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Poll What’s Your Favorite SNW Season (So Far)?
- Thread starter Michael
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I agree with your ranking, but I would say season 1 and 3 don't come close to season 2. Apart from the musical episode it was very decent. I'm still hoping there's no muppet episode in season 4. With only a handful of episodes per season, please leave the parody to someone else.As the title says, I’m wondering if there’s a consensus on which season of the show so far has been the best. I could be wrong, but from the weekly review threads I got the impression that season three probably didn’t end up being anyone’s favorite. But with season one and two I don’t really have a feel for what most people prefer. I apologize if I missed an already existing thread that asked for the same thing.
For me I think the second season has been the strongest and most consistently good thus far. While season one was overall pretty well done — with “Memento Mori”, “All Those Who Wander” and “A Quality of Mercy” being standout episodes for me — I feel season two is when everything finally clicked and the episodes weren’t just good, but often great. “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, “Under the Cloak of War” and “Hegemony” were all pretty great, whereas “Ad Astra per Aspera”, “Subspace Rhapsody”, and “Those Old Scientists” are even outstanding. Season three wasn’t all bad, of course, and I loved “Shuttle to Kenfori”, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail“ and especially “Terrarium”, but overall it feels like a noticeable dip in quality. So my ranking would be …
Season 2
Season 1
Season 3
What do you think?
I'm attempting to rewatch season 3, but holy crap is it a chore. I may relegate this season onto the same level as Enterprise season 2 and Picard season 2.
Season 3 is not a binge season, it's a rewatch an isolated episode when the mood strikes. It feels to me like it isn't designed for someone to sit down and rewatch the whole thing. It leant the furthest into the episodic nature and didn't put enough of a throughline in to the detriment of several things like Ortegas' PTSD storyline.
It's a season of side quests, some very good but inconsequential.
It's a season of side quests, some very good but inconsequential.
My new favorite's gonna be Season Four.
I'm quite shocked tbh at how much people seem to despise season 3.
Like, it is still very much the same show. With lots of up and downs, but imo even the worst episodes had something worthwhile in them, and I really do like the amount of horror/space monsters they introduced.
It's just for me the writing in each episode was less polished than before, and sometimes they had too many different concepts going on at the same time.
But it's not like PIC season 2, where they just straight up didn't do Star Trek anymore, or DISc season 3, where after saving the multiverse suddenly a single green pirate lady is supposed to be an equal antagonist.
Here it's still the same show, doing the same things, just hitting a bit fewer marks. And I love this show. So I'm a bit baffled by the extreme dislike it gets.
Like, it is still very much the same show. With lots of up and downs, but imo even the worst episodes had something worthwhile in them, and I really do like the amount of horror/space monsters they introduced.
It's just for me the writing in each episode was less polished than before, and sometimes they had too many different concepts going on at the same time.
But it's not like PIC season 2, where they just straight up didn't do Star Trek anymore, or DISc season 3, where after saving the multiverse suddenly a single green pirate lady is supposed to be an equal antagonist.
Here it's still the same show, doing the same things, just hitting a bit fewer marks. And I love this show. So I'm a bit baffled by the extreme dislike it gets.
You ain't seen nuthin yet.
I think in addition to the season having its own issues (the running arc with the "ancient evil" was just terrible), it was also just where a lot of people's goodwill for the show was exhausted.
Even though it's not the worst episode of the season, "What Is Starfleet?" might be my least favourite because it was the moment I realised that what the writers are interested in and what I'm interested in are polar opposites. The entire plot with the space creature was perfunctory and just there to get more of the usual blunt talk about feelings in, and it was the moment it became clear that SNW, like a lot of modern genre fiction, thinks that plot is a distant second to character emoting.
The other issue was the sheer amount of fourth-wall leaning meta-commentary about Star Trek - Gooding's character giving the speech about how Star Trek is a very special unique awesome show in the holodeck episode, the characters at the end of "What Is Starfleet" all literally turning to the camera and saying "Starfleet is about hope and optimism", etc. It's so cynical; the show talks at great length about what fans want Star Trek to be, but the act of just being that show un-self consciously seems to utterly elude it. It often feels like a show about Star Trek fandom, rather than just a Star Trek show.
Agreed with much of this, but for me than nadir of the season, indeed one of the low points of the entire franchise, was "Four and a Half Vulcans".
I understand the criticism itself. My confusion is more like - this show has been exactly like that from the beginning?
So what did change that people decide it is bad just now, but not earlier? Did the cracks just become more visible over time and with more mediocre plots?
I suppose so - I rewatched the first season recently and while the signs are all there, it does feel a little bit more confident in itself and less obsessed with desperately signalling what it wants to be, or getting lost in reverie about Star Trek as a meta thing.
