Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back for its fourth season, which I'll be recapping each week. Thoughts on the premiere, "Valles Marineris" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I once again imply that Doctor Who and Star Trek share a fictional universe...
Alan Sepinwall
The first two Strange New Worlds seasons left me wondering whether I was letting recency bias, not to mention the shortness of each season (making a higher batting average easier to attain), overly influence me into asking if this was among the two or three best Star Trek shows ever. The third season, though, was a huge step down. It allowed various fun elements from the first two years to calcify into annoying formula. And it illustrated the perils of what happens if you try to make a Very Special Episode every time out, rather than mixing the format-busters in with traditional stories where the Enterprise arrives on a new planet, has an adventure, and leaves.
I've only seen this new season's first three episodes, and will be watching weekly past that, to keep the recaps from being too influenced by what I know is coming. But I can make a couple of broad observations before we get specifically into "Valles Marineris."
The first is that it appears like the creative team identified the same "if every episode is special, no episode is" problem. There's a concerted effort to go back to Mission of the Week, with the tone varying each time out. Not all are successful, but there's at least an understanding that the Star Trek formula is most effective when the structure isn't that far removed from the days when Leonard Nimoy was first playing Spock.
The second is that even with this more restrained approach, the episodes are generally too long, usually clocking at or close to a full 60 minutes. In theory, this can pay dividends, if that extra time is spent developing the individual crew members and their relationships with one another. The biggest problem with the shorter seasons of streaming Trek is that we don't get to spend nearly as much time with Chapel and M'Benga as we once did with the likes of O'Brien and Bashir. When major things happen to them as individuals or as crewmates, it doesn't have the same impact. So these longer episodes could certainly be used to do lay the kind of characterization brick-and-mortar that was easier to do in the Sixties, Eighties, and Nineties. But that's mostly not what happens. You get some elements of that, like here with the establishment of a low-key feud between Ortegas and Scotty. But more often, we get certain story and thematic beats repeated a few extra times, just to be sure we get the point(*).