Some Blundering About Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1×01: Strange New Worlds

Okay so let’s drop everything for a week and talk about Strange New Worlds because I finally managed to build up a buffer.

I do not like that Strange New Worlds is rewarding the people who have spent the last four years saying that NuTrek would be good if only they made it more about white men on ships named Enterprise.

But then they turned around and showed stock footage of the attempt by republicans with full knowledge and approval of the leader of their party to violently and illegally overthrow the US government and murdered elected officials, and described it as the first stage of the conflict that became World War III. (Guess who got yelled at on Quora for describing January 6 as an “insurrection” when it was “really” a “peaceful protest, unlike the violent racial insurrection of BLM.” Hint: he also has a fucking awesome Alice in Wonderland diorama on his dining room table), so this show is okay in my book.

In particular, Strange New Worlds gets us past what’s been the biggest actual problem with modern Star Trek: the extent to which the arc-heavy storytelling competes for screen-time with the franchise’s traditional strength of using self-contained adventures to showcase a strong ensemble. For example, Discovery spent three quarters of its season leaving me very angry that Reno had not yet appeared. To contrast, I can not even begin to say which character on Strange New Worlds I am disappointed didn’t get more screen-time, because they are all wonderful and all got a few minutes.

Also, I’m lying and it is Ortegas. The only problem with Ortegas is that sometimes she is not on screen, yet everyone isn’t just standing around asking, “Where’s Ortegas?”

So Strange New Worlds seems to have chosen to go light on story arcs, but in their place, there seems to be a much heavier emphasis on character arcs. It seems natural now, but it caught me by surprise just how hard they’re leaning in on Pike’s acceptance of being, y’know, extremely doomed. Actually, there’s a broad sense of doom hanging over the whole ship, I think, and I wonder how that’s going to go. La’an seems just primed for a character arc that ends in noble tragedy, even if they never get around to going into detail about her name (There is no good reason to assume she has anything to do with the other Noonien-Singh we’ve heard of; lots of people have the same last name. I am sure this is a reasonable explanation). While Chris is dealing with the foreknowledge of his horrifying death, Spock’s opening is a very sexy, romantic, passionate courtship with T’Pring that shows genuine affection between them and a rare insight into what a romantic relationship for young Vulcans would look like, behind closed doors where they’re allowed to express what their culture requires they keep private. But, of course, we all know how this is going to end. It’s going to end with T’Pring dropping Spock for another man, and Spock not really being too broken up about this, except that she tries to manipulate him into murdering his boss to get out of the engagement. I wonder if Elon Musk has considered invoking the rite of Kal-if-fee to get out of buying Twitter. Is that joke still topical by now? And then there’s Nurse Chapel. Nurse Chapel is such a fun, freewheeling, exciting character. I love her to pieces. And yet we know that a few years down the road, she’s going to be a meek, bland character whose only real trait is an unfulfilled crush on Spock. Is that hinting that her story in Strange New Worlds is going to end with her crossing some line, going to far, flying too close to the sun and retreating into herself, a broken shell of the ass-kicking character she once was? Also, is Doctor M’Benga cruising for some career-breaking scandal that will see him demoted to McCoy’s backup under Kirk? (M’Benga has the plausible “happy ending” that maybe he’ll become a specialist, which is kind of a diagonal career move rather than a demotion – seems like that’s what happened with Hugh in season 4 of Discovery; at least, my sense of it is that he’s stepped down as CMO to become the ship’s counselor). And while I doubt they’ll lean into it, Cadet Uhura the Cool and Clever Wunderkind is going find her footing as a mature older officer once day, but there’s apparently going to be a few years in the middle there where she’s mostly limited to saying the phrase “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.” For that matter, is there something horrible we could anticipate from the fact that Una, so beloved in EU material and talked up as a paragon of Starfleetity straight up never appears again in canon?

