Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 1

Written 24 January 2025

Some Trekkie friends of mine enthusiastically recommended Strange New Worlds (SNW) to me which, after the horrible disaster that was Discovery, I was hesitant to pick up. I didn’t actually start watching it until after finishing Lower Decks and learned that Paramount canned it. What am I supposed to watch now? The Animated Series? So SNW it was.

Story and characters

The story of SNW is alright, but its characters― well… I don’t think they’re quite there yet. I feel like the shock of seeing all these characters from The Original Series (TOS) that now look and sound so different has yet to subside, and I don’t know if SNW Spock will ever match up to the platonic ideal of TOS Spock I already have in my brain.

I did get very excited when we’re introduced to Uhura’s linguistic background, since I majored in linguistics in university, but sadly that’s not very well utilized. I hoped that maybe SNW would takes some cues off Arrival, where a linguist does stuff an actual linguist would do to decipher an alien language, but all we got was an asteroid that spoke Solresol. Oh well, I guess I’ll take it.

With some of the crew interactions, I feel like the show is trying to sell me on a bunch of friendships which neither get enough screen time nor are super memorable. Of those that I can actually remember, the most memorable is when Chin-Riley and Noonien-Singh discover that the lower deckers think they’re both hard-asses, and force themselves to complete a bunch of “wacky” challenges like shooting each other with phasers. My discomfort watching this is trumped only by seeing Sisko and Kira play hopscotch while singing "Allamaraine, count to four! Allamaraine, and then three more!" in the most ridiculously out-of-character scene in all of Star Trek.

The upshot is that SNW at least has a better first season overall than most of other Star Trek series. I didn’t go “wow, this is crap!” like every time the Kazon appeared in Voyager. SNW has its moments, and matches the tone of Star Trek much, much better than Discovery or Star Trek: Picard. Even when it’s deviating from its usual formula, like when the Enterprise crew turns into characters from a children’s storybook, it’s cute rather than unhinged (*cough, cough* Fair Haven *cough, cough*).

Everything must be shiny

What actually bothers me is that SNW continues the ugly NuTrek tradition of being really, really shiny. The floor is shiny, every console and control is shiny, and all the lights have to shine directly into the camera. There are so many lights. It’s like the set designers were Twitch streamers discovering LED light strips for the first time. The walls have lights, the edges of the stairs have lights, and even the handrails all have glaringly bright lights built into them.

As a prequel to TOS, SNW has an awkward design problem: it needs to look like it belongs in the in-universe time period just before TOS, the aggressively 1960s retrofuturistic TV show where everything looks like a kitschy B-movie. So either SNW looks exactly like TOS and thus super outdated (which would have been kinda cool IMO), or it takes the modern shiny cyberpunk-ish look and tacks on some retro design elements, which is the route it went for. What SNW ended up with is a mid-century modern interior and the occasional, haphazardly included TOS-inspired knick-knack, like the handlebars in the turbolifts.

If this weren’t a Star Trek show and there were fewer lights, I’d say the interiors actually look pretty good. In context, though, it just doesn’t work for me. Everything looks more contemporary with the world of ST:Picard, another NuTrek show, than TOS. Paired with the the camera work that makes everything look like a high-budget Hollywood action movie, and you get a look and feel that runs in stark contrast to the Star Trek’s slightly campy golden eras.