The Curious Fatalism of Strange New Worlds
The return to "classic Trek" is a bit more subversive than we've been giving it credit for.
Captain Christopher Pike has a lot to deal with. In seven years, he’s going to end up horribly mutilated and confined to a life supporting wheelchair for the remainder of his natural life. His first officer lied about her heritage to get into Starfleet, and if anyone finds out she’ll be spending the rest of her life in a penal colony for it. He has one science officer is engaged to a woman who will ultimately try to manipulate him into killing his best friend so she doesn’t have to deal with the stigma of breaking off an engagement, and another who’s going to end up dead in eight years leaving behind an orphaned son. His medical officer has illegally stored his dying daughter in the Enterprise’s transporter buffer so he can search for a cure, putting the ship and crew at risk. His tactical officer is both a direct descendant of Khan Noonien-Singh and dealing with severe PTSD from a Gorn encounter. And his snarky helmswoman, who at first glance appears wonderfully free of psychological baggage, apparently really hates Romulans for… reasons.
Welcome to Strange New Worlds, what people are calling the most upbeat and optimistic show in the current era of Star Trek. Everyone is doomed, the Enterprise has become a ship of the damned, and the fans are eating it up. From the very first episode, Strange New Worlds makes it clear that it is preoccupied with death and inevitability. Spock tells Captain Pike that “knowledge of death is essential for effective leadership,” a lesson the latter takes to heart when he confronts an entire world with visions of an all-too-likely apocalypse. Now that I’ve seen the entirety of season one, I can’t help but view that exchange as a microcosm of the show so far. And I’m left wondering how and if they’ll be able to continue the metaphor going in to season two.
One thing that season one has definitely succeeded at so far is to drive home the downsides of too much knowledge. Every episode either touches on the idea of the inevitability of death or explores actions and characters long time watchers know to be doomed. I’ll admit to being somewhat mixed on the first approach, but the latter has proven particularly impactful so far. In any other context, seeing Spock and T’Pring try to navigate the early days of their engagement like a couple of kids fresh out of college would be almost painfully cute. But having seen “Amok Time” it is almost impossible to become fully immersed in the simple joy of Vulcan hijinks on display. We in the audience are forced into adopting Captain Pike’s perspective as the one burdened by knowledge of future tragedy.
Where I feel the show has had less success so far is in its attempts to create new tragedies to carry on the theme, which are essential if it’s going to follow up on the call to action Spock delivers to Captain Pike during their talk: to draw insight from suffering, and find the good in the clarity knowledge of death can bring. The series gives us three main threads to focus on in this regard: Dr. M’Benga’s quest to find a cure for his daughter Rukiya, Cmdr. Chin-Riley hiding her Illyrian heritage to illegally join Starfleet, and Hemmer’s tragic relationship with Cadet Uhura. The first seems to have been set up to form a much larger arc involving both the good doctor and the first officer involving the secret of Rukiya getting out or the cure requiring them to violate even more laws than they already have, however despite a few teases of medical malpractice it ends up being all-too-cleanly resolved within the space of a single episode that sees Rukiya turned into a quasi-immortal energy being and the entire crew’s memory wiped so that Joseph never gets publicly called to account for his abuse of his position as Enterprise’s CMO. Likewise Una’s heritage is mentioned once and then ignored by the show until it’s needed to set up a cliffhanger leading into the next season - one that it must be pointed out was wholly disconnected from the narrative arc of the episode where it occurred. Hemmer’s sacrifice is arguably the most successful in demonstrating the idea that one can draw insight from suffering, as it is the catalyst for Uhura to fully commit to a life in Starfleet, but the foreshadowing for the act is so subtle that I imagine most missed it entirely. If Spock’s lecture is to be the thesis of the series, then these examples offer only weak support because we simply aren’t given enough time to live with the knowledge of their demise.
If it is the intent to continue this focus on a set of tragic heroes going into season two, I suspect the writers are going to find it much harder to find the proper balance between the adventurous optimism that viewers love and the fatalism at the core of its story. Because I suspect that the current approach, where they ignore brewing conflicts in episodes that don’t explicitly focus on them, can only work for so long before modern viewers begin to lose patience with it. And I do hope they choose to continue with it. The idea that one can remain hopeful even in the face of certain doom is challenging and difficult to execute, but I feel also a message that many of us desperately need to hear. If the writers of Strange New Worlds can only find a way to more clearly articulate it and make us genuinely believe it, the series may end up being remembered as one of the all time greats.
Joseph Reinemann is a science fiction writer and engineer based in Madison, Wis. He has studied a variety of topics, receiving degrees in English Literature and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin. He also has a variety of hobbies ranging from boat building to robotics, all of which he eventually hopes to write about.
I think you've ignored Pike's personal journey through this first season, he's essentially gone through the stages of grief and arrived at acceptance, even if it took meeting himself to complete the arc. He's been shown what happens if he does try to avoid his fate and knows that it's best for things to unfold as it should, so he seems to have accepted that, though the bit with Number One at the end sets the stage for a new "quest".