And then there is the last minute appearance of Guy Fleegman Sam Kirk, who is even more doomed than Pike. Sam… Is really a kick in the balls, and one that kind of points me in the direction of “Yeah, they are straight up making this a ship of doom.” But also, it’s just so… Ugh. He’s there, in large part, as a taunt. You’ve got your casual fans watching this who are all like, “Whoah, they’re gonna introduce Kirk! We’re going to see Kirk’s young days serving under Pike!” and the Bigger Fanboys are all like, “Oh no Star Trek is ruined forever because everyone knows that canonically Kirk Prime never served under Pike and they only knew each other by reputation, having possibly only actually met once, briefly!” and then they turn around and gotcha both viewers with the reveal that it’s Jim, life, but not as we know it: it’s Captain Kirk’s ludicrously mustachioed brother, doomed to appear as a corpse played by William Shatner in a fake mustache in the TOS episode “Operation: Annihilate!”. But lo! Pike and Sam are old friends, and they served together. On Enterprise. Spock was Sam’s boss.

Look, I love these characters. Possibly excepting Sam; he’s only in one scene. But… They clearly had no problem inventing new characters for this show. They invented some freaking fantastic ones so far. And there’s a wealth of Pike-era characters who don’t have any baggage attached they could’ve resurrected here and given the backstory they deserved. Colt, Tyler, Boyce. The casting of Robert April proves that it wouldn’t even be a problem to rewrite any of those legacy characters to make the show less white or less heteronormative. (Honestly it would be hilarious if they brought back Colt, but depicted her as trans, just because of the wallbanger of original-Pike having made a whole thing out of being uncomfortable with “a woman on the bridge”). I’m far more interested in seeing the other path Star Trek could’ve taken instead of watching Strange New Worlds fall into the gravity well of becoming a redemptive reading of TOS. The extent to which it seems to want to be “Let’s go back and fix the thin and underappreciated elements of the original series,” feels like playing against its strengths. Chapel and Uhura and M’Benga and Sam Kirk are all sort of tainted by their destinies in a way that La’an and Hemmer and Ortegas and even Una really aren’t. If they wanted to do “TOS But Better”, like, they have the option of just doing that. I’m kind of okay with them doing that at some point (I don’t actually think that idea would carry a whole series, but maybe minisodes?), but I think it’s more respectful to this show to do less mining of TOS.

I am a long way into this essay and I haven’t even talked about what actually happens, have I? There is a lot of shirtlessness in the first few scenes, isn’t there? I think this article is going to drop before the one where I comment on topless Allison Pill in Picard, so I will anachronistically reference that and say that I am not sure how I feel about the new less-shirtful trend in Star Trek. Also, Pike is on a first-name-basis with Spock’s girlfriend. Kirk did not know Spock’s dad was the most famous ambassador in the Federation or about either of Spock’s siblings. At some point, we might have to consider the possibility that Kirk was actually just not that good of a friend. Not gonna see Spock committing a capital crime to drag his disfigured ass to a forbidden planet for big-headed voyeuristic weirdos to grant him the illusion of a very horny retirement in return for letting them watch.

Robert April shows up, and that’s dandy. I am entirely cool with them casting a black man as April, but I do feel a little of the same sting I do with the other legacy characters, not that he’s been recast, but that he’s been recharacterized. The Robert April of the animated series and the EU novels was…. A kindly space-grandpa. He wore a cardigan. He probably had Werther’s Originals in his pocket. The one who appears here is just kind of generic Sympathetic Admiral, a character archetype that is much better than the parade of Obstructionist Admirals we had in the TNG era, but are still kind of a dime a dozen in NuTrek. You could replace him with Vance or Cornwall and the scenes barely change. So really, he’s just making me sad that they killed Cornwall, since I really liked her. The actor is great, and I hope he gets some more specific characterization as they go on, but like with the future-TOS characters, his identity feels like a stunt rather than something that informs who he is. Also, small note: they have not yet made it explicit whether April was captain of the Enterprise, a detail only mentioned on-screen in the animated series. It’s not explicit yet if Pike served under him on Enterprise, or some other ship. Apparently in the Kelvin timeline, April commanded a different Enterprise, aligning with the notion that the Constitution Class was delayed by at least a decade in that universe to incorporate technical advances derived from the reports of the Kelvin survivors. I think the prevailing EU attitude until recently was that April’s command of the Enterprise had been limited to its shakedown cruise.

