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TV Strange New Worlds season 4
- Thread starter Kyehlar
- Start date
The Beer Hall Pooch
Too Evil To Worship
IKR?
That was a piss weak story written purely so they could do a film noir episode in black and white.
I've enjoyed the season so far, but maybe pulling the plug on this show was a mercy killing.
Colonel Kira's Left Tit
Bearded Belly of Bajor
That can't be the real Kor, he didn't have fake Tammy Faye Bakker eyelashes glued to his chin.
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
4.4 - I liked the idea of it and things about it. Una doesn't often get a centric episode and M'Benga was used well. But I think it was lacking in execution. I thought they'd maybe use the planet turning everything black and white for some plot reason but no, it was just there for the noir effect (and it didn't look as good as Spider-Noir.) There was no fucking reason at all to make that Klingon Kor other than the cheap name recognition and the actor didn't feel like Kor at all. The B-plot was just another contrived way to isolate La'an before she turns evil or whatever they're doing with her. And they did lampshade Una having an identical alien twin but it was still a bit too silly (yes I know TOS was very silly and they're trying to be like that, but it was made sixty years ago.)
The Beer Hall Pooch
Too Evil To Worship
I didn't see that. In fact, I thought Uhura looked even more striking in that light and it accented M'Benga's eyes to make him look even more serious and sad about past events... which might have been the objective there.
Well, I'm up to date.
I don't know guys.
I didn't think Season 3 was great. It had some really good moments and I enjoyed it overall, but the constant genre riffing became obnoxious by the end.
Season 4 is just leaning into it even harder and it rubs me the wrong way.
Someone on the writing staff REALLY likes Event Horizon, because after riffing heavily on it last season they're back doing it again with a Temu girl from The Ring thrown in for good measure.
I thought The Griffin Incident was not just meh, but actually bordering on bad television. I enjoyed the Kirk/phantom Sam stuff the most, and some of the visuals were nice. Ethan Peck is always good, and the idea of a "haunted" starship is a perfectly serviceable premise, but I don't think they did much interesting with it. It just left me cold.
THEN we get to Human Best Friend. What the fuck was this? A Hangover homage? Really? When does an homage become a derivative borefest? This episode, I think, answers that. I like The Hangover. The first one anyway. It's good fun. This was not good. The setup of Scotty and Ortegas rubbing each other the wrong way and then bonding over some shared adventure is fine. But the resolution basically being I envied pilots. Well, I envied engineers! And therefore we're actually the same! is just poor.
It makes them feel like plot puppets instead of actual people. But who cares about that, we're here for the comedy and hijinks!
Pike getting the face tattoo had "go-away heat" with me. We get it. You're doing The Hangover. You don't trust simply making Star Trek to be enough, you want to play in your sandpit and do a balls-to-the-wall, worse PG version of a movie that is better in every way.
Great.
Do you HAVE to be this explicit about it though? Trek has a long history of aping shows, films and genres, but it was not like this. It used to be:
Star Trek premise → expressed through another genre.
SNW feels like:
Famous genre/movie premise → insert Star Trek cast.
I'm ranting a bit, but I thought this was bad. It had a few amusing moments, I guess, and most of those were the quieter bits of other people reacting to the nonsense happening around them. That doesn't save it.
Spock sees everyone as plants!
I have the knife in and I don't really want to twist it, but I will anyway. I'vve been watching early Columbo at the same time as this and the contrast in the performances can be pretty stark. Strange New Worlds has some shaky acting. It has to be said. Not across the board. There are people on this show I really like. But there are performances where I can see the acting happening, and going straight from one show to the other makes it much more obvious. Honestly, if next week Pike puts on a rumpled raincoat and starts saying "just one more thing," I am going to fucking lose it.
So I sit down for A Case of Chiaroscuro feeling pretty low on trust for the show this season. And now we're doing Casablanca.
We get an asspull reason for why it's in black and white which, to be fair, I actually didn't mind THAT much in the end, and I'm already shifting in my seat getting ready to be annoyed. But I should probably make something clear here because the homage itself isn't automatically the problem. Homages can be cool. Trek has been doing them forever. The occupation/resistance setup from Casablanca? Fine. Even the black and white? Yeah, OK.
The problem is these writers so often can't just leave it there. It has to BONK you over the head with the reference like Timmy fuckin' Mallett. It doesn't seem satisfied with Casablanca being somewhere in the DNA of the episode. It wants you sitting there going, "Yes. I understand. We're doing Casablanca now."
And then, separately, Una just happens to be the exact fucking doppelganger of the resistance leader.
I... whatever.
THAT SAID, this was at least way more entertaining than the previous two episodes.
I liked Kor a lot. Demore Barnes gives a really strong performance here. I recognised him immediately and could not for the LIFE of me place him until it clicked. He was the classical-music serial killer from Hannibal!
He's a good actor.
And I appreciate it when Trek lets Klingons be something other than rowdy pirate/Viking types This version of Kor is sinister and INTERESTING.
And this is actually where my frustration with the show really is. Kor should have been the fucking premise.
