Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a unique entity in the pantheon of Star Trek spinoffs. For all intents and purposes, this show exists because the fans demanded it. Though Captain Christopher Pike, Number One, and a younger, less experienced Spock first appeared to the public in the 1966 Star Trek two-parter The Menagerie, itself brilliantly built around footage from Star Trek’s unsold 1964 pilot The Cage, Pike and Number One only made comebacks in “expanded universe” media of uncertain canonicity after that. An alternate-universe Pike, played to perfection by Bruce Greenwood, figured prominently in the first two J.J. Abrams-produced movies, but…wasn’t that in the same lane as those comics and novels that, while they might have been authorized products, weren’t official where the ongoing TV productions were concerned? And yet it wasn’t like anyone was going to recast Jeffrey Hunter and Majel Barrett and try to build new stories out from The Cage on TV, was it?
That is, until Star Trek: Discovery did precisely that in its second season, with Anson Mount’s Pike and Ethan Peck’s Spock serving as regulars for that season. Rebecca Romijn recurred as Number One as well. One episode hearkened back to the events of The Cage, and another confirmed that Pike’s grisly fate retold in The Menagerie was an unavoidable certainty. And there’s the real challenge of picking up Pike’s story between his only two appearances in the classic 1960s series: we know what happens to him. He will suffer a fate that’s both as bad as it looks – and better than Pike himself knows, because thanks to some timey-wimey visions in Discovery’s second season, he knows precisely what will happen…but only the bad part. Is there any story to be told between those two established fixed goalposts in Star Trek lore?
Strange New Worlds demonstrates that the answer is “yes”, and does so wonderfully.
These are the voyages…
The ten episodes of Strange New Worlds’ first season try to hearken back not just to an earlier era of Star Trek lore, but an earlier era of storytelling. The episodes are discrete stories, rather than sticking to the exhausting modern TV style of building up an impossible-to-beat villain/set of circumstances and then rushing to the exit as loudly and brightly as possible. (While I would say that both Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery hew to that formula, let’s face it, the template is all-pervasive in modern genre TV, and has been for years.) There’s no Big Bad stalking the crew of the pre-Kirk Enterprise throughout the ten episodes. The show is episodic in nature, though we’re presented with information about each of the characters that inform the later episodes. There are character arcs, but not one big story arc. You have time to see everyone grow and learn, but there’s no need to keep a flowchart. The universe isn’t going to go whizzing down the drain if the Big MacGuffin hasn’t been attained by episode nine or ten. It’s a delightful throwback, and… holy crap, have I missed episodic television.
From the bonus features: Anson Mount and Anson’s mutt
And it has one other magic ingredient that’s been sorely missing in modern TV Trek: it’s got a sense of humor. There are chuckles and there are unexpected belly laughs. It’s not all the end of the world. I mean, there’s tragedy and pathos too, especially on those occasions where something reminds Pike of the fate that awaits him a decade or so down the road and he flirts with the perfectly natural instinct to try to avoid it. This is something that comes up maybe two or three times in the season, and figures most prominently in the season finale, which riffs on the original series episode Balance Of Terror while asking: what if Pike does avoid his fate, and his Starfleet career continues to the point that Kirk never actually assumes command of the Enterprise? What ripples flow outward from that one change in the timeline? If you’re looking for something to compare the show’s light touch with story arc elements, I would compare it to the second season of Babylon 5. The characters retain information from episode to episode; the audience never has to ask “Why doesn’t Spock remember this detail from episode two?” And yet each episode is its own self-contained story.
From the gag reel: thank goodness, these people know how to laugh
The bonus features are tantalizing. I wish there were more of them. Namely, the commentary with Anson “Pike” Mount and writer/director Akiva Goldsman on the pilot episode. Goldsman’s script was well-constructed to begin with, so he gets to be a fountain of production trivia, while Mount warmly heaps praise on all of his co-stars, be they human or equine. I wish every episode had a commentary like this. They could’ve had a different member of the ensemble cast and some other member of the production crew – a writer, the director, just about anyone – pair up with equally fascinating results. I would love to have heard Christina Chong’s thoughts on Memento Mori, or Bobs Olusanmokun’s thoughts on The Elysian Kingdom. I realize that we get that from The Ready Room, the Wil Wheaton-hosted aftershow that cranks out one episode for every live-action Trek episode of any given series, but that’s a half-hour show where Wheaton tries to prod conversations along for the sake of pacing; there’s nothing quite like a full length commentary that has room to breathe and time to pause and consider.
No, the real holodeck
The featurettes are also fascinating, ranging from Anson Mount’s production diary to his visit to the AR well set, a soundstage whose rear wall is covered with a 180-degree arc of huge LED screens connected to computers that generate photorealistic 3-D rendered imagery in real time, similar to the Volume set used on Disney’s Star Wars and Marvel streaming series. Though first used in the fourth season of Discovery, Strange New Worlds has but this technology to spectacular use, creating everything from alien planets that would’ve eaten the budget of the entire original series if constructed physically, to the improbably huge and yet beautiful Engineering deck of the Enterprise itself. (Seriously, we need a flashback episode to show us how the Federation struck a bargain with the Time Lords to make certain parts of its ships bigger on the inside.)
No holodeck malfunctions in evidence
There are deleted scenes from a handful of episodes, though the real standaout is the lengthy – but never finished- flashback that would have opened Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach, in which Lieutenant Pike lends a helping hand to a woman from a plenet that looks like a promising future member of the Federation… well, at least, until the episode as aired shows, it’s not. The effects are unfinished, but one wonders: was simply dying Mount’s hair a darker color the extent of hinting at his younger age, or was he going to go toe-to-toe with Luke Skywalker in a streaming sci-fi de-aging duel? Or was it simply deemed more effective and efficient for the story to just tell us they had met before and that there was some attraction between them? A little context for the deleted scenes would have made them even more interesting.
The Young(?) Christopher Pike Chronicles
The extras add up to a great package even if I’m left wanting more of them, or more context for what’s there. And with season two mere weeks away, it’s a great way to get ready for ten more adventures aboard the Enterprise. Season one does have a mild cliffhanger, leaving this viewer asking the following plot-critical question: what’s that crewmemeber doing in the background looking directly up into the transporter? Hey buddy, are you okay back there? Are you, like the rest of us, wondering if the you that walks out of the transporter on the other ship is really the same you that left, or did it kill you and replace you? Just watching your soul get sucked into the pattern buffer? Good luck with that. Stay tuned.
– Earl