There's also the wave of popularity the show arrived on; they heavily promoted it as a return to older-style Star Trek and for the first six or so episodes it genuinely seemed like they were on the right track, which created enough goodwill to last into the second season. Retrospectively it sort of seems like a false dawn, but I remember at the time being utterly thrilled by "Children of the Comet" and "Memento Mori", it was just incredible to see something that really felt recognisably like Star Trek back on TV.
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Well, I don‘t think this particular poll is able to tell us anything like that. We might infer that if the poll asked for the “least favorite” season, the third would come out least favorable. But that still wouldn‘t tell you that people “despised” the season. And I suspect that if we were to have a poll asking “Do you despise season 3?”, the “nays” would greatly outnumber the “yeas”. It‘s the least popular, but that doesn‘t mean fans hated it.
I still can‘t get over the fact that after almost three months and 62 people voting it’s still a dead tie between seasons one and two. Certainly feels like fans are evenly split on the issue. I don‘t think I‘ve ever seen anything like this in a Trek poll.
"Despise" might have been a too strong word. Still perplexing that it's almost no one's favourite.
Like, season 2 had a lot more controversial stuff - the over-representation of Kirk, Pelia's accent, the musical episode, the cartoon crossover. And season 3 also a few highlights - the Ortegas Gorn episode, the giant monster ship, and the original reaction seemed a few people liked the new "demon" enemies.
I have some grievances with season 3 as well - mostly that it went back to the old A-plot/B-plot type of story telling, and that several of the major arcs got a less than great conclusion (Gorn & demons invasion, Pike's girlfriend,...).
But I wonder if this is also a case of the fandom pendulum swinging back a bit too hard - as it often does - first everyone is a bit over-hyped, to finally get what they always wanted. And now that they get it it's too much of the same but exactly what hoped for, has it's own issues becoming more visible etc etc.
Like, season 2 had a lot more controversial stuff - the over-representation of Kirk, Pelia's accent, the musical episode, the cartoon crossover. And season 3 also a few highlights - the Ortegas Gorn episode, the giant monster ship, and the original reaction seemed a few people liked the new "demon" enemies.
I have some grievances with season 3 as well - mostly that it went back to the old A-plot/B-plot type of story telling, and that several of the major arcs got a less than great conclusion (Gorn & demons invasion, Pike's girlfriend,...).
But I wonder if this is also a case of the fandom pendulum swinging back a bit too hard - as it often does - first everyone is a bit over-hyped, to finally get what they always wanted. And now that they get it it's too much of the same but exactly what hoped for, has it's own issues becoming more visible etc etc.
Hm, I dunno. I don’t think we necessarily need to stylize season three not being quite as popular with the fans into some kind of grander problem the show or that season supposedly has. IMHO, seasons one and two were both just very good and season three somewhat less good. But the setting, the characters, and the willingness to do classic Trek stories alongside more high-concept “special” episodes are present in all three seasons. Is definitely has not lost what makes it such an enjoyable watch overall. The ingredients were the same in season three, only the recipe was slightly different.
It was just a very uneven season with too many shitty episodes.
I don't think S3 is tonally or structurally the same as S1, I think it's genuinely markedly worse. S3 was hampered by several failed running arcs, and some of the characters began to calcify into the worst forms of themselves. There were also just no really good episodes to balance it out to any degree, the only half-decent one was "Sehlat" and it still sort of sucked.
Part of it felt like Discovery-era writers slipping back into old habits. S1 had its problems but it could tell a simple three-act story, which is a skill that seems to have evaporated (or just been deliberately dropped) by S3 in favour of plots happening mostly in the background and resolving in abrupt unsatisfactory ways, a la DSC.
As an aside, I'm still astonished by that line where Chapel and La'an discuss whether Spock can be trusted to "behave himself" around Corby or w/e during the archaeological expedition. I don't think they'd have had such a bizarre conversation in S1, nor would there be any doubt that Spock could be relied on to act like someone post-puberty.
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Again I get the criticism. But season 1 & 2 had the same problems already - remember M'Benga's daughter in the transporter? She did a "Batel" way earlier.
If I had to choose between S1's fairy tale episode and S3's not-Dixon Hill - I prefer the latter by a mile.
For me the biggest difference is that as of now the novelty has worn off - in a bad S1 episode (and there were a few) everything was still excitingly new. While this season there were some clunkers and even the better ones felt like the writers already fell into some habits. But in no regard would I say S3 was 'bad' as a whole. They're all quite close in quality for me, and my biggest gripe really is that I wish we would have had a lot more episodes.
For what it's worth, the producers blame the two writers strike - which I kind of get, because "not as tightly written as it could be" would be my biggest criticism of the 3rd season:
'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Producers Promise Season 4 Will Be Better
Producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers lay the blame for season 3's uneven quality on outside factors.
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