When a franchise has been around as long as
Star Trek, it’s not hard to understand a desire to reinvent the wheel — or, I suppose, the warp core. Lean too much on what
Trek has been doing since the Sixties and you risk your futuristic space opera feeling old, stodgy, and high on its own supply. But the more recent series like
Star Trek: Discovery and
Star Trek: Picard have tried much too hard to fit
Trek into the Peak TV landscape, in the process losing sight of what made these stories work so effectively for so many decades.
In particular, the decision to lean hard into serialization did both
Discovery and
Picard an extreme disservice, trapping each show in season-long arcs that simply couldn’t sustain themselves for such an extended period. The first year of
Discovery committed hard to a Make Klingons Great Again arc — and a reimagining of James T. Kirk’s biggest enemies — that just didn’t work at all, and there was no escaping it once it began.
Picard has tried a couple of different major arcs, neither of which has quite worked (I lost interest midway through the latest one and stopped), and mainly perked up when it took a week off from them so that, say, Picard could go hang out with his old friends Will Riker and Deanna Troi.
It’s not just that these different arcs have been duds. It’s that the very concept of them runs counter to everything that has defined
Star Trek from 1966 until recently. The original Shatner/Nimoy series was built on a classic Adventure of the Week model, where the
Enterprise crew would go into orbit around a planet, get to know the locals, cause and/or solve a problem, and then move onto the next one. This was how most of television operated back then, but it was a structure that worked particularly well for
Trek, allowing creator Gene Roddenberry and his collaborators to take big swings every week. Sometimes, they missed terribly, but that just meant they would have the freedom to try something else entirely for the following episode. Eighties and Nineties spinoffs
Star Trek: The Next Generation and
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did the formula one better, combining the familiar standalone missions with ongoing character arcs about Data’s desire to be more human, or (on both series) Worf’s struggle to find a place for himself in the tumultuous Klingon Empire.
Deep Space Nine eventually went very serialized, but that was at the end, and after the show had spent most of its run building to that and making the characters interesting enough to carry a prolonged interstellar war story. Serialization is all the rage in modern TV drama, but not every series is built for that. So far,
Star Trek hasn’t been.
The latest spinoff, though, is a throwback in every sense — an attempt to boldly go where so many have gone before, even if it’s been a while.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is simultaneously a spinoff of
Discovery and a prequel to the original series, with Anson Mount reprising his
Discovery performance as Christopher Pike, the captain of the
U.S.S. Enterprise immediately prior to James T. Kirk, and with a host of other familiar names and faces. Ethan Peck is back from
Discovery as a younger Mr. Spock, as is Rebecca Romijn as Pike’s first officer, Una Chin-Riley, a.k.a. Number One. (Pike, Number One, and Spock were all featured in Roddenberry’s original
Star Trek pilot, where the first two were played by Jeffrey Hunter and Roddenberry’s future wife Majel Barrett.) There are also more inexperienced versions of communications and linguistics expert Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush, reinterpreting a different Majel Barrett character), plus Babs Olusanmokun as serene Dr. M’Benga, who appeared in a couple of episodes of the Sixties show. A few of the crew members are wholly original, including aloof chief engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) and confident helm officer Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia). But even some of the newbies are linked to
Trek lore: Security chief La’an Noonien-Singh shares a last name and some backstory with Ricardo Montalban’s genetically-engineered despot Khan, for instance...
...as
Discovery and
Picard have fumbled around looking for a direction, only occasionally reminding me of why I love the franchise in the first place, I’ve asked for Kurtzman and company to just let
Star Trek be
Star Trek. With
Strange New Worlds, they finally have, and the power of possibility is palpable throughout.
