Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Strange New Worlds" | Season 1, Episode 1

There’s a new (old) captain in town, as Christopher Pike takes back the Enterprise and tries to take care of some loose ends

Photo: Paramount+

[Editor’s note: This marks the beginning of Zack’s weekly reviews of Strange New Worlds here at Episodic Medium. As with all of our coverage, this first review is free to all, but subsequent reviews and commenting privileges are exclusive to paid subscribers. You can find out more, and learn about all the shows we’ll be covering this summer, on our About page.]

These days, Star Trek only seems to know how to look backwards. A franchise that began its life as a gee whiz utopian fantasy, a view of the future where interstellar travel would inevitably be the next frontier to explore, is now yet another iteration on pop culture’s obsession with what used to work. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is technically only the second Trek prequel show in recent years (third overall if we’re remembering Enterprise), but the routine is already familiar: give people what they vaguely remember, make everything shiny, throw in a few deep cuts each week for the hardcore nerds, and don’t get too worried about breaking continuity. If anything, SNW plays things even safer than Discovery: we’ve got a Kirk-like captain at the helm of the Enterprise, gallivanting about space and having adventures. Hell, they even brought in Spock and Uhura (and Nurse Chapel and Doctor M’Benga) to back him up.

Here’s the thing, though: the melancholy that comes from realizing that a franchise that once looked to the stars now has its sights set solely inward? That’s pretty much the only bad vibes you get watching SNW, a zippy, largely delightful new entry to the canon whose unnecessary existence is balanced, and made basically irrelevant, by its charms. This is, as they say, a damn good time, and while I may not be as completely on board for it as a lot of my colleagues, even I couldn’t completely resist the appeal. Discovery lost me through sloppy plotting, tedious arcs, and a relentless, largely unearned, sense of self-satisfaction. So far at least, SNW’s ambitions are far more modest, which makes it that much easier to recommend.

“Strange New Worlds” is, like most pilots, a bit on the clunky side; it has to introduce us to the main cast (some familiar faces and/or names, alongside a couple of new characters), set up the premise, and offer a kind of broad thesis statement about its intentions as an on-going series. That last bit tends to be where most shows fall down—as rough as exposition dumps can be, hearing a main character choking down a well-meant, but incredibly overwrought monologue about “hope” and “humanity” and whatever is just never going to be an easy sell. I’ve never really been sure why writers feel the need to churn these out, either. Just give me the basics of a good story and some interesting characters, I don’t need a lecture on What It All Means yet. I can figure it out for myself.

“Worlds” stumbles hardest for me in its climactic scene precisely for this reason, as Anson Mount does his best with a clumsy monologue trying to tie in Pike’s fears about his own future with the immediate plot. The connection doesn’t really land—in fact, it borders on self-contradictory, only succeeding in the plot because the episode to have an upbeat conclusion. Still, Mount’s best is quite good, especially in this role, and what struck me the most about the scene was that for all my general irritability at this approach—and at the way the modern version of Trek tends to prioritize Good Vibes over everything else—I still wanted it to succeed. It almost did, even as I winced at the clunky lines and not-quite-there central metaphor. That’s the kind of show this is. Even when it doesn’t quite work, you keep rooting for it to get its shit together.

About Mount: is it weird that Christopher Pike is this cool? It kind of is, isn’t it? I did a pre-air review of SNW’s first five episodes for Variety, and in it, I tried to explain just how strange it is as a Trek fan to suddenly have strong feelings about Captain Pike. I won’t repeat all of that here (it’s a spoiler free review, so check it out if this episode write up somehow isn’t enough for you), but there’s something inherently ridiculous about becoming invested in the guy who wasn’t interesting enough to make the first Star Trek pilot work. There just isn’t much set in stone about Pike, which may be why the character was able to make such a strong impression on Discovery: as audience members, we can have our nostalgia hit at seeing a familiar name, without all the baggage of needing him to live up to expectations. He’s just a good dude doing the work, and Mount absolutely nails it, charming and chill with a dash of gravitas to give it weight. It’s like Kirk without Shatner’s hamminess—calling him a “hot dad” feels a bit condescending, but it’s in that wheelhouse. Like Harrison Ford in the ‘90s, let’s say that.

