Pop Culture Pick: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Going back to the future...

Image Credit: CBS Studios

I first watched Star Trek when I was five years old. It’s one of the few memories from my childhood that remains as clear to me as the day it happened. My father, not often noted for his science fiction fandom, introduced me to the show, and I’ve been a watcher of Trek ever since, never more so than during my secondary school days, which coincided with the transmission of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Though I’ve enjoyed the current era of Star Trek (especially Star Trek: Picard, for its obvious TNG connections), I’ve not felt quite the same frisson as I once did in my heyday, which I suppose is natural as you age. I’m not a giddy, nerdy teenager watching science fiction. Yet Star Trek: Strange New Worlds brought some of that energy back.

Spun off from the appearance of Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Mr. Spock (Ethan Peck) and Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: Discovery’s second season, this is a return to the adventure-of-the-week style that Gene Roddenberry’s original series held to in the 1960s, all set in the years before Kirk took over the Captain’s chair.

Strange New Worlds ran the risk of appearing to be a nostalgic wallow, crafted by people who longed to get back to that once-a-week dose of storytelling in an age of serialized entertainment, where “procedurals” are seen as creaky and old-fashioned. The show, though, manages to have its procedural cake and garnish it with just enough continuing narrative material to make the mixture work.

It helps that the entire main cast is appealing and talented, led by Mount’s effortlessly commanding yet wise and human Pike, who might as well be Picard and Kirk merged in a transporter accident. Number One (whose name we’ve since learned is Una Chin-Riley, so I don’t really blame her for going by “Number One” a lot) is brave and forthright and, thanks to Romijn and the writers, funny. Peck’s Spock is still perhaps the outlier, though he, of course, has decades of performance to compete with and does a solid job in the role.

Elsewhere, the show allows producers Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet the scope to blend the old with the new in pleasurable ways: they can experiment with ideas without having to be locked into them for a whole season and delight fans with pre-Original Series versions of characters such as Uhuru (here played by Celia Rose Gooding), Dr M’Benga (

Babs Olusanmokun) and Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush). I’m trusting that they’ll all get better character development than the ‘60s series allowed, and there are also plenty of references to nuggets of Trek lore that might pass the casual viewer by but will raise a smile from those of us raised on the show.

Not every episode works, but that’s the joy of a show that can fly between the stars without being saddled with one long, convoluted story that its stablemates have sometimes struggled to fly off: there are plenty of other strange new worlds to explore. And boy, do we need Star Trek more than ever now.

The first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is on Paramount+ now, with a new episode weekly on Thursdays. The service will launch in the UK and Ireland on 22 June.