In the era of thunderous box office hits and prestigious hyperseries television, Star Trek has struggled. JJ Abrams films tried to reinvent Star Trek for the mega-action movie era, and Star Trek: Discovery tried to reinvent it for serial television. And others, like Picard and Lower Decks, have just tried to play the fans with intense nostalgia and jokes. They’ve all been Star Trek, but they haven’t had the same impact as the original series or the 90’s Star Trek series. Watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is like watching The Next Generation or Voyager or even The Original Series. It’s the updated tone of Star Trek perfectly for 2022, and that’s largely because he knows what we want: stuffing episodes.
The franchise is huge right now, as big as Star Wars or Doctor Who, but it often seems to have been at odds with itself and a bit embarrassed by its own existence in a way that these other franchises are not. It’s like a petulant teenager who really wants to do tricks or deal with family, but doesn’t want to meet any friends in case they make fun of him.
Strange New Worlds is not like that. This show understands that you can be serious and that you can be silly and you can still tell very good and entertaining stories. It’s not a shame to exist. And yes, a lot of this is due to a fantastic cast, directed by Anson Mount as Christopher Pike and Rebecca Romijn as his second in command, A Chin-Riley (or Number One if you’re familiar with the original Star show Trek). ). But beyond a big cast appearing on a great-looking show, what really captivated me is how Strange New Worlds is happy to embrace the stuffing episode.
M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and Una (Rebecca Romijn) in one of the episodes with the most bets. Image: Marni Grossman / Paramount Plus
Stuffing episodes are defined as those that do not belong in the general stories of a series. They are often episodes of downtime, or they are the weird and funny episode of a typically dramatic show. They exist because, until the broadcast was understood, most TV series had orders for more than 20 episodes. In the same period of time that many series have between six and ten episodes, the writer’s rooms should normally produce something closer to the 22 scripts. This meant that things could get weird. Many of these 20 episodes could have plots in series: Mulder and Scully and their war on cigarette smokers and the Consortium or the endless plots of “Dear Doctor Gets Sick” in ER. But programs would also have episodes that become experimental or silly or just plain content so as not to increase the bet on “the end of the world as we know it.” Part of the reason Picard got Borg-ified had such an impact on Star Trek: The Next Generation was because we knew he was also the nerd who liked to take a private look at the holodeck.
As orders for short episodes and highly serialized plots became day-to-day on television, the stuffing episode went out of style. The Star Trek: Discovery cast isn’t accidentally portraying a fairy tale for the fun of a fourth-dimensional creature in the future. But I would say that the stuffing episode was also what distinguished television from movies as an art form. The highly serialized programs like Obi-Wan Kenobi that air on Disney Plus look like movies, carefully spread over several weeks. One of the biggest complaints about many new programs on Netflix is that they feel like feature films. The plot is always hectic, and we never have time to sit down with a character and get to know him.
And the appeal of television for so long, the reason it often inspires huge online fandoms, is because you spend so much time with these characters that you know them better than you spend two hours in the theater.
Okay, this one is from a higher episode too, but they’re fighting the Gorns! Historically, these are some low-stakes bad guys! Image: Marni Grossman / Paramount Plus
In six episodes, Strange New Worlds has not been afraid to breathe and let us enjoy these characters, as Trek fans did with previous series. So we can have an episode where Captain Pike, who learned his own tragic future in Star Trek: Discovery, tries to accept it, and we can have an episode that makes Gorn Kirk, supremely crazy, fight once with a legitimately spooky threat. But we can also have an episode where everyone enjoys their day off and two characters accidentally change bodies and negotiate some diplomatic treaties.
The program feels comfortable developing the characters in a variety of ways without feeling the need to always check for any impending threat. Programs like Stranger Things could learn a lot from the softer plot. Sometimes we don’t need seven episodes running toward the end of the world. Sometimes we only need one or two, you know, so we can have time for this body change episode or “Groundhog Day.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs new episodes every Thursday on Paramount Plus.