The main plot of “Worlds” has Pike being pulled out of semi-retirement in order to take command of the Enterprise and go rescue Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), his Number One on regular missions who went off and got herself in some trouble during what was supposed to be a standard first contact scenario. (I apologize for the run-on nature of that sentence, things got out of hand.) That may sound like a lot, but for the most part, it’s a standard issue “getting the gang back together” episode. The biggest twist is the discovery that the civilization Chin-Riley was tasked with contacting hadn’t actually developed warp technology on its own, but basically extrapolated from the after effects of the climax of Discovery’s second season; and instead of using that knowledge to develop interstellar travel, they built a very large, very nasty bomb. 

Speaking of Discovery: although Pike has been part of the Trek canon since the original series, SNW is technically a spin-off, and to its credit, the show doesn’t shy away from some of the bigger moments of Pike—and Spock’s—time on that series. The references to Michael Burnham’s super secret confidential time jump are fine, if unnecessary (it spoils some of the funniness of Discovery’s second season ending with, essentially, “And let none of us ever speak of this again on pain of death”); more interesting is the decision to makes Pike’s partial knowledge of his own fate a key part of his character. The reason he’d taken a break from the Enterprise is that he’d learned he was doomed to die (or nearly die) from horrible radiation burns during an engineering accident ten years in the future. Fans of the franchise know things are slightly more complicated than that, but here Pike’s fears create some interesting complications for a character who is otherwise friction free.

I mentioned Spock, yes? Spock’s back, still played by Ethan Peck, and I’m still surprised at how much I enjoy his performance. He’s not Nimoy, but who is? The fact that I can tolerate, and even root for, this version of the character says a lot for both Peck and the show as a whole. I loved the dark comedy of a beat late in the episode where Spock, enduring the agonies of a genetic regression, says, in the driest possible voice, “Captain, the pain. It is unbearable.” A beat then he screams. Peck plays it exactly right, and the show’s general grasp of Vulcan culture and behaviors seems a lot more on point than it has been in recent years. 

Really, it’s a solid cast all around. The other major standout this week is La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong); Noonien-Singh is a pretty obvious reference point, and I’ll be interested to see how the show handles this potential shift in franchise lore, but for right now, she succeeds at making impression by being gruff and direct and to the point. Competence is always a mark of high character on a Trek show, and Singh’s suspicious nature and willingness to be direct make an interesting contrast with the rest of the cast’s understanding of Starfleet ideals. It’s not exactly a conflict (this isn’t the sort of show where everyone’s fighting all the time), but it does offer some potential for story turns down the line.

That’s not to mention the new Uhura or the others, who we’ll get a chance to know more about in the coming weeks. Not to spoil anything, but the initial five episodes do a solid job of giving each person their own spotlight in turn. Mostly in this first review, I wanted to offer my general sense of the show, and how the first episode, while not my favorite of the ones I’ve seen, is a good indication of what’s to come. I’m not in love with everything here—to my dying day, I will rail against the franchise’s modern insistence on underlining every emotional beat, as though the audience is incapable of grasping the difference between “happy” and “sad.” And Pike’s not-so-great speech this week is indicative of an occasionally ham-fisted grasp on moral issues. But on the whole, I had a good time, and I’m looking forward to having more of them. Join me, won’t you?

Stray observations

• Okay, so while I get the episode needs to show Pike’s unconventional style winning the day, his attempts to get the warring factions of Kiley 279 to chill out via a quick lesson in Earth history seem wildly naive to me. His reasoning is that by showing them the potential devastation in their future, he can bring them around; but what he actually shows them is that Earth had a bunch of horrible wars (shout out to America’s second Civil War, apparently coming soon) and then everything turned out just fine. There’s a grain of truth in this—using the mistakes of our past to try and help others avoid repeating them—but I’m not sure some stock footage of buildings exploding is enough to bring peace to millions.

• That said, bold choice to use a few shots of the Jan. 6 riots in the footage.

• The Kirk joke got me. I forgot the timeline, and just how old Spock is (apparently Uhura also has some years on James T.?); Pike mentioning “Kirk” a few times over the course of the hour, only to welcome Samuel Kirk to the bridge at the very end, was a cute fake-out.

• T’Pring! This is a decade or so before the events of “Amok Time,” but it’s interesting to see her and Spock trying to make a relationship work back when they were happy together, before she forced him to fight Kirk to the death. Sad how people grow apart.