You know what the best kind of fan service is?
When they make a good show.
This is a review of “Strange New Worlds,” the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New
Worlds.
If you haven’t seen the episode yet, take heed: spoilers lie ahead.
Well, now.
Look what happens when you actually take one episode to tell one episode’s worth of story.
I’m not going to overpraise this episode.
It’s not one of the greatest Star Trek episodes I’ve ever seen.
It’s not a high-point of the franchise.
But it does point to the possibility that, if it continues on like this, and is allowed
to grow as past Trek shows have grown, at some point this series could be a high point.
Because this?
This is a good beginning.
This is solid.
This is encouraging.
“Strange New Worlds” — the episode and the series — succeeds in fulfilling my hopeful
expectations and in setting new ones.
We get a tight, well-paced story, with some suspense, some humor, some nice character
beats, and a dose of sincere and not very subtle political commentary.
And, we’re told that story by a cast of likable actors playing well defined characters.
In other words: it’s classic Star Trek.
It captures not only the spirit of The Original Series at its best, but also those moments
when its siblings in the current era of the franchise have lived up to their potential
— and there have been many such moments, until now mostly in the Kelvin-verse films
and Discovery.
Speaking of Discovery, as this episode begins we find Captain Christopher Pike still struggling
with the knowledge of his fate he gained during his time in temporary command of the U.S.S.
Discovery during that show’s second season.
He knows that a life of pain and serious disability awaits around ten years in his future, and
as a result he’s not really in a hurry to get back into space.
But when Admiral Robert April shows up with an assignment to rescue Number One, the Enterprise’s
first officer, who has gone missing during a first contact mission, Pike shaves off his
depression beard and gets back into uniform.
Not a depression beard.
Anson Mount’s take on Captain Pike was the highlight of Discovery’s second season,
and it looks like it will be the highlight of this series, as well.
He reminds me of Chris Evans as Captain America, playing a character who is genuinely good,
purely heroic, but not without depth, or flaws.
Pike is haunted by his fate, but that doesn’t make him brooding, angry, or grim.
He’s reluctant to discuss it with anyone but his closest confidantes, including Spock,
and most of the time when he’s in front of his crew, he puts on a brave face.
And Mount’s performance lets us know that that’s what he is doing — soldiering on,
doing what has to be done, trying to remain himself in the face of the slow but inevitable
gathering darkness.
Pike’s knowledge of his destiny, and his difficulty in dealing with it, ties into the
plot of the episode.
It turns out the warp signature that compelled Starfleet to send Number One to this particular
planet to make first contact was not from a warp engine, but a warp bomb — a bomb
this less advanced society was able to develop after detecting the massive convergence of
starships that occurred nearby at the end of Discovery’s second season.
Pike realizes that knowing his own future gives him some insight into how to deal with
these people, who have developed in a way that is not exactly parallel to 21st century
Earth, but very reminiscent of it.
So, Pike beams himself down into the middle of a conference between two warring factions
and tells them a story: his story, and the story of the history of Earth, how it’s
a utopia today, but was almost destroyed a couple of centuries ago when humanity engaged
in a devastating global conflict, the sort of conflict the people of this planet currently
stand on the precipice of.
Pike offers them a choice: use their newfound warp capability to destroy each other, or
use it to learn to travel the stars and join the Federation.
The captain solves the problem with a stirring speech.
Like I said, classic Star Trek.
Although not quite — Captain Kirk would have taken it upon himself to destroy the
warp bomb, or radically alter their society somehow, whereas Pike merely tells them a
story and gives them a choice.
Pike is at the center of the story of this first episode, which is only right given that
he’s the lead protagonist and this is the series premiere, but we also get reacquainted
with Ethan Peck’s Spock, and Rebecca Romijn’s Number One — who, for the first time in
Trek canon, gets an actual name, which is, of course, Una.
As he did in season two of Discovery, Peck does a good job conveying the impression of
a younger, less seasoned, more passionate Spock than the one Leonard Nimoy plays in
The Original Series.
And, though she doesn’t have much to do in this episode other than get rescued, Romijn’s
Number One is the same tough, no-nonsense character we glimpsed previously in Discovery.
These versions of Pike, Spock and Number One form a solid central trio, a strong foundation
on which to build the rest of the cast, which also looks extremely promising.
In this episode, we meet new Enterprise security chief La’an Noonien-Singh, a young woman
with a familiar last name and, just according to what little we hear of it in this episode,
a truly horrific backstory.
There’s also Dr. M’Benga, who appeared in a few episodes of TOS and is currently
serving as chief medical officer of the Enterprise, and his nurse, Christine Chapel, another familiar
name from TOS, although in one of this show’s boldest retcons, this version of Nurse Chapel
seems to actually have a personality!
And there’s Uhura, who at this point is still a mere cadet — baby Uhura!
She hasn’t even had her memory wiped and had to relearn everything on a computer yet!
God, just think of all the experiences she has ahead of her to forget . . .
Those are the only members of the crew to leave much of an impression in this episode
— there are others who we catch glimpses of, like Ortegas, and a certain Lieutenant
Kirk, hmm, who we will presumably get to know a bit better as the season goes on.
Like I said at the top, this episode is nothing extraordinary, but it’s a good show, and
a good start.
As far as pilot episodes of Star Trek series go, it’s not the best — I still think
DS9’s “Emissary” and Voyager’s “Caretaker” set the standard as far as that goes — but
it is perhaps the most confident, the most self-assured.
This feels like a series that knows what it is, and what it wants to be.
That might be the most encouraging thing of all, especially considering how the other
live action Trek shows currently in production have struggled — or, in Star Trek: Picard’s
case, is still struggling — to find their identity.
And, on top of everything else, it confirms something I’ve thought since the beginning
of Discovery: that the creative team behind this current generation of Star Trek, the
Kurtzman regime, if you will, are perfectly capable of producing great Star Trek shows,
shows that are worthy of standing with what has come before, but which are also capable
of charting their own courses.
These are talented people, capable of doing good work.
All they have to do first is get out of their own way.
This first episode of Strange New Worlds suggests that they may finally have figured that out,
and I couldn’t be more excited to see where they take us from here.
Those are my thoughts.
Please share your thoughts with me in the comments.
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Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next week for a review of episode two!