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In what has become the penultimate season of “Strange New World,” the series suffers from the bulk of the episodes featuring some kind of gimmick that isn’t necessarily bad, but it makes the entire season seem a bit frivolous.
Unlike previous season, there isn’t any particular narrative running throughout the season. Even the character arcs are limited. Add to this all the episodes that are some kind of gimmick, and it makes it all feel kind of disjointed. On their own, most of the gimmick episodes aren’t bad, even if most of them lean too much towards comedy, but there are really only three episodes that feel like “typical” Star Trek, so it seems like every week something wacky is going on. Unsurprisingly, the three “normal” episodes are the best. The others are hit or miss, but even the sillier episodes are worth a laugh or two. But the notorious puppet episode was a complete waste of time. It’s clear a lot of time and effort was put into making it, but it was an ill-conceived idea that been done better on other shows. And the ending was a slap in the face.
One of the series’ strengths has been its focus on the characters. And even though a little too much attention has been spent on their love lives, it helped ground the show somewhat. This season, it feels like only La”An has a consistent arc running throughout the season. Outside of that, there’s not a lot going on and even if there is something, they only scratch the surface on it. (In fact, apparently multiple episodes had their releases switched around and it really didn’t make a big difference.)
The show looks fantastic, While CG is obviously used for the most part, the ships and all the space phenomena look really cool. There are some really nice callbacks to previous Trek shows this season, but there’s also some more major disregard to established Trek canon.
Overall, with the majority of episodes featuring some kind of gimmick and a surprising lack of character arcs, season 4 of “Strange New Worlds” becomes an inconsistent string of episodes attempting to recreate something that’s been done before without really improving it.
** out of *****