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Series premiere review: ‘Strange New Worlds’
"Strange New Worlds," the newest Trek series’ eponymous pilot, is the best-looking, best-produced episode of TOS ever made. That is to say, it’s a TOS-style story made with 21st-century filmmaking. Of course it looks great. Pretty much every episode of these new shows looks great. The secret is "Strange New Worlds" looks great while delivering a classic Star Trek experience. This is not a groundbreaking hour of television, but it’s a good, solid execution of a classic formula.
Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) is coaxed (ordered) from an extended leave following the Enterprise‘s joint mission with Discovery to take down Control. (He gets his order from Admiral Robert April, played by Adrian Holmes, who almost immediately looks like one of Trek‘s better admiral characters.) You’ll recall in the process of that arc, in second season’s "Through the Valley of Shadows," Pike vividly experienced his future in which he would be gravely injured and permanently disabled after very nearly dying. "Strange New Worlds" picks up in the months after that revelation, and it has shaken Pike to his core. He’s having trouble getting motivated to go back to work as the Enterprise gears up for redeployment after being repaired, and it’s hard to blame him.
‘Picard’ season finale: The trial this time was personal
"Farewell" is pretty much season two of Picard in a nutshell. It’s trying to do a lot of things. It puts in some decent efforts to connect to its past. And it has some character moments that do work. But on the whole, as an hour (and season) of television, it’s a jumbled, anticlimactic mess that adds up to less than the sum of its many, many parts.
It’s simultaneously doing too much and not enough — too much plot and not enough story. It has bizarre Easter-egg mini-detours that go nowhere, and generally flails about like Chris Farley telling you about his van down by the river. It’s hard for me to hate an episode featuring Q, Guinan (the real one), and Picard reaching various emotional resolutions, but this (and the whole season) just doesn’t add up.
Dark discoveries abound on ‘Picard’
As season two of Picard lurches toward the finish line, the creators are able to deliver a fairly engaging payoff that tackles several aspects of the season-long storyline, even as they churn through a bunch of routine action sequences and needless detours in the process of getting there. "Hide and Seek" isn’t great Star Trek, but it’s pretty good season-two Picard, which I suppose is the problem. It’s probably the best episode since the second installment of this over-padded arc of a season, but it’s still not especially good.
This show just can’t stop getting in its own way even when it’s doing things right. There’s too much contrived silliness in here to make it something to recommend, even though there are scenes and ideas that I thought worked in the context of what we’ve seen this season.
Finally, some ‘Mercy’ in the season’s plotting
"Mercy" is a welcome step in the direction of plot coherence, where multiple threads of what has been happening for the past few episodes begin to converge in ways that finally start to reveal a picture that may not totally make sense but at least doesn’t feel completely random and haphazard. Finally we have most of the major players pointing toward a common direction, instead of isolated in their bubbles doing their own thing.
Still, though, other pieces (like Picard unlocking his mother’s room in the past) are missing or deferred, and the first half of the episode had me impatient, with its interrogation scenes that felt like they were ported in from the overplayed police procedural of your choice, and the scenes aboard La Sirena with Rios, Teresa, and her son, which frankly felt like a complete waste of time, despite the easygoing efforts Santiago Cabrera.
Things that go ‘Huh?’ in the night
Things happen on an all-new episode of Star Trek: Picard.
That seems to be the best synopsis for many episodes this season. Lots of things happen. I have no idea how they relate to one other or make a compelling or cohesive tapestry (weak laugh), but, yeah, sure — things happen. Some of those things are reasonable. Some of them seem like confounding already-dead-ends conjured from the sky.
In "Monsters" we go into Picard’s mind, where he struggles with the troubling memories of his mother being dragged away that we’ve been seeing all season and possibly been making incorrect assumptions about. To facilitate this internal confrontation with the past, the comatose Picard has conversations with an ostensible Starfleet therapist (James Callis) who challenges Picard on his emotionally closed-off ways. There is some value here, and having two good actors just sitting in chairs in a somewhat adversarial face-off is at least worth something.
