Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

Yes, but there's a nonbinary person and the Black lady doesn't know her place and that made my peepee shrivel up!

I know... it's like they actually listen to the fans' response or something.

Although I still hold that the soft reboot of Discovery was capitulating to haters rather than improving what they'd started with.

It sounds like TPTB have explicitly decided that Strange New Worlds ends with Kirk's first day in command of the Enterprise. (sorry if this is me being late to the party)

https://trekmovie.com/2025/07/15/ex...nge-new-worlds-will-end-with-kirk-in-command/

Agree with the consensus that this was a very uneven season...

...but even at its worst, SNW is still better than most of the Trek we've been saddled with for the past 25 years.

So I'm not complaining.

you coulda stopped there.

It's simply the best of everything that preceded it.

(Even ST09 )

Late to the party, but some thoughts on the season finale:

I really liked the whole Captain Batel story about how she was The Beholder, but I don't think there was nearly enough build up throughout the season to give it the full emotional punch it deserved. And Ensign Gamble was always a bad choice, as he just doesn't come across as evil.

The timeline (not a dream, but an actual reality that required so Batel could build up her powers) where Pike and Batel are married and have a family was also well done, but also deserved more time. The knock at the door grew more and more ominous as time progressed.

And the use of M83's "Wait" was poignant. The final scenes hit all the right feels but really didn't get the emotional gut punch that it frankly deserved.

I also don't mind the use of Kirk, but his appearance in this episode seriously undermines the continuity of the TOS two-parter, "The Menagerie," mainly because of the "mystery" surrounding Spock's behaviour about a former commanding officer.

What I mean is that given the relationships that have been established in SNW, if Spock told Kirk that Pike needed help, Kirk would be like, "fuck it we need to help him."

I think Kirk has a "forget" meld coming his way.

Spock will have a good 15 years of serving with Pike. Maybe kirk hits gis head and forgets by then.

And then about fifty-gazillion times after that.

That will all get fixed when they film Star Trek: Year One after SNW ends.

I'll give that line as much credence as: "The only crime in the Federation that still carries the death penalty."

Off the top, I don't know of any crime in the Federation or a Federation member planet that still has the death penalty other than visiting Talos IV or similar planets.

I assume the Federation legal system is akin to the US's, where there's Federation law and then Earth, Vulcan, Andorian etc. law much as there's federal law and state law. The possibility might then exist that the Andorians still retain death penalties for certain crimes in their jurisdiction, but the Federation doesn't, sort of akin to their being a federal death penalty still, but X number of states have outlawed it.

Yes, that is a way to resolve it, but: The implication is that the Federation itself has a death penalty. Which seems to run counter to everything else e learn about it in pretty much every other show (including the rest of TOS).
My main point of course being that beholding yourself slavishly to every line of a 60-year-old TV series can make things awkward. Like Pike considering becoming an Orion slave trader, or being shocked at seeing women on the bridge.

I obviously agree with the overall point that we can't treat every line of TOS (or any of the shows) like it's gospel when they clearly contradict the present state of civilization or other stuff on Star Trek old or new. Like the notion of women being an anomaly on the bridge makes no sense when his second-in-command is a woman who had presumably rose up the ranks for years, not to mention the real world evolution of the military where women have been earned their positions and bled and died in the militaries of most countries. (Are there any militaries with the sort of wholesale bans or broad limitations on women in combat forces these days?)

But I can't think of anything in Trek or real life to make it seem contradictory or problematic that the death penalty has been limited to just one crime category. It might seem dumb to think that Federation jurisprudence apparently does not consider murder, treason, or anything else a capital crime but trespassing in the no-no zone of certain planets is. But it's not like the death penalty isn't arbitrary anyways.

I always thought the death penalty seemed barbaric for any advanced civilization. And indeed, when the crews encounter it from other species, it is always treated as a barbaric, backwards practice.

Meant to post this a while back, someone mentioned Spock's hair changing style. Looks like it was done to match Sarek's hair style from TOS.

Hey how come Star Wars and Alien can have the same aesthetic, but Star Trek can’t?

The SW prequels have a very different aesthetic by design.
Ditto Prometheus.
Both directed by the original creators.

This would be welcome

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Showrunners Talk “More Serious” Season 4 – TrekMovie.com

Puppets notwithstanding

because they've been playing catch up visually since 1979.

in 1967, when everyone had a 14" B/W tv, there was little need for visual details (or internal consistency). By the time of TMP leading into TNG, everything changed-especially the Klingons.

Star Wars and Alien aesthetics were created by world renowned designers (seriously, we spent hours when I studied industrial design talking about McQuarry) who understood form follows function. TOS didn't get that.

You really don't know the difference between a multi-million dollar big studio movie from 1976 and a low-budget TV production from 1966?
You realize that in TNG Geordi's visit was a hair barrette, right? And that they quickly realized that in a multi million dollar big screen film it looked like absolute shit so they changed it for all subsequent films?
Hell, Generations is a prime example of the difference between TV and film productions, and how weird it looks when you try to transplant TV to film whole cloth.

Oh, no, I'm sure Gene Roddenberry, who executive produced the movies, and created TNG really wanted those old 60's sets back.

It's funny to me that no one bitched nearly as much about how the entire aesthetic of The Motion Picture was completely, almost unrecognizably different from the original TOS show.

TMP was not a return to TOS, it was a continuation of the story and a natural evolution.

so you're saying that smoothie klingons and Xmas tree light consoles were just placeholders until such time as they could be more suitably imagined and rendered? That the visual language of TOS was never meant to be canon?

The only point you and vanity Smurf have is that you're both full of shit.

The truth is that the Star Wars aesthetic has evolved as the franchise got more money and CGI improved. Looking at the prequel trilogy, things are much slicker and technologically sophisticated than in A New Hope, even though A New Hope is decades in its future. This would be even more true if Lucas didn't feel like tinkering with the OT by introducing special editions and such. One can fanwank why computer displays in ANH look like they could have been taken off the Atari 2600.

I imagine that the Alien franchise does not all look like the first two movies today, but I haven't really paid close enough attention to it.

Even assuming the premise to your question were true, it'd be irrelevant. One can and should accept that certain owners of certain IP want to do things a certain way and others do not. And maintaining the same aesthetic consistently makes sense in some contexts and some franchises, but not for others.