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.
