But there are times when Wesley’s take on Kirk has no resemblance beyond the name to the guy William Shatner played. (**) You don’t want any of these new actors to just do impressions of the Sixties cast. Bush gets to play a bold scientific adventurer who just happens to like the half-Vulcan science officer, and whose feelings seem to be at least somewhat reciprocated. The Sixties version was a two-dimensional character defined largely by a hopeless crush on Spock. M’Benga), Chapel has gotten by far the biggest upgrade. (*) Of all the characters from the original series who are part of the SNW ensemble (including Babs Olusanmokun as the gentle Dr. Jess Bush as Chapel and Babs Olusanmokun as M’Benga in the Season Two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The amnesia episode is primarily a Pike spotlight, yet it gives its biggest moment to Melissa Navia’s cocky pilot Erica Ortegas, while the Uhura episode is also Wesley’s best showcase as Kirk(**). There’s the ongoing love triangle among Spock, T’Pring, and Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel(*) Uhura growing more comfortable in Starfleet La’an’s growing connection with Jim Kirk the crew getting used to eccentric new chief engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) and more. (I have a particular soft spot for the comedy episodes, and Peck tends to be at his most self-assured in those.) But what’s most impressive is how well showrunners Henry Alonso Myers, Akiva Goldsman, and their team are able to keep digging deep into character and advancing various stories even within the confines of mostly non-serialized episodes. Law & Order: Starfleet, anyone?Īll of these are executed at a very high level, and the variety is enough to please Trekkies of every stripe. It’s enough to make one wish for a spinoff focusing solely on Batel’s legal career. (*) That one is also the biggest showcase yet for former Wynonna Earp star Melanie Scrofano as Captain Batel, the long-distance love interest of Anson Mount’s Captain Pike, and also a member of Starfleet’s JAG corps. It is, to borrow a famous Trek episode title, the best of both worlds. Strange New Worlds also feels old-school because of how much it manages to pack into each installment, so that its shorter seasons can feel as rich and full as the strongest parts of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. But Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - which returns for its second season this week - feels old-school not only because it’s set a few years before the events of the original Sixties series, and not only because it goes back to the Mission of the Week structure used so well in earlier franchise entries. There’s not a lot of breathing room in the world of 10-episode (or less) seasons, especially since so many of them are strictly serialized. This led to the series’ best creative stretch. What was meant to be a self-contained palate cleanser between larger arcs - a mock trial pitting the firm’s senior partners against their less powerful associates - instead made the showrunners recognize that pitting their main characters against one another was even more interesting than bringing in guest stars as antagonists. (*) My favorite example of this: “Red Team/Blue Team,” from late in the fourth season of The Good Wife. What some modern viewers dismiss as “filler” episodes often turned out to be the most fun and/or important ones(*). And it let both the audience and the creative team develop a deeper understanding of the characters, which often led to surprising new directions. The 22-episode approach allowed story and character arcs to play out more gradually, so that the payoffs would feel more satisfying. And there are other incredibly thin installments that may as well open with one of the producers directly addressing the audience to say, “Look, we’re running out of ideas this year, but we had to come up with something, so … enjoy these fairy tales coming to life!” But the pros far outweighed the cons. As we near the midpoint of DS9, we’ve begun to just skip over all the episodes about the cartoonishly greedy Ferengi, for instance. Unevenness was inevitable when producing that much content each season. There were definitely downsides to the old system. In addition to the underrated spinoff’s individual merits, it’s striking to be reminded of the differences between the era where every successful show made 20-plus episodes a year, and this current one, where 10 episodes per season is the most given to almost everybody, including modern-day Trek shows like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. We’ve been bingeing Star Trek: Deep Space Ninein my house lately.
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