Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

From familiar planets to Enterprise captains, to the complicated history of Star Trek, here's how Strange New Worlds episode 1 dives deep into the ...

This is a slight retcon that Star Trek canon has been grappling with since TOS. In “Space Seed,” Spock mentioned that the Eugenics Wars were fought in the 1990s and that it was the last of your “so-called World Wars.” However, in TNG, WWIII and “the Eugenics Wars” were posited as separate events. April tells Pike and the crew that General Order 1 will now be called “the Prime Directive.” Pike scoffs at this saying the term will “never stick.” This of course is an inside joke. Number One refers to “zero point,” saying it’s “where we and the crew of Discovery opened up a wormhole to the future. Pike seems to roll the concepts of “the Second Civil War,” “the Eugenics Wars” and WWIII, all into one time period. As Spock shows Pike and La’an a map of “worlds in this sector with warp,” he uses his hands, casually, to point at the screen, and change what’s being displayed without touching it. What once sounded like a “mistake” now is part of the real-deal sound. Pike did two five-year missions, but not back-to-back, and we know that because there’s some non-five-year-mission action in there during the Klingon War and Discovery season 2 (in fact, right now, canon puts “The Cage” in 2254, which would be close to the end of Pike’s first five-year-mission.) Here’s a funny thing: Of all the points in the Star Trek chronology, the exact years of The Original Series have a tiny bit of wiggle room. Spock mentions to Pike that it’s been about “three months” since the events of Discovery season 2, which could imply this is still 2258, or maybe a bit later. Spock mentions the Klingon Moon Boreth, which is where Pike had his future vision in Discovery. Boreth was first introduced in a TNG episode called “Rightful Heir.” At that time, time crystals were not discussed, and Worf was seeking spiritual enlightenment. Throughout the episode, Pike and Number One both mention events that are “classified.” As Una makes clear toward the end of the episode, they’re talking about the ending of Star Trek: Discovery season 2, in which crews of both Enterprise and Discovery fought the evil AI known as Control, and Discovery opened a time portal wormhole to the future. Well, in Star Trek: Picard season 2, we learn Rick and Morty exist in the Trek timeline, which suggests that Star Trek: Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan also exists in the backstory of Trek, somehow.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" breaks new ground among the more recent "Trek" shows by going back to the old ways of the franchise.

to be associated with that is kind of confusing and strange, but at the same time, it’s been the most incredible journey. Interestingly, both Peck and Mount have been living with these characters since 2019 when they first appeared on “Discovery” Season 2. At multiple points in “Strange New Worlds,” that knowledge causes him considerable stress. And that, in a strange backdoor way, is tied up in his identity.” “The show is episodic but the characters have memory,” as Mount puts it. We wanted to reinvigorate that sense of excitement.”

Welcome to the USS Enterprise. star trek strange new worlds rebecca romijn anson mount ethan peck Image via Paramount+. The first episode of ...

Strange New Worlds has ushered in the return of episodic Star Trek with integrity and a bold mission to continue exploring the galaxy through the lens of our humanity. Strange New Worlds upholds Star Trek's long legacy of reflecting social issues and commenting on the best route to a utopian sci-fi future. Strange New Worlds Season 1 Episode 1 serves as a perfect entry point for new viewers, while also being packed to the brim with references to decades worth of lore for longtime fans. However, if you're looking for a primer before diving into the rest of the first season of Strange New Worlds, we've got you covered. The first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds introduces the audience to a USS Enterprise and her crew that are both familiar and yet unexplored. Strange New Worlds has a long legacy to live up to and if the first episode is any indication, it's going to do so with ease.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Review: This one is a pleasant, watchable series that has its heart in the right place and works best when it doesn't take ...

