It’s hard to believe it’s been two entire years since the last season of Paramount+’s sole remaining leg of the “Star Trek” franchise, “Strange New Worlds,” graced our streaming screens. In the interim, Paramount has swept in and quietly cancelled or cut off at the knees all of its remaining series: “Discovery,” “Picard,” “Lower Decks,” and “Prodigy” are all gone (even if “Prodigy” somehow returns for a third season, it’d be on Netflix). In the meantime, all “Trek” fans have had to nibble on is a deeply disappointing “Section 31” movie that barely felt like the final frontier at all. So it’s natural to crave the comforting, episodic delights of “Strange New Worlds”‘ third season, a show that continues to uphold the ideals of its franchise’s point of origin, even as its swings boldly go nowhere all that deep.
When last we left the crew of the USS Enterprise, they were facing a Gorn invasion of a remote Federation colony, with the Gorn having captured several members of the crew, and a fleet of enemy ships bearing down on Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his intrepid crew. The season opener, “Hegemony Part II,” concludes this two-parter in exciting fashion, an action-packed and dramatic hour that offers plenty of chances for the show’s top-notch effects work and production design to shine. (That said, I’d be happy for the show to look a little less feature-ready if it meant squeezing a few more episodes into the season order. Ten episodes are just not enough for a season of “Trek,” especially one so indebted to the light, exploratory rhythms of vintage TV.)
More than all the hurried technobabble, explosions, and a surprising surfeit of body horror, though, the premiere sets up a few season-long questions the rest of the season’s first half explores in the background of its otherwise standalone brief. The events of the episode lead to a ticking-clock scenario for Pike’s lover and fellow captain, Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano, also doing yeoman’s work on “Revival“), whose looming Gorn infection offers Pike more to do than his usual captaining. We also finally get to see some new shades from Lt. Ortegas (Melissa Navia), as her trauma from the Klingon War and her experiences as a Gorn prisoner start to affect her judgment (and her dynamic with Rebecca Romijn’s Number One). And crucially, we begin to fill in more gaps from the pre-TOS crew, with Martin Quinn’s Scotty now joining the ship officially as its jittery new engineer, who can pull off miracles as long as you hold a phaser to his head. (He bounces well off Carol Kane‘s Chief Pelia, though the latter pops in and out of the season more frequently than I’d like.)
But underneath those serialized threads, “Strange New Worlds” remains committed to stretching its legs and exploring wilder tones than the franchise often allows itself; over the course of these five episodes, we see space battles, holographic murder mysteries, sliding-doors romantic farces, and even a horror-tinged pastiche I don’t remember having seen in the franchise to date. What’s remarkable about these whiplashing tones is that showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, and their own crew of writers, manage to navigate that asteroid field with particular aplomb, letting each episode have its own feel without making it feel like it’s a different show each time.
Take “Wedding Bell Blues,” the season’s prerequisite “Spock farce” episode, which offers plenty of room for gags about dewey-eyed jealousy as he sees his ex, Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), nurture a new relationship with Dr. Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) (and a mysterious godlike being, played with impish delight by Rhys Darby, who gives him the chance to imagine a different life). Like any good Spock-centric episode, it gives Ethan Peck the chance to demonstrate his exceptional comic chops, as well as his innate understanding of Spock’s roped-in tempestuousness. And it ends on a surprising note of grace for anyone who’s had to let go of the hopes of rekindling an old flame. (That the show continues to prod that wound in future eps remains a weak point, though I guess it’s an indicator that that journey, as the Prophets of “Deep Space Nine” would say, is not linear.)
The rest of the cast get their moment to shine, as well; Babs Olusanmokun’s Dr. M’Benga gets an episode to reckon with his demons from the Klingon War (in the form of a knife fight to the death that recalls his fate at the end of “Dune: Part One“), and Christina Chong’s La’an Noonien Singh gets a rare lighter entry in “A Space Adventure Hour,” which spins a fantasy about a ’60s murder mystery story into a pastiche reflection on original “Trek”‘s early days as a cheesy TV show and its cultural importance. (The cold open for that one gives Kirk actor Paul Wesley the chance to go full Shatner, and it’s a riot.)
Where the season’s still stumbling is in its innate nature as a morality play, something the original series prided itself on and which “Strange New Worlds” has previously emulated. You won’t find big, speechy episodes like season two’s “Ad Astra Per Aspera” in this season’s crop (though that could change as the season develops); instead, the show aims to keep it light, with its darkest moments focused on the emotional whirlwinds of its characters rather than making broad political allegories. The closest we get is late in the aforementioned ’60s throwback episode, where one character gets to opine on the utility of a “Star Trek” show to inspire its audience, to make it look up at the stars and dream of what’s out there. That kind of optimism is what set this franchise apart in the 20th century—and which streaming legs of the franchise like “Picard” struggled to capture.
By Paramount’s reckoning, “Strange New Worlds” is set to end in its fifth season, with the fourth being filmed alongside this one. No one knows what to expect as this last leg of the “Trek” franchise enters its final frontier. But we’ve got plenty of light-years to go, and we might as well enjoy the genuinely thrilling ride while we’re on it.
First five episodes screened for review. First two episodes are currently streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes airing Thursdays.
