The Secrets to Strange New Worlds' Success
How this Star Trek series keeps getting it right.
[WARNING: This column contains minor spoilers for Season Two of Strange New Worlds.]
In the penultimate episode of season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — “Subspace Rhapsody,” characters start breaking out into song for mysterious reasons having to do with quantum uncertainty. Early in the episode, security officer La'an Noonien-Singh asks, “What’s next? More improbability, or will we suddenly just poof into bunnies?” Dr. M’Benga responds, “I would prefer not to be a bunny either.”
Seems like a random bit of dialogue, but as IndieWire’s Wilson Chapman noted, it was most likely a sly reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “[it] instantly brings to mind a specific song from another musical episode, maybe the most famous one in the subgenre — ‘Bunnies,’ Anya’s (Emma Caulfield) rock solo in Season 6’s ‘Once More With Feeling.’”
What’s telling about the BtVS reference is that, oddly enough, Strange New Worlds is the show currently on air that most closely evokes Buffy’s unusual skill set. Among the many things that made Buffy great was the show’s ability to shift its tone from comedy to horror to romance to action to drama from episode to episode — indeed, even within episodes1 — and make it all work. That was a credit to the talent and versatility of the cast, crew and writing staff.
Television needs more shows like this to be on the air, and in 2023 the only one with the stones to pull it off is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. SNW’s dexterity with tone, combined with self-knowledge about what makes a Trek show click, make it a must-watch for sci-fi fans.
SNW has proven to be as deft as Buffy in jumping from genre to genre with only 20 episodes episodes under its belt.2 This came through most clearly in “Subspace Rhapsody.” That ep had a number of highlights,3 but Uhura — played by Grammy-winner Celia Rose Gooding — anchored the episode with her solo performance “Keep Us Connected.” The song lyrics successfully tied up Uhura’s arc over the entire second season:
Alan Sepinwall’s Rolling Stone review of this past season also noted the show’s deft ability to switch tones from episode to episode with grace:
Consider this trifecta from the just-completed second season of Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists,” a light-hearted crossover with the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks, was followed by “Under the Cloak of War,” a harrowing and dark hour about combat PTSD, and then by “Subspace Rhapsody,” a musical episode in which the crew of the Enterprise can’t stop themselves from singing and dancing. And then that oddball trilogy led to this week’s season-ending “Hegemony,” a pure horror outing pitting the crew against the cruel reptilian conqueror race the Gorn.…
What’s remarkable, then, isn’t any one particular genre or tone that Strange New Worlds has tackled this season, but that it’s done so many of them in so short a time. A traditional 22+ episode season of Trek would have room for a few comedy outings, some dark introspective crises, epic adventure, etc., but there would also be lots and lots of basic Mission of the Week episodes that felt very much of a piece with one another. Season Two did a couple along those lines, including one where Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike was trapped on a planet that wipes everyone’s memories, and another where Celia Rose Gooding’s Uhura had to stop the Enterprise from torturing a race of aliens only she could hear. Mostly, though, the SNW creative team (led by showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers) opted to take the biggest possible swings as many times as they could this year, and it worked incredibly well.
My only quibble with Sepinwall’s assessment is that the Pike episode on the amnesia planet was not just a basic mission of the week ep — a significant chunk of that episode saw the entire crew of the Enterprise suffering from memory loss. It was legitimately disturbing. That speaks to the rapidity with which SNW fleshed out its characters.
Every episode managed to pull off a scene or two that registered for a good long while after the show ended. In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” Christina Chong got a chance to show some different sides to her no-nonsense security officer character and pulled it off with panache. All of this is also a continuation of what the show pulled off in its first season. That included a fairy-tale episode and the biggest swing of all, a re-telling of the original series’ “Balance of Terror.”
Versatility for the sake of versatility is great, but that’s only an element to what makes Star Trek: Strange New Worlds so wonderful. The show also knows what makes traditional Trek work. The first quality is a sense of optimism about the future even if the odds look grim. This is best embodied by Anson Mount as Christopher Pike and Rebecca Romijn as Number One Una Chin-Riley.4 Beginning with the show’s pilot, both Pike and Una (and the show through them) have excelled at finding ways into the light even when the situation seems extremely dark. Consider this scene from the first season:
The other key lesson the show has mastered is to find the right mix of emotion and professionalism in the crew. One of the problems with Star Trek: Discovery has been that everyone in Starfleet kept acting like they weren’t in Starfleet, putting their own trauma so front and center that at times it feels like an SNL parody of Trek. The officers in SNW are obviously affected by what they experience as they explore the stars, but they also recognize the importance of duty. Not every character behaves professionally all of the time — that would be boring. But that impulse grounds Strange New Worlds while make it easier to preserve an episodic format.
At a moment when the Star Wars franchise is uneven and other televised sci-fi is of erratic quality, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has managed to avoid the nostalgia trap and tell fresh stories that are nonetheless quite relevant for 2023. As Pike sings in the “Subspace Rhapsody” final number, “The starship Enterprise feels electrified!” The show is worth watching in full for die-hard Trekkies and newcomers alike. It’s definitely worth having Hollywood studies settle with the unions so everyone can get back to filming season three.
BtVS’ “Hush” from Season Four rightly earned an Emmy nomination for its writing, and is generally considered to be one of the spookier episodes from that show. Within that ep, however, Giles’ slide show scene manages to provides crucial exposition while serving up a ton of laughs.
And, hopefully, has done so without any of Buffy’s traumatic aftertaste.
Other highlights: Christina Chong revealing her powerhouse voice as La’an in “How Would That Feel”; Jess Bush’s kicky song and dance number as Nurse Chapel; and the perfect Klingon cameo.
Also, Anson Mount’s hair is the ninth modern wonder of the world. Seriously, it’s fucking fabulous.
Daniel, thanks for your interesting take on this series. I haven't analyzed the show to your degree, but I can say this: I find it more engaging and entertaining than much of what has been produced previously in the Trek universe since The Next Generation. It IS a treat to experience each new episode.
The writing is rich, the characters multi-dimensional and the production value is high. The set design is exquisite and it does feel like everyone in this production, from the writers and actors, to the entire production team, is "swinging for the fences" in every episode. The singing episode was a real eye-opener. It easily could have flopped. Instead, they pulled it off in spectacular fashion. "Ad Astra Per Aspera" was a real gem, with a message for our times in true Gene Roddenberry tradition.
As someone who watched the original series as a teenager, I feel this series is good old-fashioned appointment viewing, something I haven't felt for a very long time. Kudos to everyone involved.
The soundtrack from Subspace Rhapsody is on Apple Music. Christina Chong’s How Would That Feel is now on my playlist. It could have been part of a Broadway show.