Sandhu) is better at doing Leonard Nimoy’s raised-eyebrow lift than Ethan Peck (the guy currently playing Spock).
If there’s anything I don’t like about SNW, it’s how they changed the Gorn into basically a race of space-faring Xenomorphs who cannot be reasoned with, which is especially odd because the one Original Series episode that used the Gorn (‘Arena’) started with the premise that they were a savage race but then Kirk found out they had their own reasons to feel threatened by the Federation, and the encounter managed to work out peacefully.
The security chief La’an (Christine Chong) is clearly the least sympathetic character, though I also think that’s on purpose. This is that much more obvious in the episodes where Chong is allowed to play against type.
Strange New Worlds was advertised as being more episodic (like the original Star Trek or TNG) in comparison to Discovery or Picard which have been focused on season-arcing plots. This is not exactly true. There’s no over-arcing “Big Bad/Bad Wolf” motif in Season 1, but there are several character arcs that recur over the course of the season, such as the courtship of Spock and T’Pring (which the audience knows will end badly), and the parallel flirtation between Spock and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), teasing what might be an interesting Season 2 with the villain played by Jesse James Keitel being married to Spock’s half-brother, the villain of Star Trek V. I mean, they could screw up that premise but I doubt they could screw it up as much as that movie did.
They finally gave a background to Number One (Rebecca Romijn), a character from the ’60s pilot who was so much of a cipher that the script didn’t give her a name other than “Number One.” Even in this production, her given name “Una” is just a synonym for “one.” Prior to SNW, fan fiction had assumed that Number One’s artificial identity meant she comes from some Human offshoot culture, and that turns out to be the case: Una is an Illyrian, from a Human nation that deals with the Federation but cannot join it because they use genetic engineering as applied technology when the Federation maintains a ban on it,due to the Eugenics Wars and the legacy of superman dictators like Khan Noonien Singh. What complicates things is that La’an considers Number One to be her role model as a Starfleet officer, but her surname is Noonien-Singh, which accounts for much of her character angst. (‘What’s your name, soldier?’ ‘Bill. Bill Hitler. No relation.’) La’an and Dr. M’Benga agree to keep Una’s secret but when it comes out, Una is arrested by Starfleet in a season-ending cliffhanger.
The engineer discovers that M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has been using power from the transporter, and the doctor eventually tells Una that he has a young child with a fatal blood disease, and he smuggled her aboard in the transporter, keeping her in beam-lock as a makeshift suspended animation while he works on a cure. He takes her out periodically to share time and to read her favorite fairy tale book. This mini-arc gets resolved in the most deliberately silly episode of the season.
Pike (Anson Mount) remains haunted by his vision of the future, knowing that he saves young cadets from a radiation accident but is then condemned to live the rest of his life in a power chair that only allows him to click “YES” or “NO” (because in 1967, the effects department at NBC couldn’t imagine the interface system that Stephen Hawking had access to by the mid-1980s). However he is not aware of how he ends up after that (which was the story of original Trek’s ‘The Menagerie’) so he assumes that that vision is the end of his life. He also seems remarkably willing to discuss this issue with other people, given that the events surrounding Discovery Season 2 are supposed to be a Federation secret on par with the existence of Talos IV.
Pike’s latest attempt to thwart this fate leads to “A Quality of Mercy”, which is probably the best overall episode in terms of the level of its stakes and how it reinforces both Pike’s sacrifice and the bond he makes with Spock. Unfortunately, Paul Wesley (guest starring as Captain Kirk) through no fault of his own, less resembles William Shatner than Jim Carrey playing William Shatner on In Living Color.
That particular episode also implied that Kirk was ultimately the better captain where it counted and that it was better for the universe that Pike didn’t save himself from his future. In Strange New Worlds, they’ve made Pike a happy medium between the American military mindset of Captain Kirk and the compassionate humanism of Captain Picard, but in this alternate-timeline run of original Trek’s “Balance of Terror” episode, Pike ultimately decided to let the Romulans live, when the failure of their mission in the main timeline was what stopped a general war.
I really like the cast, especially Mount. If I squint hard enough, I can almost imagine him as Jeffrey Hunter. However, Ethan Peck just doesn’t come off as Spock to me. He doesn’t remind me of Leonard Nimoy or even Zachary Quinto. As I’ve said, it matters less when you have new actors for characters the audience has only seen once or twice (Pike, Number One, M’Benga) and more when you have characters who’ve been around most of the series (Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Chapel). Again, I LIKE these people, and I like what they’re doing with the characters, but they don’t really bring to mind the Original Series.
Strange New Worlds actually IS what Discovery was promoted as – an attempt to take pre-Kirk Star Trek in a new direction with modern sensibilities and production values – and while in the back of my mind it’s just not enough like original Trek to me, it’s good enough on its own terms to where it’s worth watching. Not just that, it’s better Trek in one season than half of Discovery and two-thirds of Star Trek: Picard. And now we’ve got the preview for Season 2, which looks to be much the same, only more so. Plus, the Klingons are back, and their makeup DOESN’T suck.