11.1.1 Everything New Is Old Again

Strange New Worlds

Strange New Worlds is almost certainly unique in the history of television. This is probably already true under the assumption that it counts as a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off (you could argue Discovery span off directly from TOS, but I don't think you could do it persuasively). But it goes further than that. This is the fifth show of Trek's third era. As a result, it's in perfect position to respond to the response to the responses.

Same Shit, Different Stardate

We've outlined already the ways in which the previous two live-action shows either missed the mark, or actively pissed on it. Clearly something needed trying. The early scans on this one weren't particularly positive. I mean, it looks and sounds gorgeous, clearly, but under the pretty colours lies one more attempt to turn back time. I repeatedly took both Voyager and (especially) Enterprise to task for their various bids at the Star Trek auction house. Picard is going to receive some very similar scorn for some very similar reasons. And yet none of them went so far in trying to replicate what came before as Strange New Worlds. The original model Enterprise, crew modelling the original uniform colours, and the original structural model of episodic story telling.

And it doesn't end there. Strange New Worlds is determined to invoke as much of the franchise's history as it can, whether that makes sense or not. Was there anyone desperate for the Gorn to return as recurring enemies? Or who'd been clamouring to learn what Nurse Chapel was up to in her early years?[1]

One could think of this of one more example of Trek learning all the wrong lessons. This new iteration of Pike and Spock had proved popular enough on Discovery to make it worthwhile using them to anchor a new show. Why not follow that vector at warp speed? Per aspera ad astra ad nauseum.

That's not quite what's going on here, though. Voyager and Enterprise were both reactions to the fact the franchise's imperial phase had come to an end, and no-one knew what to do about it. Both of them were attempts to recapture the bottled lightning of TNG, yes, but that was just a tactic as part of the real goal of recapturing the TNG audience. "Don't go! We can change/change back! We promise!".

SNW had a very different set of priorities. Not to reclaim what had been lost (though I'm sure tempting back old-school Trek fans who'd passed on every previous Kurtzman property was on the list of objectives), but to build something new. This is the first live-action Trek show after TNG to not be in direct dialogue with TNG. Instead, its sights are squarely on where Disovery and Picard might have gone wrong, in the hope of scooping up the prize for definitive 21st century Trek show, something that was still very much up for grabs.

Put another way, trying to redo the recent past simply wasn't an option for Strange New Worlds, in the way it had been for, say, Voyager. Discovery and Picard had both failed to be the future, and therefore had to be considered the past. The only question was what was going to come next.

Future Imperfects

The question, then, becomes how to update the franchise for the next generation of viewers, in a way that worked as well as the first update. To put it in the obvious terms - how could the next Next Generation do as well as the last Next Generation?

There are as many theories on this as there are Trek fans, I'm sure. Personally, I'm not even sure the goal is possible - it may well be that the contemporary, streaming-service-siloed TV landscape just isn't a place TNG-level smashes occur with any frequency any more. I can't remember any show dominating the cultural zeitgeist since, ooh, let's say Game Of Thrones in the early-to-mid naughties, though the risk of such declarations are always that they simply reveal my age and irrelevance more than they do any deep truths about the nature of television.

Either way, though, it was surely still worth critiquing the approach of previous Kurtzman Trek, to see if fixing the leaks would make a new ship more ship-shape. Again, speaking for myself (he says, like the rest of this blog is dispassionate analysis), the problem with both much of Discovery and literally all of Picard was the idea every season should be a single story, with everyone featured spending the whole time miserable and stressed. Every decision had to have the fate of the galaxy riding on it. Every day had to threaten to be everyone's last. Everybody just kept yelling at each other, and then something exploded. To quote the big man himself: it was fucking gruelling.

All of which was a complete failure to recognise what actually made TNG work. You need the quiet moments to make the loudness resonate. Endless explosions don't ramp up drama, they just give you tinnitus to the point nothing registers anymore. Worse, it drained the franchise of both hope and heart. Gone too was the spirit of cooperation, as demonstrated not just by the casual xenophobia the humans of each show deploy (explained by a horrifyingly violent war in Discovery, and by just not being Picard in Picard), but by how a single character operates as the show's lodestone, enjoying the narrative's moral compass pointing toward them no matter where they're standing. This was at least cathartic when it was an American black woman who almost always won out while refusing to listen to anyone's conscience but her own. Once Picard recycled the trick with an old white dude, though, it was clear something was going wrong.

