‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season Two’s Shocking Finale Cliffhanger
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
This post contains spoilers for Season Two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is now streaming in its entirety on Paramount+.
Over the last year, we’ve said goodbye to some all-time television shows, and the void each one leaves can be impossible to fill. But you keep looking, and hoping that something comes along to at least approximate the feeling you got from watching the original. And sometimes, that feeling comes up again in the most unlikely of places. Case in point: the show that has most reminded me of Atlanta since Atlanta ended is… Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?!?
More from Rolling Stone
SAG Actors Want Higher Residuals. Here's How Streaming Residuals Work
'Gilmore Girls' Actors Sound Off on Netflix Over Show's Streaming Residuals
Hear me out. I promise this makes sense.
Yes, Atlanta was a singular, auteur-driven, extremely contemporary comedy that was defined more by a vibe than by any stories, while Strange New Worlds is the 11th series in a franchise that’s been around for almost 60 years. On paper, the only vague connection between the two is that Donald Glover’s previous TV show had him spend a lot of time hanging out in a fake version of a Star Trek holodeck.
But here’s the thing that will hopefully prove that I am not a crackpot: both shows have mastered the art of being wildly unpredictable and versatile from episode to episode, so that viewers can be shocked and delighted by how different each is from the one before it. So Atlanta could once upon a time give us the ridiculous, hilarious “Barbershop” one week, and then the next shock everyone with the haunted house horrors of “Teddy Perkins.” Or consider this trifecta from the just-completed second season of Strange New Worlds: “Those Old Scientists,” a light-hearted crossover with the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks, was followed by “Under the Cloak of War,” a harrowing and dark hour about combat PTSD, and then by “Subspace Rhapsody,” a musical episode in which the crew of the Enterprise can’t stop themselves from singing and dancing. And then that oddball trilogy led to this week’s season-ending “Hegemony,” a pure horror outing pitting the crew against the cruel reptilian conqueror race the Gorn. (They’ve been reimagined from the silly rubber-suited monsters from the Sixties series into terrifying creatures akin to the Alien xenomorphs.)
Did Atlanta tend to be more artful and distinct? Of course it did, which is what can happen when you’re a wholly original show led by a strong and singular creative vision. But the sheer joy I have felt this season as I’ve seen what crazy genre shift Strange New Worlds would do this time is the closest I’ve gotten to how it felt when Paper Boi and friends were out having misadventures. If anything, it’s amazing that Strange New Worlds can do this within the confines of a famous franchise whose owners and fans have very specific expectations for what Star Trek should be.
Or maybe not. The thing is, none of what Strange New Worlds has done this year individually feels different from either past Star Trek or past sci-fi/fantasy series that appeal to the same audiences. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer was among the earliest shows to do a splashy musical episode, for instance.) If you go back through earlier series, you can find comedy episodes like this season’s “Charades,” where aliens turned Spock (Ethan Peck) fully human and he began acting like a hormonal teenager. This year’s courtroom drama “Ad Astra per Aspera” was very much in the vein of the famous Next Generation episode “Measure of a Man.” The doomed time-travel romance “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” meanwhile, combined elements of two iconic James T. Kirk adventures, “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Space Seed,” only this time it was a version of Kirk himself (now played by Paul Wesley) who had to die to secure the future, while his archenemy Khan Noonien Singh had to be saved at all costs, much to the despair of Christina Chong’s La’an, who had fallen in love with Kirk and has always hated her ancestor Khan.
What’s remarkable, then, isn’t any one particular genre or tone that Strange New Worlds has tackled this season, but that it’s done so many of them in so short a time. A traditional 22+ episode season of Trek would have room for a few comedy outings, some dark introspective crises, epic adventure, etc., but there would also be lots and lots of basic Mission of the Week episodes that felt very much of a piece with one another. Season Two did a couple along those lines, including one where Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike was trapped on a planet that wipes everyone’s memories, and another where Celia Rose Gooding’s Uhura had to stop the Enterprise from torturing a race of aliens only she could hear. Mostly, though, the SNW creative team (led by showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers) opted to take the biggest possible swings as many times as they could this year, and it worked incredibly well.
Now, being formally inventive is only so interesting in and of itself. What made this season so excellent was how well the show handled each of these modes, and how smartly they incorporated various gimmicks into advancing ongoing storylines. The Lower Decks crossover, for instance, marked the beginning of the end of the affair between Spock and Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), because time-traveling Lower Decks fanboy Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid, effortlessly transitioning the character into live-action) let slip to Christine that Spock will go on to be a legendary figure, and she is not part of that legend. (It also had an amusing coda where we got to see animated versions of the SNW crew.) The musical episode, meanwhile, forced La’an(*) to finally tell Kirk about the relationship she had with an alternate timeline version of him(**). The PTSD episode — featuring Robert Wisdom (Bunny Colvin from The Wire) as a Klingon diplomat — reshaped a lot of how we see the seemingly gentle Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and the clash with the Gorn brought a lot of individual characters’ old traumas to the surface. It’s fun to watch the series change shape from week to week, but it’s also extremely well-crafted episodic television.
(*) La’an’s power ballad, “How Would That Feel,” was easily the best of the “Subspace Rhapsody” songs. As with most musical episodes, the other songs (save for maybe the Uhura spotlight “Keep Us Connected”) were mostly functional, memorable less for their sonic craftsmanship than for the context of having non-musical characters singing them. (Case in point: the brief snippet of mortified Klingons doing a K-Pop number.) But “How Would That Feel” has already made it onto one of my playlists. Good stuff.
(**) That scene was potentially such a minefield, but so well-handled. Kirk is smart enough to immediately understand what La’an is talking about regarding time travel, and he clearly likes her. But we know from his backstory in the William Shatner era that this would be around the time his on-again, off-again girlfriend Carol Marcus would be pregnant with their son David, which provides a wholly plausible excuse for him to not give La’an a chance. Wesley’s take on the character has been hit or miss, feeling more like Pike Light than the cocky and impulsive adventurer we know. But that was a great scene.
The finale, “Hegemony,” not only introduced a young version of miracle-working engineer Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn, an actual Scottish actor playing Scotty), but went old school back to Nineties Trek by ending on one hell of a cliffhanger. A good chunk of the crew (La’an included) have been taken captive by the Gorn, Pike’s girlfriend Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) has been impregnated with Gorn eggs, whose hatching would kill her, and Starfleet is ordering Pike to back off and let the Gorn keep all that they have just taken. As with the “Mr. Worf… fire” cliffhanger from the classic Next Generation two-parter about the Borg, it’s clear that things will (mostly) work out well when the season returns, but what a rush it was to see To Be Continued on the screen at the end of such a thrilling, scary hour.
The only complaint (other than that this season could have used more Pike) is that, between streaming production schedules and now the double-strike, it is probably going to be a very long time before we find out how it all resolves. But, then, Atlanta once took off four years between seasons. Hopefully, that’s where the resemblance — which, admittedly, maybe only I can see — comes to its end.
Best of Rolling Stone
