Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount 2022)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is old-school Trek, pitched to win-over Trekkers nonplussed by, or actively hostile to, the new-school Trek of Discovery. Disco has plenty of fans of its own, of course. But the latter group is—if I can use the word non-dismissively, and indeed non-ironically—woker than the former, which strikes me as fine, actually. Woke, outside its vapid use as a term of abuse in our ongoing nonsense culture war, speaks to a set of personal, political and aesthetic concerns shared by many, and Disco does a pretty good job, so far as I can judge it, of presenting to those. And there’s room for lots of different iterations of science fiction. Star Trek: SNW makes its pitch to the older-school Liberal fanbase of Star Treks TOS and TNG: viz., happy to make room for some women so long as the handsome white dude with the excellent hair remains in overall control. In favour of an ethnically diverse meritocracy, up to a point, that point being where the ‘ethnics’ constitute one-African-American, one-actual-African, one-Asian, one-Hispanic, one-Alien (who is also the one-Disabled) tokenistically distributed here-and-there among the white majority. No Jews, though, in SNW, which is ... odd, especially considering the show's original casting and prior racial-allegorising trends.

There’s a strong emphasis of the importance of workplace hierarchies and proper functioning of organisations, respecting the chain of command and so on, all the stuff younger wokes (younger, that is, than me) find so irksome. But here we are: it’s a 2022 show with a nicely varied cast, good sets, splendid special effects and some inventive episodic scriptwriting. Plus, let us not forget, Anson Mount’s amazing hair.

This probably comes across as snarkier than I intend. At the time of writing, the first five episodes of the show’s first series ten-ep run have dropped in the UK, and I watched all five in short order, enjoying them. It tickled, evidently, my nostalgia button—a distinct Next Generation vibe to much of it. Episode 1 ‘Strange New Worlds’ sets-up the series and treads water doing so somewhat, but Episode 2 ‘Children of the Comet’ was a very nice little standalone: a comet is headed directly towards an arid world, threatening on impact to wipe out the indigenous population. The obvious thing is for the Enterprise to intervene, diverting the comet’s trajectory, but when they try, that stalwart of Trek scriptwriting, the Vastly More Powerful Spacefaring Species No-one Has Ever Heard Of Before appears, threatening Pike with destruction from their hideously-beweaponed, much bigger starship if he does so. To them, the comet is sacred, a kind of god, and its wishes—even its desire to crash into a populated planet killing itself and everyone—must be respected. How Pike gets out of this, saving his ship, and the world, is neatly spun.

Here's one thing though: the more a franchise propagates itself, the more ornate and intricate its continuity and worldbuilding, the more inconsistency is liable to intrude. Take episode 3, ‘Ghosts of Illyria’, a serviceable romp through a world ravaged by proton storms, or perhaps crouton storms (I wasn’t entirely paying attention) where all the original inhabitants have disappeared. It turns out they’d genetically modified themselves out of materiality altogether and are now humanoid flashes of ball-lightning or something. Anyway, their essence infects the Enterprise crew like a virus, and everyone goes crazy for light (‘Mehr Licht!’ they all cry, like Goethe. Or would do if the scriptwriters had had the courage to boldly Goethe) since their vitamin D levels are so low.

There’s a certain amount of smashing up the ship and of course a last-minute reprieve, but then at the very end there’s a reveal: the virus, or whatever it was, got past the transporter filters because the chief medical officer (Babs Olusanmokun’s Joseph M'Benga) has been keeping his medical transporter free of upgrades and unchecked-over. Why? Because his young daughter has an incurable disease and, rather than watch her waste away and die, he has stored her in the memory buffers of the transporter. But—wait: what? You can do that? But if you can do that then, well, the implications are huge. Why does the sick bay sedate ill patients? Why not just bung them in the transporter buffer? Why travel around the galaxy with a crew of hundreds? why not store hundreds of various folk in the transporter buffer and bring them out as needful? You could fly about in a shuttle and carry an army of thousands in the transporter buffer, conquer the universe.

I mean: really?

Not to get distracted. Episode 4, ‘Memento Mori’, is a hunt-chase spaceship battle where the Enterprise, outgunned by a fleet of Gorn hunter-killer starships, has to hide inside a Brown Dwarf: basically a retread of the final sequence from the peerless Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan, though without the investment that film provides in the characters duking it out. But that's fine, and I like the way no actual Gorns are shown, just their weird-shaped spaceships. Gornless is better. Episode 5, ‘Spock Amok’, is one of those episodic Trek attempts at comedy: Spock and his fiancé T’Pring (full name: ‘T’ Boldly Pring, Were No One Has Pring’d Before’) swap bodies and there’s some awkwardly treading-carefully-to-avoid-crass-gender-stereotyping comedy wrung out of the exchange. Somewhere between Amok: Lame and Amok: Fine. But I shall watch the next five episodes when they finally arrive in the UK.

Still, that plot wrinkle about storing live people in the Transporter buffer indefinitely and without ill effects has put a small hook in my imagination [Ian Burdon on Twitter reminds me that there's a TNG episode based on the same idea]. I know people who write Trek novelisations, and a fine and honourable profession it is; and I know too that there's no way Paramount would ever commission me to write a left-field Trek novel in which Federation ships are small pods containing hugely powerful transporters, attached to gigantic warp engines, and everything and anyone needful is conjured like a rigelian rabbit from a hat as and when needed. Ah well.