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cimoreneI saw a few other reviewers besides Gavia Baker-Whitelaw saying that the newest Star Trek show, Strange New Worlds, [yet] a[nother] prequel, this time about the Enterprise under Captain Pike, is the best Star Trek in recent years and the most Star Trek -feeling one. The more people who say this the more positive my feelings become, although that doesn't translate into increased eagerness to see it sooner; my attention span for film is small and I prefer to wait until a whole season is out before I watch a show.
Here's a review I read recently that pinpointed exactly what's made me so - not even just disappointed in recent Star Treks, but like... frustrated and even angry about them:
‘Strange New Worlds’ Is ‘Star Trek’ As It’s Meant to Be
It remains to be seen whether I am as satisfied with the characterization of established characters as the writers of this article (I've distinctly departed from the opinions of most reviewers on that point with other characters in the past)...
...and also how far I am on board with the costume design. Star Trek has traditionally been terrible at costume design, to be fair, so really if it sucks it will be very true to the spirit; TOS is the only one that gets a free pass from me because it was on a shoestring budget... but at the same time, a prequel set closer in time to TOS has a different challenge, namely, they have canonical uniforms to guide them, and the degree to which they depart from them is a yardstick that wasn't present in the era of TNG and DS9 - the best and most Star Trekky Star Treks to have any budget. The costume design of TNG and DS9 had a lot more freedom to work from and they chose the hilariously terrible designs they chose that make no sense in-verse and also are ugly, and you definitely wouldn't have guessed they had any budget by looking at those. The bits I've seen in gifs of Strange New Worlds - which I assume should be set in the ~couple of decades? prior to the beginning of TOS - look... maybe promising somewhat?, but I'm always eager to analyze in detail.
I did notice some hair and makeup that seemed better than what one could have expected from old Star Trek (VOY and prior)... and some that looks eye-rollingly 'sexy by the standards of today's central casting', which never fits properly in any Star Trek but has always been a problem Star Trek has had. (The coolest hair and makeup in old Trek, to my eye, is the weird hairstyles, because at least it suggests wacky trends exist in the future... but it's all actually pretty much there because of the trends of the 1960s, which just happened to be significantly wackier by 1980s-2000s standards.)
Here's a review I read recently that pinpointed exactly what's made me so - not even just disappointed in recent Star Treks, but like... frustrated and even angry about them:
‘Strange New Worlds’ Is ‘Star Trek’ As It’s Meant to Be
Angelica Jade Bastién: I am 100 percent onboard with your assessment that Strange New Worlds is the best the franchise has been for a long time. The thrill of Discovery and Picard was always wrapped up in the potential of streaming TV more broadly: What could TV be if it weren’t so stuck inside the commercial constraints of network television? What if it didn’t have to bend to episodic limitations or act breaks that could squeeze in ads for new cars? That frontier seemed so exciting and so wide open, and given the approach to other genre franchises (and to shiny, expensive TV more generally), it was not hard to feel excited about what a modern-era Star Trek could be. It could be heavily serialized; it could be grimdark and finally take stuff seriously; it could jettison all the goofy side plots where everyone just sits around playing poker and Data talks about his relationship to cat ownership. And sure, all of that is very exciting in the way that anything you’ve never seen before sounds like a fun new experience.
What Discovery, Picard, and now the sharp left turn of Strange New Worlds suggest, though, is that if you take out episodic storytelling and quiet human character beats and jam-pack every episode with multiple timelines and mirror worlds and perpetually looping elaborate backstories, what you have is … no longer Star Trek. The reason Strange New Worlds feels like the best Star Trek has been, for me, is that it feels like the only recent installment in the franchise that is actually a Star Trek show.
It remains to be seen whether I am as satisfied with the characterization of established characters as the writers of this article (I've distinctly departed from the opinions of most reviewers on that point with other characters in the past)...
...and also how far I am on board with the costume design. Star Trek has traditionally been terrible at costume design, to be fair, so really if it sucks it will be very true to the spirit; TOS is the only one that gets a free pass from me because it was on a shoestring budget... but at the same time, a prequel set closer in time to TOS has a different challenge, namely, they have canonical uniforms to guide them, and the degree to which they depart from them is a yardstick that wasn't present in the era of TNG and DS9 - the best and most Star Trekky Star Treks to have any budget. The costume design of TNG and DS9 had a lot more freedom to work from and they chose the hilariously terrible designs they chose that make no sense in-verse and also are ugly, and you definitely wouldn't have guessed they had any budget by looking at those. The bits I've seen in gifs of Strange New Worlds - which I assume should be set in the ~couple of decades? prior to the beginning of TOS - look... maybe promising somewhat?, but I'm always eager to analyze in detail.
I did notice some hair and makeup that seemed better than what one could have expected from old Star Trek (VOY and prior)... and some that looks eye-rollingly 'sexy by the standards of today's central casting', which never fits properly in any Star Trek but has always been a problem Star Trek has had. (The coolest hair and makeup in old Trek, to my eye, is the weird hairstyles, because at least it suggests wacky trends exist in the future... but it's all actually pretty much there because of the trends of the 1960s, which just happened to be significantly wackier by 1980s-2000s standards.)
