Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Pre-season Thoughts

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay. So today I'm here to give some brief thoughts on the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds before the season premiere airs on CTV Sci-Fi Channel tonight. It's already dropped on Paramount+ but I haven't encountered any spoilers so far so I'm going solely based on the teaser trailers we've gotten. So let's get into it.

Considering I reviewed all ten episodes of season 1 last year, I think you can guess how excited I am for season 2. In fact, I'm planning on reviewing every episode of season 2 as they come out. So look forward to season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Reviews every Friday, since I can't watch SNW until it airs on TV on Thursday nights.

Season 1 was a major surprise for me last year. Given Star Trek's habit of having really bad first seasons for just about every series that's come out since TOS first began back in 1966, and given how much I disliked the first seasons of both Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024) and Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023), I was concerned that the quality of SNW season 1 would also not be great. Luckily my fears were laid to rest after the pilot aired. 

The big thing that made season 1 so good is how much attention every character got. It was the first true ensemble cast that we had since Enterprise first went off the air back in 2005. Not only were the characters consistently well written, but they were also consistently well acted. 

For me season 2 has to continue developing all of these wonderful characters. Including the new characters coming in. Like Paul Wesley's James T. Kirk and Carol Kane's Commander Pelia, who is apparently the Enterprise's new chief engineer following Hemmer's death at the end of season 1. These characters are probably the best we've had in Modern Star Trek outside of the crew of the Enterprise-D and Captain Shaw in season 3 of Picard. Because, oh boy, Shaw was awesome. But the SNW crew felt like Star Trek characters. Which is something I felt we haven't truly had in Modern Trek up to that point. At least in live action, as the main characters on Prodigy feel like Star Trek characters too. Though they feel more like the classic TOS and TNG characters rather than the more flawed DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise characters. 

The trailers we got for the second season promised us Klingons, for an episode, dealing with Una's arrest at the end of the first season, further exploration of Spock and Chapel's relationship, and a growing threat from the Gorn. Personally, just for my personal tastes I'm more excited for the Spock and Chapel stuff than I am for the Gorn stuff. Not for the weird continuity reasons that some people have, but because the second Gorn episode that we got at the end of season 1 was the scariest episode of the season and I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did the rest of the season. Though it wasn't as bad as it might've been on any other modern Star Trek show.

 The one thing that I am still concerned about is the crossover episode with Lower Decks. Not because Lower Decks is an animated comedy that gets so ridiculous that it's hard to take the show as canon, because as you know from my season 1 reviews, SNW got pretty ridiculous at times with episodes like "Spock Amok" and "The Elysian Kingdom". And I'm not even concerned about it based on my rather coloured history with Lower Decks which caused me to stop watching the show entirely. What concerns me about this crossover episode is the fact that crossovers are incredibly difficult to pull off.

Crisis On Infinite Earths was an incredibly huge undertaking for The CW back in the 2019-2020 TV season. It cost alot and the story was almost too big for only five episodes. Even some of the earlier Arrowverse crossovers were extremely risky to do on a logistics level, because not only were they filming the crossovers themselves, but they were also still filming regular episodes of Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and DC's Legends of Tomorrow as well. Which meant Stephen Amell, Grant Gustin, Melissa Benoist, Caity Lotz, and whoever else from their respective casts were going to be in the other episodes of the crossover, could only be away from their own shows for a short amount of time before they needed to be back in time to film other episodes of their shows. 

With the SNW/LD crossover that isn't a huge issue since Tawny Newsome, who voices Mariner in Lower Decks and is playing the character in live action in SNW, and Jack Quaid, who voices Boimler, and is playing the character in SNW, are showing up in SNW for one episode, and maybe not even a full episode, I'm not quite sure how that's going to work. However Lower Decks is a strange Star Trek show to crossover with. Mainly because the show's brand of humour is more in line with the more inappropriate/adult comedy shows like Rick & Morty and so the Lower Decks audience is smaller for that reason. Don't get me wrong, Star Trek: Lower Decks is a super popular show, but its popularity isn't universal. So there's alot of people who watch SNW, who either don't like Lower Decks for one reason or another, haven't seen Lower Decks because they overlooked it due to it being animation, or are too young to be watching the show due to the nature of the show's humour.

So marrying the more traditional Star Trek tone with the more out there tone of Lower Decks is going to be difficult. It can work, but it's probably going to take many SNW fans off guard if they aren't already familiar with Lower Decks. Personally, I hope it works, but I'm not sure if non-Lower Decks fans are going to like it or not. Particularly those who didn't like the more ridiculous nature of "Spock Amok" and "The Elysian Kingdom" in season 1. Or if the episode is going to work or not. We shall see when that episode airs. I'm not sure when that will be since I don't know what number that episode actually is in the season. 

I think that's all I wanted to say about season 2 prior to watching the season premiere. I'm really excited to have this show back. It was my favourite season of the modern era of Star Trek last year and I can't wait to dive back into the world of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for another ten episode season. 

That's it for me for today, but I will be back tomorrow for my review of the season 2 premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "The Broken Circle". So until then have a great rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.