Star Trek: Strange New World begins final full season with dinosaurs and ghosts
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Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds delivers ambitious sci‑fi storytelling and genre‑shifting episodes complete with dinosaurs and ghosts as it kicks off the final full season of the series.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is two episodes into its fourth and final full season (it returns for a shortened fifth outing), and it's safe to say we’re on track to continue the trend of trying a new genre each week.
The season four premiere, “Valles Marineris,” is an incredible kickoff to the season. In some ways, including the fact that it’s almost fall, it feels like getting a new season of DS9 or Voyager back in the day.
The episode is big in scope, taking the Enterprise back in time—way back in time. The incredible story weaves the tale of Martians, dinosaurs, the destruction of a planet in our own solar system, and an explanation for the dark canyons on Mars called Valles Marineris.
As usual with modern Trek, the effects are exceptional. This is incredibly evident with the scenes on prehistoric Earth and the various dinosaurs.
The story is great and does something newer Star Trek rarely does—tell an epic sci-fi story that’s not paint by numbers. As a writer and artist, I can almost always anticipate the story beats—I was surprised here, and that’s the mark of a great Trek adventure.
The concern that this contradicts Voyager’s “Distant Origin” is unfounded. Both can easily fit into ancient history.
The only complaints I have for this episode are the Vulcan cadet—new Star Trek doesn’t know how to write Vulcans—and Admiral April. They’ve equated Vulcan with rude and have turned it into a stereotype. While I wish they would’ve stuck with April from the Animated Series, that’s not my beef here. Why is a flag officer like April stopping by the Enterprise to personally give Pike their mission—one that is just science and observation in nature? It’s just an excuse to have the character there, like Kirk, that makes no sense in-universe. In TOS or TNG, they almost only did this via viewscreen.
“The Griffin Incident” was a legitimate horror story set in space on a lost Federation starship discovered by Spock, Kirk, and La’an on their way back to the Enterprise. Shoehorning Kirk into these stories is getting ridiculous, by the way. That aside, they encounter spooky, gory, and downright scary moments at times. But that’s where it ends. By the final stretch, you really don’t know what’s going on from a story perspective. Is everything that happens being imagined by the three principal characters? There is no scientific explanation. There is no resolution as to what happened to the USS Griffin. There’s no understanding of why Spock had his ears cut off or how. This is Star Trek, and a ghost didn’t do it. And the worst part is the determined Kirk and Spock from the original series would’ve busted heads (or ghosts, if needed) to find the answers. Here, they just throw up their hands and turn it over to the stupid Kurtzman era MacGuffin—Division 12. The best I can tell is that these are a cross between Starfleet’s ghostbusters and X-Files.
While this season has been better with fewer cringe moments, the worst was learning that Kirk, Spock, and La’an were coming back from a conference called “Future Federation Leaders.” Good lord.
I can’t help but feel that they’ve written themselves into a corner with La’an. At this point, “Space Seed” seems laughable from a continuity perspective. Granted, so does the idea of spending most of his time on the Enterprise when Pike was said to have only met him once. The introduction of David and Carol Marcus, at least by name, is equally pointless. It fits into continuity, but this—much like everyone, including Uhura and Kirk calling each other by their first names, doesn’t line up with the first season of TOS. Similarly, having T’Pring show up every five minutes makes “Amok Time” seem out of place.
While these episodes, from a sci-fi drama perspective, aren’t bad (again, the premiere was very good), it’s how this Star Trek series is playing out that tarnishes it. It could’ve been very frontier-driven. Boldly going—not reinventing the wheel each episode into a new genre. We’ve said it before—the perfect model was the Marvel comic, Star Trek: Early Voyages. The same is true for Starfleet Academy—the Marvel comic of the same name. This is Star Trek—it’s really not hard had they gotten a fan or an expert’s input.
