Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Strange New Worlds began like a love letter to classic Trek, episodic structure, a charismatic Pike, and just enough retro charm to make us believe the franchise had found its soul again. For a few glorious episodes, it felt like Starfleet was back on course.

But then came the drift. The tonal chaos. The genre-hopping. The canon crimes. And suddenly, we weren't watching Star Trek anymore, we were watching Kurtzman Trek, where emotional depth is replaced by trauma flashbacks, and legacy characters are rewritten like fanfic with a studio budget.

Episodes like Four-and-a-Half Vulcans and Wedding Bell Blues don't just miss the mark, they vaporise it. Spock becomes a rom-com lead, La'an dreams of ballet, and Chapel's arc feels like it was lifted from a CW drama. The Enterprise crew spends more time navigating their feelings than the galaxy, and the Prime Directive is treated like a vague suggestion.

This isn't exploration. It's exposition. It's Star Trek: Feelings Edition, where every character has a tragic backstory and every plot twist is designed to trend on social media for 24 hours before being forgotten

The production values are stellar. The cast is game. But the writing? It's a transporter accident of tone, pacing, and philosophy. Trek used to challenge us. Now it coddles us. It used to ask "What does it mean to be human?" Now it asks "Did Spock text back?"

Strange New Worlds started with promise, but somewhere along the way, it warped into Kurtzman Trek, a franchise boldly going... away from everything that made Star Trek matter.

Season 1 was an A Season 2 a B Season 3 a C

The show has lost its way unfortunately. Too many unnecessary characters, too much love interest for Spock (one each season?), Pike gets let's focus each season, the first officer is practically non existent, too many "silly" episodes, and amazingly the show is called "Strange New Worlds" but each season they visit fewer and fewer worlds and encounter fewer and fewer new species.

I just finished watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and have to say I really enjoyed it. I don't consider myself a huge Treky or anything, I watched the original a little but it was on before I was born and watched Next Generation when I was a little kid but don't remember too much, I do like the recent movies a lot though. Anyway, just as a sci-fi fan with a little knowledge on Star Trek...I liked it. It seems that even most die hard Star Trek fans like this one and they hate all the new stuff. The writing and cast are what makes this so good and the visuals are also pretty good for a tv show. I'd definitely recommend this to both Star Trek fans and sci-fi fans who don't know anything about Star Trek and are just looking for a good sci-fi show to have fun watching.

Captain Pike's swooshy future pompadour is completely distracting from most of what he says, serious or comedic, in Season 3. Which means it's always the star of the scene. You know I'm right. Do yourself a favor: watch any scene where the camera is centred on him and try not to look at his hair. You can't. No one can!

Who doesn't love Star Trek??

This is not a terrible Star Trek (like "Discovery"). It's okay. I find it difficult to get invested in the characters with only 46 episodes spread over five years.

The stories are okay. There have been a couple of real duds, though (the "singing" episode in year two and the "holodeck" episode in year 3). "Lower Decks" was a far superior show than "Discovery" and also better than this show. I thought "Picard" was excellent and I would like to see that be sequeled by the young(er) crew led by 7 of 9. But more than 50-odd shows... I miss the old Star Treks (especially DS9).