Strange New Worlds Ending With Short Season 5 - The State of Star Trek

 Strange New Worlds Ending With Short Season 5 - The State of Star Trek

With the news 'SNW' is to end with its fifth season, but not only that, a shortened, six-episode season, now seems a good time to take a look at Trek's health a year on from when I last did so. Things didn't look rosy even then, but now it's on life support waiting for the news to come down it's time to turn off the machine, with the caveat that some new medicine is to be attempted, though judging by recent medication the hopes of an improvement in condition would seem to be unfounded. Chopping through the overgrowth of my heavy-handed analogy with the machete of plainness: 'Starfleet Academy' is the last and only 'hope' (if we can stretch the meaning of that word!), for Trek's future, an idea that dates back to the 1980s and was a bad one even then. Certainly I never liked it when I heard about it and that was just for a film, now it's a whole series. But like it or loathe it, the current generation of Trek, the Third Generation as I like to deem it after 'TOS' and its film series, and the Golden Age Berman-era, could be coming to an end thanks to the business part of show business - these things seem to move like behemoth destroyers passing in the ocean, but the merger or buyout, or whatever the technical term for Paramount's new masters is supposed to be, is starting to take hold and it's mainly through the lack of commissioning of new Trek than anything concrete that suggests they might well be reevaluating its importance to their business, despite it being at the forefront of its plans when 'DSC' began as the poster child for CBS All Access way back in 2017.

For me, I'm at the point, and have been for some years, where I don't see Trek improving, and in fact have been more and more put off by its general lack of care in its own reality - it started with 'DSC,' then pulled back to a stage where things were going in the right general direction, but with 'SNW,' once again showed me their view of canon is a very loose and malleable thing. Where once history was carved in stone (with the potential for intelligent writers to do a bit of chipping where needed in order to give the slabs a smoother fit - it is fiction after all!), and any major deviation would be seen as an alternate timeline that needed to be dealt with or had its offshoot to follow (most notably the Mirror Universe and Kelvin Timeline), now they can just shift the Eugenics Wars a century later, have the Gorn be the main opposition years before 'TOS,' alter characters to the point of being unrecognisable (Chapel, Pike, Spock, maybe even Scotty, what little I've seen of him), and so the news 'SNW' is ending was good for me. I've found it to be worse than 'DSC,' something quite surprising, though it shouldn't have been when you follow the rule that each new endeavour tends to be a little worse than what went before, which is why I don't excitedly call for Alex Kurtzman's resignation like a politician brought into ill-repute: whoever comes along next could be even worse, as hard as it is to imagine, because at least some of Kurtzman's hires have worked out, to an extent.

It's sad to me to see 'TOS' so utterly disrespected, often forgotten its giant shoulders is what everything else is perched atop, now remade for a new generation with completely different attitudes, beliefs and interests, overwriting the Grandad of it all. But if you look at the other long-running franchises that's what happens, and I've probably said all this before that it was amazing Trek was so strong as it was when created by so many different people over such a length of years. 'Star Wars,' 'Dr. Who,' James Bond... It doesn't matter what it is, eventually new people are going to come along and put their mark on it, and there's a good chance they're going to either undo what was so great about it before, or so venerate it that they're scared to create anything meaningful. That's always the dilemma and is one of the main reasons so much pop culture is mostly regurgitated mush with little to impress or impart. From my perspective I've continued to buy the discs and watch new Trek, not out of a sense of enjoyment, or even keeping up with fellow Trekkers since I'm not in contact with any, but simply because it's available, and in the streaming world of today that's less common, so I will at least praise Trek for releasing the productions, and in a timely manner. Yet I'm still not in any great hurry to get the most recent releases - 'Lower Decks' Season 5 I'm very interested to see, but am currently reviewing the rest of the series and don't want to watch that at the same time, and 'DSC' Season 5 I am interested to see, as the end of the mostly poor series that started this whole era, but am in no hurry as I go through Season 2 of 'Prodigy' which has so many episodes and is similarly lacking in that spark of interest, so I only do one a week.

It's long since I actively looked forward to new episodes of Trek, but at least I got to the stage where I was interested in rewatching the best bits of this era for the purposes of reviews, with 'Picard' Season 3 and 'LD' encouraging me to engage with them on that level, even if Season 4 was a step backward. After 'SNW' Season 2, which really was mostly a chore to get through, I don't anticipate its upcoming Season 3 at all. As far as I'm concerned that series has ruined the established characters, in so far as I would take it seriously at all - it's not going to dissuade me from going back and revisiting 'TOS,' the 'true' sequence of events, and for those that would say the original should be viewed as a crude or imagined view of history that has come down to us, or whatever personal way of justifying the differences, or pointing out its inconsistencies and suggesting we should accept changes because of that, I say I have no interest in following that weak logic. I'll watch it, but I doubt I'll ever have the desire to record my detailed thoughts in reviews because I don't want to think about it, it's too upsetting, much like 'DSC' and most of 'Picard' - it actually puts me off more Trek. And so I actually feel relieved Trek is lessening. It's disappointing the proposed streaming films have seemingly come to nothing - there's been no update or movement from that quarter, probably due to the terrible first attempt of 'Section 31,' another piece of Trek I'll probably watch at some point if I see it going cheap in a charity shop, but have no interest in watching for enjoyment's sake.

