Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will go further from the center in season three.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds went big with concepts for the second season of the show. Some fans loved it, others not so much. The unique ideas for the season saw some fans on Twitter go wild, but others not so much. Their Rotten Tomatoes score fell for season two, and a lot of that had to do with the “big swings”, i.e. the musical episode.
It’s among the lowest rated in Trek history on IMDB and stands as the second most polarizing episode to date for Strange New Worlds, outside of The Elysian Kingdom. The musical episode, “Subspace Rhapsody” has a 6.9 on IMDB, while the Elysian Kingdom has a 6.1.
The “big swings” aren’t landing and are hurting the franchise’s perception among the greater majority of fans. Yet, despite that, season three will feature even more. According to Akvia Goldsman, if you didn’t like what we saw in season two, you’re going to hate season three. Goldsman told Variety that things are just going to keep getting genre-hopping, saying;
"We’re going to keep going. We genre hop. So where we haven’t been, we will try to go. Henry’s watchwords for Season 2 were, “Let’s do Season 1, just bigger and better.” That’s become the truth of Season 3. We’re always doing the thing that we do best, which is secretly just a lot of relationship stories in space. We’ll keep unfolding those hopefully in ways that are different, in the same way that the tones of our episodes will be different. But yeah, ambition will taper off only when we can’t figure out a thing to do we haven’t done before."
While the series showrunner, Henry Alonso Myers, went on to explain that the concept behind doing this is to “challenge the actors”. Our bad, we thought the idea behind shows was to have entertaining and compelling storylines. Myers goes on to tell Variety;
"The joy of doing the show — Akiva and I spent a lot of time on this — is trying to come up with something really great and cool and different for our actors. The more challenging stuff you bring them, the harder they will work. We want to bring them great material so that they will continue to do incredible things."
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is becoming a parody of itself
This is what happens when you have non-Star Trek fans trying to make Star Trek television, eventually, they get on board with the moral teledramas and they start doing whatever they find funny, quirky, or meme-worthy.
It’s truly sad to see how much fans didn’t like certain episodes because they were too far from the core of Star Trek, and then to see the people running the show going “Naw, who cares”.
It’s almost like they don’t believe fans will stop watching if they keep doing dumb stuff over and over again. This is the same problem we see with films. Look at Barbie, a smash hit. Top 30 highest-grossing movies of all time for a variety of reasons. Does Mattel, the creator understand they caught lightning in the bottle? No, now they’re going to do 20+ movies all centered around their toylines.
That’s what’s happening with Star Trek. We have people in charge who think one idea was so good, that it needs to be the basis of the entire franchise. In this case, it’s genre-hopping. And while Star Trek has never been shy of being as much as it can for all, it always kept the core tenets going.
There’s a reason why the best-rated episodes from Strange New Worlds season two on IMDB are the ones that had a moral center to their story. That’s what Star Trek is. That’s why it works. It appears Goldsman and Myers are more worried about trending than they are about making good content.