📺 Watched Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
I was a huge fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child, and also enjoyed the re-runs of the original series. And with Strange New Worlds they’ve finally produced something kind of similar.
It’s a refreshing change from some of the other recent reincarnations of Star Trek which are often very enjoyable, but more in the vein of trying to be a gritty 12 hour long film with appropriate thriller-style cliff-hangers you need to remember from one episode to the next, if not binging.
So with this one, we’re back to (almost) each episode being its own little story, with a set up, the requisite drama and a resolution all within the hour. What the crew actually gets up to seems also quite similar to the older TNG stuff - exploring, encountering new aliens, facing dilemmas, accidentally travelling through time and dimensions, that kind of thing. There are some storylines that permeate through each series, which was also the case in the old show - but the main drama of the day is a one-and-done thing contained within a single episode for the most part.
There’s occasionally some real cheesy stuff, kind of like some of the newer Doctor Who episodes have. Those episodes I typically don’t love as much, but they make for some variation, and presumably some people do enjoy them. Yes, they even found a way to wedge in a musical episode.
Old-school Trek fans will also recognise at least some of the characters. They are substantially more baby-faced to their previous incarnations due to the series being set in the time period preceding Captain Kirk’s captainship of the Enterprise. Instead it’s Captain Pike, Kirk’s immediate predecessor, in charge of the original version of the Federation’s flagship, the Starship Enterprise.
Serving alongside him we see a couple of old faves - a communications trainee who happens to have the surname Uhura, and Spock, already a science officer, already struggling with his half-Vulcan half-human identity. Turns out future-Captain Kirk (who we do meet, but not as a captain) has a brother, a xenobiologist type, who works for Pike. I understand that people with better memories than me will also recognise some of the other crew, or at least that they were referred to back in the day.
So all in all, similar characters, similar adventures, similar episode structures to the decades-old incarnation of the Trekkie universe. Hard to objectively say how much I enjoyed it for the nostalgia vs how much I’d love it if I was new to the whole thing. But for anyone similarly aged to me who wants something akin to the TNG adventures, definitely go for it.