The best way to view Strange New Worlds, then, is as a conscious choice to return to episodic storytelling in, which a bunch of very different people mostly get along, and generally look like they're actually happy to be where they are. Aside from Doctor M'Benga, there's literally nothing riding on anybody's decision to keep boldly going - this is simply the career they've decided they want. Sure, it's not unreasonable to ask why this couldn't be done with a completely new cast of characters, in a completely unexplored section of the franchise's timeline. But it's worth noting that SNW has found a way to make turning the clock back work in a way neither Enterprise nor Discovery were able to.

And speaking of clocks...

The Counter-Cracker Incident

Let's talk characters, shall we? After all, however convincingly I've argued that a return to (roughly) Kirk-era Trek is defensible, the decision to pepper the show with previous Kirk-era characters is something rather different.

And this is clearly something Strange New Worlds wants to lean into. This episode features precisely two main characters here who aren't recast 60s throwbacks, one of whom conspicuously shares two-thirds of her name with the Original Series' most infamous antagonist.

The choices being made here matter, though. With one exception (Sam Kirk, who's barely in this at all anyway), the two white dudes used to sell this new show are as far as we wade into that particular pool. There's no attempt to recast Scotty, or Leslie, both of whom enjoyed more appearances on TOS than did Dr M'Benga. Instead, we get four women (only two of them white) and a black African character (we should note also that the two new characters are both also women, one Latina, one biracial). The tales the show wants to retell aren't always going to be the ones most in need of attention, but they're about as expansive and inclusive as we could have possibly been expected, considering the show was commissioned off the back of Mount and Peck proving popular.

The most interesting choice of all, though, at least for this pilot episode, is the inclusion of Robert April. Aside from an on-screen graphic in Discovery, April has absolutely zero footprint in the franchise, outside of the final episode of The Animated Series. As we've covered, that's a show which is generally dismissed as being "non-canon". IDFC has made its position on that term clear, of course, but it's worth noting that "The Counter-Clock" incident is directly and repeatedly contradicted by Enterprise (since the former suggests humanity acquired warp drive at least six decades after a Suliban force tracks Klaang to Broken Bow). April's only appearance in Trek continuity is one that would break continuity, as soon as we insist it's something breakable.

This character, then, features in precisely one episode. a twenty-minute story in a series commonly ignores, and which anyone invested in a single coherent Trek timeline is a actually required to discount. It would be effectively impossible to find a more obscure character to have return in the 2020s. And yet Strange New Worlds decides to bring him back, apparently purely so they can recast this guy:

with the bloke pictured up top.

This is, quite simply, glorious. As a trap for bigots, it's so obvious even Wile E Coyote would question its lack of subtlety. Racists aren't roadrunners, though; those lads couldn't wait to fling themselves onto the spikes. "It isn't about ethnicity, it's about CONSISTENCY!" each of them yelled, half a second before their mouths became too full of sharpened bamboo pole for them to make any sound but a muffled scream.

OKKK, Boomer. We'll let the ladder down when you've had time to think things through. Or to bleed out.

Hell Is Other Prequels

Inclusive casting choices don't automatically lead to entertaining shows, naturally. If they did, the Chibnall era of Doctor Who would have been a glorious success, rather than a squib so damp it was essentially gunpowder chowder. It doesn't even translate into something politically palatable, necessarily - see once again Chibnall's Who, a show which only showed any real energy when it was time to spin excuses for capitalism. Strange New World's approach also runs the risk of mistaking reference to canon for actual plot beats, like in Chibnall's - actually, you know what? let's just call the 13th Doctor era a failure mode SNW desperately needed to avoid, and move on.

Thematically, "Strange New Worlds" puts a lot of its eggs in one breeding sac - the disastrous fixed points ahead of Pike and Spock (and, for some reason, Sam Kirk). On paper, it's an interesting idea to pair the dramatic irony of T'Pring's eventual rejection of Spock, with Pike's full awareness of what awaits him in around a decade's time. In practice, the captain's struggle with knowing exactly as much as the audience does just highlights how the T'Pring/Spock storyline feels rather too familiar - the classical structural mistake prequels make of laying the foundations of the future, rather than the foundations of a story. There's a fun Mitchell & Transphobe sketch where they play screenwriters, talking about how writing historical fiction is easy because you can just keep including references to the characters' futures - "It lets you look really clever and witty, without actually having to do a joke" [2]. It's an easy route to take, in other words, but it's a risky one too. The more you rely on dramatic irony, the more you risk dramatic irony poisoning - stories that become indigestible because the chefs mistook the seasoning for the meal.

