Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Full Season 4 Review - Never Stop Growing
Early in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ fourth season premiere, Captain Pike is offered a promotion that would take him off the Enterprise and away from the crew he loves. He declines. “I want to focus on my now,” he says. “And that’s here. With the Enterprise.”
That line is the season’s thesis. Strange New Worlds is a prequel, and everyone watching knows where each of these characters ends up. Pike’s fate is fixed, Kirk will command the ship, and Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and Chapel will become the people audiences first met in 1966. A prequel can respond to that certainty with dread, or it can respond by insisting on the present. Season 4 chooses the present. Ten episodes and one of the franchise’s most consistently surprising runs later, I think it chose correctly.
I’ll start with the peak, because “Orders of Magnitude” is the best hour of the season and one of the finest the series has produced. The episode could have been about the thrill of watching Kirk step into command. Instead it shows what command costs. Admiral Reeger, played by Joe Morton with a performance that ends somewhere very far from where it begins, arrives as a legend stepping onto the bridge. He turns out to be a man whose grief over his wife and daughters, lost in a massacre, has curdled into ordering the wholesale destruction of an inhabited planet in the name of preventing future casualties. Kirk’s challenge to him, first diplomatic and finally an act of outright sabotage, is a moral thriller in which Paul Wesley never once plays the moment as heroism. He plays a young officer who respects hierarchy and has run out of ways to obey it. The discovery that Kirk’s father George was likely the true hero of the battle that built Reeger’s reputation turns a mutiny into something closer to a family reckoning. This is the captain we already know Kirk becomes, and the episode makes us watch him being made.
The season’s high-concept episodes are its most conspicuous feature, and they deserve a fair hearing. A noir in black and white. A puppet episode. A soap opera. A drug-fueled resort comedy. A return to the storybook kingdom of Elysia. Some Trek fans have complained about the silliness, and in their most persistent form the complaints are silly in their own way. Absurdity is baked into the premise, as Ortegas herself says in one of the season’s best jokes. What matters is whether the gimmick serves the story, and here the results were better than decent.
“A Case of Chiaroscuro” gave Rebecca Romijn her best showcase of the season. It used its monochrome palette to ask what Una will do when moral clarity is unavailable, and it gave Kor enough dimension to make his future collision with Kirk’s crew feel earned. “Level-Five Transporter Accident” turned out to be a portrait of Spock’s anxiety about chaos, told through Muppets, and it ended with the dream version of T’Pring arguing that embracing disorder is itself a form of logic. “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” dressed grief in daytime-television haze, and Anson Mount made the audience believe him when he asked how something can be both real and not real. “Off-Hour” borrowed from The Next Generation’s “Disaster” and made Jess Bush’s Chapel the emotional anchor of an hour that was really about two people deciding to stay. Not once did the show sacrifice character development for the sake of its formal gambles, and that is the harder trick.
The closest thing to a stumble, however, was “Once La’An a Time.” Its return to Elysia repeated the structural gimmick of its season 1 predecessor without recapturing the grief that made that episode work. La’An’s season-long internal struggle was resolved through a sword fight with her fairy-tale double and a shared sip of magic potion, which was tidy where it needed to be earned. But for a season to reach its ninth episode of ten before misfiring says more about the first eight than it does about the ninth.
Then there is the finale, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” which I did not expect to love as much as I did. It is a time-twist story built around Uhura. Celia Rose Gooding, who has had standout moments all season, carries an episode in which Uhura, after the Enterprise has an encounter with a white hole, finds herself speaking with her own self one year in the future. In that future, Pike has moved on, Kirk commands the Enterprise, M’Benga is elsewhere, and Uhura and Scotty are in a relationship. The mechanics are gloriously silly, and the rescue of a “space baby” from a black hole won’t survive scrutiny as science. But the emotional design is exact. Future Uhura scolds her younger self for missing the pleasures of the present because she is so intent on her future, and then sends her back by advising her: “never stop growing.” It is the season’s philosophy in a single scene, and it comes from a character who began this series unsure she belonged in Starfleet at all.
The finale also drops quiet hints of what is coming, in the form of an unexplained future without La’An, a Pike who has departed, and a ship that is already becoming the Enterprise of the original series. It is the best kind of subtle foreshadowing, and I found it far more effective than an overt cliffhanger would have been.
If the season has a governing virtue, it is that it never lost sight of its ensemble. Mount’s Captain Pike is still the show’s moral center. Peck’s Spock, Chong’s La’An, Bush’s Chapel, Olusanmokun’s M’Benga, Romijn’s Una, Navia’s Ortegas, Quinn’s Scotty, and Kane’s Pelia each got at least one moment that made them feel like more than function. It’s rare for a show this near to the end of its run to feel this alive.
Season 5 will be six episodes long, and after both Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds come to an end next year, there is no Star Trek in production beyond that. That is a loss, and it makes the run we just watched all the more precious. This was a season that took the franchise’s oldest ideals and a willingness to be strange, and staked its ending on them.
Pike’s line from the premiere has aged well across ten episodes. The show chose to live in its now, and the result is one of the best seasons of Star Trek in recent years.