Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 1 available for free!

[Irlo]

This was the only of the recent Trek series that I was interested in seeing. I went in to it with high hopes and came away somewhat disappointed. The season was okay with some excellent high points, but it's not a great show overall.

Spoiler: Spoilery comments here.

Pike's glimpse into his own future was necessarily contrived, but it was an interesting way to deal with the fact that the viewers also know what's going to happen. After initial eye-rolls, I grew to appreciate it.

Too many melodramatic backstories and secrets for my taste.

I wished Una was more like Number One from TOS.

Vulcans don't kiss. Someone make the director watch the Enterprise Incident, please. (And then use a time machine to go back to re-film these episodes.) If Spock and T'Pring had used their fingers instead of their lips, the kiss with Chapel later in the season would have packed a bigger punch.

I hated the reimagined Gorn. Not because I'm tied down to canon, necessarily, but because aliens that hatch inside human bodies and burst out stopped being interesting three decades ago.

I hate episodes like the story-book-come-to-life episode. This one was no exception.

The season finale had a real potential to be phenomenal, but it fell a little flat for me. The Romulan commander's performance was lackluster ... he just didn't seem into it at all. I loved the inclusion of the ill-fated wedding couple and more generally the parallels to the original episode. I would have presented it very differently, though. (These Trek creatives really need to run things by me first!) I would have omitted the visit of Pike's future self at the beginning of the episode and started in with Pike experiencing an unexplained time jump to the wedding scene. Pike (and the viewers) could have gone through the episode not knowing what was going on ... not knowing that there were no real stakes. Pike would have to piece together the fact that he's in the future after avoiding the accident, and when it was all wrapped up he'd get the visit from his future self giving him a chance to go back to avoid this timeline.

I liked the uniforms and the sets. I liked the music. I generally liked the actors.

I'll watch Season Two.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

And I finished the first season. One of the problems with a prequel series is that they can touch on issues that appeared in the original series and suddenly something doesn't make sense. The original series episode "The Arena" makes less sense given that the Federation obviously had some pretty good knowledge about who the Gorn were and what they were all about. In "Arena," we find out the Gorn attacked because they believed the Federation was moving in on their territory. i.e. They weren't just a bunch of jerks attacking for no good cause. But that does not sound like the Gorn in SNW.

I enjoyed the last episode partly because it was a retelling of "Balance of Terror" which is one of my all time favorite TOS episodes. It was kind of neat to see how Pike handled the situation differently and while he wasn't wrong or foolish it was still a less desirable outcome than Kirk's decisions. This was a solid first season without a single bad episode. And you could tell the actors had a lot of fun with "The Elysium Kingdom."

We still need to see how the story evovles in season 2 for the Gorn.