Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 (TV series review)
For those who follow my reviews, I’m not exactly impressed with ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’, so why buy season 3? There’s been over a year since the last season so maybe they were doing some sorting out. Nope!
It certainly isn’t there with the concluding episode, ‘Hegemony’, of the two-parter. Captain Christopher Pike (actor Anson Mount) might be wearing a dark uniform, but he depends so much on his crew to provide a selection of choices as to what to do than rely on anything he might be able to counter with. His dependency on Montgomery Scott (actor Martin Quinn) being able to re-make a device to mask the Enterprise from the Gorn on a bigger scale nearly wasn’t there if it hadn’t been for engineer Pelia (actress Carol Kane) panicking him. All of this on an unofficial mission from Admiral Robert April (actor Adrian Holmes), so you have to wonder if the Enterprise was chosen because it was the best of the fleet, it is the flagship after all, or expendable. It’s also interesting that using the transporter to rescue people wasn’t shown. Probably the expense of so many people and not even to the transporter room but to an emergency medical centre. This is supposed to be before that chap Kirk became the Enterprise’s captain and Starfleet not being so advanced. There’s also the matter of having only one person being the best pilot and so forth. This is space, people, and a large crew. You want people with multiple expertise not a dependency on one who can often be on away missions. When it came to Captain Melanie Batel (actress Melanie Scrofano) and Pike’s amour with her genetics muddled with a Gorn and unable to be frozen, Nurse/Doctor Christine Chappel (actress Jess Bush) was the only one working on her until Spock (actor Ethan Peck) came to help and they still got lovey-dovey in the process than spending more time on the consequences of the treatment. This Enterprise is supposed to have a full medical crew. Relying totally on a computer prediction of what they suggested is also not a good way to use it. Why didn’t they ask it to compare various alien physiologies because it would whizz through them faster than they could. In a computer-driven society, you would think the AIs would be suggesting faster than its crew.
With the third episode, ‘Shuttle To Kenfori’, Spock tells Pike that a rare flower from the planet Kenfori might save the wife of his girlfriend Batel from her hybridisation with Gorn. Now, here’s a thing. Pike takes the Enterprise off, I assume the 203 crew on the other decks are there, into the forbidden area that the Klingons are, leaving it at a distance while he and M’Benga (actor Babs Olusanmkun) go down to the planet in a shuttle. You would have thought Starfleet would have questioned Pike as to what he’s done before, let alone after because this is forbidden territory and he must surely be court-martialled over it. The only person who got a reprimand was pilot Erica Otegas (actress Melissa Navia) for not keeping the speed down by her superior, Una Chin-Riley (actress Rebecca Romijn), when she should have been told while she was piloting.
Why should I not be surprised at there being a hologram deck story, as with the fourth episode ‘A Space Adventure Hour’, even though it was inevitable that it wouldn’t be used again. With its opening, I could have sworn actor Paul Wesley was Bruce Campbell doing his Kirk imitation. There is an odd question: would there be a SF TV show in a future where space travel was commonplace?
Gods, if there was a demonstration of a boring episode, the fifth, ‘Through The Lens Of Time’, has to be up there. Everyone droned and none of the cast seemed interested in what they were doing. All TV series have a slump at some point but this one was dire.
It was inevitable that there would be a story about that new boy, Jim Kirk (actor Paul Wesley again) on the USS Farragut in the sixth episode, ‘The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail’, having to take command when most of its crew had to be injured or evacuated after getting in the way of an attack by an alien scavenger starship. His crew, members of the Enterprise who transported across to help. This event has been covered in all Starfleet realities so not surprised that it finally appeared here. Whether it’s a good event is debatable. Definitely too many stops for ‘meaningful’ conversations when actions were needed.
The seventh episode ‘What Is Starfleet’ almost looks like someone read one of my early articles citing how can their starships promote peace and yet loaded with enough weapons to destroy a planet. Having a media reporter looking at and interviewing the core crew also gives a chance to identify then all but there is one omission. I’ve been wondering if they actually have a navigator, surely one of the most important positions on the command deck if they want to go between star systems and not even seen as a secondary character. It is interesting that a few of them, including the captain who had a haunted look, did not want to discuss how it felt killing other beings. No wonder later starships had mental health councillors on board.
