More traditionally Star Trek than Discovery or Picard, Strange New Worlds puts a modern-day spin on traditional franchise territory. Its real trump card, however, may additionally become its crew, with Anson Mount’s charismatic, authoritative Captain Christopher Pike the standout.
It may be titled Strange New Worlds however there’s something refreshingly familiar about the eleventh TV series to endure the Star Trek call. While the 4 previous suggests within the modern-day generation have each set out to take the franchise in new instructions, this debut episode shows the contemporary new release is getting lower back to the assignment declaration Gene Roddenberry laid out in the Nineteen Sixties: the USAEnterprise on an extended-time period challenge to discover the cosmos. In different words, the employees and hardware may additionally have changed, but this is the most Star Trek the venerable antique franchise has felt in a long time.
This pilot episode – also, confusingly, titled ‘Strange New Worlds’ – picks up in the wake of Star Trek: Discovery’s 2d season, in which the Disco team travelled forward to the thirty second century to shop the universe from megalomaniac AI CONTROL. While those precise exploits stay categorized to most of Starfleet, the people left at the back of nonetheless undergo the scars: Spock (Ethan Peck) is grieving the loss of his sister, Michael Burnham, at the same time as Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) has long gone off the grid in Montana as he struggles to come back to phrases with a premonition of his terrible disfigurement and incapacitation in a radiation leak. It’s not lengthy earlier than they’re lower back in movement, however, after an uncommon First Contact state of affairs concerning first officer Una/Number One summons them returned to the Enterprise bridge…
If you’re streaming a Star Trek display on Paramount Plus, probabilities are it’s no longer your first journey around the Alpha Quadrant, and Strange New Worlds goes heavy at the nostalgia. As in JJ Abrams’ alternative universe Star Trek movies, the number one-coloured uniforms are a smart replace of Kirk and Spock’s classic clothes, at the same time as unique series prop and set designs get a loving 21st century makeover. The opening credit, in the meantime, are successfully a love letter to the Enterprise – one of the display’s most stylish spaceships – and they’re fantastically soundtracked through a Jeff Russo’s smart riff on Alexander Courage’s traditional authentic subject. There are also severa subtler nods to past Treks, from mentions of authentic series aliens the Gorn, to a distinguished position for Pike’s in-canon predecessor within the Enterprise hotseat.
(Image credit: Paramount)
Crucially, Strange New Worlds also recalls that the original series’ reputation owed as a great deal to the chemistry among Kirk, Spock and the relaxation of the group because it did to its often groundbreaking sci-fi. This new cohort is a promising bunch, and that they immediately establish the sort of clean chemistry you’d expect in a group of especially skilled co-employees – if the Enterprise become an office, it’s somewhere you’d need to paintings.
Of the new faces, Christina Chong’s La’an Noonien-Singh is the standout, a coldly green newcomer to the Enterprise unafraid to act first, ask questions later. She additionally receives a beginnings of a backstory which – as has been confirmed in interviews – will in the long run hyperlink her to her famous namesake, Khan.
Meanwhile, medics M’Benga and Chapel (Babs Olusanmokun and Jess Bush) – both rebooted from the original collection – do enough to signify Sickbay might be a fun area to hang out, Lt Ortegas (Melissa Navia) brings wisecracking heart to the helm, and the rebooted Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) is full of huge-eyed wonder as the Enterprise’s brand new cadet prodigy.
But, as you’d assume, it’s the characters formerly established in Discovery who take centre degree – with viable the exception of Rebecca Romijn, who’s greater McGuffin than fully fledged individual first day trip. Spock’s entrance, especially, holds huge relevance for a conventional unique collection episode – we received’t say which one – whilst Pike gets to unpick the ramifications of that vision of his horrible accident
Anson Mount had already performed enough in his season on Discovery to set up his Pike as one among Star Trek’s remarkable captains, his charismatic portrayal a complete reinvention of the timber unique version performed by using Jeffrey Hunter in Trek pilot episode ‘The Cage’. Here he expertly treads a best line between the introspection and 2nd-guessing that could inevitably come in case you knew precisely how and while you’re going to die, and being a exceptional Starfleet captain. While no longer quite as gung-ho as his successor on the Enterprise, Captain James T Kirk, is – frequently unfairly – looked as if it would be, he’s additionally organized to bend steadfast Federation policies to get the first-rate outcomes.
While the episode’s plot explores the type of standalone first contact/prime directive topics The Next Generation should do in its sleep, it does have some amusing subverting the expectancies that come from Starfleet’s function as galactic peacekeepers. If some of the allegory is a little too at the nose at times – the truth Pike’s watching conventional sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still at the beginning of the episode is no accident – contemporary international events make its anti-conflict sentiments experience even greater applicable than they could have when it changed into written.
Trek purists will surely quibble the fact that a number of the gadgetry is inconsistent with the pre-original collection setting, the group often using tech that, inside the Star Trek timeline, shouldn’t turn out to be common till The Next Generation technology. But otherwise this is an extremely promising begin for the state-of-the-art department of the ever-increasing Trek universe. Strange New Worlds can be boldly going in which its predecessors have long gone earlier than, but it’s doing so in style.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is out now within the US. A UK airdate is TBC. For more, take a look at out our manual to the Star Trek timeline.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1, episode 1 evaluate: “An extremely promising begin”
More historically Star Trek than Discovery or Picard, Strange New Worlds puts a cutting-edge spin on conventional franchise territory. Its actual trump card, however, may additionally grow to be its crew, with Anson Mount’s charismatic, authoritative Captain Christopher Pike the standout.More infoAvailable platformsTVGenreSci-fi