Series
Because editing the review erases the title and it never ever returns for some reason, I'll include it here:
"Strange New Worlds" is a mixture of classic and new Star Trek — and it's the Best of Both Worlds
Yes, I wrote the title purely for that reference.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is doing something that not a lot of shows — especially streaming shows — are doing these days: it is completely episodic, with each episode about a different Problem of the Week. This is pure, classic Star Trek — this is how TOS and TNG operated and even a lot of DS9 pre-Dominion War.
However, what is *not* episodic is the character development we get about each character. Back in TOS, since the writers didn't know when their episodes would air (or whether or not people could re-view them), the character development is scattershot and inconsistent. TNG improved this somewhat, but it still took a few seasons before really diving into what made each character tic and often at the expense of other characters.
SNW works on the characters and their development right out of the gate and it all *works*. We get to see Pike and his style of leadership and his fears about what the future holds for him (made literal in his vision of his inevitable fate). We get to see Spock and his divided loyalties between his Vulcan and Starfleet (made more apparent here than it ever was in TOS). We get to see Number One and La'an Noonien Singh and Nurse Chapel and Doctor M'Benga and Ortega and Uhura and *we get to know all of them well*. (Well, okay, Ortega still hasn't had an episode dedicated to her, but we know it's coming.)
This kind of writing means that character comes first, plot second. So I don't really mind the thin plots — ooh, look, the Gorn, oooh, look, some, uh, electrical ghosts? — because it's not really about the Problem of the Week, it's about how the characters *solve* the Problem of the Week and how they deal with their own issues during it. It's also about showing us a future that isn't perfect, but is still one we can strive towards. Big Joel commented that Star Trek was about "radical hope" and that, I think, is what SNW represents: it's eschewing the long form Discovery-like plots (even if I like Discovery, it does get a bit tedious after a while) in order to focus more on what made Star Trek so great: the characters and how they interact, how they evolve, how they fit in this future. And unlike in the past shows, SNW can make these character arcs as long as they want and not have a budget of two tin cans and also give us great moments of empathy and hilarity and action and horror and hope.
A+, 10 out of 10, two thumbs up.
Series Discovery wearing the skin of TOS.
I was 'optimistically skeptical' when I first heard about this series. I genuinely hoped it would be good, but didn't have many expectations considering the writers.
Seeing the episodes, I realized that this is just Discovery with a new coat of paint. It has the same problems of the Burnham saga, but attenuated by the lack of a central figure like her. The dialogues are marred by whedon-esque quips, with unlikeable characters talking in smug, condescending tones with each other, completely lacking any sort of professionalism or sense, they keep calling themselves geniuses, patting their own backs, whining and screaming and snarking. Everything is full of lens-flare with hypertechnological glowing panels and spinning, so much spinning, every character has a dramatic background that they need to spill as soon as possible and keep hammering again and again 'My parents were killed by the goooorn!'. At the same time, it says it wants to be TOS, but tries every single corner to one-up it, with technical innovations that wouldn't be seen TNG and beyond showing up without care of how it could be worked or influence the plot.
Speaking of plot, the biggest fault, in my opinion, is the fact that the 'problem of the week' only serves as a vehicle for personal drama. Mind you, I have no illusions, Trek always had drama in it, but most of the time said dramas served as the vehicle to the debate and the problems, such as Worf receiving a barrel to the face leading to talks about Medical Ethic and Euthanasia, or Kirk's hesitance about firing against an enemy ship being a discussion of ethics in war and killing another sentient being. Here, the Kurtzman method of 'drama writing the plot' is still in full impulse, just not focused on a single character, and a future-reading computer only serves to make Uhura feel good about being in starfleet, or a Gorn attack and a gritty combat in a nebula only serves to make a security officer ok with loss. The writers not only show that they don't know about Star Trek, they disregard basic science altogether, 'Linguistics is like Engineering'? an organism that doesn't have antibodies and just heats up anytime it has an infection? Windmill generators in a world with safe fusion energy? People inventing warp-engines because they saw a phenomena in space? A cursory research on google would be enough to stop those ideas on their tracks, yet these things ended being filmed and shown.
And the more you look at each episode with a critical eye, worse it gets, since they seek to one-up the trek of old that they don't think of consequences. Beam up cream directly onto someone's eye? Why not just hack the computers? Keep a child in transport buffer pattern? Why not just keep her in stasis? Especially since she'd be dead after the ship lost power in the very next episode, and any engineer worth their salt would know what's going on. Because it NEEDS to be overblown and dramatic, rehashing plots from previous series, not offering anything new. Or else it wouldn't be Kurtzman.
So, if you enjoy it, go on enjoying it. If you're curious and hesitant, yes, this is still Kurtzman, avoid it. If you want good Trek, Orville is around the corner.
Series The first Nu-Trek series I'm actually EAGER to watch
I'll start with the fact that I was never that much of a fan of TNG and TOS. I don't hate them by any stretch, but I'm a Niner through and through: I think it has a more consistently high level of writing quality and finds its feet much faster, and it does a better job fleshing out the peoples of its corner of the universe than other series. Some people deride it for being bleak and depressing, and it can be at times, but as The Sisko Who Is of Bajor put it, "It's easy to be a saint in paradise."
The CBS revival series have been mixed to negative experiences for me. I found season 1 of DSC infuriating (see here), and Picard S1 fell flat for a lot of the same reasons: mainly in that they tried to allegorize current events without actually understanding them. For example, Mar-a-lardo wasn't some foreign invader, he was a result of this country's own un-addressed internal problems. If you want to write an allegory to far-right movements properly, you need to use groups like Terra Prime, not the Klingons and Romulans. (Hilariously, they even had their own versions—the "logic extremists" and whatever that secessionist movement mentioned in Picard was—but barely dignified them with more than an aside glance.)
But one definite bright spot was Anson Mount's performance as Christopher Pike in DSC S2. Like a lot of other Trekkies, I wanted more of that, and I got it with Strange New Worlds. He's a perfect example of non-toxic masculinity: honorable, brave, idealistic, but also sensible and intelligent. Like Kirk in the good parts and late-TNG Picard, he's a man of integrity who embodies the ideals of the Federation without coming off as naive in any way, solving problems through cleverness and diplomacy rather than technobabble or violence.
And it doesn't stop there. One of DS9's best points was that it didn't allow any one character to hog the spotlight: it gave pretty equal amounts of time to show the lives of all the dozen-strong ensemble, who are diverse in their viewpoints and lived experiences, not just their mere demographics. SNW hits this spot where the severely limited POV of DSC really didn't. Like Doctor M'Benga: committed to his medical practice, but not so much that he can't enjoy a quiet round of fly-fishing. We're getting a solid coming-of-age story from Celia Rose Gooding's version of Nyota Uhura, and a lot of great character moments from La'an Singh and Una Chin-Riley.
And they're all smiling. I think I can count the times the cast of DSC and PIC looked like they were actually enjoying themselves on one hand with fingers left over.
I'm feeling genuinely happy watching this series in a way I haven't been happy watching Star Trek in a very long time.