The new Star Trek shows have been a bit more pessimistic than the ones fans remember. But a new spinoff is returning to the source.
Everything is coming up Star Trek over on CBS All Access, which has three (!) series already on the air — Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Lower Decks — and another two on the way: a show about the intelligence agency Section 31 and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
The latter will follow the original crew of the USS Enterprise before Captain Kirk took over: Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Spock (Ethan Peck), who’s always there, apparently. These three were introduced way back in the original pilot for Star Trek: The Original Series, and were reintroduced in the second season of Discovery. But for their own show, Star Trek boss Alex Kurtzman is taking a bit of a different approach.
“I think Strange New Worlds, under the guidance of Henry Myers and Akiva Goldsman, it’s going to be a return in a way to TOS [Star Trek: The Original Series],” Kurtzman told Deadline. “We are going to do stand-alone episodes. There will be emotional serialization. There will be two-parters. There will be larger plot arcs. But it really is back to the model of alien-of-the-week, planet-of-the-week, challenge-on-the-ship-of-the-week. With these characters pre-Kirk’s Enterprise. I think what people responded so much to in all three characters is this kind of relentless optimism that they have. And that they are at the young phase of their careers.”
Discovery and Picard are both heavily serialized shows, with seasonal arcs and little room for episodes that stand completely on their own. It shares that with most prestige shows today; story-of-the-week shows have fallen out of favor.
But I’m happy if someone is looking to bring them back, and a Star Trek show is perfect place to try it, since the series has such a long history of that kind of thing.
Strange New Worlds will also harken back to Star Trek shows of old by keeping the tone optimistic. Both Discovery and Picard play like Star Trek for a modern age, with a bleaker outlook on things than Gene Roddenberry probably envisioned when putting together the original show. But hey, you try living through the last 50 years of human history and not getting a little discouraged.
And Captain Pike will maintain that outlook even though he saw a brutal vision of his future on Star Trek: Discovery. Without spoiling things too much, there’s dark times ahead for him.
"That Pike, who has experienced this extraordinary trauma, which he is famous for. It is how he knows how he is going to die. The idea is, how does a character who knows how he is going to die live optimistically from that point on and lead a ship? It’s a great question. I have never seen a show where a character knew that already. You have to have an inherent optimism in your world view in order to say, “I am going to get up every morning knowing how it is going to end for me.” And still lead everybody to be the best versions of themselves."
With so many Trek shows either on the way or already here, there’s certainly enough space for some different tones. Bring on the optimism, says I.
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h/t StarTrek.com