Star Trek Strange New Worlds (Spoilers)
May. 20th, 2023 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightofdayeI finished SNW s1 on paramount plus this week. So here's a lot of waffle about it. Containing vague but definite spoilers under the cut
So I watch the first season of Strange New Worlds, and to be honest, I've been a bit hesitant to watch it and biased against it because like The Orville it's heralded by people who dislike Discovery and Picard as 'real proper Trek', and since I like Discovery and Picard or at least think they are at least okay and underrated, that annoyed me greatly.
Now of course, I watched it and it is pretty good. There's no denying that. It's upbeat. It's characters are likeable. Anson Mount as Pike is especially charismatic. I think it's a triumph of style and tone because I'm sure there are as many continuity issues and just oddities that you could pick up on compared to Enterprise or Disco but people don't want to.
It's episodic and that's a strength and a weakness, it lets you do a lot of different stories but those stories have to take up 50 odd minutes time and then you're done. There a couple of stories episodes 5 and 6 stand out where they took far to long to get to want feels like it should have been the meat of the episode which makes everything wrap up quickly and patly. There's a moral dilemma in episode 6 that Pike just has to… accept because there's no time to deal with it.
The short episode count is always an issue. The only series were like 250% the size of this one mid 20s number of episodes rather than 10 so there isn't room for everyone in the ensemble to shine.
The characters well… there's a lot of returning characters from TOS and to be honest I like them all but it feels iffy continuity wise. M'Benga is going to go from CMO to supporting Doc in TOS and having him and Chapel and Uhura all as part of Pike's crew doesn't seem to meld well with The Menagarie heavily implying (iirc it's been a long time) that Spock is the only one who knows him.
It's not the kind of show where you'd worry about the characters overly but it remains we know the fates of a lot of the cast. Pike, Spock, Uhura, Chapel, even secondary cast like Sam Kirk. And La'an Noonien Singh descended from Khan, the number of TOS connections seems forced like it's a very small universe and so far aside from a brief moment with Una/Number One La'an connection to Khan hasn't been relevant, so there's no reason she couldn't have not been a Noonien Singh. Likewise Uhura as a gifted cadet uncertain if she wants to be in starfleet, there's no reason that character had to be Uhura.
So the other original characters of note are helm officer Ortegas and Hemmer the aenar engineer. I really like the concept of Hemmer, it makes sense to have more Aliens on board and he would be from a canonical but rarely seen founding member of the federation. (when are we getting a tellarite character?) but they underused him and then killed him, sadly.
The last two episode were really quite iffy conceptually for me. The Gorn are no basically xenomorphs that you have to kill and the message of the finale is 'pike sucks, kirk's great because he's willing to kick ass'. For all the other series get complained about for shooting things to solve your problems this is actually the only series that really came out actually did that. Contrast to Discovery Season 4 which really was about making peaceful contact with a very alien and apparently hostile society.
It's kind of to the show's credit that they followed up on Pike learning about his accident in Discovery but the message that he shouldn't prevent it because inevitably he sucks and Spock and Kirk are what's need to save the universe is just so… eh. No. It's bad thematically and logically. There's really nothing he can do where he and the cadets are fine without Spock dying? It's contrived. Tell all the cadets not to turn up and then retire yourself and let Kirk take over the Enterprise if you must, how does that end in disaster? Like I know they've got to enforce continuity some how but still, this makes little sense.
As to Kirk, In the finale he's an alternate timeline Kirk and he's actually pretty good. Sam talking about him makes him sound like a JJVerse stereotype of Kirk as a renegade womanising maverick that he just wasn't in TOS and is massively overstated by popular culture. But his actual character is good. He's brave, inventive, and principalled and even though he disagrees with Pike he's still respectful, attentive and suggest compromises between there point of view and there seems to be genuine liking and respect between them which is what I always want in crossovers.
That said I'm less happy he'll be back in season 2 for the aforementioned continuity snarl with The Menagarie.
Hopes for season 2? Give Number one, Ortegas and Sam Kirk focus episodes or at least more material Don't bring in more TOS characters like Scotty. Give us another original engineer and don't kill em.
tldr: it's genuinely good and I see why people like it but I don't love it.