The whole concept was awful and by the response to it, it sounds as bad as could have been expected, the only relief being it wasn't a series! But I suspect that production, and the complexities of the merger and money matters, has put paid to the hoped-for streaming film concept and that 'S31' will be a mere anomaly. The downside is that that appeared to be the only outlet for more 25th Century Trek with the 'TNG' cast, and possibly other actors playing their characters from that time period as the 'current' point in Trek history (since it matches up with the actors' ages and roughly the same time has passed in the real world as in-universe), and when you consider the age of the actors from the 24th Century series', NOW is really the only time they were realistically going to portray their much-loved characters again. And that's a sad thing because, for all the many, many faults of modern Trek, one small positive has been having so many beloved characters return, however insubstantially, and in some cases it's felt like a return to the good version of Trek before it became fantasy melodrama for teens. Not in every case: for every sort-of Data, Riker and Worf, there's a doddery old Jean-Luc Picard or entirely altered Seven of Nine. While I never wanted the Seven series I was still interested to see what they might do with a one-off streaming film for the 'TNG'/'DS9'/'Voyager' cast and those hopes seem to be over.

Even had that happened I'm sure it would have been a weak version of Trek focused on running around spitting out 'witty' comic book dialogue, explosions, and little of substance, an emphasis on extreme ideologies and little to no development of the races and galactic setup of the Trek universe that has been crumbling ever since 'DSC' first appeared. It's a sorry state for a once-great empire, but Trek has gone the way of all Earthly empires, it was just a matter of time. And with the ending of my familiar companion piece, the Trek magazine, it marks another slicing off of the interest and potential to excite, but it says a lot that, while slightly sad from a nostalgic perspective, I don't feel any real emotion about the state of Trek because it's been coming to this for years. It does affect my appreciation of old Trek, too, I can't deny, in the same way new 'Star Wars' and 'Dr. Who' put me off the old stuff, I find myself less drawn to Trek than when it was a main focus in life. The old Treks will always be special and I'll keep rewatching them, but it feels like a more 'dead,' niche universe than ever before, even when there was no Trek being made post-2005, and the fact Trek is winding down is more of a relief as someone that doesn't really like what I've been given with this era.

Who knows if the two feature films that were supposedly planned, one for the Kelvin Timeline crew, one as an Earth-based origin story (?!), will even happen - if they were aiming for the 60th Anniversary next year then they'd have to rush things along. But again, I hope they don't happen. I'd have preferred if 'SNW' didn't even get its six-episode final season and just end at 4 which had already been green-lit for a while. And as for 'Academy,' it doesn't matter enough to me that the EMH is there, the setup holds no anticipation. With that pessimistic thought, and with likely only 'SNW' 3-5 and 'SFA' 1-2 on the way, the ones actually confirmed, I'll put the seasons in order of merit, best to worst:

Lower Decks S2 - still the best episodes

Picard S3 - best live action for getting 'TNG' together, moves up a spot after reviewing it and 'LD'

Lower Decks S3 - not quite as good as I thought, though still some good ones, especially the finale

Lower Decks S4 - better than S1, weaker than the others, but good redemption story

Lower Decks S1 - not bad end, still the weakest of the series

Picard S1 - novelty that turns bad, and then worse

DSC S4 - slow, but the most Trekky

Prodigy S1 - plain average, but did have a good episode which is why I bumped it up one

DSC S3 - mostly inoffensive

SNW S1 - strong finale, otherwise nah, but it was a good finale so it goes up one

DSC S1 - switches with above, started with potential, soon lost

Short Treks - one good, some bad, most mediocre, it moves down a way as more irrelevant with the 'SNW' potential lost

DSC S2 - more bad stuff done to the 23rd Century, while its spinoff S1 at least had the finale

Prodigy S2* - mostly quite dull and time-wasting

SNW S2 - close to most boring, if mildly fun crossover

Picard S2 - the most boring

very Short Treks - actively offensive

*haven't quite finished yet

As you can see, there's very little change, though reviewing altered things slightly and relatively reliable 'LD' continues to take most of the top spots. Hopefully by next year I'll be up to date with 'DSC' and 'LD,' but here are my anticipation ratings:

Lower Decks S5: ***
DSC S5: **
SNW S3: *
S31: -
SFA: *

As opposed to my 2024 list:

SNW S2: **
LD S4: ***
DSC S5: **
Prodigy S2: **
Section 31: -
Starfleet Academy: -
25th Century, post-Picard: ***

'Academy' gets one star for having The Doctor, but really it's only half a star if that were possible. I may not even have seen it in a year's time as who knows when it'll even debut, let alone come out on disc, but I'm not in any way looking forward to it. Same for 'S31.' And of course there was still the possibility of post-'Picard' in some form back then which looks to be just about nonexistent now.

Who knows, perhaps 'Academy' will prove many people wrong, perhaps more streaming films will be announced, perhaps Kurtzman's time will be up and they'll immediately set to developing a new team that can guide Trek into success... But I doubt it. At least William Shatner still lives, amazingly!