But it’s that very enjoyable genericness that makes it unable to transcend passive viewing, rather than the kind of show you’d actively return to week after week. “Anyone wanna tell me how a comet can put up a forcefield?” The more imaginative second episode follows a bunch of religious space monks sworn to protect a comet that’s on a collision course with a neighbouring planet. A race-against-time episode that involves our heroes saving the day by literally singing to a comet. The first episode, for example, is essentially Rescue Mission Impossible with the crew trying to go undercover to save one of their own who’s imprisoned on a planet consumed by civil war. Thankfully creators Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman and Jenny Lumet ensure Strange New Worlds is accessible to newcomers and invite us to strap in, sit back and just go along for the intergalactic ride of funky space adventures on the fancy spaceship. There’s Una “Number One” Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), a young Spock (Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory Peck, as the gentlest, least interesting Spock yet), young Cadet Ahura (an endearing Celia Rose Gooding), and security officer La'an Noonien-Singh (a joyless, permanently sulking Christina Chong) among others.

Captain Pike and the Enterprise crew boldly blast into this back-to-basics “Star Trek” spinoff.

"Strange New Worlds" is produced by CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment. Every episode intends on being a standalone story which should draw in even more loyal viewers with its classic "Star Trek" approach. It’s light, fun, and agile in the best ways possible.

Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and more cast along with executive producer Akiva Goldsman talk old characters, new adventures, and confronting the human ...

“We didn’t want to just skirt the issue and get on with the show,” Mount continued. According to Mount, Pike’s great conflict in that regard is “figuring out what happens between now and then, and is the knowledge of that going to affect my ability to lead and protect hundreds of people that serve under me and trust me? In a switch from the original series’ curmudgeonly doctor, M’Benga exudes warmth and empathy, which Olusanmokun said was “a beautiful part of it for me.” “The pronunciation of ‘sensors’ never becomes second nature,” Peck admitted. For her part, Romijn considers the opportunity to define the character beyond the original Star Trek pilot (and some Trek novels) as a “slightly” daunting task. Perhaps less controversial though, will be his portrayal of Spock. Building from his time on Discovery, the character will be decidedly more in tune with his emotions than Nimoy’s depiction of him in the original series. “An extrapolation of the original series can create overlap,” he explained. The format also allows Strange New Worlds to lean heavily into Trek’s sense of fun and camaraderie. “We’ve really been pushing the envelope in terms of style and genre,” Mount added. “Think of the original series; you could go from fantasy, to straight horror, to sort of historical recreation, to hard sci-fi, comedy,” Goldsman explained. As with the original, Strange New Worlds will tell episodic stories — that is, the Enterprise will warp into a new situation each week and solve it by the end of the hour. In late 1964, NBC commissioned a pilot for a series called Star Trek. It featured Jeffrey Hunter as Christopher Pike, captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise; Majel Barrett (going by M. Leigh Hudec at the time) as his first officer, the enigmatically named “Number One”; and Leonard Nimoy as Science Officer Spock, a devil-eared alien.

After years of up-and-down, divisive, serialized storytelling, the latest 'Star Trek' series triumphantly returns the franchise to its familiar, ...

It’s not initially clear what galaxy-altering implications, if any, Strange New Worlds may be building up to, though the series does introduce an imaginative possible Big Bad and, in typical Trek fashion, finds ways to comment on the 21st century by way of the 23rd. Most of the episodes evoke Trek episodes past: a conflict between warring factions on a world that’s about to blow itself up; a vintage mysterious space anomaly; a crew contracting a confounding infection; a colony in distress; the complexities and perils of shore leave and diplomatic negotiations. Star Trek doesn’t necessarily need to be static; it could and should be a Changeling that adapts to its times and challenges its audience, and future Trek incarnations may perfect the model that Discovery and Picard pioneered. We want to do it the way it was done.”) From its font to its theme song to its story structure to Spock saying “reh-cords” and “sen-soars” to much of its recurring cast—which includes younger versions of Original Series characters Uhura, Nurse Chapel, and Kirk’s brother Sam, and will, as of Season 2, welcome Kirk himself (played by Paul Wesley)—Strange New Worlds is a comforting, familiar throwback. Perhaps improbably, the most consistent of the series that preceded Strange New Worlds is the animated Lower Decks, a comedic sitcom that fondly and perceptively spoofs TNG-style conflict by focusing on the not-in-command crew of an outmoded vessel that specializes in second contact. In some respects, Strange New Worlds seems almost regressive and cautious compared to the series that spawned it. I’m often the first to point out the problems with prequels or bemoan uninspired, nostalgia-centric narrative recycling, and on the surface Strange New Worlds would seem to risk checking both boxes. Discovery made Michael (and Sonequa Martin-Green) the first Black female captain in live-action Trek; in Pike (and Mount), Strange New Worlds returns to the franchise’s white-guy-captain roots. I finished it mostly out of vestigial loyalty to the character, the urge to rubberneck at a flaming 10-episode pileup, and fascination with what Stewart was thinking as he delivered his lines and presumably wondered how he got himself into this. Pike, preparing to settle into the captain’s chair on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, reminds his crew of its mission: “We seek out new life and new civilizations. You know the ones: those previously proclaimed by William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, and even Scott Bakula. They come right after the phrase “to explore strange new worlds,” which means they were always bound to be the big finish of an episode called “Strange New Worlds” that launches a series called Strange New Worlds. And after 50 minutes of anticipation, there they are, as expected and promised, with only minor modifications. But that’s not Strange New Worlds. Through the series’ first five episodes, which were provided to critics in advance of Thursday’s series premiere on Paramount+, the prequel/spinoff doesn’t take the coolness of the Enterprise’s five-year/ continuing/ ongoing mission format for granted.

