Strange New Worlds: Strong New Series

 “The Universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression by any group anywhere can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedoms except the freedom to act irresponsibly.”

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) launched this week. Its creators (Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet) have made no secret of their goal with this new Star Trek series: to return to the optimism, and the episodic format, of The Original Series (TOS).

SNW follows the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the USS Enterprise (NCC 1701) in the decade prior to Kirk's adventures chronicled in TOS. The new series jumps off from the end of Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery but has its base in TOS (Pike and his crew starred in "The Cage", the first TOS pilot, and appeared again in the TOS two-parter, "The Menagerie").

To say that I have been excited about this new series is something of an understatement. I have  been open about my disdain for Star Trek: Picard and, though I think it has developed into a much stronger series, my uneven relationship with Discovery.

One of the strengths I found in seasons 3 and 4 of Discovery was its return to the Federation-building project that so marked TOS, its return to optimism and its belief in what Pike refers to in SNW Episode 1 as "the power of possibility".

Beginning in the later seasons of The Next Generation and carried through subsequent editions of Star Trek that were helmed by the lamentable duo of Berman and Braga (Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise), Star Trek has, in my opinion, run off the rails, abandoned the very values that made TOS special and spectacularly successful.

The last two seasons of Discovery tried, with significant success, to bring those values back into Star Trek: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, the power of unity, the responsibility of individuals and individual societies to the whole, the responsibility that comes with power, the idea that the human race will not survive its current challenges if it does not come together.

With SNW, the creative team promised a series that committed itself completely to those ideals.

They also promised to return to an episodic structure and to a series that exercised fully the power of science fiction to lay the human condition bare by transposing it onto non-human species on other worlds.

Episode 1 of SNW delivers. Cleverly written, well acted and beautifully presented, "Strange New Worlds" puts Pike and his crew in the challenging position of having to extricate Number One and two of her crew from a prison on a pre-warp planet (Kiley 279) while undoing the damage done by two separate but equally disastrous first contact incidents.

SNW is packed with references, both subtle and direct, to Star Trek lore: from familiar characters (Spock, Uhura, M'Benga, Chapel, Kyle); to ships bearing familiar Trek names (the Yeltsin is mentioned early in background radio chatter, the shuttle that brings Pike to Enterprise is called the Stametz, and the ship that needs rescuing is the Archer); to a musical theme and numerous music cues that bring back the original TOS theme.

T'Pring wears a ring similar to the one she wore in the TOS episode, "Amok Time", in which she was introduced; Pike's cabin is wonderfully reminiscent of Kirk's retirement place in the the Nexis in the film Star Trek: Generations; and the updated/original Enterprise is both renewed and familiar in this new series.

SNW even begins (and ends) with that famous voice-over: Space, the final frontier... To quote Uhura, so beautifully performed by Celia Rose Gooding, "Cool".

There are concerns/questions in relation to this first episode:

• Although I love the return to optimism, Episode 1 does get a bit preachy sometimes;
• Why mess with that most beloved and mysterious of Vulcan lore, the Ponn Farr, right off the bat?
• Why introduce transporter tech to this Enterprise that did not exist in Kirk's Enterprise 10 years later -- the ability to change crew members' clothing as they are beaming down?
• How is it possible that Spock can work with a new Security Officer named La’an Noonien-Singh (brought vividly to life by Christina Chong) under Pike but not make the connection between this crew mate and one of the greatest Star Trek villains of all time, Khan Noonien-Singh, when Spock encounters him a decade later in TOS?
• Unless I missed it (and it is entirely possible that I did), there was no clear nod to the TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon", in which Kirk and his crew dealt with almost exactly the same situation and used almost exactly the same approach to address it: Kirk's quotes from the TOS episode would fit equally well in SNW: "Death, destruction, disease, horror. That's what war is all about... That's what makes it a thing to be avoided". And later, “We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it! We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes… knowing that we're not going to kill today."

But those are fairly minor compared to the many strengths of "Strange New Worlds". Taking a lesson from TOS, SNW establishes almost immediately the Pike/Spock/Singh triangle and the tangible tension between Spock and Singh. Spock focuses on rules and safe, conservative approaches while Singh relies on instinct, on creativity, on immediate action. Pike learns very quickly to value both approaches.

Even though Singh is new, Pike trusts her instincts early and late in the episode and it pays off.  Singh suggests raising shields and Pike does so over Spock's objections -- just in time to ward off an attack from the planet. In a later scene, Singh asks, "Permission to act fast" and Pike grants it, leading to a quick, efficient resolution to a problem. Even later still, Singh simply anticipates the permission will be granted and resolves another problem almost before it develops.

In our household, Picard's series was called Star Chat: The Next Conversation because JL and his crew always had to talk things through before taking any action. Discovery also tended toward this suspense-killing approach. Pike is more Kirk than Picard: he thinks fast and acts faster, trusting his instincts and those of his crew. It's refreshing, to be honest.

And Singh seems to embody this approach. It will, no doubt, get them into trouble from time to time but, more often, it will keep the plots moving.

Perhaps best of all, SNW is fun. Its characters are fun and are having fun. Spock complains that he has lost his pants in transporting down. M'Benga and Chapel take great joy in chasing down an escaped Kilean scientists who escapes the Enterprise's sick bay and bridge officer Erica Ortegas (played  with sardonic humour by Melissa Navia) complains that problems occur "always when I'm in the captain's chair".

Not surprisingly, some of the best lines go to the Captain: he makes a joke in his ship-wide broadcast to start the adventure; upon transporting down, he asks with dismay, "Why is it always an alley?"; he gets to present himself to an alien race and say those immortal words, "Take me to your leader"; he picks up the Kilean leader's "big stick" metaphor and, with the Enterprise now floating menacingly above the Kilean capital city, agrees that the only thing that matters is who is carrying the biggest stick, finishing with, "In this case, that is me".

Early in SNW episode 1, Pike watches that seminal scene from The Day The Earth Stood Still and hears the statement quoted at the outset of this blog post. The quotation is perfect in capturing the role of the Federation. But the inclusion of a scene from this classic science fiction film also holds a certain promise to the viewers who have waited with such excitement for this new series: the promise that SNW will be good science fiction, that it will take advantage of the possibilities science fiction presents to address the issues with which our world currently grapples, openly and honestly.

And I think that's worth celebrating.