The eighth episode, ‘Four-And-A-Half Vulcans’, shares a common problem with when Spock was turned human in ‘Charades’, lousy science. Vulcans are not humans in disguise no matter which ‘Star Trek’ reality. To think an inoculation would covert them between species is crazy. Humans have iron-based blood, Vulcans copper-based blood, hence their slightly green skin tint. Their organs, especially brains, are radically different. It’s not enough to have pointed ears and slanted eyebrows and odd cleaning habits. The reality of Spock is a hybrid with a certain amount of genetic manipulation. You can’t just take out one set of DNA and leave the other. Genetics is a lot more complicated than that no matter which century. DNA carries the code but RNA is the final product and is the bit that needs manipulating and even that has limits.
The same also applies with the ninth episode ‘Terrarium’ where Ortegas is stranded on an alien moon. If the planet it is linked to is spouting its toxic gases onto its moon then there wouldn’t be any breathable air. The rules of any survival plan, regardless of whether its on Earth or somewhere out in space, you don’t roam too far from your craft because any rescue party will focus on that. For the transporter to be able to work well in a singularity also looks seriously compromised. There’s also the puzzle that a communications officer like Uhura could solve the problem. Where were the Enterprise’s top engineers Pelia and Scott in all of this? Increasingly, the scripts are being used to service the command crew actors than the reality of the situation and using the experienced officers and getting more absurd. If anything, this season has been more about using anything that looks loosely like a good idea irrespective of giving enough thought to ironing out its problems. At least having a few science advisors in production wouldn’t hurt. It isn’t for them to re-write the scripts, just provide alternative solutions to get them out of messes like this.
The tenth and last episode of the season, ‘New Life And Civilisations’, is an even worse episode to end on. The build-up to track down one of the creatures from the episode ‘Through The Lens Of Time’ somehow manages to get its shuttle to the planet before the Enterprise and get themselves into a jam. The Enterprise links up with the Farragut to manually aim joint phasers to provide synchronised energy to open a portal. How can humans or Vulcans be better at targeting a small target on a planet than a computer? No one questions the amount of heat this provides and would surely have incinerated anyone nearby. You would have thought someone might have thought of putting a homing beacon down to ensure they hit the target. Considering, at this time, the Farragut has a Vulcan captain, we don’t see her only that Kirk chap. Writers don’t appear to understand the chain of command or cast availability. Only Pike and Melanie Batel go through the portal and rather than unravel the mess just have extended conversations. Maybe there was a cut in the budget but hardly an enthusiastic ending to the season. Its almost as though the scriptwriters wanted to write extended dialogues to show where their money was being used.
Am I having a downer on these new ‘Star Trek’ stories? It hardly looks impressive purely based on critical plot points above. If I extended what I wrote above, I’d end up with something even more damning than just hitting on a major point in each episode. The cast is doing well but really it all falls apart with poorly researched scripts and making it more like a family show than military officers doing their jobs. Are they catering for the traditional ‘Star Trek’ fans or trying to draw new viewers in? The use of imagination needs constraints with practical reality and looking for solutions within what is established than trying to look fanciful and failing spectacularly. Haven’t the lessons from the last ‘Star Trek’ film been learnt by not putting the Enterprise underwater was one of the reasons why it failed been leant? You can see the people in the writer’s room twiddling their thumbs as they come up with ideas and then picking them because they are different or looks ‘interesting’ than working out from how can we make this work and these are supposed to be experts on Trek lore. I hope the plan for the series after this isn’t putting that Kirk chap in charge of the Enterprise rather than slot in the original TV series. Not as though it hasn’t been done before…a few times.
GF Willmetts
January 2026
(pub: CBS Studios, 2025. 3 * DVD disks 10* 52 minute episodes. Price: varies. ASIN: 9757476984-6)
