What Do We Want from ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’?
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Television, News, Culture, Science Fiction, TV

What Do We Want from ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’?

CBS has announced they’ve ordered a third Star Trek series to their CBS All Access service, entitled Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It will be headlined by Anson Mount (as Captain Christopher Pike), Rebecca Romijn (as ‘Number One’), and Ethan Peck (as Spock), who all appeared in season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery and proved enormously popular. Which is no tall order in the case of Peck, in particular, who had to walk in the shoes of both Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto!

Here’s the official announcement from the cast on Twitter:

It’s another positive sign that CBS is leaning into the Star Trek universe as their readymade fan-friendly franchise that can compete with the likes of Disney’s Star Wars and Marvel films. There will soon be three Trek series on-air, with this joining Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.

A few other shows are also being developed, of course: a spin-off focused on Section 31 and Michelle Yeoh’s character Philippa Georgious (well, her evil Mirror Universe counterpart), an animated comedy called Star Trek: Lower Decks, and another cartoon aimed at children. And if we’re being optimistic, there are still rumours of a three-part limited series about villainous Khan Noonien Singh (referred to as Star Trek: Ceti Alpha V) from director Nicholas Meyer (who directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), and the faithful Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series that’s been in development hell for decades!

But let’s concentrate on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for now, and consider some reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic about it:

Akiva Goldsman 👎

The divisive name of Akiva Goldsman is, sadly, all over Strange New Worlds, just as it’s been on Discovery and Picard. He’s written the pilot (based on a story by himself and Jenny Lumet) and will serve as an executive producer alongside Henry Alonso Myers, Heather Kadin, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth. Goldsman’s been attached to mostly bad projects over his career, like the two Joel Schumacher Batman films, Lost in Space (1998), I, Robot (2004), The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015), Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), and The Dark Tower (2017). The theme in his filmography is making bad things out of good intellectual properties, so whatever goodness has prevailed on Trek is seen to be down to other influences on the show.

Mount, Peck & Romijn 👍

Those three actors were good value during season 2 of Discovery. Anson Mount was particularly involving as the de facto leader of the cast that year, with some old-fashioned charisma and likeability. A lot of people, myself included, were disappointed they didn’t just cast him as a new character who could become that show’s captain fulltime. But at least we’ll get to see him in action more on SNW.

Ethan Peck was also quite good, although obviously nobody can touch what Nimoy did playing Spock, and I prefer Quinto’s performance in the movies as a younger version of the iconic Vulcan. But Peck wasn’t terrible and there’s certainly room to explore his career under Pike’s command before Captain Kirk arrived on the scene.

Rebecca Romijn wasn’t actually a big part of the season, she just floated in and out a few times as ‘Number One… so hopefully SNW can now flesh out her character and, y’know, give her an actual name!

Trekking before Star Trek? 👍

Discovery is set about a decade before the events of the Original Series of Star Trek, but that series has now jumped a thousand years into the future for its upcoming third season. That means SNW will remain in the past and get to continue exploring this period of time, up until the moment Pike becomes an invalid and Kirk replaces him in the captain’s chair of the USS Enterprise. The title of the show suggests more weekly exploration, which is great, but will it tread on the toes of what the Original Series was about too much? One got a feeling the Enterprise’s “five-year mission” to explore “strange new worlds” with Kirk was a daring thing for Starfleet to commit to, but is that going to be retconned if the exact same ship was having similar adventures pre-Kirk? Or will Pike and company only be zipping around known space, so we get plenty of Vulcans and Klingons in the mix?

More standalone adventures? 👍

I miss weekly self-contained episodes. The best stories in Discovery have been the ‘one-and-done’ adventures or arcs that didn’t last too long — like the time-loop story with Harry Mudd (pictured above). I know the modern trend is for serialisation, but both seasons of Discovery started to splutter after the first 8 hours, and Picard was almost moribund from episode 4 onwards. Every previous incarnation of Trek has been quick adventures or maybe a two-parter, much like Doctor Who still does, so I hope the writers are going to help differentiate SNW by going back to that formula.