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![Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is either good or it’s just so comforting that I don’t care](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/snw-header-800x251.jpeg)
Paramount+
If the trendy Star Trek exhibits have all felt somewhat off to you, Unusual New Worlds could also be what you’ve got been ready for.
The fashionable period of TV Star Trek has been greater than prepared to experiment with what a Star Trek present is. Discovery and Picard each concentrate on closely serialized season-long plotlines. Decrease Decks is an animated sendup of (and love letter to) Trek‘s cultural peak within the ’90s. And the computer-animated Prodigy goals for a youthful viewers, with less complicated storylines, a lighter tone, and tween-y interpersonal melodrama aplenty.
What none of those exhibits has explicitly tried to do is replicate the format of older exhibits just like the Authentic Collection or The Subsequent Technology—monster/alien/glowing-godlike-being-of-the-week tales the place regardless of how dangerous issues may search for our heroes, all the pieces shall be kind of wrapped up on the finish of the hour.
Unusual New Worlds faithfully follows the episodic template developed and perfected over many seasons of tv and plenty of a whole lot of episodes of Trek exhibits of years previous, and the result’s a cushty, previous T-shirt of a present. Acquainted plotlines, storytelling beats, and crew dynamics rapidly emerge over the course of the present’s first 5 episodes, and Unusual New Worlds is executing on all of it remarkably effectively. It is also by far the most secure, most retread-y of the entire new Trek exhibits, for higher or worse.
Acquainted previous crew
![Anson Mount returns as Captain Christopher Pike, the hottest dad in space.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/snw-01-980x653.jpg)
Paramount+
Unusual New Worlds advantages from the work accomplished to determine Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the most recent iteration of Spock (Ethan Peck), and Una “Quantity One” Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) within the second season of Discovery. Mount particularly has efficiently cultivated a Cool Scorching Area Dad vibe for Pike that’s nowhere to be present in Trek’s original failed pilot-turned-cost-cutting-flashback sequence.
Even many of the “new” characters—Cadet Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and Chief Safety Officer La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong)—are both lifted from the Authentic Collection or straight impressed by established characters. As a result of it is not ranging from scratch, Unusual New Worlds hit the bottom operating, avoiding the awkward first-season break-in interval that the majority Trek exhibits undergo from as they try to fill in backstories and depict mind-bending sci-fi eventualities on the identical time.
Unusual New Worlds picks up the place that season of Discovery left off, with just a few scenes to remind everybody precisely what occurred on Discovery within the first place—Discovery‘s plotting is convoluted at one of the best of instances, and any pre-pandemic tv season feels as distant to me as the burning of Rome. Pike has glimpsed a grim imaginative and prescient of his personal future, and he decides to hold on captaining the pre-Kirk Enterprise regardless of it.
![There are a couple of characters, like Lt. Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), who don't have anything to do with characters we've met before, but they're few and far between.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/snw-04-980x654.jpg)
Paramount+
After establishing that, although, the present makes solely occasional nods within the route of serialized storytelling, and most episodes observe a sample that even informal Star Trek followers will acknowledge: A menace or unknown anomaly is launched, the crew puzzles over the scenario collectively in ways in which assist to determine their characters, after which the scenario is resolved by some mixture of diplomacy, phasers, and good-old-fashioned know-how.
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