In a streaming world where new series are decreasingly unlikely to get a second season (let alone a third) even if they appear to perform incredibly well, it’s something of a treat that Paramount keeps giving its various incarnations of Star Trek five season runs. The company has recently announced, ahead of the start of the third season of the best of all those shows, Strange New Worlds, that it’s to get a fourth and a fifth season too! Woo! Although that fifth run will be truncated, and be its last. Boo!
The experiments in the final frontier have had mixed results over the last decade. Beginning with the very promising Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, the long-abandoned television franchise returned from a 12-year hiatus since the (merciful) demise of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005—a period that had otherwise only been populated by J. J. Abrams aimless and soon-abandoned reboot movies. This was then followed in 2020 by Picard, quickly accompanied by animated comedy Lower Decks, kids animation Prodigy in 2021, and then in 2022 the beginning of Strange New Worlds.
Now, clearly making judgement on anything Star Trek is a surefire way to get a person in all manner of trouble, but who cares: Discovery’s five seasons offered diminishing returns, its fourth series reaching a nadir of utter dreadfulness that was only mildly improved upon in its fifth meandering final run. Picard was so excruciatingly bad as to have been ruled illegal under the Geneva Convention, although its third and final season—while still rubbish—delivered joyfully silly fan-service as it reunited as much of the The Next Generation crew as would agree to stagger onto set. Lower Decks was utterly brilliant for five glorious years and you should watch it immediately. No one, not even the people who wrote and drew it, watched Prodigy. And Strange New Worlds has made the entire roller coaster worthwhile.
The mistake both Discovery and Picard made was to believe Star Trek was ever supposed to be more than people in pastel colors exchanging sci-fi gobbledegook, blowing up a spaceship, and then learning a jolly nice lesson in time for the credits. Presumably attempts to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle moments from the earlier series, like “The Best of Both Worlds” or “In The Pale Moonlight,” they failed to understand these only worked because they stood out from the usual amiable chatter. Both series just felt morose, hopeless, and as such, distinctly un-Trek.
Strange New Worlds (and Lower Decks for that matter) understands the brief. Set before the events of the original 1960s Star Trek TV show (well, in between the events of the pilot and the rest of the series, nerds), it span off from one of Discovery’s finer moments, as we see Captain Pike faced with a vision of a gruesome accident that would ruin his life. But, put that aside, because now we’re off to enjoy the voyages of the Starship Enterprise before Kirk gets into the captain’s chair, and it’s going to be so much fun.
The previous two seasons of Strange New Worlds have brought us some of the best Star Trek ever. It’s bright, and positive, and features an incredibly capable crew driven to be a force of good in the galaxy. They are very much on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no humans have gone before. And if that means getting trapped in a fairy tale, or a space creature causing the entire crew to communicate in musical numbers, then dammit they’ll do that so flipping well. And they’ll do it with impeccable haircuts.
As such, when things do get more serious, they’re mostly earned, and you know aren’t going to end in inescapable doom. (Although, let’s be fair, S02E10's “Hegemony” was an embarrassing miss in its attempt to suddenly turn into Alien.) So, it is with absolute delight that I greet the news that Paramount is letting it serve its full five-year mission.
It’s vanishingly rare for any TV series, let alone streaming ones, to get guaranteed episodes for a further two seasons in advance. It means that on top of season three’s 10 episodes, we’re promised another 10 for season four, followed by an abbreviated six-episode run for season five. And yes, admittedly, the 26 episodes this assures us of is the same number as a single-season order for Trek in the 90s, but times have changed, and honestly, I’m grateful we get any.
Also, while I’d love the idea of the show running for as long as the cast and writers are willing, it does make a lot of sense to give SNW a termination date. As much as the joy of things as daft as seeing cartoon characters from Lower Decks appear in this live-action show distracts us, the reality is we are heading toward Pike’s accident, determined not only by his earlier vision, but also by August 23, 1969's episode of Star Trek, when the disfigured post-accident Pike appeared, sealing his fate some 56 years ago. They can’t keep putting it off forever.
But, we’ve got a solid 20 episodes before we need to worry about any of that! And the trailer for the new season, which starts July 17, suggests it’s going to be fun times. Including Patton Oswalt as a Vulcan! And, thank goodness, it doesn’t look like Nurse Chapel is going anywhere.
It’s all on Paramount Plus, which can more conveniently be accessed through Amazon Prime, along with all the episodes of the other mentioned shows. But honestly, just watch this and Lower Decks.
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