Season 2 isn’t over yet—there are two more episodes to come, one of them a musical.
But this is the first time I’ve been unreservedly happy with a Star Trek series or movie since Deep Space Nine seasons five and six.
The current era of Trek-franchise work began kind of awkwardly and haphazardly after the franchise owners just sort of bumbled aimlessly around during Trek’s 50th anniversary in 2013. The mostly horrible J.J. Abrams-controlled film series was heading for its final little wet fart of a movie, having mostly wasted some brilliant recasting on pointless tweaks to characters, convoluted time-travel and parallel realities nonsense, and the stomach-churning dinner-theater level re-enactment of the ending of Wrath of Khan. You could really feel Abrams’ long-stated dislike for Trek coming through by the end: the movies ended up feeling like the “Monkey Christ” version of Star Trek. (Though Abrams didn’t exactly pay off his alleged affection for Star Wars either in his two sequel films in that franchise.)
But somehow a new group of creators pushed through the confusing waste of the reboot films in order the create their own kind of confusing waste with Star Trek: Discovery. The good parts of Discovery weren’t just casting: there were some interesting characters, a real desire to provide some new technological and narrative hooks, and especially a plan for making a complex, contradictory central character who was not the captain. The bad parts were terrible ideas where it’s nearly impossible to guess at what the showrunners were thinking (though rumor has it that they were internally at odds, so may they weren’t sure themselves), most signally the rebooting of something decidely not broken, the Klingons, but also potentially great ideas that then just got dropped halfway through a season or where the wrap-up was totally bungled. Maybe the worst thing in the end is that the show populated its bridge with visually interesting characters who got less development in four seasons than most of the recurring regulars on the original Star Trek, which is saying something. (I mean, when the audience knows more about Harry Kim on Voyager, the blandest character in Trek history, than they do some of your recurring characters, you’ve missed a beat.)
But Discovery, with all its many flaws, was the gateway to Strange New Worlds, so for that alone it deserves an extra star. Anson Mount as Pike and Ethan Peck as Spock made just about everybody want a series built around Pike’s Enterprise, and now we’ve had two seasons of it.
The first season was very good, but I think it was marred a bit by some homages that tipped over into rip-offs, in particular a season-ending episode that centered on an ill-advised attempt to turn the Gorns into a version of the Xenomorphs of the Alien franchise. It’s not a good mix, quite aside from being too unoriginal.
This season feels like the writers are unclipping their safety harnesses and starting to tell new stories as well as establish new characterizations and character arcs. They’re even messing quite a bit with Spock’s early history in a way that I completely love but I have to concede is quite courageous given how hidebound fandoms can be. I never thought we’d get an in-canon explanation for why Spock in “The Cage” is much more emotional than he was in three seasons of the original series, but here we go. More potently by far, I 100% approve of the complete rewrite of Christine Chapel from the overtly sexist version featured on TOS.
At this point, what I’m thinking is something I would never have thought was a good idea if you’d asked me a few hours after I saw Star Trek Beyond in the theaters, which is that if the creators of Strange New Worlds want to keep going into the era of Kirk, Spock and McCoy and retell or reinvent TOS itself, I’m all for it. I can easily see a fourth-season finale where Pike meets his preordained fate and we get a season focused on Kirk’s transition to captain. After all, the first time we canonically see Kirk as captain of the Enterprise, some time has passed since he assumed command. We could get a whole season with Gary Mitchell as helmsman, with Dr. Piper (a character we never got to know), with Janice Rand as a reinvented character in the spirit of Chapel. We could get McCoy’s introduction and the development of his relationship with Chapel and M’Benga (who apparently stays on the ship after Kirk arrives). Sulu’s never really gotten much character development in-canon, on-screen (a bit more in the Abrams films, I guess), so that could be an opportunity. And so on.
Heck, maybe they could pair the Enterprise with a smaller ship commanded by Una Chin-Riley with La’an and Ortegas as first officer and pilot for a season-long exploration arc, I dunno. At this point I’m feeling really grateful: it’s lovely to have a Trek to look forward to rather than one that requires making a mighty effort to salvage the best parts from the worst parts.
Image credit: By Cecilia Giménez - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/world/europe/botched-restoration-of-ecce-homo-fresco-shocks-spain.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54153025
Image credit: "Sunday Strange New Worlds Panel" by rwillia532 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.