The first season of Star Trek: Stranger New Worlds ended in early July. It is a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series and a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery. The creators of the TV show are well-known producers, screenwriters and directors Akiva Goldsman and Alex Kurtzman. We have already watched all the episodes and are ready to share our impressions.
Genre Science Fiction, Drama, Action, Adventure
Director Chris Fisher, Amanda Rowe, Andy Armaganian, Chris Byrne
Cast Melissa Navia, Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Jessica Bush, Christina Chong, Rebecca Romijn
Paramount+ release
Release year 2022
IMDb website
Star Trek: Stranger New Worlds kicks off with Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) in a prolonged depression. After appearing in the second season of Discovery, he learned about his future terrible death ten years later during an accident on a spaceship. Pike is hesitant to return to serve in the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), but he is forced by circumstances – during the establishment of the first contact with a new civilization, First Officer Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) disappeared. The captain first goes in search of her, and then decides to stay in the fleet to spite his fate. Thus begins a series of new adventures for one of the most famous starships in science fiction.
The creators of Star Trek: Stranger New Worlds did not violate the canons of the series and lead their project away from the usual Star Trek series. So it happened with the new Discovery, and the more recent Picard is trying to diversify the usual style of the franchise, adding unusual narrative moves and building episodes.
Star Trek: Stranger New Worlds is both old-fashioned and modern at the same time. It has a retro aesthetic and is reminiscent of the franchise’s classic series, but filmed as the latest and greatest sci-fi project. Here, each episode is a separate story in a new genre (adventure, detective, horror in the style of “Alien”, a story with an instructive ending, and so on), but all episodes are connected by a common plot thread about the future death of Captain Pike. Some episodes are extended in time, but they do not feel artificially stretched and almost do not sag in the pace of story development.
The new series managed to create lively and fascinating characters, as well as to select suitable actors for their roles. Pike is a dashing captain and an older version of the more famous James Kirk. He loves to cook and is happy to feed his team with all sorts of goodies. The science officer Spock, played by Ethan Peck, will seem to someone not as similar to a Vulcan as the same Zachary Quinto from the trilogy of new films. But he did an excellent job of playing out the conflicting emotions that rage in the head and heart of a half-Vulcan and half-human. But Celia Rose Goodin is almost perfect as Nyota Uhura. And outwardly, she is very similar to the young Nichelle Nichols from the original series.
The rest of the new characters are interesting and diverse, and among them there are necessarily heroes with a non-traditional sexual orientation. All of them are given an almost equal amount of time in the episodes, their history and characters are revealed and presented from a new perspective. This more classical approach, in my opinion, is much better than the almost complete focus on one or two main characters, as they did in Discovery. But there are almost no aliens in the team, and everything is according to the canon – at the beginning of their space travels, the fleet of the United Federation of Planets mostly consisted of people.
Star Trek: Stranger New Worlds is to be commended for its modern CGI and overall style. Everything here looks feigned, super-fantastic and realistic at the same time: space beckons and frightens with its beauty and danger, retro-futuristic starships shine in the sun and shoot lasers, the team sits at outlandish consoles with large buttons, and doctors drive incomprehensible gizmos in front of patients and use even stranger instruments .
The new series is old and fresh at the same time and this is what catches the most. At the same time, the project smells of mothballs, which means that the usual construction of episodes with the disclosure of one topic at a time can scare away the younger generation.
