Spoiler alert Sunday!

Reflections on Strange New Worlds, "Hegemony Part 2" and "Wedding Bell Blues"

I’ve been debating how to handle the new season of Strange New Worlds on this blog. I decided that doing full episode write-ups seemed too much like work and I didn’t want new Star Trek to feel like a chore. Instead, I plan to offer up some reflections in the hopes of starting an open discussion in comments. I will likely do one of these for all episodes, and I will make no effort to avoid spoilers — I believe that the emails and the actual format of the blog itself will prevent anyone from being accidentally exposed to undesired information about the plots of these episodes.

I wasn’t sure how to interpret the decision to end last season on a cliffhanger. The growing conflict with the Gorn was the closest thing to a uniting thread for the whole season, and breaking with the purely episodic format with a two-parter might have signalled a turn to a more serialized approach. Thankfully, though, it seems that the use of the season-spanning two-parter was more an homage to the classic Next Generation-era cliffhangers than a signal of a new storytelling format. The decision to release two very different episodes simultaneously may have been an attempt to reassure fans that we are still going to be getting the episodic Trek we crave.

I have to admit that “Hegemony, Part 2” more or less washed over me. It was serviceable, but unremarkable—precisely “more Star Trek,” without adding anything very distinctive or memorable. And with the exception of “Best of Both Worlds,” you could say the same of virtually every other cliffhanger two-parter — the resolution never quite lives up to the cliffhanger itself, in large part due to the need to restore the previous status quo. Strange New Worlds doesn’t quite reach for the infamous “reset button” here—La’an apparently benefits from facing her Gorn trauma, while Ortegas’s apparently minor wound looks like it will have longer-term effects—but we are still more in the realm of 2000s Sunday night drama than something like Battlestar Galactica (or even the level of serialization Deep Space Nine eventually reached). I worry that as the show reaches its enforced finale, the pressure to create some kind of serialized plot will increase, but for now, they’re remaining faithful to the formula that has made Strange New Worlds the breakout hit of the streaming era.

“Wedding Bell Blues” was definitely more memorable. They spent the first season going “meta” with Pike’s knowledge of his own preordained future in the beeping wheelchair, and now it looks like they’re dwelling on the need to slot Spock into a different approach to emotion and the different relationship dynamics that presumably grow out of that. The biggest dangling chad here is obviously his crush on Nurse Chapel, which we know “has to” end with her engagement to Korby. From that perspective, this story has a strangely “meta” aspect, where Spock is confronted with the fulfillment of his wish and then has to reject it so that the proper timeline can be restored. It’s not quite a time travel story, although the mischievious Trelane appears “too soon” and does seem to reset people’s memories and activities in a way that is tantamount to messing with the timeline. I doubt the break will be as clean as Pike’s firm decision in “A Quality of Mercy” to accept his fate after seeing how badly he would screw up the first encounter with the Romulans—after all, we do need their feelings to resurface 5-7 years later (in “The Naked Time” for Chapel and in The Animated Series episode “Mudd’s Passion” for Spock).

The Easter egg of confirming fan theories about the connection between Trelane seems to be the main focus of fan discussions I’ve seen. But as with many of the new plots involving Spock, it seems to open up a plot hole—how does Spock not recognize Trelane in “The Squire of Gothos”? They do seem to cover their tracks a bit by leaving him unnamed other than in the cast credits and by rendering his appearance ambiguous (does he still look like the Andorian wedding planner when Papa Q chews him out?), but those kinds of moves always feel a bit forced. Why not avoid the problem by simply inventing a new mischievious super-being to mess with Spock? Then you could spawn a generation’s worth of fan speculation instead of resolving it!

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of Q, so the Easter egg that I most enjoyed was the introduction of the three-armed Edosian bartender, a callback to Lt. Arex from The Animated Series. We had already seen a couple Edosians on Lower Decks—which for obvious reasons has done the most work to try to reintegrate TAS into the contemporary canon—but seeing it in live action was welcome. The fact that Arex’s third arm comes out of his chest but the bartender’s seems to come out of her back seems like a fudge to make the special effects easier to execute, but I suspect a fan consensus will emerge that it’s a gender difference.

I have other thoughts, but first I want to hear what you think!