Plot: Season 4 sees the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise – led by Captain Christopher Pike – embark on a series of thrilling and emotional adventures across the stars. As they journey to strange new worlds, they will battle inner demons and external threats, encounter colorful new characters, reunite with familiar faces, and confront terrifying aliens. Through it all, they strive to embrace a bright, hopeful future.
Review: Since the 2022 premiere of its first season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been a consistent critical and fan favorite. Embracing the episodic structure of The Original Series rather than the heavily serialized Star Trek: Discovery and Picard, Strange New Worlds gave fans a prequel that represents the fun and genre-breaking world of the 1966 classic starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. With the announcement that the fifth season would be the last for Strange New Worlds, the fourth season has the heavy task of beginning the path towards the conclusion of Christopher Pike’s tenure as captain before handing the reins to James T. Kirk. With a slew of fun adventures to open the season, not only is the fourth season of Strange New Worlds the best in the series, but it ranks amongst the best seasons of any Star Trek show.
The fourth season picks up after Marie Batel’s (Melanie Scrofano) sacrifice, which doomed her romantic relationship with Christopher Pike (Anson Mount). Instead of dealing with his grief, Pike throws himself and the Enterprise into mission after mission, which increases tension amongst the crew. For the first half of the season, the Enterprise embarks upon adventures that raise the bar on what this series can do. Last season saw a detective mystery set on a prototype holodeck and a musical episode, both of which pale compared to what this season has in store. From dinosaurs to a black-and-white noir episode to the highly anticipated puppet episode, Strange New Worlds has found innovative ways to play with genres and tone within the deep space of the galaxy. The black-and-white episode, for example, is not just filmed in black and white but operates within an actual plot device that echoes a similar visual palette in Dune: Part Two.
Each of the six episodes made available for this review addresses ongoing plot threads within the confines of standalone stories. Each episode centers on a different lead character but gives every member of the cast plenty of room to explore their own arcs. Few Star Trek series have been this balanced in giving the entire cast their due. The season pays close attention to La’An Noonien Singh (Christina Chong) as she deals with the fallout from being turned into a Vulcan last season, while Spock (Ethan Peck) and Kirk (Paul Wesley) grow closer as friends thanks to their mind meld. Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) and Scotty (Martin Quinn) share a fun rivalry in the early episodes, while Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) gets to lead a real-time episode that is one of the most intense of the season. There is even a pretty scary horror episode that eclipses last season’s zombie episode, with a story that feels closer to Event Horizon and the gore to match. Rebecca Romjin, Carol Kane, Babs Olusanmokun, and Celia Rose Gooding all shine as their characters get plenty of time to shine.
As much as the horror, dinosaur, noir, and real-time episodes worked for me, my favorites of the season are the comedic caper on a resort planet and the puppet episode. Using recreations of the crew crafted by Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop, the episode titled “Level Five Transporter Accident” is one of the funniest episodes of any Star Trek series. Many have drawn comparisons to it and a similar episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Strange New Worlds builds the puppet element into the plot in a way that works better than I could have imagined. All of these episodes are fuller and more fun than any other season of Star Trek that I can recall, with the cast all fully inhabiting their roles. Anson Mount has now played Christopher Pike longer than any other actor and leads this crew with a sense of adventure, optimism, and confidence that has elevated this performance to the top of my favorite Star Trek leaders.
Showrunners Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman waste no time in treating this season as anything but marquee Star Trek. Yes, the plot does start heading towards the eventual shift from Pike to Kirk, but it does not take up the focus of these stories. Paul Wesley’s Kirk gets more screen time as his friendship with Ethan Peck’s Spock grows, but it is still secondary to the main thrust of the series. These episodes hail from legacy Star Trek directors like Axelle Carolyn, Jordan Canning, and Jonathan Frakes, but there is no specter of endings looming over the chapters. Each episode leads nicely into the next with a fresh theme and moral that also echoes the formula that made the original series so beloved sixty years ago. The special effects remain solid, for the most part, with a few sequences in the premiere episode weaker than expected, but all subsequent chapters are incredibly realized.
I can think of no better way to honor the six-decade legacy of Star Trek than with the phenomenal fourth season of Strange New Worlds. No Star Trek series to date has managed to give the entire cast as balanced an arc as we get here, nor has any cast gelled quite as well as this one. Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Rebecca Romijn, and the entire crew of this take on the Enterprise have played these characters long enough that they could have phoned in their performances. But thanks to fun writing that harkens back to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for what Star Trek represents, this season is a love letter to the franchise and all of its fans. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is coming to an end after one final, shortened season, but first, audiences get to enjoy one of the best penultimate runs of all time.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres on July 23rd on Paramount+.