Pike being forced by his boss to go back to work before he’s ready and facing a horrible death is perhaps the most relatable thing to happen in Star Trek since Doctor Jurati saved the day with the power of clinical depression two seasons in a row.

The main plot of the episode – Enterprise is pressed into service early to rescue Una from a First Contact gone bad – is fine, nothing really special in and of itself, but it feels like a redux in many ways of ideas from all over the franchise history. We got to see how Pike approaches the Prime Directive in Discovery more than once, basically the first time in decades that Prime Directive plots haven’s sucked. Of course, they pretty much end the episode with April saving their bacon and declaring that the high command is going to become a lot more hard-ass about it from now on. They even try to do a little “And this is the origin story of the Prime Directive” thing, insofar as April explains that they’re basically rebranding it from “General Order One”, which is how Pike had referred to it most of the time (Kirk uses that terminology at least once in TOS, but it’s exclusively “The Prime Directive” by TNG. Rebranding takes time). It feels reminiscent of lots of Prime Directive stories, or even non-Prime-Directive cultural interference stories. It’s very much a fusion of elements of, say, “A Private Little War” (TOS) and “Patterns of Force” (TOS), but also elements of “First Contact” (TNG), with elements that remind me a lot of the TOS novel Prime Directive and the Captain Sulu audio story Cacophony. And then Pike’s resolution to the situation, audaciously, is pretty much lifted from Star Trek Into Darkness somehow. It’s a modern take on recurring patterns in the franchise that really does take away the best of them.

The plot has a lot of layers and complications, and to be honest a few of them feel unnecessary, like the (admittedly cool) complication of them needing to beam a DNA patch into Spock’s eye while he’s being scanned (Super cool, but I feel like the ability to do mid-transport costume changes and beam things into someone’s eye are perhaps stretching credulity for what the transporter can do in this time period – in the TOS era, it was depicted as pretty dangerous just to beam indoors. Yeah. Check it out: in TOS they hardly ever beam to an indoor location that isn’t a designated transporter alcove, and it’s called out as being tricky a few times; the ease of “site-to-site” transport in TNG was one of the things that was added as a reminder that this was the Future’s Future. It’s a cool idea, but we now have at least four shows set in the post-TNG era where this technology would be more appropriate. They make a great sound, though. There’s a little whistly bit underneath the main shimmer which is lifted from the original pilot version of the sound effect. Everything in this show makes a great sound. This show sounds good. That remix of the theme song? Chef’s Kiss). But they play well together. You’ve got a planet which has been struggling with a “renegade faction” for centuries (“Centuries” feels hard to swallow. After centuries, you’re not a renegade faction so much as a whole separate regime with its own history and culture) that’s produced a warp signature. Una was sent out on a little ship to make first contact, on the assumption that they’d discovered FTL-travel and thus it was time to meet the neighbors. But it turns out they hadn’t: they’re basically at a 20th century level of sophistication, close to a century away from warp drive (The only advanced technology we see is retina scanners). But they were close enough to the battle near Xahea that their space telescopes could detect the fuckton of warp signatures, and reverse engineered that into a bomb.

We are not given the details of how Una and her team ended up captured and imprisoned. It probably had something to do with them beaming to the front door of the high-security military facility where they keep their doomsday weapon, but it’s a little sus that this would, indeed, be First Contact protocol. And I say this recognizing that it is, indeed, first contact protocol as invented by the Vulcans to just literally land right next to the warp signature and say hi. (Not for nothing, but there’s no one left aboard the USS Did-you-catch-this-reference. How were they planning to get back? Transporters don’t have remote controls in this century) The penultimate resolution is that Pike decides that this counts as Their Mess – the usual “out” in TOS Prime Directive episodes: someone else interfered first so the Prime Directive doesn’t apply – and outs himself to the leadership, giving a Kirk Speech about how… we too… were once a primitive and…. violent people, not unlike…. yourselves, but we have…. grown to… understand that only peaceful solutions can bring about… lasting… change. And that doesn’t work, which is kind of lovely. So he has the Enterprise drop into low orbit so everyone on the dingdong planet can get a good look at it and appreciate the fact that he does, in fact, have the power to obliterate their entire civilization from orbit if they get uppity.

