‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Renewed for Fifth and Final Season

[Quinton]

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If the timestamp doesn't work at 13:25 Akiva talks a bit about how the greenlight for Season 5 came about; and reading between the lines, you can figure out why it's 6 episodes and not 10.

I think many in the cast and crew agreed to take less in compensation on some level and worked with the accounts to see what they could do with the ultimate season budget they were given <-- But that's just supposition on my part...only those involved in whatever negotiations took place know the particulars.

Yeah, I think it’s a good guess, for sure.

 

[Ssosmcin]

All good points. I would also add that its easy to look back on old shows and point out "fillers". When those episodes were being released in real time they were not seen as fillers. Each episode was a new adventure and even if it wasnt as good as the previous episode you couldn't wait until the next week. Because of this you got almost a full year of excitement except for the brief hiatus during holidays or summer. Now with streaming its wait a year or two for what is essentially a miniseries of 10 episodes that you are done with in a couple of months. The only thing that is better is the production values, but I would gladly trade that for a 20 -25 episode season. I don't know how anyone can say what we have now is better, but then again I'm old school.

The great majority of Star Trek from TOS through Enterprise was episodic. One one full season of Enterprise was an arc and then they had multi part stories mixed in the final season. DS9 was moderately serialized but the war arc was ongoing. TNG was purely episodic (with a minor plot point carried over later on - like Worf's problems with the Klingons). There was no such thing as a "filler" episode. Because they weren't supposed to be connected. Filler is when you have an episode of an arc focused series that doesn't really impact said arc.

Exceptions to this would be "clip shows." So TNG had one "filler" episode. Arguably, so did TOS with "The Menagerie." Even "Where NO Man Has Gone Before," being a pilot they didn't intend to air, was plopped on the sked because they needed to populate the timeslot that week.

But TNG had good episodes and bad episodes. But the random Troi or Crusher episode was no more or less a "filler" episode than anything else.