{"id":52428,"date":"2025-09-12T10:11:55","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T17:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=52428"},"modified":"2025-09-24T14:01:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T21:01:40","slug":"star-trek-strange-new-worlds-season-three-wrapup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2025\/09\/12\/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-season-three-wrapup\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Three Wrapup"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:357,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/tenforward.social\\\/@djwudi\\\/115192052643724189&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>(Previously <a href=\"https:\/\/tenforward.social\/@djwudi\/115192052643724189\">posted on Mastodon<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Lots of spoilers follow. Stop reading now if you haven&#8217;t finished the season yet, unless you&#8217;re not invested enough to care about spoilers.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Initial final thoughts on season three of <cite>Strange New Worlds<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>Some high points, but on the whole, this is definitively the weakest season of SNW so far.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;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&#8217;re far more concerned with shoehorning in as many references as possible to what&#8217;s gone before and what&#8217;s coming up than with really building out and expanding the universe. Sure, I often enjoy hints and ties and fanservice when it&#8217;s done well and integrated organically in ways that make sense, but it&#8217;s far too often felt clumsy, and done because they could rather than because it made sense to the story of the moment.<\/p>\n<p>The Gorn have been a problem since the start, and while it seems that (and we can hope that) with &#8220;Hegemony Part II&#8221; and &#8220;Terrarium&#8221; they&#8217;ve wrapped up that plotline, doing so with an <cite>Enemy Mine<\/cite>\/&#8221;Arena&#8221; mashup wasn&#8217;t really all that satisfying. (I&#8217;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 &#8220;maybe in a few <em>thousand<\/em> years you&#8217;ll be worth looking at again&#8221;.)<\/p>\n<p>Bringing back Trelane in &#8220;Wedding Bell Blues&#8221; and canonizing the &#8220;Trelane is a Q&#8221; idea was fun, but also doesn&#8217;t entirely make sense to have Trelane annoying Spock at this point in the timeline, unless you factor in some off-screen retconning that Trelane&#8217;s doing some time fiddling, and is messing with younger Spock because older Spock got under his skin during the events of &#8220;The Squire of Gothos&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Shuttle to Kenfori&#8221;&#8216;s space zombies were fun in the moment, but in retrospect, join &#8220;Through the Lens of Time&#8221; (the first venture into the time-and-space-warping Vezda prison labyrinth) as primarily being there to set up the events of the finale.<\/p>\n<p>The holodeck episode of &#8220;A Space Adventure Hour&#8221; 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 &#8220;Arch!&#8221; and risks\/glitches, to the TNG holodeck technology of a full century earlier (that&#8217;s specifically noted in &#8220;Farpoint&#8221; as being groundbreaking and amazing to all who see it).<\/p>\n<p>I think &#8220;The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>The documentary of &#8220;What is Starfleet?&#8221; was a good idea that I don&#8217;t think actually carried through in its execution.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Four-and-a-Half Vulcans&#8221; is, so far, the &#8220;Spock&#8217;s Brain&#8221; 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 (transforming humans into Vulcans, biologically <em>and<\/em> psychologically, in a matter of moments&#8230;complete with new hairstyles, even) makes <em>no<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n<p>And then the finale, whose &#8220;New Life and New Civilizations&#8221; title doesn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m hoping that a lot of this came down to the disruption of the writer&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>And speaking of clumsy fanservice and unsubtle foreshadowing, we now have multiple ties between <cite>Star Trek<\/cite> and <cite>Doctor Who<\/cite>: two overt and one &#8220;blink and you&#8217;ll miss it&#8221; (the mention of <cite>Star Trek<\/cite> on <cite>Doctor Who<\/cite>, Pelia&#8217;s mention of meeting a &#8220;time travelling doctor&#8221; at some point in her past, and the only-really-visible-in-screen-grabs appearance of the TARDIS sitting on the <i>Enterprise<\/i>&#8216;s hull in &#8220;Sehlat&#8221;). At this point, <em>not<\/em> 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 could work really well as one of the &#8220;zany adventure of the week&#8221; episodes between plotisodes, I&#8217;d much rather have had that be an actual surprise when it happened, rather than the &#8220;oh, okay, they&#8217;re finally following through on this&#8221; that it will end up being if it happens.<\/p>\n<p>All this said, on the whole, I&#8217;m still enjoying SNW. The design, costuming, and effects are gorgeous (though the <i>Enterprise<\/i> really needs to be lit better in exterior shots, realism be damned). The cast is great, and though I was unsure about both Peck&#8217;s Spock and Wesley&#8217;s Kirk at first, they&#8217;ve both grown on me. I&#8217;m not writing off SNW by any means &#8212; but I&#8217;m also recognizing that this season wasn&#8217;t as strong as I&#8217;d hoped.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s hoping things improve for the final seasons. (Not sure if puppets are going to help, though&#8230;but maybe if <em>that&#8217;s<\/em> the Dr. Who episode? Wouldn&#8217;t that just get people going&#8230;.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Previously posted on Mastodon. Lots of spoilers follow. Stop reading now if you haven&#8217;t finished the season yet, unless you&#8217;re not invested enough to care about spoilers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2047],"tags":[1506,4127,4097,6861],"class_list":["post-52428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-trek","tag-doctor-who","tag-snw","tag-star-trek","tag-strange-new-worlds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52428"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52452,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52428\/revisions\/52452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}