The new teaser for the upcoming third season of Strange New Worlds… doesn’t inspire much confidence, as it continues to dive into weird genre-bending episodes that seem more the cast and crew having fun doing whatever than doing anything worthwhile and resembling good old fashioned classic Star Trek.
Yes, the Original Series had episodes that the crew visit alien worlds modeled after 1930s Chicago, Nazi Germany, and the Roman Empire, but those episodes happened because the costumes were available and thus those episodes cost less money to make. Once we got to the later spin-offs, episodes of these kinds were the rare breed to break away from the norm.
When you only have a ten-episode run and every episode is some wacky gimmick episode, it feels less like a consistent series of standalone episodes and more like an anthology series of sorts that happen to feature the same cast of characters. It’s too bad that they decided to go this route, because I thought the first season of Strange New Worlds was one of the better live-action seasons of Star Trek to come out of this uneven Kurtzman era, but once the second season decided that we’re gonna do gimmicks galore, that’s where it lost me.
It also bring pause to the casting of Paul Wesley as Jim Kirk as he’s sharing a drink with the much younger looking Scotty as played by Martin Quinn (or vice versa – since Scott is actually supposed to be OLDER than Kirk by a few years.)
I’m hoping that I’m wrong and this season turns out to be quality. For what it’s worth, my older brother – who has been into Trek almost all his life – is more excited for this direction than I am, so I’m willing to at least give this thing a shot. I just don’t want what was a promising show degrade into pointless schlock. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like schlock. But I also like Star Trek. And I can really use more Star Trek right about now.
dtm666 