**This review may contain minor SPOILERS**
Watch the SPOILER review on YouTube
In its second season, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” continues to excel with the best of classic Trek storytelling and gives us serialized stories coupled with strong, season-long character arcs.
Like the original “Star Trek” and “The Next Generation”, “Strange New Worlds” features serialized storytelling. This allows for a wide variety of stories from episode to episode. The show can go from courtroom drama to comedy, to stories out of a sitcom to a horror movie. Most of these work well, some better than others. (However, a few feel too much like scripts that could be interchangeable with almost any previous Trek series.) The downside of all of this is that there’s even less over an overarching story arc than last season, which was already pretty light in that department. Also, the way the episodes are structured it feels like we lose that sense of space exploration as it feels more like the crew just reacting to stuff that’s just kind of happening to them. Fortunately, the show does play to its greatest strength: Compelling character arcs that keep the audience invested in the crew of the Enterprise.
While almost every character gets a moment to shine this season, some really get some meatier storylines than others. (And everyone gets more to do than Ortegas, who once again gets no real storyline of her own.) While his story was probably the biggest thread throughout season one, Pike’s arc is much more subdued this time. Una gets some big moments early before dropping back into the crowd, while Uhura gets a couple episodes to take the lead. Dr. M’Benga is given some strong new material, but most of this seems to have just come out of nowhere considering none of it was even teased last season. La’an has a significant solo episode early, and that throughline continues for her the rest of the season. The biggest character stuff is given to Spock and Nurse Chapel. While it had some strong moments that built off of last season’s developments, it was a tad inconsistent and will take a lot of work to make it match up with their relationship on the original “Star Trek.”
Overall, the show still looks great, but sometimes the visual effects look a little bit like (great) video game graphics and the Stagecraft wall often fells flat like greenscreen effects. There’s some fun new and returning guest characters, including the debut of Chief Engineer Pelia and characters from the animated “Lower Decks” crossing over into live action.
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” once again captures the classic, serialized storytelling of the earliest Trek series, while putting in much more complex character arcs then those shows. The lack of a season-long narrative does hurt the show a bit, especially with the wild variety of stories from week to week.
**** out of *****