Well Strange New Worlds Season Three totally snuck up on me and now that it’s about over, I realized I hadn’t covered SNW Season 2.
Season One was clearly a showcase for modern Trek’s breakout star, Anson Mount as Captain Pike, with the broad arc of the season being his attempts to either escape or cope with the knowledge of his grim fate, culminating in an alternate timeline where he was the captain of the Enterprise during the “Balance of Terror” scenario and his decisions turned out to be disastrous for everyone but himself. We don’t see that much of Mount in the first few weeks of Season Two; it turned out he was taking family leave to be present for the birth of his first child. This was a good thing insofar as the audience got to see the strength of SNW’s large ensemble cast.
This started with the resolution of the Season 1 cliffhanger where Number One (Rebecca Romijn) was arrested for being from a genetically modified species, against Federation laws. This continued Romijn’s development of a character who only appeared in the original pilot by actually giving her an origin and a sympathetic background. It ended with the premise that Una would get to stay in the Federation on the grounds of being a refugee, which is one of those recurring science-fiction things (especially in Star Trek) where the status quo is technically preserved but the protagonist is made an exception to it because of “main character energy.”
Later when Pike was brought back to the Enterprise, they had the episode “Among the Lotus Eaters”, which was set on Rigel VII, in reference to one of Pike’s previous adventures referred to in “The Cage.” A radiation anomaly affected both the away team and the ship in orbit, causing everyone to lose their memories and revert to either barbarism or helplessness. This story highlighted one of the show’s most popular original characters, Erica Ortegas, who managed to get herself together to go to the bridge and save the day, but the writing was still a bit forced. Ortegas is a good enough character and Melissa Navia is a good enough actress that she needs a bit more motivation than “I’m Erica Ortegas, and I fly the ship.” Fortunately, they did work on that in Season 3.
One of the minor recurring arcs in Season 2 was where the implied attraction between Nurse Chapel and Spock in The Original Series became a full-fledged romance, and they managed to do it in a low-key way that didn’t violate established continuity. Too much. They also established a certain history between Chapel (Jess Bush) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), having served not only as physicians but as combatants in the Klingon War. This leads to a later episode, “Under the Cloak of War”, in which M’Benga is told by Pike to assist in a peace mission with a Klingon diplomat that he knows to be a war criminal. Olusanmokun establishes his character’s intense internal pressure and stress, with events leading to a confrontation in which M’Benga ends up killing the Klingon, in what was probably not self-defense, though the case was ambiguous enough for Pike to go along with it.
It sort of figures that the show sandwiched its most dark and grim episode between “Those Old Scientists” (the Lower Decks crossover) which was the most silly episode of the series up to that point, and the musical episode, which was bound to be even sillier than that. Although on that score, “Subspace Rhapsody” was clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “Once More, With Feeling”, especially the conceit that living in a musical reality causes everybody to confess their most uncomfortable motives in song. The difference being that unlike with Buffy, everyone on the SNW cast can actually sing.
And they did much to humanize the combative and hostile security chief La’an (Christine Chong), especially in the early episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” which somehow manages to combine “Space Seed” with “City on the Edge of Forever”, using James Kirk (Paul Wesley) as the bridge. In this case, La’an is stuck in a dystopian variant time line and the Kirk of this dimension is a captain of a united Earth military ship who ends up having to help her restore her timeline by going to 21st Century Toronto, where they try to make sense of things and end up falling for each other. It turns out La’an’s ancestor, Khan Noonien Singh, is in Toronto, living as a child in a special academy, and he is being stalked by Sera, a young journalist who turns out to be a Romulan agent trying to kill Khan to stop his influence from changing humanity’s timeline to where they become a threat to the Romulans. And in the midst of all this, Sera blurts out to La’an that she was supposed to have traced Khan to 1992 but thanks to multiple Temporal Wars she ended up stuck in the 21st Century instead.
This one episode, almost offhandedly, answered the ongoing question of why so much of the Discovery/SNW line of Star Trek doesn’t look like the previous Star Trek timeline- because it isn’t.
This is not the original Star Trek timeline. It’s just not. It is at best an alternate universe like the “Abramsverse” that split off from the “Prime” universe with a certain event.
What this does is address a very common problem with science fiction, where the creator suggests a future at a certain date which will have all sorts of radical things, and here we are in 2024 and we don’t have ray guns or flying cars. Soylent Green was set in 2022, yet we don’t have ecological collapse, discolored skies, masses of people cramming the streets and industry casting about for meatless alternatives to traditional foods.
Okay, bad example.
Real history passed the period of the Eugenics Wars from the original series bible many years ago, and so the original series is very clearly not plausible as our future. But in SNW’s debut episode, Captain Pike did a primer on the Eugenics Wars for an alien government, and showed real footage of people marching on Washington after the 2020 election. So right from the get-go, they’ve retconned The Original Series background to make it fit in with our history up till now.
I mean, consider “Turnabout Intruder”, the famously bad Star Trek episode that marked the end of the original series. In this story, Dr. Janice Lester is an old contemporary (and former lover) of Captain Kirk who wants to destroy his life out of insane jealousy that he gets to be a starship captain but Starfleet will not allow women to be captains. Of course as the story goes on it becomes clear that Lester is too mentally unstable to be a captain regardless. The show did imply that this gender barrier was a double standard, but it did so in the most awkward and patronizing way. Which gets to one of the issues with the Original Series: It really was progressive in terms of its diversity casting (what was then called ‘United Nations casting’) but its treatment of women mostly remained old-fashioned.
Even so, ’60s Trek clearly modeled Starfleet after American military services, and at the time it might have seemed unrealistic, even for this series, to show women captains. Now it would seem unrealistic NOT to. This is where you have Captain Batel, and Michael Burnham, not to mention Burnham’s role model, Phillippa Georgiou.
As they put it in another classic science-fiction series:
If you wonder how he eats and breathes
And other science facts
(La La La La)
Tell yourself, ‘It’s just a TV show,
I should really just relax’
I wouldn’t say this is the greatest TV show of all time, but in just two seasons of Strange New Worlds, Paramount finally seems to had gotten the sweet spot for New Trek where it combines complex modern sensibilities with the ’60s Trek feel. As opposed to Discovery, which is often too impressed with its own “progressive” politics, or Picard, which was so dark for most of its run that it might as well have been produced by Zack Snyder. Did Season 3 do as well this year? Well… mostly.