Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ trailer doesn’t do much to move the needle

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds didn’t make me feel optimistic for the show.

The new trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is here and fans got to see the first look at the new show coming to Paramount+ in May. The show is both a spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery and a prequel of the original Star Trek series of the 1960s. It features Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Ethan Peck as Spock, and Rebecca Romijn as Number One, all characters introduced in the original pilot of Star Trek; The Cage.

The idea of the show is great, and the cast is well put together, but the trailer? The trailer didn’t get me excited one bit. For those reading this, keep in mind this is an opinion, you may have seen it and loved it. That’s ok. That’s good, I just didn’t get excited for it.

It spent more time showing off shots of various places in the galaxy and unique transitional shots than it did anything else. Yes, it’s a teaser trailer, but any time you plut out a trailer of sorts, the goal is to get fans excited. I just didn’t feel anything look at CGI rendered space-storms.

Star Trek should never be a franchise carried by visual effects. It’s a stage play set in space, with the characters and inter personal dynamics being the thing that has carried the franchise for decades. That’s what fans want. Thats what I want.

That’s not what the teaser gave me.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has a heavy burden

Every member of the Nu Trek grouping of shows has met with some sizeable backlash, save for maybe Star Trek: Prodigy, which is relatively inoffensive. Strange New Worlds is set up to take the fans of Star Trek back to the beginning, in more ways than one.

The show is going to be more self-contained than the last few shows, with a focus on returning to the episodic nature of story telling made famous in the original Star Trek, and followed up nicely in The Next Generation, Voyager, and most of Deep Space Nine and Enterprise.

So Strange New Worlds has to some how merge the old and new of Star Trek to saciate the fanbase. Yes, this trailer didn’t tickle my fancy, but I don’t have doubts that the show can still be good.

They took a low-risk approach with the teaser, and opted to not explore or showcase too much of the show. So it’d be unfair to be critical of the show off of one, brief, teaser.

So I’m not passing judgement on the show, just the teaser. It didn’t elicit the hopefullness in me like it did in other pieces about it.

I’m hopeful that the show truly does return to what made Star Trek great, and I’m not going ot let a teaser detour me from giving it a shot.