Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

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401: Valles Marineris 2026 July 23
(First watched 2026-07-31) Big serious as well as big crazy... that's kind of the Strange New Worlds sweet spot.

A clear winking Doctor Who reference near the beginning of the episode, then an especially timey wimey Star Trek time travel episode. Investigating what turns out to be their own emergency beacon, they get shot back to the past and involved with ancient Martians, as part of a big bootstrap paradox that sets the Solar system up for humanity's eventual arrival.

They didn't dwell on it for long, but La'An says she's been feeling differently and wonders if her augment genes have been activated. I'm sure we'll be coming back to that.

Something else I wanted to nitpick about the time travel. When they realized they were on past Earth, it became a rule that they couldn't kill anything so as not to affect the future. But... that ship has kind of sailed. Could killing a dinosaur change the future completely? Sure. So could stunning it. So could waving hello to it.

We've often enough in Star Trek seen ships destroyed due to warp core problems or ejected warp cores that explode, but in this case the antimatter taken from the core was used to blow up an entire planet. Puts into perspective the kind of power ANY interstellar vessel has at its disposal.

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402: The Griffin Incident 2026 July 30
(First watched 2026-08-03) Well... that was a weird one. And atypical for Star Trek in that they didn't even come to sort of technobabble excuse to explain away what they experienced. Just: This is such weird shit that we're going to leave it to the department that investigates weird shit to figure out what the deal is.

So this is at least the third time that standing SNW Enterprise sets have been used to stand in for a wrecked/abandoned ship of same or similar class. EDIT: Wait, at least 4. There was the one in the episode of Aliens where Hemmer died. There was the mirror Enterprise in Discovery. There was Pike's girlfriend's ship a few seasons back. Now this.

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403: Human Best Friend 2026 August 6
(First watched 2026-08-07) This episode seems to be extremely divisive. Count me on the positive side. I acknowledge that the premise seems totally unbelievable. Shore leave on a planet with intoxicating gas where people seem free to... really, really make bad decisions? But let that past and there's a lot of fun. Klingon Total Eclipse of the Heart? Hell yeah. Hell yeah.

Also worth noting about Jim Kirk. It is increasingly increasingly increasingly unbelievable that they keep bumping into him. But again, let that past... and it was interestingly handled. Spock incorrectly thinks he's a figment of his own imagination, and thus opens up to him about secrets he's told nobody else. So now Kirk knows him in ways nobody else does, and has a chance to prove his own worthiness to Spock by keeping it all secret. Not a bad piece of the puzzle for "How does the extremely taciturn guy become such close friends with a guy like that?"

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404: A Case of Chiaoscuro 2026 August 13
(First watched 2026-08-13) Visually the city setting was very interesting. Trains and zeppelins throughout the retro-styled city. Beyond that... meh. Noir stuff isn't of particular interest to me. And the dual setup of "this region of space is black and white because of blablabla" and "somehow coincidentally Una looks exactly like this recently killed person, down to the hair style" was a huge stretch of a setup for not personally much payoff.

I was starting to worry Una would try to take over this person's role permanently. She's one of the characters we still don't know the future of, and there aren't many episodes left.

The Kor in this episode... was it supposed to be the Kor from TOS/TNG? Didn't particularly seem a close match, but hey. *checks Memory Alpha* Yeah, that's him.

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405: Level Five Transporter Accident 2026 August 20
(First watched 2026-08-20) Of all the ridiculouses this show has done, this is the most ridiculest. But it made me laugh.

The end reveal that it was all a dream... I'm split on. On the one hand it gave a free pass to all the completely implausible earlier events, but it also boiled the episode down to the only actually meaningful thing being "Spock has emotional issues and is at least somewhat reconciling with T'Pring."

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406: Off-Hour 2026 August 27
(First watched 2026-08-28) I'm pretty sure Star Trek has tried the "one real-time hour" thing before (Enterprise?), but I think this one worked better. Multiple overlapping threads and troubles for all the characters to get caught up in.

Also, original original The Cage doctor Philip Boyce is back. There's a short discussion about how a former CMO is now back in a non-CMO capacity, which is clearly meant as foreshadowing of M'Benga's own future role during the TOS era.

