Star Trek New Year’s Day selections for ringing in 2022

These Star Trek New Year’s Day viewing choices celebrate new beginnings.

Do you anticipate having your fill of football on New Year’s Day? Do you think you may want to take at least a little break from the annual Twilight Zone marathon over on SyFy? Then be sure you program some Star Trek New Year’s Day episodes and movies for yourself on January 1!

But which ones? We’ll assume you’ve already watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode “11:59” the night before. (The only Star Trek story actually set on New Year’s Eve? How could you not!) But that’s only one out of the more than 800 Star Trek episodes and films now available. How to choose which of the others make for especially appropriate New Year’s Day viewing?

Here are three suggestions of Star Trek to watch on New Year’s Day. In its own way, each of these Trek tales focuses on the theme of new beginnings—and if there’s any holiday to think about those, New Year’s Day is the one!

“Metamorphosis” (TOS, S2E9)

Sure, this episode’s assumption that ideas of male and female are “universal constants” doesn’t keep up with current thinking. And the Zefram Cochrane we meet here, played by Glen Corbett,  is hard (though not impossible) to square with the one we meet in Star Trek: First Contact, played by James Cromwell.

But “Metamorphosis” remains one of Star Trek’s most beautiful love stories. The Companion’s devotion to Cochrane is moving. We should all be so fortunate as to have someone look at us the way the Companion looks at Cochrane through the bright eyes and gossamer, multicolored scarf of the dying Commissioner Nancy Hedford (Elinor Donahue), whose life she revives and transforms when assuming her flesh. And the love Cochrane is clearly beginning to feel for her in return by the episode’s end is genuine.

“Metamorphosis” is the story of a quiet new beginning: a man and a woman starting a new life, far from the noisy galaxy, in which they will grow old together under the fig trees they plant. To paraphrase Cochrane, he and the Companion will have a lot of happy new years together.

“First Contact” (TNG, S4E15)

Before Star Trek: The Next Generation gave us the aforementioned First Contact film, it gave us “First Contact,” a highlight of the generally strong fourth season.

The story presents the Federation’s meeting with a not-so-strange new world from the aliens’ point of view. It’s a refreshing deviation from Trek’s normal template. It’s filled with plenty of satire on contemporary American culture as well as some excellent character moments, for both our regular characters and the people of Malcor III.

Although this episode doesn’t end with Malcor III taking its place in interstellar civilization just yet, it’s still a great story about new beginnings. As Chancellor Durken (George Coe) realizes, his people will ultimately have to put aside “this conceit that [they] are the center of the universe” before they “cross the threshold of space.” And Mirasta Yale (Carolyn Seymour) gets her new beginning sooner, since she’s been ready for space since she was an awestruck nine-year-old at a planetarium.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

What better way to end a Star Trek New Year’s Day marathon in 2022 than with the Trek film celebrating its 40th anniversary—especially when it’s a movie with new beginnings at its heart?

Naturally, when many fans think first of The Wrath of Khan, they’ll think about Captain Spock’s death. In and of itself, that scene may not seem like very festive New Year’s fare. But as Admiral Kirk says in his eulogy for Spock, “This death takes place in the shadow of new life, the sunrise of a new world—a world that our beloved comrade gave to protect and nourish.”

Though the Genesis Planet will self-destruct in Star Trek III thanks to David’s questionable use of protomatter (and, in my opinion, the screenwriters’ questionable narrative choices), in Star Trek II it is a new beginning made manifest on a major scale. It is, to quote Kirk’s final log entry, “life from death,” and it makes him—he, who has been feeling weary as he stared down his own mortality all movie long—feel “young” again.

May this New Year bring us all renewed spirits and hopes, as well!

What Star Trek will you be watching this New Year’s Day, and why? Share your suggestions in the comments!