Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing well for a Saturday. Today I'm here to review the first two episodes of the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Unlike my Strange New Worlds episode reviews over on Josh's Geek Cave, these reviews won't have major spoilers. But, I do want to talk about the overall details. Engage!
"Hegemony, Part II" opens right where the season 2 finale ended, however, before the episode opens, we get, for the first time in at least twenty years, the classic "Last time on Star Trek [insert name here]" recap, which ends with, "And now, the conclusion". Now, this was how two part episodes, be it season finales/season premieres or random two part episodes in the middle of a season would open the second part with during The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and if I remember correctly, they also opened two part episodes of Enterprise with in the early 2000s. Obviously for Strange New Worlds Anson Mount does that voiceover since we don't have Majel Barrett around anymore to do it, but to hear those words again when modern shows have recaps at the beginning of every episode with their own casts taking turns to do the voiceover, was a welcome blast from the past.
The episode itself was awesome. It did such a good job at maintaining the storyline started in the season 2 finale, which is not something many shows do these days. Mostly because most shows don't have cliffhangers at the end of a season these days, and the ones that do, use it as a hook for the cliffhanger at the end of the season, and then when the new season debuts, they abandon that storyline in favour of starting the storyline for the new season. But because Strange New Worlds is mainly an episodic show similar to the Star Trek shows of the '60s, '80s, and '90s, it's able to bring back the trappings of those older shows, particularly the ones from the shows made from 1987 to 2001, while also maintaining the feel of a streaming show made in the 2020s. That's one of the things I love about Strange New Worlds. It looks like a modern TV show, but it feels like a show from the '80s or '90s, with a little bit of '60s thrown in for good measure.
So, the Enterprise crew is in a very tough situation with the Gorn, between Captain Marie Batel being infested with Gorn eggs, and the away team consisting of Lieutenant La'an Noonien-Singh, Lieutenant Erica Ortegas, Doctor Joseph M'Benga, and Lieutenant junior grade George Samual Kirk having been captured by the Gorn on Parnassus Beta, along with the colonists who survived on the planet following the Gorn's initial attack at the beginning of "Hegemony, Part I" last season. That's where we are when we return to the crew at the beginning of the episode.
Without spoiling the details, the ship makes it out of the situation, badly damaged, but intact, with the crew more or less the same. Unlike Discovery, who probably would've killed off one or crew members, Strange New Worlds kept everyone alive. Which is surprising as I thought they were going to kill off Batel since Melanie Scrofano, is the lead on the new Science Fiction series on SyFy Channel and CTV Sci-Fi Channel, Revival. But, I guess with the current model of television production for streaming services being a season of a show is filmed in its entirety before the first episode ever airs, Melanie is able to appear in Star Trek and play the lead in Revival as well. Which is great, because I think Batel will be appearing a lot more this season than she did in the first two seasons since she and Pike are getting pretty serious.
Having said that though, I do think they'll kill her off at some point before the series finale at the end of season 5. Just because she's a character original to this show, and Pike ends up in a Starbase medical facility until Spock takes him back to Talos IV in "The Menagerie, Part II" in season 1 of the original series. At the very least she and Pike will break up at some point before the end of the series in season 5.
Now with episode 2, "Wedding Bell Blues", we're immediately thrown into cosmic entity hijinks and we meet Roger Korby for the first time since we first met him in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", all the way back in 1966, during the first season of the original series. We also meet an unnamed cosmic being and his father. Rhys Darby, who I'm unfamiliar with, plays this being, and John De Lancie voices his father, who remains in non-corporeal form. Now, this isn't a spoiler because every Star Trek fan who has ever seen the episode, "The Squire of Gothos", again from the first season of the original series, knows that the child-like cosmic being is Trelane, originally played by William Campbell, from that original series episode. Apparently, Akiva Goldsman confirmed it in an interview, most likely on the aftershow, The Ready Room, but they couldn't name him in the episode because of canon reasons. Especially since Spock and Uhura didn't know who Trelane was when they beamed down with Kirk in "The Squire of Gothos".
I've said this before, and I'll probably keep on saying this, but one of the reasons I love Strange New Worlds so much is because it's not afraid to be silly and pure escapism, without losing the morals and values that fans are drawn to the franchise for. As much as I enjoyed season 1 and season 5 of Lower Decks, my biggest problem with it is that as a series that is primarily a comedy, it does stuff that require traditional two dimensional animation to make them believable to the audience watching the show, and because of that doesn't work in Star Trek canon otherwise, like the character of Counselor Migleemo, a member of the bird-like Klowahkan race. Don't worry, I'll talk more about Lower Decks in a future blog post.
Overall though, I had so much fun watching the two episode premiere of season 3 of Strange New Worlds. After two years it was great to be back on the Enterprise with Pike, Una, Uhura, Spock, Ortegas, La'an, Pelia, M'Benga, and Chapel.
That's going to be it for me for this week. Since Strange New Worlds appears on On Demand on cable on Friday mornings, I've decided to shift my Star Wars Journal and Star Trek Journal posts, so that The Star Wars Journal posts will come out on Mondays while these reviews will come out on Fridays, after I've watched the episode of the week. So until next week have a great rest of the weekend. Live long and Prosper!
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