Starring Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, it also features Ethan Peck as Spock, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Celia Rose Gooding as Cadet Uhura. And ...

But the continuity of the franchise didn’t bother to explain away this discrepancy until Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005. But if this series runs for several seasons, it will be interesting to see how the showrunners eventually address the timeline. Regardless of the timeline, SNW is an absolute joy to watch. But with the series ostensibly serving as a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series, many are wondering where the show fits in the overall Star Trek chronology. But then there’s stuff like a huge bar/lounge on the ship we’ve never seen in any version of the Enterprise before. This places the show seven years before we meet Kirk and Spock in the TOS pilot “ Where No Man Has Gone Before,” which takes place in 2265.

The Original Series told us that was Starfleet's first encounter with the villainous Gorn. But there are hints that we might see them on Star Trek: Strange ...

The potential of the Gorn, to Goldsman, trumps anything previously set down by The Original Series. This may anger some fans but we’ll have to wait and see what Strange New Worlds does with the Gorn in the future. Goldsman describes the race as “a really, really great enemy for whom we have no compassion. Executive producer Akiva Goldsman however teases that the writers are “less concerned” with canon in this case than you might think. A classic example was in Star Trek: Enterprise’s use of the Romulans. In their first appearance in The Original Series, it had been established no human had ever actually seen a Romulan. That meant in Enterprise, set around 100 years before the time of TOS, no human character should lay eyes on a Romulan. The show went out of its way to keep this consistent, despite featuring several Romulan appearances. It took a lot of work, but canon was (mostly) respected. St ar Trek is a franchise with a massive legacy, one the newer series on Paramount+ are gleeful to explore.

The debut episode of the new Star Trek show has drawn complaints for using documentary footage of the 2014 Maidan Uprising to depict an alien riot.

There’s also the fact that using footage of the Ukrainian protests out of context right now, as the Russian invasion of the country continues into a second month of fighting, comes across as somewhat tasteless: Just the act of doing a science fiction show that deals with social issues, whether we intend it to or not, always means that it’s going to deal with the present.” The unrest began in the wake of then-President Viktor Yanukovych and the Azarov Government choosing to not sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, a deal that would eventually be ratified in 2017. However, the footage shown is from much closer to our home than the world of Star Trek: it’s footage taken during the late 2013-early 2014 civil unrest in Ukraine known as “Euromaidan,” or the Maidan Uprising. “Star Trek has always been a show that deals with social issues and we really didn’t want to shy away from that. The trio arrives to find the world a pre-warp civilization being torn apart by a conflict between the planetary government and a local uprising—one that threatens to boil over to disaster when Enterprise discovers the government has managed to reverse-engineer a matter-antimatter reactor thanks to recent Federation warp signatures near their world, and has developed it into a devastating weapon.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. This week Paramount+ unveiled a new science fiction series, but it's also, ...

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William Shatner starred as James T. Kirk, captain of the Starship Enterprise, and Leonard Nimoy played his half-human, half-Vulcan sidekick, Mr. Spock.

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