By Joshua Tyler
| Published
We’re about to get the fourth episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ third season, which means it’s 40% done. Four episodes in, and the show still hasn’t had a new idea.
The first episode was the finale of a cliffhanger set up by season 2’s finale. A cliffhanger that seemed like it might sort of be ripping off the Star Trek: The Next Generation cliffhanger two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds.” Now that we’ve seen the second part of Strange New Worlds’ story, we can confirm that, yep, it definitely was.
The Gorn were substituted for the Borg after changing the Gorn to be more Borg-like. The story followed all the “Best of Both Worlds” story beats and finishes in exactly the same way “The Best of Both Worlds” did, by literally putting the Borg… er, the Gorn to sleep.
The second episode brought back Trelane, the child-God from the original series episode “The Squire of Gothos.” He was once again obsessed with getting women to wear fancy dresses.
Nothing new was added other than confirmation of things we all thought all along. Oh, Trelane is a Q exactly as everyone has been saying for thirty years. What a shock.
Episode three was the most unique story of the season because it didn’t rip off a previous Star Trek episode; specifically, it recycled standard zombie stories generally. That’s what now passes for creativity among the writers working for Paramount to create Star Trek.
The fourth episode is being released this week. Paramount is gleefully trumpeting it as a holodeck detective adventure, exactly like Dixon Hill on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
At least when Deep Space Nine did this, they changed genres. Instead, they did James Bond-style spy adventures on the holodeck. Star Trek: Voyager did black-and-white B-movie holodeck adventures in the style of Flash Gordon. There was also that weird episode where Janeway lusted after a hologram. Maybe Strange New Worlds will rip that off next.
Insert an obligatory rant about how Starfleet isn’t supposed to have invented holodeck technology in this era, here.
The rest of the third Strange New Worlds season seems unlikely to do better. Paramount has been heavily promoting an upcoming episode in which everyone on the crew turns into a Vulcan.
This may be their most egregious form of cribbing because they’re stealing from themselves. The show previously did an episode where Spock became human, so now they’re just flipping it upside down.
Imagine if, after doing the episode where Spock goes crazy from Pon Farr, the 60s Star Trek did an episode where Kirk went crazy from Pon Farr! The original series would have been canceled even faster.
When Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuted its first season, it had huge potential. It was, at times, a little derivative, but it also mixed in new ideas here and there. First seasons are often patchy, and Star Trek shows have a history of not finding the right warp field frequency until they’re a few years in.
The opposite has happened with Strange New Worlds. In the two seasons since, the new ideas have faded and been replaced by gimmicks like a musical episode (which ripped off Buffy the Vampire Slayer). This is especially egregious in a franchise whose entire reason for existing is to have new ideas. Boldly go isn’t just a catchphrase, it’s an operational imperative.
It’s now clear that Strange New Worlds is going nowhere, and the “New” in its title is nothing but gaslighting. So is the “Worlds” for that matter. When was the last time this crew went to explore a world? Last week, they explored a wedding, instead.
Maybe the final episodes of this season will turn it around, but when you only do 10 episodes, turning things around is tough. Mixing in one new idea per season, should they at some point manage to do one in season 3, does not justify the existence of this show.
For all its aesthetic and casting charms, Star Trek: Strange New World has been cursed with the same terrible writing plague that has ruined all of the new Star Trek, and no one involved seems interested in curing it. Maybe Skydance will do better when they finish taking over Paramount. It’s hard to imagine them doing worse.
