Episodes viewed: 6 of 10
Streaming on: Paramount+
The second season of this love-letter to classic Star Trek begins with some unfinished business. Christina Chong's La’an Noonien-Singh departed the Enterprise last year on a humanitarian sabbatical, which now leads to a mysterious distress call and a fun steal-the-Enterprise sequence reminiscent of The Search For Spock. Meanwhile, Number One's shocking arrest in the finale has to wait until Episode 2 for its resolution, in the form of a Trek-style courtroom drama echoing Next Gen’s iconic The Measure Of A Man.
Loose ends neatly tied, however, Strange New World's second run soon heads off into fresher territory, while never straying far from the winning formula that made Season 1 so entertaining. Unapologetically episodic, it deftly taps the chemistry between its perfectly-cast ensemble, while serving up a heady blend of classic sci-fi tropes (a planet where something mysterious wipes memories! Aliens who communicate through dreams!) and welcome character development.
Joining the crew this year is stage and screen legend Carol Kane as new engineer Pelia, a long-lived alien with an appealingly offbeat manner that suits Kane's style perfectly. Her unusual background is organically worked into the story thanks to a well-pitched time-travel episode that not only serves to bring a new dimension to La’an, but reintroduces Paul Wesley’s James T. Kirk — all while demonstrating that it’s still possible to take Trek back to the twentieth century without choking horribly in the process (looking at you, Picard Season 2).
The mission-of-the-week format that puts it at odds with other contemporary Treks continues to be the show’s main strength.
Anson Mount anchors the series as ever, keeping it light and fun, his take on Pike a delightful mix of gravitas and vulnerability — not to mention, culinary skills. Ethan Peck, meanwhile, continues to impress as Spock, not only showing new sides to the galaxy’s favourite Vulcan, but building on the comedic aspects he teased out so well in Season 1.
The mission-of-the-week format that puts it at odds with other contemporary Treks continues to be the show’s main strength, this season maintaining the easy combo of self-contained adventures and ongoing, character-led subplots without the two bumping up against each other. All the while, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers skilfully thread the canonical needle, keeping an eye on timeline conflicts that might send die-hard Trekkies into an apoplectic rage.
If there’s an issue with this strong run of early episodes, it may be time spent splitting the crew off into different pairings. It makes sense on a budgetary level and allows the writers to figure out who works well together in smaller groups, but denies us the real joy of watching the entire team work together to solve a problem or, if we're honest, just hang out aboard ship. Dividing the roster also leads to one or two characters feeling slightly short-changed in this season’s first half, with Babs Olusanmokun's Dr. M'Benga in particular lacking slightly in screen time, though he does manage to firmly establish his credentials as the most physically intimidating doctor ever to grace a Star Trek show.
Yet to be answered in the initial six episodes, though, is how the show will go about incorporating the flesh-and-blood versions of Ensigns Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Boimler (Jack Quaid) from animated series Lower Decks, which promises an audacious melding of creative minds. But then, if any show could pull off that sort of crossover without buckling under the tonal shifts or feeling overly gimmicky, it’s certainly this one.
Building on the strong maiden voyage that was Season 1, Strange New Worlds continues to prove that even in an era dominated by serialized, sometimes po-faced drama, there’s still room for a fun, slickly-produced, adventure-of-the-week sci-fi in the grand old Trek tradition. This one definitely has space-legs.