Pike's future is by far the more interesting proposition. By chaining him to the knowledge of his future, the risk of over-seasoning (though not over-egging) evaporates. Having your main character worried about how knowing how some things end up will lead to them screwing up the parts in-between is also just an unusual angle to take. We've had terminal diagnoses, of course, but a specific fixed point of known agonising horror? That's something else. And we needed something else. In a show so weighed down by the trappings of the past, there had to be an original take baked into the proceedings - it couldn't just be the strange worlds that were new.

The captain's crisis of confidence and chronology accordingly takes on a lot of weight here. We begin at rest. Pike is on extended leave while he processes, or rather fails to process, something he's not permitted to share. He's watching old movies about spreading a message of peace across the stars, because he sees no chance of being able to do so himself anymore. He takes his breakfast coffee with pancakes and denial. He spends his days haunted by reflections and chased by shadows (note how April's shuttlecraft is first introduced - a dark shape pursuing Pike across the white Montana snow).

At first, this seems an uninspired choice. Wouldn't it have been more interesting for Pike to lean into the fact that he's received a writ of invulnerability for the next decade? Why not take take this as permission from the gods to phaser every strutting badlad from here to Qo'noS. He's stumbled into a reverse Kobyashi Maru - every scrape he finds himself in just became a no-lose scenario, His date with destiny is going to suck, but at least he knows she can't stand him up.

As Pike explains to Spock, though, it's not quite that simple. He's a starship captain, and a captain has a crew. Pike's impenetrable causal carapace only covers his own body; if he gets too cocky, it's other people who'll pay the price. Spock's quite right that an awareness of one's mortality is crucial to successfully commanding a starship [3], but Pike has precisely the opposite problem - an awareness of immortality, for as long as he's commanding the Enterprise. He's become an inversion, both of what he once was, and what everyone else thinks he is. It's worth noting in passing here that the craft that takes Pike aboard ship is named after Stamets - a man everyone else thinks is dead but Pike knows lives on in the future. He's experiencing life inside out - a photo-negative hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting his distorted, haunted face.

There's only so long you can keep that up as a going concern, of course. Pike's fretting over his limited shelf life has a limited shelf life. Diminishing returns will kick in at some point.

That though - appropriately enough - is a Future Us problem. What's of more immediate relevance is the extent to which Pike's fixation dovetails with the tale of Kiley 279.

An Inconvenient Truth

It's easy enough to see what the big idea is here, mainly because the episode insists on all but telling us explicitly. This is a retelling of The Day The Earth Stood Still [3] with a Federation twist. Both tales involve a world's recent technological advancements in the field of indiscriminate slaughter leading to an interstellar visitor bringing a message of peace, that visitor then being detained and mistreated by the locals, before finally escaping and having their superiors deliver a much less friendly message about how continued internal belligerence will lead to colossal loss of life.

This being Trek, the big difference is that while Klaatu relays his robot overlord's message that they'll destroy Earth if we don't knock war on the head, Pike is warning of auto-apocalypse. His first effort goes nowhere; the most powerful politician on the planet is just too convinced murder is the only language the enemy understands (sound horribly, horribly familiar?). Pike's Plan B is to reveal both the Enterprise and footage of Earth's Third World War to the entire population.

This too is glorious. With the ruling class refusing to listen, Pike brings his message to the people. This is genuinely top tier Trek politics, and extremely encouraging to see in a pilot episode. While I (surely deservedly) give Trek crap whenever it allows the conservative tendencies of its 60s origins to rise back to the surface, the truth is that the liberalism it expresses on its better days is a problem all its own. There's no future in stories which pretend we can persuade or shame the powerful into doing anything other than what's best for them and their class. You can occasionally argue their interests currently align with those outside the class (what Derrick Bell called "interest-convergence"), but this is never more than a temporary alliance of convenience. Moreover, as the Kilean leader amply demonstrates, even so obvious an argument as "You will burn with everyone else" isn't necessarily going to generate the will to help oneself by helping others. Addressing the people directly - doing everything you can to take decisions out of the hands of the self-appointed decision-makers - is the only way to secure genuine change.

The pieces of this pretty picture don't quite fit together, though. Consider the scene immediately preceding the Enterprise descending into Kiley 279's atmosphere. Pike's plan is inspired by La'an Noonien-Singh recounting how she survived the Gorn killing every other person aboard the SS Puget Sound. It's a good moment, and it gives Christina Chong more time to prove how valuable she's going to be to the show going forward, The paralleling of Pike and Noonian-Singh at least partially works, in that it's clear the lieutenant's respect for her new captain grows upon learning he gets where she's coming from.

