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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Hype Train To the Stars

Woof, New Life and New Civilizations was overall pretty rough. Truly everything involving the ghost aliens was like... astonishingly shlocky for this show, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing and hearing anytime they were the focus. That scene in sick bay with Patel giving exposition to Pike... ontological good and evil in Trek huh?

But! Some good in there too. Batel and Pike's vision of their future was genuinely affecting, I enjoyed that a lot. The biz with Spock and Kirk was fairly fun, nice seeing them spending time together without it feeling too too forced. Pelia got a bunch of fun lines, the costuming was amazing, loved the weird dual-ship maneuver they did...

This season definitely was not one of their better ones overall. A good number of stories spent doing things that could happen in any show, not really taking advantage of this being Star Trek. I think Adventure Hour was a fun mystery with this cast, but did it need to take up one of the ten episodes we get a season? Same with the zombie episode, and the wedding one. Always pleasant to see this cast doing things, but wouldn't mind those being things unique to this world.

The standout for me was The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, which was a very strange, fun, well-characterized story that was very Star Trek. Terrarium was also something I enjoyed a lot, if you can ignore the remarkably bad ending. Though I think Babylon 5 did it much better, I liked the documentary episode for at the least asking many questions that the civilian population would have of Starfleet.

Has me a little worried for the next season, but, hopes up!
 
Kirin said:
I’m not up on production scuttlebutt, what’s the deal with “1.5” more seasons?
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Paramount wanted to wrap up the series with a movie, but the show runners pleaded that they needed more time to wrap up storylines and got the shortened six episode fifth season instead.
Mothra said:
Has me a little worried for the next season, but, hopes up!
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The show runners seem to recognize the reaction to season 3 hasn't been great, and have been citing outside factors like the strikes as reasons for the quality of the season.(Like, I dunno, maybe they didn't get to get these scripts past first draft or something) But they say season 4 will be better. Here's hoping they're right!

My husband liked this season's darker episodes, while I preferred the lighter ones, because at least they were usually amusing, and the darker eps were often dumb (like the finale, outside of the Inner Light bit). So the unevenness can land differently for different people.

Issues with this season aside, I do have a little bit of a mini-rant: I am kind of dreading their endgame at this point, because I know they're aiming to put Kirk in the captain's chair as the final shot. While I like Paul Wesley as Kirk, it's in spite of each appearance being treated as some momentous occasion. "See! It's Kirk! Wow!" Spock's lines about how they may serve together on a ship in the future were especially cringe-y. A lingering shot or something is maybe fine, but putting it in words like that is ham-fisted as hell. Talk normally instead of treating this show as backdoor pilot for the next show (TOS Year One).
 
Lakupo said:
I am kind of dreading their endgame at this point, because I know they're aiming to put Kirk in the captain's chair as the final shot. While I like Paul Wesley as Kirk, it's in spite of each appearance being treated as some momentous occasion. "See! It's Kirk! Wow!" Spock's lines about how they may serve together on a ship in the future were especially cringe-y. A lingering shot or something is maybe fine, but putting it in words like that is ham-fisted as hell. Talk normally instead of treating this show as backdoor pilot for the next show (TOS Year One).
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I agree with everything you've said. They are pushing the self-winking too hard when it comes to Kirk. I did really like his focus episode this season, but even that one crossed the cringey line a couple times for me.
 
Also just feels like it's distracting from Pike's story. Every time Kirk is on-screen, especially for things that aren't something new we've seen from the character, it really makes me wish the show was interested in continuing to build Pike's character.
 
I was skeptical when SNW introduced Jim Kirk as a character, because ever since late-season TNG the powers that be behind Star Trek have spent so much time trying to replicate the Kirk-Spock relationship rather than doing something new. I admit that SNW has mostly done Kirk pretty well, but I’m sorry to see the show putting ever more time into Kirk and Spock rather than developing the relationships of characters we haven’t been retreading for sixty years. TNG was a huge success! Why are they always falling back on trying to give us more TOS?
 
I'm sympathetic to the notion of, "Let's focus more on this crew vs the TOS crew," when it comes to SNW. But I also feel like uncalibrated perceptions have a lot to do with it too. The fact that seasons are so short, yet SNW is the truest "ensemble" show we've ever had, has led to feeling like we barely see some characters, or see some characters too much, when in reality we likely see them at a similar rate to characters in older shows*. It just doesn't feel like it when the sample size is so small. Not that this show/season hasn't had problems or flaws, it's just that when 40% of a 10 episode season has problems, it feels like a lot compared to 40% of a 26 episode season.

*The exception to this rule is Pike, who we see a lot less on average versus the captain/main characters of older shows. So seeing Kirk featured almost as often as Pike feels weird, despite the fact this show is clearly a pure ensemble where Pike has as much of a chance of being featured in an episode as other main characters.
 
Yeah, I think that's part of it, or at least exacerbates the issue of who gets the focus when. The amazing and amazingly large cast is definitely a a blessing and a curse for the show, especially with its episode count. On The Michael Burnham Show Discovery, focusing on a few characters early on made sense, but then as the cast became the good part, the episode count did hamper it a bit (even if the plots were too threadbare to support more) Back in the TNG days, each cast member would typically get one to three A plots focused on them a season, and here there's just not enough time to focus on the main cast properly, and then you add in the huge recurring cast (Jim, Sam, Pelia, Batel, Beto, Korby) that's demanding attention. We got a Beto Ortegas episode before we got a proper Erica Ortegas episode! And Una barely got anything hefty to do this season (her blood got to do a lot!). The showrunners needed to have reassessed their priorities a little.
 
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