Coming home from grade school, I had a routine: Speed Racer, then Lost in Space, then Star Trek after dinner. That was the block. I loved Star Trek before I could've told you why. I just knew I never had any idea what was coming next. Strange New Worlds is back with Season 4, and it's this show is the first time in a long while a Trek show has actually given me that same feeling.
The setup is the crew of the Enterprise, pre-Kirk, doing a mission-of-the-week format instead of one long serialized arc. That alone is a big deal. So much modern TV (Trek included) has leaned into ten-hour movies chopped into episodes, and this show just says no, here's a standalone story, see you next week. It's a format that lets the show take real risks, because a bad idea only costs you 45 minutes instead of derailing a whole season.
And the risks are wild. They have leaned into a musical episode and a full classic-sitcom-style episode, laugh track and all, and somehow neither one felt like a stunt. They're playing with tone the way the original series used to, one week it's a serious first-contact story, the next it's practically a comedy sketch, and it never feels like the show doesn't know what it is. It knows exactly what it is, it just refuses to be one thing.
The character work carries a lot of it too. Nurse Chapel and Uhura both get real space to be people instead of background crew, which the original series never had time or interest in doing. It's the kind of update that doesn't rewrite anything, it just finally points the camera at characters who were always worth looking at.
This is the most fun I've had with new Star Trek in years. Recommended.