That escalated quickly.

But the cool thing, I think, is that even that doesn’t actually work. It’s not enough. It brings the two factions to the bargaining table, but there is no sudden realization that we are not alone and should put aside our differences. Ozymandias’s plan doesn’t work in the long run. So Pike instead bombs them with a PSA about Earth’s own doomsday war in order to scare them straight. I am once again getting ahead of myself because I’m going to talk at greater length about some of this in my Picard stuff that I’ve written but not posted yet. But it appears they’re finagling the timeline again and depicting a second American civil war (not explicitly identified in this timeline with any specific orange failed businessman or white supremacist movement, but I do see a few red hats in the crowd), the Eugenics Wars, and World War III as escalating stages in a continuous conflict. This doesn’t necessarily contradict earlier depictions outright in their entirety. In the US, we study something called the “French and Indian War”, which to the rest of the world was a small theater of the Seven Years’ War, and the “War of 1812” which elsewhere is “A minor British side-campaign during the Napoleonic Wars”, and much of Europe studies the “Hundred Years’ War”, which is basically a series of two to four almost entirely separate but related conflicts taking place over a century and a half (there’s a few wars on either end that aren’t generally considered part of it but easily could be if you wanted), so what counts as a single war with periodic deescalations and what counts as several distinct wars will vary depending on who’s writing the history book. But there’s a strong implication here that there’s no global war with genetically engineered humans in the 1990s; they might be revising the ’90s to be when Khan was born rather than when he rose to power (I suppose it’s also possible that they’re moving to the idea that the “Eugenics Wars” didn’t actually involve Khan at all – that he was, like, the prototype, and his movement left Earth before things really heated up. Could be an attempt to thread the needle on why Kirk is oddly sympathetic about Khan personally, while the Augments inspire blind terror in humans of Archer’s time). In any case, the speech is nice and the big stick is nice, but what really sells the Kileys on peace and cooperation is, in fact, Pike giving them a glimpse of their future, in the form of showing them what Earth did to itself.

Pike is oddly free about telling people how he saw a vision of his own future. And Spock is oddly free about revealing the truth about Discovery to La’an. And he didn’t even need to. He could give the Starfleet version of the story, that Discovery was destroyed in the battle – even saying that much is treasonous. Why leave in the frankly irrelevant detail that Discovery went to the future? It’s enough for her to know that there was a huge space battle between Enterprise, Discovery, the Kelpians, the Klingons, and Section 31. April mentions at the end that he’s been read in on the battle, and now I don’t know if that means he knows what happened to Discovery, or if he believes it was destroyed. Even more confusing, when Spock talks to Pike about his vision, it doesn’t sound like Spock knows what happened. He was there. He knows Pike had a Time Crystal Vision – though he doesn’t know of what. Pike seems to have told Una the most about it, and no one else anything at all. But he very casually opens up to the Kileys about the fact that he recently witnessed his own death. I assume they are building their way toward Spock learning the details of Pike’s doom to close the loop on setting up the framing story for “The Menagerie”.

I am feeling pretty optimistic about this show. After years of complaints that Discovery was too “woke” (when Discovery rarely had anything actually woke in its plots of messaging – it’s mostly your usual “Working together is better than fighting” stuff; what the complainers mean is “It has too many people who aren’t straight white men”), I wouldn’t have been surprised if SNW backed off. But their immediate move is to blame Trump supporters for World War III. And if that is a bit ridiculous, I mean, being ridiculous hasn’t ruined Trek for me since “Threshhold”.