Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Review: A Trek As Good As It Has Ever Been
The second season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is excellent. The show remains exhilarating. The characters only continue to grow, and their relationships continue to develop in organic, interesting ways. The show's light whimsy still winkingly undergirds its sci-fi stories, and the stories themselves are playful and intriguing. There are a few moments of treacly nostalgia here and there, but they feel organic and light, not hefty and forced. This is "Star Trek" firing on all cylinders.
"Strange New Worlds" gains a great deal of its strength by using a certain writing structure that it is cribbing specifically from Trek in the 1980s. I shall elucidate:
Throughout the 1970s, after the original "Star Trek" went off the air, creator Gene Roddenberry made many speaking engagements at a string of "Star Trek" conventions, a then-new phenomenon. It was at these conventions that Roddenberry and fans seemingly began to form a consensus over Trek's utopian ideals. The original series certainly had utopian leanings, but it wouldn't be until Roddenberry began work on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1986 that it would be a Trek show's stated thesis. At that point, Roddenberry developed what was infamously called "Roddenberry's Rule," meaning that no "Star Trek" stories could stem from interpersonal conflicts between the characters. The idea was that everyone would be kind and work well together in a utopian future.
Many writers, even to this day, bristle at the limitation, aching to write conversations between people with conflicting ideas. Some have ignored the rule entirely, feeling it churlish and deliberately difficult.
In the third season of "Next Generation," however, the writers found a workaround that "Strange New Worlds" also employs.
Character by character
The "Next Generation" writers found that if they focused a given episode on the drama of a single character — rather than always incorporating the entire ensemble — the interpersonal conflicts became less important to generating drama. In one episode, for instance, Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) had a problem he needed to solve, and the other characters became supporting players in his story for the week. The next episode might, then, be about Worf (Michael Dorn).
This character-by-character approach has been key to the success of the second season of "Strange New Worlds." Each of the first six episodes focuses primarily on the drama of a single member of the Enterprise's crew and zeroes in on their own strife, professional prowess, and romantic interests.
The season's second episode, "Ad Astra Per Aspera," for instance, is about Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and her criminal trial. At the end of the first season of "Worlds," Una was arrested for lying on her application to Starfleet Academy. It seems she is not human, but a genetically enhanced Illyrian. For Starfleet, this is a big no-no, as genetic manipulation once led Earth into a devastating, decades-long Eugenics War. "As Astra" focuses on her defense (handled by guest star Yetide Badaki), namely, how arresting people for their pre-birth genetic profile is merely a new form of institutionalized prejudice. Badaki's speeches are first-rate "Trek," and Una gets to explain a little bit more about her past and what led her into Starfleet to begin with. Captain Pike (Ansom Mount) only comes to know his fellow officer that much better.
The stakes are not of a galactic scale. Instead, audiences are gifted humanity, legal philosophy, and warmth. This is all so very grand.
I'm the pilot
Una will also, as a commanding officer, get a chance to bond with the Enterprise's new chief engineer Lieutenant Pelia (Carol Kane). The laidback, sloppy Pelia butts heads with the protocol-forward Una in the show's sixth episode, "Lost in Translation." That they eventually find a middle ground displays that "Strange New Worlds" has given a great deal of thought to long-term professional relationships.
Some of the characters are merely professionally edified in their stories. In the season's fourth episode, "Among the Lotus Eaters," the Enterprise crew (as the title would lead you to believe) have encountered a type of spatial radiation that erases the bulk of their memories. Pike, La'an (Christina Chong), and Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), sans memories, must deal with a crisis on the planet below, while Lieutenant Ortegas (Melissa Navia) has to pilot the Enterprise to safety up above. Ortegas can't remember her name or where her quarters are, but she's such a skilled pilot, mere sense memory begins to kick in and she's able to perform some pretty daredevil moves, even without her memories. Once the crisis is solved, Ortegas is vindicated in her role on the ship. If we're to accept "Star Trek" as a workplace drama — which it very much is — then this kind of job understanding is one of the more exhilarating things that can happen.
