TL;DR – For me, this is an episode that failed most narrative levels.  

Disclosure – I paid for the Paramount+ service used to view this series.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Review Introduction

Well, when I sat down to watch last week’s Level-Five Transporter Accident, I didn’t know I was sitting down to watch what was apparently the most divisive episode since Janeway and Paris had salamander kids. This week we shift to a more serious episode as our homage voyage among the stars ends up in 24-Land.  

So, to set the scene, the Alpha shift is looking forward to the end of the week and for Beta shift to take over. Everything is going fine until everyone spots a slight navigation oddity. But before anyone has time to process it, the USS Enterprise is rammed by a slipstream wormhole and yanked into its wake. Ripped from their heading, badly damaged, separated crew, and slowly shutting down. Worse, if they don’t find a way to stop, the ship will be ripped apart at the subatomic level. Now, from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be [SPOILERS] ahead.

24 Minutes

This trend of homages is continuing this season, with this week’s instalment riffing on 24, the famous/infamous TV Series that told a story in 24 episodes over 24 hours, with a ticking clock at the start of every ad break. It was profoundly successful for a time, and maybe helped push Americans to be more okay with torture; it has a complicated history. Thus, it was such an odd frame of reference to copy; I was completely bamboozled as to what they were doing with these profoundly out-of-place split-screen shots and countdown timer. Once it all snapped together, it did not get any better. The only part of this homage that actually worked was when Pelia (Carol Kane) is uplifting Scotty (Martin Quinn). The fact that she is quietly finding a leak in her quarters was a good touch, as was the way she bolstered a flagging Scotty.   

Technobabble-babble-babble    

Now, as someone who quite loves the science fiction genre, I am perfectly fine with a touch of technobabble being used to plaster over narrative inconsistencies. We get it, it happens, and I am even fine with the ship getting yanked by some gravitational anomaly and being yeeted through the galaxy. However, and it is a big however, every single part of the solution that they used to escape the anomaly felt at best forced, and at worst complete and utter rubbish. You can’t just say ‘strong force neutrinos’ a bunch of times and just hope that it is enough. You are not bringing your audience with you, instead you are trying to build the track in front of the train after it has already left the station and hoping no one noticed. The biggest issue with the technobabble this week is that it was used to try and cover for the fact that there was no tension in the episode. Every single character that they put under threat we know will survive, so what is the point?   

Multiple Failures

For an episode like this to fail at such a spectacular level, it needs to fail on multiple levels: the first, as mentioned, is the oddly out-of-place homage; the next is the language construction, and finally there is the conflict. Every part of the conflict in this episode felt completely forced. Pike (Anson Mount) is taken out by an electrical beam only to pop back as if he just had a nap. Spock (Ethan Peck) letting Una (Rebecca Romijn) go through the gravity plating even though he grew up on a planet with much higher gravity. The fact that this happened during a shift change was the only thing in the narrative setup that felt slightly plausible.

This is all bad, but it is taken to an extremely poor level in sickbay. The fight between Chapel (Jess Bush) and M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has no structural merit to it because it has no build up, it is just there to create conflict so Chapel has a false motivation for everything she does, but it just makes Chapel appear to be a petulant teenager. Why was there a table like that, only held down with a magnetic lock in sickbay? Worse, when the table moves, Chapel is on the edge of the post, which would have taken the hit from the post, not her. The way the sequence is filmed, M’Benga does not save Chapel; he just kills himself. Then Chapel is presented as this hero, but she ignored her patient’s wishes, ignored direct orders, failed basic triage in an emergency, and got extremely lucky that the local McGuffin decided to McGuffin in her direction. Piling one coincidence after another is not good writing, nor is character assassination.

Recommendation

In the end, do we recommend Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? This week we don’t. Very little about this episode came together well. I am not sure how it failed so spectacularly, but goodness, did it ever. I honestly hope this is just a blip in season. Have you seen Star Trek: Strange New Worlds yet? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Directed by – Dan Liu
Written by – Bill Wolkoff
Created by – Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, & Jenny Lumet
Based On – Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry
Production/Distribution Companies – CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, Weed Road Pictures, HMRX, Roddenberry Entertainment, & Paramount +
Starring – Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Jess Bush, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, Martin Quinn, & Rebecca Romijn
With – Brian Markinson, & Carol Kane