What a difference five years make. Back in 2020, the two live-action Star Trek series that hit Paramount+ were Star Trek: Picard Season 1 and Star Trek: Discovery Season 3. With plenty of bright spots, overall, both of those seasons were deeply earnest, full of anxiety and bloodshed, and certainly created division among the various sects of Trek fans. Today, Strange New Worlds — which ironically began as a Discovery spinoff — is now the near tonal opposite of where the franchise was very recently. And with Season 3, Strange New Worlds is remarkable because, unlike the various course-corrections in Discovery and Picard, this show isn’t really trying to reinvent itself at all.
Strange New Worlds is, if you squint, a live-action version of Lower Decks, albeit a much more mainstream one. For fans who loved the two previous seasons, Strange New Worlds Season 3 is simply another season of that same show: a breezy episodic structure combined with a quirky tone, and quick to set phasers to fun (almost) every time. And so, judging by the first five episodes of Season 3 that were given to critics, Strange New Worlds is doing all of that again, with only one difference: Unlike Season 2, there seem to be fewer gimmicks. No musical episode. No crossover with another show. Instead, the series is confident that fans will enjoy the very specific soap opera woven around the newish crew of the Starship Enterprise.
