Warp Factor Trek

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ fourth season arrives at a dire time for the franchise. With the recent announcement that the second season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will be its last and Strange New Worlds’ fifth and final season now in post-production (truncated to six episodes), there are no new Star Trek television series being produced for the first time in a decade. After the somewhat lukewarm reception to Strange New Worlds’ third season, there’s considerable pressure on this fourth and penultimate season to succeed. Will it do so?

After seeing the first six episodes of Season 4, I think it manages to.

For starters, all of the wonderful production elements remain — the show still looks and sounds excellent. Unless the story demands otherwise, it continues to be bright and colorful, contrasting with the occasional, more dimly lit scene or episode. The costuming remains sumptuous, detailed, and visually striking, particularly for new alien species. The sets are a beautiful mix of practical and digital effects, all lovingly rendered. The sound design also excels at creating a sense of atmosphere, especially during action sequences, and the wonderful orchestral score compliments it, adding emotion and personality.

Like any season of Star Trek, this one is a mixed bag, but Strange New Worlds in particular has embraced the episodic format of classic Trek. This has led the show’s writers to take many risks and tell a wide variety of stories with a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach, which has served the series well and continues doing so here. If one episode doesn’t work for you, there’s a good chance another will. Even the weaker episodes offer much to enjoy – whether it’s a funny joke, or an endearing character interaction.

The stories range from edge-of-your-seat action to outright absurdity, doing an excellent job at balancing Star Trek’s many disparate tones. Delivering horror and drama together with comedy, the experimental genre-bending is front and center. We get a buddy comedy, a dash of film noir, and of course, a much-speculated-upon puppet episode as well as some time travel chaos. After six episodes, the average quality feels stronger than at the equivalent point in Season 3, which stumbled in its more experimental episodes.

The character-centered writing feels more porposeful than last season, and there’s a welcome emphasis on characters that have felt somewhat underutilized. Anson Mount’s Pike takes more of a back seat than before, as does the brilliantly cast Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura. With how much attention she received in earlier seasons, the minimizing of Gooding’s role isn’t too bothersome. The reduction of the Pike and Uhura parts excellently allows more screen time for everyone else. Nicely, Melissa Navia as Ortegas and Rebecca Romijn’s Una have much more to do this time. There’s also wonderful development for Ethan Peck’s Spock.

The returning familiar faces include a guest character who has an important history in Trek canon and turns up in the sixth episode. Meanwhile, plenty of new characters make their mark on the show. So far, the biggest drawback is not having more time to spend with them.

This highlights one of Strange New Worlds’ flaws: its tendency to match how modern Trek often feels rushed, with ten-episode seasons which have become the standard in the streaming landscape. Due to the condensed episode count, Season 4 struggles a bit, making the more whimsical episodes feel almost like they’re taking away opportunities to explore more serious stories. Yet, those same episodes are excellent at what they aim to do and give us so many iconic and quotable moments that it’s hard not to love them.

While the puppet episode is sure to be as polarizing as the musical episode from Season 2, in a franchise with entries such as Deep Space Nine’s “Move Along Home” and The Next Generation’s “Qpid”, these stories fit in perfectly. Season 4’s comedy overall is a cut above previous seasons, which is impressive considering Strange New Worlds has always been very successful at embracing Trek’s humour. Several jokes made me laugh out loud, especially in the third and fifth episodes. Even the silliest episodes from the six manage to include strong character development, along with a ton of laughs.

Generating some of the fourth season’s funniest moments is one particular enemies-to-friends relationship among the regular cast, which is especially delightful. Other budding friendships are beautifully intertwined throughout the six episodes, as the crew continues its journey from shipmates to family. These lighter episodes and moments serve as an effective counterbalance to the darker or more action-packed elements, offering a nice backdrop to develop relationships which longtime fans are familiar with from The Original Series.

The higher-stakes episodes also overcome an inherent challenge facing Strange New Worlds as a prequel. We already know the eventual fates of much of the bridge crew and many of the other strict storytelling limitations in the “trek” towards the status quo at the beginning of The Original Series. But despite this foreknowledge and how it becomes more confining as we approach that timeline transition, the fourth season still succeeds in creating genuine suspense. Enough characters have uncertain fates that several of the six episodes deliver a few real nail-biters, in spite of Trek’s fundamentally lighter and more optimistic tone.

On the whole, these initial six episodes leave me optimistic that this will be a solid season of Strange New Worlds. In the other four episodes, it would be great to see at least one with a bit of moral complexity – in the vein of the season premiere – as the first few episodes feel a little overtaken by occasional hijinks. Another classic morality tale or two would help balance the season while delivering more of the TOS feel which so many fans love the show for. Even so, the fourth season is off to a very enjoyable start. It will be exciting to see where the Enterprise takes us next!