(Previously posted on Mastodon.)
Lots of spoilers follow. Stop reading now if you haven’t finished the season yet, unless you’re not invested enough to care about spoilers.
Initial final thoughts on season three of Strange New Worlds.
Some high points, but on the whole, this is definitively the weakest season of SNW so far.
As I’ve grumbled about several times, they really seem to be falling into the danger of prequels in that, because we know where things are going to end up, they’re far more concerned with shoehorning in as many references as possible to what’s gone before and what’s coming up than with really building out and expanding the universe. Sure, I often enjoy hints and ties and fanservice when it’s done well and integrated organically in ways that make sense, but it’s far too often felt clumsy, and done because they could rather than because it made sense to the story of the moment.
The Gorn have been a problem since the start, and while it seems that (and we can hope that) with “Hegemony Part II” and “Terrarium” they’ve wrapped up that plotline, doing so with an Enemy Mine/”Arena” mashup wasn’t really all that satisfying. (I’m left wondering why the Metrons decided after this experiment to run another almost identical experiment just a few years later, which then results in “maybe in a few thousand years you’ll be worth looking at again”.)
Bringing back Trelane in “Wedding Bell Blues” and canonizing the “Trelane is a Q” idea was fun, but also doesn’t entirely make sense to have Q annoying Spock at this point in the timeline, unless you factor in some off-screen retconning that Trelane’s doing some time fiddling, and is messing with younger Spock because older Spock got under his skin during the events of “The Squire of Gothos”.
“Shuttle to Kenfori”‘s space zombies were fun in the moment, but in retrospect, join “Through the Lens of Time” (the first venture into the time-and-space-warping Vezda prison labyrinth) as primarily being there to set up the events of the finale.
The holodeck episode of “A Space Adventure Hour” was entertaining (particularly the show-within-a-show bits), but again, begs the question of how they have a pre-TOS holodeck that appears to be identical in look, feel, and operation, even down to “Arch!” and risks/glitches, to the TNG holodeck technology of a full century earlier (that’s specifically noted in “Farpoint” as being groundbreaking and amazing to all who see it).
I think “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” stands out as being one of the better episodes of the season, with its look at a younger, less sure of himself Kirk. This was one of the few that seems to have really put some thought into growing a character.
The documentary of “What is Starfleet?” was a good idea that I don’t think actually carried through in its execution.
“Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” is, so far, the “Spock’s Brain” of SNW. On the one hand, much about it was campy, silly fun; on the other, it leaned far too hard into the worst racist stereotypes of Vulcans, and even from a treknobabble standpoint, the serum and its effects (in a matter of moments, transforming humans into Vulcans, biologically and psychologically) makes no sense. (Patton Oswalt is a gem, though, and while the post-credit goofing around scene is the best part of the episode, that a two-minute post-credit bit of silliness is the highlight is itself a somewhat damning compliment.)
And then the finale, whose “New Life and New Civilizations” title doesn’t really have anything to do with the episode itself (there was neither new life nor new civilization), and overall had more distracting plot holes than actual engaging plot.
I’m hoping that a lot of this came down to the disruption of the writer’s strike of a couple years ago, that the scramble of dealing with that affected how this season came together, and that season four and the abbreviated season five will be better.
However, I worry that the (admittedly understandable) plan to tie the end of SNW into the beginning of TOS is going to end up with more clumsy fanservice and unsubtle foreshadowing.
And speaking of clumsy fanservice and unsubtle foreshadowing, we now have multiple ties between Star Trek and Doctor Who: two overt and one “blink and you’ll miss it” (the mention of Star Trek on Doctor Who, Pelia’s mention of meeting a “time travelling doctor” at some point in her past, and the only-really-visible-in-screen-grabs appearance of the TARDIS sitting on the Enterprise‘s hull in “Sehlat”). At this point, not doing a Trek/Who crossover at some point in the next couple seasons would be more of a surprise than doing one, which is a shame, because while I think it would be fun to do and would likely work really well as one of the “zany adventure of the week” episodes between plotisodes, I’d much rather have had that be an actual surprise when it happened, rather than the “oh, okay, they’re finally following through on this” that it will end up being if it happens.
All this said, on the whole, I’m still enjoying SNW. The design, costuming, and effects are gorgeous (though the Enterprise really needs to be lit better in exterior shots, realism be damned). The cast is great, and though I was unsure about both Peck’s Spock and Wesley’s Kirk at first, they’ve both grown on me. I’m not writing off SNW by any means — but I’m also recognizing that this season wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped.
Here’s hoping things improve for the final seasons. (Not sure if puppets are going to help, though…but maybe if that’s the Dr. Who episode? Wouldn’t that just get people going….)