So I watch the first season of Strange New Worlds, and to be honest, I've been a bit hesitant to watch it and biased against it because like The Orville it's heralded by people who dislike Discovery and Picard as 'real proper Trek', and since I like Discovery and Picard or at least think they are at least okay and underrated, that annoyed me greatly.
Now of course, I watched it and it is pretty good. There's no denying that. It's upbeat. It's characters are likeable. Anson Mount as Pike is especially charismatic. I think it's a triumph of style and tone because I'm sure there are as many continuity issues and just oddities that you could pick up on compared to Enterprise or Disco but people don't want to.
It's episodic and that's a strength and a weakness, it lets you do a lot of different stories but those stories have to take up 50 odd minutes time and then you're done. There a couple of stories episodes 5 and 6 stand out where they took far to long to get to want feels like it should have been the meat of the episode which makes everything wrap up quickly and patly. There's a moral dilemma in episode 6 that Pike just has to… accept because there's no time to deal with it.
The short episode count is always an issue. The only series were like 250% the size of this one mid 20s number of episodes rather than 10 so there isn't room for everyone in the ensemble to shine.
The characters well… there's a lot of returning characters from TOS and to be honest I like them all but it feels iffy continuity wise. M'Benga is going to go from CMO to supporting Doc in TOS and having him and Chapel and Uhura all as part of Pike's crew doesn't seem to meld well with The Menagarie heavily implying (iirc it's been a long time) that Spock is the only one who knows him.
It's not the kind of show where you'd worry about the characters overly but it remains we know the fates of a lot of the cast. Pike, Spock, Uhura, Chapel, even secondary cast like Sam Kirk. And La'an Noonien Singh descended from Khan, the number of TOS connections seems forced like it's a very small universe and so far aside from a brief moment with Una/Number One La'an connection to Khan hasn't been relevant, so there's no reason she couldn't have not been a Noonien Singh. Likewise Uhura as a gifted cadet uncertain if she wants to be in starfleet, there's no reason that character had to be Uhura.
So the other original characters of note are helm officer Ortegas and Hemmer the aenar engineer. I really like the concept of Hemmer, it makes sense to have more Aliens on board and he would be from a canonical but rarely seen founding member of the federation. (when are we getting a tellarite character?) but they underused him and then killed him, sadly.
The last two episode were really quite iffy conceptually for me. The Gorn are no basically xenomorphs that you have to kill and the message of the finale is 'pike sucks, kirk's great because he's willing to kick ass'. For all the other series get complained about for shooting things to solve your problems this is actually the only series that really came out actually did that. Contrast to Discovery Season 4 which really was about making peaceful contact with a very alien and apparently hostile society.
It's kind of to the show's credit that they followed up on Pike learning about his accident in Discovery but the message that he shouldn't prevent it because inevitably he sucks and Spock and Kirk are what's need to save the universe is just so… eh. No. It's bad thematically and logically. There's really nothing he can do where he and the cadets are fine without Spock dying? It's contrived. Tell all the cadets not to turn up and then retire yourself and let Kirk take over the Enterprise if you must, how does that end in disaster? Like I know they've got to enforce continuity some how but still, this makes little sense.
As to Kirk, In the finale he's an alternate timeline Kirk and he's actually pretty good. Sam talking about him makes him sound like a JJVerse stereotype of Kirk as a renegade womanising maverick that he just wasn't in TOS and is massively overstated by popular culture. But his actual character is good. He's brave, inventive, and principalled and even though he disagrees with Pike he's still respectful, attentive and suggest compromises between there point of view and there seems to be genuine liking and respect between them which is what I always want in crossovers.
That said I'm less happy he'll be back in season 2 for the aforementioned continuity snarl with The Menagarie.
Hopes for season 2? Give Number one, Ortegas and Sam Kirk focus episodes or at least more material Don't bring in more TOS characters like Scotty. Give us another original engineer and don't kill em.
tldr: it's genuinely good and I see why people like it but I don't love it.
