I wanted to go back over Strange New Worlds before doing a review of Starfleet Academy so far. Star Trek – Strange New Worlds Season 3 came and went a while ago, but Season 4 is coming up in 2026, and in terms of its overall story arc the show continues to build a bridge between Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and the classic crew of the Enterprise that followed him.
Leading up to the Season 2 cliffhanger, the show had replaced the late engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) with Delia, a Lanthanite played by Carol Kane. Lanthanites settled on Earth and pass for Humans and are very long-lived, although since Delia is played by Carol Kane, this basically meant she is from outer space by way of Latvia. Well anyway in the last episode of Season 2, the Gorn staged a massive attack on a Federation settlement, which led to several members of the crew getting captured. But at the same time, Captain Pike’s team ended up finding local survivors, including Delia’s old engineering student, a young Montgomery Scott. Played by Martin Quinn. An actual Scot! With an actual Scottish accent!
Much like the other cast members (or Simon Pegg from the movies) Quinn doesn’t look that much like his Original Series counterpart, especially because of his age. But he looks like he could grow into the role. In Season 3, Quinn became a regular cast member as they established Scotty’s relationship with Delia and others in the cast, including frequent guest star Paul Wesley as Jim Kirk.
I liked this season overall, but I can understand why a lot of people think it jumped the shark. In particular the episode “Four and-a-Half Vulcans”, which did a lot to stereotype Vulcans when this show and other media had done much to give them depth. At the same time, casting Patton Oswalt as a Vulcan hippie was highly illogical.
While Strange New Worlds Season 3 apparently played out in an episodic fashion like the first two seasons, it ended up putting together a seasonal story arc that came together in the end. Again, the cliffhanger was the Gorn capturing several Federation people, which was a source of great tension for Pike, especially since Pike’s fellow captain and steady girlfriend, Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) had been implanted with Gorn eggs. Not only did they have to try and fix that, ship pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) had to help her friends escape a Gorn containment unit, during which time she was severely injured and traumatized. This led to several episodes where Ortegas dealt with her anger only to end up stranded with a Gorn pilot who helped her to survive a hostile planet, who ended up shot down by Starfleet security sent to rescue Ortegas. Some of us wanted Melissa Navia to have a little more to do, and she did pretty well with this character arc.
As one-shot episode stories proceeded, Captain Batel remained on the Enterprise recuperating, as her condition required her to keep Gorn DNA in her body. The show introduced a likeable medical aide named Dana Gamble who accompanied the crew and Dr. Roger Corby to an ancient ruin, but Gamble picked up an ancient artifact that destroyed his eyes. It actually ended up devouring his soul, and Batel, with Gorn territorial instinct, holds him off until he is put in the brig. Gamble ends up escaping and killing a guard only to get killed by Pelia, who recognizes him as part of an ancient evil called the Vezda. The crew puts the spirit in a transport pattern buffer but it escapes and builds an apocalypse cult at the planet where the Vezda are imprisoned. In the season finale, Dr. M’Benga and the crew realize that the genetic experimentation on Batel has effectively made her akin to the race that imprisoned the Vezda, and in the pocket dimension where the Vezda are imprisoned, Pike and Batel confront Gamble, and after their victory they marry and live past Pike’s foreseen maiming, having a child and growing old together. But as Batel dies of old age, she tells Pike to answer a knock at the door, and when he does, he realizes that he was living in an illusion of the life she wanted them to have together. To defeat Gamble and re-imprison the Vezda, Batel had to evolve into the guardian of the dimension and abandon humanity altogether.
The story is tragic not only in terms of Pike’s personal loss, but in that it confirms his pre-determined path towards ending his Starfleet career crippled and alone.
It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you examine the particulars, but as a story it ends up working. What it reminded me of more than anything else was the season-to-season story arcs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where every season they basically set up a “Big Bad” villain with low-key appearances in early episodes, the threat escalates towards the end of things and then the threat is defeated in a season finale that could double as a series finale. And the reason the Buffy producers did that is because their show was on a cheap-ass indie network and they had no idea if they would get renewed next year.
That isn’t the issue with Strange New Worlds, but we know now that the series’ days are numbered. The seasons have only been ten episodes each, and after a ten-episode Season 4 (which has already finished production) the final fifth season is supposed to be only six episodes. And while the premise is already a setup for the timeline of The Original Series, they’re implying more strongly that they’re going to pass the baton to Paul Wesley for at least a “Year One” season of Kirk as Captain of the Enterprise. And while I personally think Wesley looks more like Jack Lord or the young Morrissey than the young Bill Shatner, he’s good enough on his own terms to keep watching.
Well, maybe, because in the wake of David Ellison buying up CBS/Paramount to make Paramount Skydance, he and his father Larry seem to be using their capital – and their clout with Donald Trump, Viceroy for Russian North America – to buy out CNN and if possible its parent company Warner Brothers/Discovery, so it would get that much closer to having a state media monopoly. And as we’ve seen with Warners’ own maneuvering and consolidating, a lot of development projects tend to fall by the wayside in order to satisfy the bottom line. Possibly including not only an SNW sequel but Starfleet Academy, which hasn’t finished its first season yet.
Yeah, I promised myself I would quit complaining so much about the Trump occupation government, but reality keeps getting in the way.