A pragmatic, sinister Klingon occupying this world, dealing with resistance, collaboration and the consequences of Klingon power? That's the episode.
Barnes is good enough that whenever Kor was on screen I wanted to know more about him, how this occupation worked, what compromises people were making, what the Klingons actually wanted, how Una and the crew were going to deal with it.
AND YES, we do sort of get that but just when it's leaning into it properly it has to fight its way out from underneath all the COOL PREMISE™ stuff.
We can't just have Kor, the occupation and the resistance. We need the Casablanca pastiche pushed right to the front, and then on top of that Una needs an inexplicable doppelganger so she can be dropped directly into the middle of it. That's what frustrates me so much about this show.
If it was just bad, I'd stop watching it. Being Star Trek would not be enough. The problem is there are constant signals of a much better show underneath all the writers' room masturbation, desperately trying to get out, and it keeps getting choke slammed into the fucking wall by whatever COOL PREMISE™ somebody has fallen in love with that week.
And the short seasons make this worse.
Old Trek could afford to fuck around because there were 24–26 episodes. A ridiculous tangent could be one weird week in a season doing a LOT of other things.
SNW gets ten episodes.
"Let's do The Hangover!" is one of your ten opportunities this year to tell a Star Trek story.
At some point the tangents stop being tangents and become the identity of the show. I like this crew. I like the Enterprise. There are actors I like, characters I like, individual scenes and ideas I like. Every so often the show settles down for five minutes and I think YES.
Then COOL PREMISE™ becomes the overbearing point of the show again and I check out.
Maybe I am being a bit harsh, but that's my takeaway right now. I GET that this is the explicit artistic direction of the show, but I don't have to think its a particularly strong artistic direction.
I don't know guys.
I didn't think Season 3 was great. It had some really good moments and I enjoyed it overall, but the constant genre riffing became obnoxious by the end.
Season 4 is just leaning into it even harder and it rubs me the wrong way.
Someone on the writing staff REALLY likes Event Horizon, because after riffing heavily on it last season they're back doing it again with a Temu girl from The Ring thrown in for good measure.
I thought The Griffin Incident was not just meh, but actually bordering on bad television. I enjoyed the Kirk/phantom Sam stuff the most, and some of the visuals were nice. Ethan Peck is always good, and the idea of a "haunted" starship is a perfectly serviceable premise, but I don't think they did much interesting with it. It just left me cold.
THEN we get to Human Best Friend. What the fuck was this? A Hangover homage? Really? When does an homage become a derivative borefest? This episode, I think, answers that. I like The Hangover. The first one anyway. It's good fun. This was not good. The setup of Scotty and Ortegas rubbing each other the wrong way and then bonding over some shared adventure is fine. But the resolution basically being I envied pilots. Well, I envied engineers! And therefore we're actually the same! is just poor.
It makes them feel like plot puppets instead of actual people. But who cares about that, we're here for the comedy and hijinks!
Pike getting the face tattoo had "go-away heat" with me. We get it. You're doing The Hangover. You don't trust simply making Star Trek to be enough, you want to play in your sandpit and do a balls-to-the-wall, worse PG version of a movie that is better in every way.
Great.
Do you HAVE to be this explicit about it though? Trek has a long history of aping shows, films and genres, but it was not like this. It used to be:
Star Trek premise → expressed through another genre.
SNW feels like:
Famous genre/movie premise → insert Star Trek cast.
I'm ranting a bit, but I thought this was bad. It had a few amusing moments, I guess, and most of those were the quieter bits of other people reacting to the nonsense happening around them. That doesn't save it.
Spock sees everyone as plants!
I have the knife in and I don't really want to twist it, but I will anyway. I'vve been watching early Columbo at the same time as this and the contrast in the performances can be pretty stark. Strange New Worlds has some shaky acting. It has to be said. Not across the board. There are people on this show I really like. But there are performances where I can see the acting happening, and going straight from one show to the other makes it much more obvious. Honestly, if next week Pike puts on a rumpled raincoat and starts saying "just one more thing," I am going to fucking lose it.
So I sit down for A Case of Chiaroscuro feeling pretty low on trust for the show this season. And now we're doing Casablanca.
We get an asspull reason for why it's in black and white which, to be fair, I actually didn't mind THAT much in the end, and I'm already shifting in my seat getting ready to be annoyed. But I should probably make something clear here because the homage itself isn't automatically the problem. Homages can be cool. Trek has been doing them forever. The occupation/resistance setup from Casablanca? Fine. Even the black and white? Yeah, OK.
The problem is these writers so often can't just leave it there. It has to BONK you over the head with the reference like Timmy fuckin' Mallett. It doesn't seem satisfied with Casablanca being somewhere in the DNA of the episode. It wants you sitting there going, "Yes. I understand. We're doing Casablanca now."
And then, separately, Una just happens to be the exact fucking doppelganger of the resistance leader.
I... whatever.
THAT SAID, this was at least way more entertaining than the previous two episodes.
I liked Kor a lot. Demore Barnes gives a really strong performance here. I recognised him immediately and could not for the LIFE of me place him until it clicked. He was the classical-music serial killer from Hannibal!
