As a “Star Trek” fan, it’s hard not to feel the bittersweet sting of another set of Wilderness Years coming. With Paramount feeling the sweet sting of budget cuts and an impending merger with Warner Bros., it feels like the higher-ups at the Big Blue Mountain are closing up shop on the Final Frontier. Its now-flagship show, “Strange New Worlds,” has a mere two seasons to wrap up its five-year mission, and its last gasp at a hit series, “Starfleet Academy,” is burning off a pre-shot second season and closing its doors, hobbled by its expansiveness and the fact that no one seemed all that interested in it. (I didn’t think it was all that bad, in the final estimation.)
To that end, “Strange New Worlds” has the lonely duty of carrying on the “Trek” torch for a few more episodes yet, even as its luster faded a bit by a fairly uneven season 3. The show’s episodic nature is as much of a blessing as it is a curse; yes, it’s neat to get a modern, feature-quality upgrade of the original series’ model of episodic weekly adventures, but sometimes the swings got a little too ambitious. Showrunner Alex Kurtzman et al. learned all the wrong lessons from that musical episode in season two: If comedy episodes are such a hit, why not make them half of our show?
It’s in that tradition that Season 4 continues mightily, in a crop of episodes as exhilarating as they are frustrating. This season was shot back-to-back with the previous one, so it makes sense that the approach is the same, balancing more earnest explorations of the galaxy and our characters’ interpersonal relationships with goofy romps that make ample use of our ensemble’s comic chops. (We were doomed for this course as soon as the showrunners saw a) how skilled Ethan Peck is at doing farce and b) how big the musical episode from season two hit for fans, for good or ill.)
What’s more, this back half of episodes has an even more constricting mission to fulfill: set the “Enterprise” on course to fit the crew roster of “The Original Series.” The fate of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) has been baked into the show’s premise since its beginning, with the future Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) popping in for frequent visits on the show in ways that stretch credulity (not to mention Starfleet regulations, considering he doesn’t even go here yet). Season 3 added Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) to the cast, leaving only Sulu, Bones, and (maybe) Chekov to add in here before the day is out.
Is “Strange New Worlds” looking to close out with the exact same crew configuration as the original show? Who knows. But the pieces are starting to fall into place, which leaves the whole thing feeling a bit like time is running out. Much like Pike himself, time is running out for this particular crew to enjoy their time as a little space family, and it’ll be bittersweet when it’s finally over.
The first six episodes flit between standard Trek fare and these big-swing comedy premises, same as season 3, in ways that are both delightful and whiplash-inducing. The show’s premiere, “Valles Marineris,” is a stern, somber adventure ostensibly in the classic Trek mold, with time warps and moral dilemmas abound as Pike grapples with the ultimate Prime Directive question: do you interfere in cosmic events if they might lead to the creation of the human race? It’s a bit of Cold War thriller, a bit of that Adam Driver dinosaur movie; its tonal swings are a bit too vast to feel any grounding.
Just as the episodes caterwaul in tone, so too do they modulate in quality. A grim “ghost ship” episode (replete with some of the most stomach-churning gore effects you’ll see in a “Trek” show; think “Alien: Resurrection“) will bounce right into a light-hearted “Hangover” riff on a pleasure planet whose atmosphere intoxicates its inhabitants, in which Ortegas (Melissa Navia) must haul a zooted-out Scotty through the hazy bacchanal of the previous night. It’s a fun hour, admittedly, aided by fleet-footed comic direction from “What We Do in the Shadows” EP Yana Gorskaya and a neat guest turn by “Kids in the Hall” alum Dave Foley. (We also get Rebecca Romijn‘s Number One singing a Klingon cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”; Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam, Bonnie Tyler.)
But the gimmick of throwing our cast into “Trek”-styled riffs on popular movies wears thin, as another episode limply gestures at the black-and-white wartime intrigue of “Casablanca” on a planet whose atmosphere literally removes the color from our perception. Then, sigh, there’s the much-ballyhooed puppet episode, in which a “Level Five Transporter Accident” turns our crew (save Spock, of course) into Muppets. It’s a fine premise that they do a surprising amount with—it’s a hoot to see Carol Kane given the Jim Henson Workshop treatment, and it neatly ties into a running character beat about Spock’s growing anxiety. But the show’s insistence on hour-long runtimes leaves them running out of things to do with the puppets pretty quickly.
But it’s the sixth episode, “Off-Hour,” that rights the ship nicely, bringing “Strange New Worlds” out of the realm of pastiche and goofiness into a stirring, straightforward disaster episode that sees the crew working together to bring the ship out of a slipstream wormhole that threatens to tear the Enterprise apart. For a season that has bogged itself down with myriad interpersonal relationship dramas whose endings we already know (Spock’s dalliance with Christina Chong’s La’An, Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel wondering whether to stay on the Enterprise), this crisis seems to pull together the crew in ways that make them feel, however temporarily, like the true inhabitants of the ship fans have known and loved for sixty years now. And if “Strange New Worlds” can recalibrate its energy to maintain this particular matter/antimatter balance, we should be in for a satisfying bow to one of “Trek”‘s most consistently entertaining chapters.
Six episodes screened for review. Premieres July 23rd on Paramount+.
