The eleventh series in the Star Trek saga premiered over Paramount Plus a few weeks ago, a streaming service providing CBS television programs and Paramount motion pictures. While technically a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery, this new series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, is technically a prequel to the original 1960s Star Trek series. Captain Pike of the Enterprise, along with a cadet (not lieutenant) named Nyota Uhura, Nurse Christine Chapel and Science Officer Spock, will badly go where no man has gone before... prior to Captain Kirk.
To be fair, the closest any of these sequel (and prequel) series came to the original series was Star Trek: The Next Generation, which launched additional spin-offs and sequels such as Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, but the producers wanted to take us back to the type of stories the original series did in the 1960s. Every episode is a self-contained adventure (unlike the prior Discovery which provides us with one long continuous story arc that each episode picks up where the last ended) and with the same style uniforms, dialogue and plots. Never was the latter more evident than the third episode of this series, "Ghosts of Illyria," which gave us another magnetic storm and a medical outbreak from an alien planet as the third and fourth episode of the original series did, but with a variation-on-a-theme and a social issue we can all be reminded of. Some might complain that Strange New Worlds is basically borrowing ideas from the original series, but is that really a bad thing?
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds follows Captain Christopher Pike (played perfectly by Anson Mount) and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) in the 23rd century as they explore new worlds throughout the galaxy, in the decade prior to the original television series. This rendition has a contemporary take on that series' episodic storytelling and while the computers look more realistic than the 1960s counterpart, they still maintain the same art deco and designs.
Fans of the original series will not only rejoice in how well this rendition plays out -- the first to truly capture the feel and formula of the original series -- but also the fact that Easter Eggs can be found for the die-hards who realize planets are named after actors who played guest starring roles on the original series, and names of species Captain Kirk would ultimately face off against such as the "Gorn." In one episode, a direct reference to "Space Seed" and Khan was obvious, as was Spock's carotid artery joke also from that same episode
The final episode of the season concluded on a high note and all ten are available for streaming on Paramount Plus. If you love the original 1960s Star Trek, then this is definitely the series for you.
The producers might be saying "We're doing this for the fans" but they are clearly working from an old recipe. Which reminds me of the old fable of great grandma's cookie recipe. With each generation, whether it be due to technical advancements or the supply chain of ingredients, the recipe was tweaked -- and then tweaked again. Generations later, someone found the original recipe and tried it out and asked why was the recipe even tampered with in the first place. Well, it seems the same can be applied here as well. The Star Trek premise was tweaked and revised with each new series until (apparently) someone at Paramount stopped and asked why they were not going back to the series' roots. After all, that old recipe still tastes good. I, for one, am looking forward to future episodes this summer and hoping the producers maintain the plotted course for a five year mission...
