‘Strange New Worlds’ Apparently Focusing on the Wrong Story to Tell
The arc of the series always should have been the bond between Pike and Spock
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 3 is just starting to fly into warp, and already its showrunners are talking about how they plan to end the series with a truncated fifth season.
Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman spilled some beans in an interview with TrekMovie published this week, in which Strange New Worlds debuts its third season on Paramount Plus.
Goldsman reveals that the series will end with Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) taking over the captain’s chair of the USS Enterprise.
That, by itself, isn’t a bad place to bring the series to a close.
And, of course, the devil’s in the details — and the storytelling — between now and then, but reading Goldsman’s comments it seems like he and the rest of the Strange New Worlds creative team is missing the real story that the series should be telling.
“We will take the show to Kirk’s first day of command, which is by the way, not actually the original series. The original series starts a bit into Kirk’s command,” Goldsman said.
But Strange New Worlds was not supposed to be about Kirk and his adventures.
It’s always supposed to have been about Kirk’s predecessor in the center seat, Chris Pike (Anson Mount), his first officer (Rebecca Romijin), and the rest of his crew.
When the characters were reintroduced in Star Trek: Discovery and again in the first season of Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike’s ultimate sacrifice and tragic fate was supposed to be a key theme.
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It’s that fate — and how Spock (Leonard Nimoy) lays his life on the line to save his former captain (Sean Kenney) in “The Menagerie” — that’s the real dramatic tissue that connects Strange New Worlds with the original series.
Spock’s ultimate friendship with Kirk (William Shatner) obviously is well-explored in canon.
What I always found missing — and compellingly so every time I would watch “The Menagerie” in reruns as a child — was the strong bond that would compel Spock to hijack the Enterprise and risk the last death penalty violation on the books to return Pike to Talos IV.
That bond must have so strong as to almost be beyond friendship itself.
If the triumvirate of the original series was Kirk, Spock and Dr McCoy (DeForest Kelley), then the triumvirate of Strange New Worlds should have been Pike, Number One and Spock (Ethan Peck).
Number One and Spock are the two friends who Pike confided in with his vision of his gruesome future.
And with Spock ultimately the one who saves Pike, the dramatic potential here would be to have been endless.
Instead, the showrunners seem to have sidelined all of that in order to once again focus on Kirk and more of his origin story.
If that’s how the next 2 1/2 seasons go, they will have squandered one of the greatest untold stories ever in Star Trek canon.
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