"Lost in Translation" provides a similar catharsis for the young Ensign Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who finds her mind invaded by hallucinations of zombies and death. She will eventually find that she is not ill, but that her hallucinations (not to reveal exactly how) stem from a complicated issue with language translation. Given that she is the ship's communications officer, the crisis allows her a chance to flaunt her skills.
Necessity is the mother of invention
"Strange New Worlds" also remembers that budget limitations often work in Trek's favor. If an episode has to take place in only three rooms, "Star Trek" writers typically found a way to wring drama and conversation out of it. In the show's third episode, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" (a title taken from the same "Macbeth" speech that provided the "Star Trek" title "All Our Yesterdays"), La'an becomes stranded in 21st century Toronto with a young James Kirk (Paul Wesley), himself scooped up from an alternate timeline. The characters eat hot dogs, play chess for cash, and try to figure out why they were thrown backward in time to this particular location.
La'an may be solving a mystery, but audiences can see that it was merely because it was easy to film in Toronto with only two (ultimately three) actors. "Tomorrow" gave off the same vibe as "Star Trek" episodes filmed at Vasquez Rocks in California, or "Next Generation" episodes shot at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant & Japanese Garden in Van Nuys, or that two-part episode of "Star Trek: Voyager," when the crew went back in time to 1996 Venice Beach. More than anything, it was fun to shoot on location and to not worry about sci-fi special effects for that week.
And, yes, La'an kind of falls in love with Kirk. The stern security guard, and granddaughter of Khan, displays warmth and humanity in a way she didn't in the show's first season. Previously, she was merely intriguing and capable. Now she has an emotional dimension. All this without seeming too fixated on legacy or sentimentality (see: "Star Trek: Picard" season three).
Whimsy
To expand: there are a few moments of "Star Trek" portent throughout "Strange New Worlds" that, while coming naturally as part of the show's narrative, can strike this old cynic as mildly cloying. There is the moment, for instance, when the young Kirk, only just now a first officer aboard the U.S.S. Farragut, comes on board the Enterprise to meet Uhura and Spock (Ethan Peck) for the first time.
While audiences are clearly meant to get a thrill out of seeing these first meetings dramatized, the show at least tactfully remembers that these characters aren't necessarily destined to become friends. Their first meetings are professional and casually presented. They have little ring of legacy about them. While "Strange New Worlds" takes place only a few years prior to the original "Star Trek," it has been ginger about fatalism. The adventures are being had here and now, and aren't always linking up to extant Trek canon. Sometimes "Trek" can vanish up its own posterior, vaunting the familiar and worshiping at the altar of portentousness. "Strange New Worlds" is mercifully light on its feet.
Indeed, it's the breeziness of "Strange New Worlds" that might be its greatest strength. There is a featherweight, gentle sense of whimsy to the show that makes it amiable and approachable. Characters wink and sparkle and smile. They love their jobs and enjoy their lives.
Pelia
I would be remiss as to not address Pelia more closely. Although she looks human, Pelia belongs to a species that lives thousands and thousands of years. This is a new wrinkle in "Star Trek," and Pelia adds a new dynamic to the series. She is the Enterprise's chief engineer, and has a casual, flip response to the propriety of "Star Trek." She's shaggy, a packrat, and doesn't seem to care about anything beyond the crisis in front of her. She's a change from the stern Hemmer (Bruce Horak), the late engineer from the show's first season. Pelia is a comedy character in a show already notable for its humor and light touch. That Kane plays the role with the exact same accent she used on the 1978 sitcom "Taxi," and that the character is incredibly long-lived, one can posit in their minds that Pelia and Simka Gravas are perhaps the same person.
As previously posited, "Star Trek" rarely starts at its strongest. That the first season of "Strange New Worlds" started as strong as it did was a refreshing aberration, but caused no small amount of trepidation. Could the series keep it going?
Not only has "Strange New Worlds" remained strong, but seems to be experiencing an upswing. It knows what makes "Star Trek" good and leans into those elements. "Star Trek" is now better than it has ever been, providing an engaging, provocative, intelligent sci-fi series that can rest right next to some of the better episodes of the franchise's heyday.
Later in the season, there will be a crossover with "Lower Decks," the other great new Trek program. There is reason to be excited.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" begins streaming on Parramount+ on June 15, 2023.