Strange New Worlds has been met with near-universal acclaim from critics, earning a close-to-perfect 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes. But despite all that praise, and despite that impressive number, the show still deserves more.
Strange New Worlds Deserves To Be The Highest-Rated Star Trek Show
When Paramount hired Alex Kurtzman to be the Kevin Feige-like architect of the Star Trek franchise, and turned Star Trek into “The Star Trek Universe,” he took a lot of chances on a lot of different shows, and the results were very mixed. But, as he was throwing scripts and castings and spinoff ideas at the wall, he stumbled into the perfect Christopher Pike spinoff.
Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn were cast as Pike, Spock, and Number One, respectively, in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. But they proved to be so popular among fans that these new incarnations of the iconic Original Series characters were given their own spinoff. Set a decade before Kirk’s adventures in TOS, Strange New Worlds marked a welcome return to the Star Trek we recognize: following the crew of the starship Enterprise as they boldly go where no one has gone before.
Strange New Worlds is the best show to come out of Star Trek’s modern era. Unlike The Original Series, it didn’t peter out in its later seasons, and unlike The Next Generation, it hit the ground running in season 1; it didn’t need any time to find its feet. Strange New Worlds deserves to be the highest-rated Star Trek show on Rotten Tomatoes, but it’s not; right now, Prodigy takes the top spot with a slightly higher 97% score.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Could've Lasted Beyond Season 5
So far, Strange New Worlds has aired three seasons, which you can stream on Paramount+, and there are another two on the way to complete the series. The fourth season is expected to air from July to September later this year, and a fifth and final season is already in production with a shorter six-episode order. I’m sure the showrunners have a satisfying ending in mind for the series finale, but it feels like it’s still too soon for this show to call it a day.
What sets Strange New Worlds apart from other Star Trek shows is its classic episodic structure. Whereas its predecessor, Discovery, has a serialized narrative unfolding across multiple episodes, Strange New Worlds goes back to the old-school adventure-of-the-week structure of The Original Series, where each episode tells its own self-contained story. Since it’s not building towards an endgame, that kind of format can go on indefinitely. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds shouldn’t have to end after five seasons; that episodic structure would’ve allowed it to continue for years and years.
Release Date
May 5, 2022
Network
Paramount+
Showrunner
Henry Alonso Myers, Akiva Goldsman
Directors
Dan Liu, Amanda Row, Maja Vrvilo, Akiva Goldsman, Dermott Downs, Eduardo Sánchez, Jeffrey W. Byrd, Jonathan Frakes, Jordan Canning, Leslie Hope, Valerie Weiss, Sydney Freeland, Christopher J. Byrne, Rachel Leiterman
Writers
Onitra Johnson
English (US) ·