Beyond that, things get glitchy. The scene is structured as revelatory - the moment Pike realises how he can save the Kileans from themselves. What's needed, he decides, is to force them to face the reality of their own mortality, just as Noonien-Singh did when Newting her way through lizard territory. But La'an's point is that almost nobody ever believes they're going to die, even as its happening. The idea a slideshow from a guy who claims to have seen the future is going to make a difference to that is ridiculous. Perhaps forty-five years of living in England has made me hopelessly pessimistic, but I can't see how Pike can't see how it never matters how many people don't want a war. Nor is there necessarily any correlation at all between how much verifiable footage is publicly available of something happening, and the extent to which people will accept it as true.

It's not that Pike's wrong that the problem lies in a failure to truly understand the stakes here. It's the idea that pulling an Al Gore will do anything to fix that. The Kilean plot thread concludes with a montage showing us the people of the planet finding hope in the new reality Pike has ushered in, but it could just have easily shown us Kilean senators brandishing print-outs from their Twitter analogue "proving" that the footage of a ruined Earth was faked, and that Pike had been positive identified as a career leftist agitator, and anyway the real threat is people throwing coloured powder on public monuments etc. etc. etc.

The whole thing feels solipsistic, too, as though Pike's knowledge of his own catastrophic future means he'll be better at persuading others they risk similar calamity. Frankly, it's far too easy to read this as a white guy taking an idea from a biracial woman in his employ, twisting it to match his own situation and philosophy, and delivering a presentation on the resultant mess. "Now that I'm convinced, clearly everyone should be!". Finally, the modern messiah to save us! A spaceman's come travelling! Whitey's from the moon!

YOLO Kiley

All that said, though, it's not like I have a better plan for saving the Kileans while respecting their right to self-determination. And while it's messy, and incoherent, and scarcely problem-free, the end of "Strange New Worlds" at least gestures as to what the wants to do. For much of its runtime, one thing that niggled about the episode is how Pike's existential crisis over his inescapable agonising fate was making for an odd pairing with the return to basics episode-of-the-week boundless optimism format. I've praised both halves of the pairing already, but the combination is less chocolate and peanut butter than chocolate and smoked salmon.

One thing Pike's speech manages is to cube that particular sphere. He's focussing on how knowing the fixed endpoint of life as he knows it can't change the fact that he can do good now. What happens before the end fucking matters. We are not simply the fact of our own inevitable end. Until the very last moment, we're shaping the present, and the future. "Tiny changes to Earth", to quote one of my favourite bands, or "We fight them until we can't", to quote one of my favourite fictional characters. A looming deadline is a licence to live, and what we did has meaning even after we can't do it anymore.

As messily as it's delivered, it's certainly an ethos. "How can we value what we can't take with us?" might not be the most original concern, but it's light years ahead of the first years of Discovery and Picard, which asked respectively "Can a society really survive if it does zero war crimes?", and "What if rehiring Patrick Stewart is literally all you need to do to make a Trek show?". There are rough edges to work out here, and the possibility the whole project will collapse into nostalgia bait from a Mandela-effect universe remains live. A little more attention to landing-sticking, though, and an ongoing commitment to the philosophy that design and structural cues can be backwards facing [4], but the cultural and emotional beats can't, and Strange New Worlds might finally be the perfect mixture of past and future the franchise has been searching for since Deep Space Nine.

We'll check back on how that project is going in six months. Next up, though, we're going back to the beginning of the current era of Trek, to finish our look at what Bryan Fuller's Discovery might have been.

[1] In fact, we know the answer to this full well - engaged to her former teacher. Which is an awful plot beat, and one SNW was wise to avoid entirely. It does though add further weight to the question of why Chapel was deemed worth bringing back at all. If you have to jettison a character's entire past to make them work, why even try?

[2] This ignoble inclination is helpfully demonstrated in this very episode, with the "joke" about the futility of renaming General Order One "The Prime Directive".

[3] Fun fact: Day... was directed by Robert Wise, who also directed Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

[4] A tiny detail I adored here is the design of the USS Archer, which is based on design schematics from Franz Joseph's Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual, which was published all the way back in 1975.

Ordering:

1. Emissary 

2. Encounter At Farpoint 

3. Second Contact

4. The Vulcan Hello

5. Lost And Found

6. Strange New Worlds

7. Broken Bow

8. Beyond The Farthest Star

9. Remembrance

10. Caretaker 

11. The Man Trap