In the penultimate season of Strange New Worlds, which is confirmed to end after its final half-season next year, we have had a kooky vacation episode, a film noir-esque episode, a horror episode, and one not-so-gimmick episode that happened to be the season premiere. You would think that they’d spend more time crafting decent stories instead of more of their BIG SWINGS… but alas…
Here’s the thing with this show… that I’m watching via Prime Video because Amazon lets me sign up with Paramount Plus through that and use up my gift card funds… which is enough to last the next month… but I digress…
Look, I don’t want to say that the episodes have been “bad” per se. Yeah, the horror movie episode didn’t quite work for me, the vacation episode was a big swing and a miss, there’s way too much Kirk on this show, and we still haven’t made it to the puppet show… but honestly, I didn’t mind the noir episode. I didn’t think an explanation was necessary for the black & white visuals, but they did toss that in there. Maybe now they can explain why a certain character who appeared in TOS looks drastically different from their original appearance… if you’re gonna go to great lengths to explain the color choice, then you may as well as EXPLAIN THAT.
But other than that, it’s a perfectly fine Trek offering. A bit of a throwback of sorts in that we’ve reached a colony that emulates old Earth and is ruled by REDACTED. It almost comes across a rehash of a certain TOS episode and I didn’t mind it because it’s one of the few decent episodes of Trek where the noir doesn’t distract. (Honestly, you can all this a simulation of what it would have been like to watch Star Trek on a black and white screen… although some folks may have done that once upon a time and are still alive to tell that tale, so… eh.)
See, I want to say nice things about Strange New Worlds and there are bits and nuggets along the way that show some promise… but then there’s the rest of the show and suddenly, it loses me. And you would think that the one issue that most people watching this were complaining about – the focus on more BIG SWINGS and less on giving us something that’s up to the standards of what made for good Star Trek stories – would be ratified and addressed… but I guess there’s a reason why this era of Trek television is coming to an end.
Anyway, we’ll see how much this show improves and whether I’ll stick around for the rest of it. I might be able to catch the rest of the show with this one subscription, but if not… I guess we’ll see if this seasons’ run will convince me to keep the Paramount thing for another month.
If not… oh well.