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407: Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass 2026 September 3
(First watched 2026-09-03) Bringing on Trelane once was a stretch considering his role in TOS. Bringing him on again is too much. They just clearly wanted to do a Q episode and didn't want to come up with something else.

Beyond that, mostly OK episode. The soap opera gimmick wasn't as much fun as some of the others they've played with, though I did enjoy Ethan Peck playing Sybok as the evil twin.

Strong point near the end where Pike admits the sense of loss he feels from his "fake" life as seen at the end of last season, in particular the child he raised. This is the sort of thing Picard never got on TNG after The Inner Light, and only many years later did the ongoing novels give him a chance for.

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408: Orders of Magnitude 2026 September 10
(First watched 2026-09-10) A strong, tense episode, and for a change this season not a "the one with" episode.

At this point it's long past ridiculous how much Jim Kirk is on this show, but when he's around they use him well.

So the ship they were chasing was responsible for _5 million_ colonist deaths? That seems like a pretty big deal and like a pretty big string to leave hanging with only two more episodes in the season and eight more episodes overall. Seems like an amount of deaths that would... have a BIG reaction in the Federation. Like the attack on Florida back in Star Trek: Enterprise Season 3 that changed everything for Earth.

So there's a lot of discussion about what the badmiral and George Kirk were up to during the war with the Klingons. This seemed like a longer-ago event than the war with the Klingons from Star Trek: Discovery Season 1, so did they have a _different_ war with the Klingons a decade before that? I don't remember having that impression from early Discovery, where it seemed like the Klingons as an active threat was something new and totally Burnham's fault and something the Federation was not prepared for. Looking at Memory Alpha now it seems like they consider most of the 23rd century to be at least a prolonged state of cold war between the Federation and Klingons with occasional bouts of action.

So Kirk jacked the guy up with drugs to make him crazier. That's... a big risk. Make the crazy guy crazier, in the hopes that he goes crazy enough you can remove him from command?

Further, M'Benga takes the blame for it. Is this the reason he's no longer CMO by the time of TOS? We've still got some time to fill before that, though.

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409: Once La'An a Time 2026 September 17
(First watched 2026-09-17) With few episodes remaining and their stated desire to swing for the fences and do everything they wanted... they wanted to do a sequel to one of the earlier silly episodes rather than something all-new?

The character logic was... pretty crap. "Oh, it's a weird planet of doppelgangers? Clearly it's designed to help our frustrated security officer."

All that said... it had plenty of amusing moments, and they really went for that Princess Bride vibe.

The writers have found way too many excuses to bring the real James Kirk around, but they really love having an opportunity to bring fake James Kirks around, because it's like they don't count towards their calorie limit or something. We did get just a little of the real at the end, though. It's... kind of weird seeing him and La'An together at this point. Like, they've been building their relationship up over the last few seasons, but we know it goes nowhere, and there's not even many episodes left to do much interesting with it before that.

At the end they said Pelia stayed behind to help with the "ship" that was the Elysian kingdom. Was that really her being written out of the show? I know time to wrap up the SNW-original characters is running short, but if so that was an incredibly low-key way to go about it.

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410: Tomorrow's Enterprise 2026 September 24
(First watched 2026-09-24) A pretty decent time travel story, mostly in the Frequency style.

The two time periods are said to be only about a year apart, so it really is getting close to the end of Pike's time on the Enterprise, as well as plenty of other characters. We see Ortegas goes on to be a flight instructor. We only get pregnant pauses about La'An from Jim Kirk, which I take to be Bad News coming up for her in the remaining several episodes. We see Boyce as the current acting CMO but it being stated Bones will probably take over as M'Benga seems to be going to a Vulcan posting. Una we get no hints of.

Some of the black hole stuff seemed pretty unscientific, buuuut for a show that's not locked to hard sci-fi it doesn't ruin things. But like... the Enterprise having the power to resist incredibly strong gravitational pulls, sure, it regularly goes faster than light anyway. But Uhura basically swimming into the event horizon? OK, I guess just best to not dwell on that.

Given the general Star Trek cancellations going on and that for this show it was apparently a minor struggle to get even the shortened fifth season, it seems likely enough that at some point they considered that this might be their last episode. If so it didn't exactly wrap up all loose ends, but did more than nothing while still pointing to what was coming ahead.

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