Hey everyone! As promised I'm back for my review of season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. There will be spoilers so if you haven't finished the season yet, or haven't even started it yet, please go watch the show, before you read this review. Let's get into it.
As mentioned before, I was incredibly skeptical when this show was announced. With poorly both Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard had turned out in their first seasons, and the fact that Akiva Goldsman's track record with working on Hollywood studio franchises such as Batman being not great, I was worried that this show would be worse than Picard seasons 1 and 2 combined and that the creatives working on it would continue to struggle with balancing an ensemble cast which is something that I've criticized Discovery for the entire time it's been on the air. My one saving grace for this series was the fact that Anson Mount and Ethan Peck would be returning as Pike and Spock respectively, and they were the best parts of season 2 of Discovery. For me anyway.
With each casting announcement, I became more and more excited, but still cautiously optimistic because I wanted to like this show but quality is very important to me, and I was not confident in the producers and writers's abilities to turn out a quality show that was more than just a game of spot the easter eggs while being dark, brooding, and very brutal. But I was excited because we were getting to see Nurse Chapel, someone who never got the character development she deserved in TOS or the TOS movies, and didn't even get screentime in the Kelvin timeline movies. Not to mention Doctor M'Benga, who was such a minor character in the original series that I was intrigued with his inclusion here.
The pilot aired and it was great. And then as each week went by and each new episode aired I was excited for each of them, and watching the show stopped being a show that I felt obligated to watch because I'm a Star Trek fan, and became a show that I was excited to watch and then talk about every single week. Did I feel every episode was a 10/10 show? No. There were absolutely episodes that I liked more than others. My favourite episodes being episode 5, "Spock Amok" and episode 8, "The Elysian Kingdom". But none of them were bad and they all kept me interested in all of the characters, not just in Pike, Spock, and Una. So by the time the season finale closed with the arrest of Una by Captain Batel I cared enough that I began thinking of ways Pike could get her out of her predicament without jeopardizing his Starfleet career, since, you know, he had to be around long enough to give command of the Enterprise over to Kirk and be put in the beeping wheelchair.
Same thing goes with Hemmer's death in episode 9. I've mentioned this before but one of the problems that Discovery has problems with is balancing and developing characters on the show. Tilley, Stamets, Burnham, and Saru are all very developed characters. But characters like Detmer, Owosekun, Bryce, and Rhys were pushed to the side. So in season 2, when Airiam was killed off, having been compromised by Control, it wasn't impactful because we hadn't spent much time with her, and we only got some basic background information on her in the episode where she was killed. That background info wasn't enough to make the audience care about her death because she was a blank slate to us.
Hemmer on the other hand was different. While we may not have known a whole lot about his family or his career prior to being assigned to the Enterprise as chief engineer, we didn't necessarily need to because we learned who he is through his interactions with the rest of the cast over the course of eight episodes (he was only in the pilot for two seconds at the end of the episode). We saw him encourage Uhura many times, we saw him interact with Spock in a playful manner, we saw him revel in playing a wizard in M'Benga's storybook fantasy in episode 8, and we saw how he handled things in a crisis. And all of that more than made up for our lack of knowledge about his background. Does background information flesh out a character? Yes, absolutely. Do we need to know all or any of it? Not unless it informs us as the audience, of a pertinent piece of information related to the situation given to us in a story. In this case, episodes of a television show. And only if it helps to move the story along or be part of a character's progression. So when Hemmer died not only did we, as the audience, feel it, but we saw WHY the other characters felt it. Why Spock lost control of his emotions during the memorial, which led to Chapel hugging him in the corridor. Why Uhura chose to continue with Starfleet instead of resigning following her time in Starfleet Academy. And why Ortegas spoke so highly of him during the memorial. We saw why in the eight episodes that Hemmer appeared in, and that was very satisfying to me.
Speaking of Ortegas, while we didn't get an episode focused on her this season, she got alot of screentime. She was in every single episode and Melissa Navia did such an amazing job playing the character. I can't wait to see more of her next season.
My favourite character has to be Nurse Christine Chapel, played by Jess Bush. Majel Barrett was one of my favourite actresses on Star Trek when I was a kid. She was so versatile too. I mean she played Number One (Una) and Chapel on TOS, played Chapel in some of the TOS movies, played Deanna Troi's mother, Lwaxana on TNG and DS9, AND voiced the computer of every Federation starship on TOS, TAS, the movies, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and Star Trek (2009). But, I always felt that Chapel was just there as a big middle finger to the network executives who didn't like Majel in "The Cage" and didn't get very much to do. So to see the character come back in such a big way in this series is amazing. I love her friendship with Spock this season. It's fun, but it has a little hint of romantic interest on Chapel's part, which is interesting. Especially because it appears that Spock finds her fascinating to coin a phrase.
I also love that Chapel is friends with Uhura and Ortegas in a very supportive way. I mean she's not even in Starfleet yet, but she has the respect and friendship of the Starfleet officers onboard the ship. Very similar to how Doctor Phlox had it even though he was part of the Interspecies Medical Exchange and not a member of Starfleet on Enterprise.
Overall this was a fantastic season of television. My buddy Aaron and I have talked alot over the last few weeks about how incredibly lucky he and I are as geeks to have these quality shows coming out on a weekly basis. Sure, we aren't interested in some of them or are more interested in others, but compared to 20 years ago when we were both in high school and we had Enterprise, Smallville, Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, and Justice League only on TV, we're in geek heaven right now. And to have a Star Trek show on the air that is quality storytelling and not concerned with what the more difficult side of the fandom thinks about it is amazing. So here's to however many seasons of SNW we can get.
And that my friends is it for today and for this weekend. So I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will see you back here next week for alot more posts. Until then, take care.
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