“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” Season Three
James Brown
Season three of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” doubles down on the series’ promise: radical variety with a steady heart. The Enterprise crew flips from frothy pastiche to sober speculation, and the show invites us to enjoy both modes without apology. It plays dress-up like a repertory troupe, then puts on the lab coat and asks hard questions. However, the swing feels erratic, not deliberate.
The campy homage arrives like a weekly variety show. A screwball caper leans into corridor farce, complete with doors that open at the worst time and quips timed like drum fills. A holodeck-style genre exercise winks at classic Hollywood, then at noir, then at Saturday-morning serials. You can spot the fingerprints of the franchise’s pulp ancestry, but the humor points forward, not backward. Directors keep the frames clean and the cuts brisk, and the jokes land because the actors commit. Anson Mount’s easy gravitas lets him play the straight man without shrinking. Ethan Peck relaxes into a drier Spock, a comedian of restraint. Jess Bush leans into Chapel’s sparkle and steel.
Then the series pivots—abruptly—into serious science fiction. The palette cools, the score thins, and the dialogue sharpens to questions of duty, personhood, and the costs of first contact. A tribunal refuses absolution. A cosmic anomaly becomes less a spectacle than a moral instrument, forcing the bridge to weigh survival against responsibility. A refugee tale sidesteps sermonizing and argues instead through behavior. The show remembers that curiosity has consequences. When it slows down, it listens.
“We laugh to open the door, then think to walk through it.”
This alternation isn’t structured. It’s whiplash. By moving from camp to consequence, the season rehearses how culture metabolizes myth: we laugh to open the door, then think to walk through it. The homage primes empathy; the science fiction tests it. The pattern clarifies the characters. Rebecca Romijn’s Una carries her commanding presence into the next romp without losing warmth. Christina Chong’s La’An lets a romantic detour cast a long ethical shadow. Melissa Navia’s Ortegas turns swagger into care. Babs Olusanmokun’s M’Benga keeps the stakes human when the cosmos grows loud. Spock’s logic collides with Pike’s leadership, and sparks fly. In the end, optimism and accountability share the captain’s chair.
Craft buttresses the oscillation—the production design gleams without smothering. Light slides across brushed metal like a metronome, ticking between play and peril. Visual effects serve the story rather than preen. The scripts keep sentences short when tension spikes, then allow themselves a flourish when the tone loosens. Editors respect rhythm and breath. Directors stage bodies so comedy and consequence share the same blocking, only at different tempos.
Purists will say the tonal swings betray canon. They are not wrong. The original series had a few funny, light-hearted episodes, but it was always built around serious science fiction. “Strange New Worlds” attempts to honor that legacy with twenty-first-century calibration. It knows our attention splinters easily; it also knows we still crave consequence. The result feels like a modern broadcast’s attempt at compromise: a sandbox with rules. The problem with this season (and Season 2) was that the campier episodes felt more like “Orville” than “Star Trek.” (Last season’s musical episode still makes me cry like Michael Jordan.) The even bigger problem is that this show, in its attempt to appeal to a mass audience while still pleasing die-hard fans, fails to thrill or excite either group.
Final Thought
Season three proves camp and consequence can't share a logline.