He's a good actor.
And I appreciate it when Trek lets Klingons be something other than rowdy pirate/Viking types This version of Kor is sinister and INTERESTING.
And this is actually where my frustration with the show really is. Kor should have been the fucking premise.
A pragmatic, sinister Klingon occupying this world, dealing with resistance, collaboration and the consequences of Klingon power? That's the episode.
Barnes is good enough that whenever Kor was on screen I wanted to know more about him, how this occupation worked, what compromises people were making, what the Klingons actually wanted, how Una and the crew were going to deal with it.
AND YES, we do sort of get that but just when it's leaning into it properly it has to fight its way out from underneath all the COOL PREMISE™ stuff.
We can't just have Kor, the occupation and the resistance. We need the Casablanca pastiche pushed right to the front, and then on top of that Una needs an inexplicable doppelganger so she can be dropped directly into the middle of it. That's what frustrates me so much about this show.
If it was just bad, I'd stop watching it. Being Star Trek would not be enough. The problem is there are constant signals of a much better show underneath all the writers' room masturbation, desperately trying to get out, and it keeps getting choke slammed into the fucking wall by whatever COOL PREMISE™ somebody has fallen in love with that week.
And the short seasons make this worse.
Old Trek could afford to fuck around because there were 24–26 episodes. A ridiculous tangent could be one weird week in a season doing a LOT of other things.
SNW gets ten episodes.
"Let's do The Hangover!" is one of your ten opportunities this year to tell a Star Trek story.
At some point the tangents stop being tangents and become the identity of the show. I like this crew. I like the Enterprise. There are actors I like, characters I like, individual scenes and ideas I like. Every so often the show settles down for five minutes and I think YES.
Then COOL PREMISE™ becomes the overbearing point of the show again and I check out.
Maybe I am being a bit harsh, but that's my takeaway right now. I GET that this is the explicit artistic direction of the show, but I don't have to think its a particularly strong artistic direction.
Last edited:
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
I feel like they saw the black and white planet in Dune 2 and worked backwards from there when writing the episode.
StarMan™
Well-known member
New Star Trek I have seen since 2023:
- SNW S3: Trelane episode; skipped thru in about 10 minutes (actor was a Kiwi, so was curious). Meh.
- SFA S1: Pilot episode; lasted 15 minutes before switching off (didn't even make it to Paul Giamatti).
- SFA S1: Sisko episode; keep your paws off DS9, FFS. Jesus, who thought it was a good idea to "provide resolution" to someone else's show?
And with the complaints I've seen of Strange New Gimmicks S4, I 'm relieved to see I'm still not missing out on any actual Star Trek!
Meanwhile, many of my former compatriots across the interwebs continue to watch and moan, all the while contributing positively to the viewership numbers. I guess it doesn't matter at this point seeing it's all cancelled. Perhaps if people had ditched their completionist attitude or "I must be an informed critic in order to denounce NuTrek on a weekly basis" nonsense earlier, this Kurtzman era would have been canned sooner.
- SNW S3: Trelane episode; skipped thru in about 10 minutes (actor was a Kiwi, so was curious). Meh.
- SFA S1: Pilot episode; lasted 15 minutes before switching off (didn't even make it to Paul Giamatti).
- SFA S1: Sisko episode; keep your paws off DS9, FFS. Jesus, who thought it was a good idea to "provide resolution" to someone else's show?
And with the complaints I've seen of Strange New Gimmicks S4, I 'm relieved to see I'm still not missing out on any actual Star Trek!
Meanwhile, many of my former compatriots across the interwebs continue to watch and moan, all the while contributing positively to the viewership numbers. I guess it doesn't matter at this point seeing it's all cancelled. Perhaps if people had ditched their completionist attitude or "I must be an informed critic in order to denounce NuTrek on a weekly basis" nonsense earlier, this Kurtzman era would have been canned sooner.
StarMan™
Well-known member
BTW - not meant as a go at anyone here. I get most of you are getting enough out of it for it to remain watchable. But there are still many out there who have been disgruntled for years whose straw is still seemingly in tact on the camel's back.
Imagine going to the same restaurant and bitching to the high hills the food stinks, yet continuing to frequent it week after week, month after month ... year after - you get the point.
I can live without new Trek just fine and would be okay if this were the end of the line. I suppose part of me would like to recapture the experience I once had with Trek, which is why I'm happy this era is ending. At least there's a statistical chance. But these people who harp on endlessly while continuing to watch seem utterly oblivious to the reality that they've helped keep it alive.
Imagine going to the same restaurant and bitching to the high hills the food stinks, yet continuing to frequent it week after week, month after month ... year after - you get the point.
I can live without new Trek just fine and would be okay if this were the end of the line. I suppose part of me would like to recapture the experience I once had with Trek, which is why I'm happy this era is ending. At least there's a statistical chance. But these people who harp on endlessly while continuing to watch seem utterly oblivious to the reality that they've helped keep it alive.
CaptainWacky
I want to smell dark matter
You could watch Prodigy though.