An interesting, deliberately thought provoking 🤔 question for a lazy long weekend Sunday morning…
Setting aside whether specific fans like specific ‘gimmicks’ (crossovers, musicals, bringing back Kirk or Khan) or tropes (transporter malfunctions), Space.com is posing the hypothesis that the proportion was too high in Strange New Worlds second season.
There’s no arguing that the season was successful in drawing in large audiences week after week. Taking a look back though, was there too much trippy-Trek™ dessert and not enough of a meaty main course? YMMV surely.
For my part, I can both agree that trippy Trek is something I’ve been wanting more of, and that I would have welcomed 2 or 3 more episodes were more grounded or gave the opportunity to see more of Una as a leader and dug into Ortegas backstory.
The 90s shows seemed to be bit embarrassed by trippyness, although Voyager found its pretext allowed even stern Janeway to pronounce ‘Weird is our business.’ One can argue that the high proportion in SNW is a feature, not a bug.
I’d still prefer a 12-15 episode season though.
Yeah I agree they went too far. Season 2 was disappointing; they seemed to want to spend their time indulging themselves with musical shows and cross overs. It feels like they alternated each episode - one moment you get a serious episode and the next a silly one.
However the season also gave us Ad Astra per Aspera which was one of the best star trek episodes I’ve seen in a long time. Among the Lotus Eaters wasn’t bad; they just didn’t need to shoehorn Khan in - it undermined what was actually otherwise a nice character driven story for La’an. The “should I kill hitler/my grandad” bit at the end was something that could have been impactful but was just didn’t feel right.
Among the Lotus eaters and Lost in Translation were decent serious stories. Under the Cloak of War was an another attempt at a serious episode; it just didn’t come off in the end.
And for me, Those Old Scientists was actually one of my favourite episodes. It was not Ad Astra Per Aspera good, and it was undeniably silly, but there was just something very warm and wholesome about the episode, and it actually reflected much better on Lower Decks than SNW; Boimler and Mariner felt a bit more fleshed out by the episode and it made me more appreciative of the show and what it’s doing.
I think all in all, it was a decent season. It didn’t maintain the high level of quality of the first season, and there were some really poor episodes (the opener Broken Circle and Cherades were terrible, and the muscial episode was just too far EVEN in a season with a crossover with a cartoon) but the highs were high and most of the other episodes were decent even allowing for some silliness. Season 1 was masterful TV in my opinion. Season 2 was decent.
Did they overdo the gimmicks? Yes. I still enjoyed the show despite the flaws but I sincerely hope they reign it in in season 3.