All dressed up with a long plot to go
It’s at this point in the season that the "10-hour movie" structure of this series is really starting to take its toll. There are some things to recommend here — notably everybody’s awesome red-carpet wardrobe — but they’re mostly overshadowed by the sinking feeling that all of this is a waste of this production’s time.
Consider the fact you’ve got Patrick Stewart on board for 30 episodes of this series to continue the story of Picard. You’ve got all the resources of the CBS/Paramount machine at your disposal. You could tell a couple dozen cool stories centered on Picard and his crew, preferably some of them even in the 25th century. Instead we’re spending, I’m guessing, an entire eight episodes in 2024, running around and chasing vague plot things in an overarching story that so far makes very little sense.
‘Picard’: A Soong for every season
"Fly Me to the Moon" is a course correction after the hugely uneventful "Watcher," in which a car chase featured no one chasing the car. (I just can’t get over that one.) This outing is fine, but the season, which started out with two very entertaining and promising shows, is getting predictably mired in the bog that is its serialized nature, which features a lot of plot and characters but an unfortunate lack of curiosity.
It’s more about moving pieces around on a chessboard (although Picard has so far yet to become "the board upon which this very game is played," as was promised by Q) and setting various things in procedural motion.
This episode does so at a reasonable clip and it has its character-based pleasures, mostly involving Agnes (who knew?) and her new frenemy, the Borg Queen, who early in the episodes uses Rios’ voice commands to tap into a cell tower and call the police. A police officer arrives, which the Queen seems prepared to assimilate (although I was wondering why she never used that handy Borg tentacle until this very moment), so Agnes shoots her dead with a shotgun.
‘Picard’: A tale of a bartender and a boombox
The best scene in "Watcher" comes near the beginning. It’s the scene on the bus with the punk mohawk guy with a boombox who’s listening to a version of the same song as the punk mohawk guy in Star Trek IV. Seven asks him to turn the music down. The guy complies and embarrassingly apologizes. I laughed out loud. It’s a fun, winking reference to the time-travel scenario we’re in and shows the writers have a self-awareness about the material they’re aping.
Unfortunately, that sense of fun and self-awareness is nowhere to be found elsewhere in this slog of an episode, which is mostly just bitter and preachy — when it’s anything at all, that is, since it spends most of its time literally spinning its wheels. The first two episodes did a good job of moving the narrative forward and keeping us involved. The third episode was a piece-moving transition piece, but an engaging one. This episode, however, worries me. It’s a textbook example of serialized stalling, where everyone mostly just kind of does mechanical things in ways that run out the clock on the episode while not really accomplishing anything.
‘Discovery’ ties it up neatly in the season finale
My one-sentence review of "Coming Home," Discovery‘s fourth-season finale, is as follows: It does all the right Trekkian things, but is predictably and sometimes painfully obvious about it. There’s very little that happens here that was not telegraphed or expected, and that simultaneously speaks to this season’s merits and shortcomings. On balance I consider this pretty average, mostly because it whiffs at being an emotional and visceral payoff (while trying way too hard at that), even as it succeeds in affirming the season’s overall values and mission statements. The substance is fine, even admirable; the execution is … sigh.
On the plus side, this season of Discovery is the most true-to-Trek of the four seasons of this series thus far, highlighting the importance of diplomatic restraint, communication efforts, teamwork, and individual contributions, while warning against the dangers of unchecked aggression and hubris. In the end, the values of Starfleet are affirmed and rewarded, which is exactly the way it should be if you’re going to tell a story that extols the traditional Federation.
Picard and crew jump back to the 21st century
"Assimilation" is a step down after the first two refreshingly absorbing episodes of the season, but it’s still a pretty enjoyable outing despite its notable flaws, and brisk enough that it doesn’t feel too much like the latest setting-resetting episode (the third in a row, no less) it primarily serves as. Its mission is to get us to the year 2024 and provide some initial things for the characters to do there, and it does that, with some threads that work to varying degrees ranging from somewhat clunky to reasonably good.
While it looked like the crew of the La Sirena was going to be recaptured by Seven’s husband and detained in the fascistic alternate timeline of the 25th century, this episode says "psych!" and quickly dispatches all the bad guys, and the ship slingshots around the sun and arrives in the 21st century, all before the opening credits.