Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022-) Review
Not rated
Every other page in this set is my own verdict. This one isn’t, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, so there’s no number on it.
What follows is a survey. Where the critical consensus sits, what the show’s defenders point to, what its critics object to, and what the numbers say happened in the third season.
The short summary is that this is the modern Star Trek with a serious case for it. Critics have rated it well across three seasons, longtime viewers who dislike almost all recent Trek frequently make an exception for it, and the reasons given are consistent enough to take seriously. It’s also now a show with a visible problem, because the third season holds ninety percent with critics and around fifty-two with audiences. That’s the widest split in the series and worth examining instead of dismissing.
That split is what interests me most about this show from the outside. I trust a ninety-to-fifty-two gap more than I trust either number on its own, because it usually means critics and weekly viewers were watching for different things, and I want to know which camp I’ll land in when I do sit down with it.
Where It Came From
The show exists because of a spin-off decision. Anson Mount played Christopher Pike in the second season of Discovery, the response to him was strong enough that Paramount built a series around the character, and reviewers of that season had singled him out.
Paramount responded by giving him the Enterprise. Strange New Worlds premiered in 2022, set roughly a decade before the original series, with Pike commanding the ship Kirk will inherit. Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet created it, with Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers running it. That’s largely the same management as Discovery. It’s the first thing to note about a show that most people consider far better. The cast is Mount as Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, Ethan Peck as Spock, with Jess Bush as Chapel, Christina Chong as La’an, Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura, Babs Olusanmokun as M’Benga and Melissa Navia as Ortegas.
Three seasons have aired. The first in 2022, the second in 2023, and the third from July to September 2025 after the writers’ and actors’ strikes delayed it. A fourth arrived in 2026 and Paramount announced in June 2025 that the fifth will be the last. So it’s a show with a known endpoint. That’s unusual in this franchise and means the final two seasons were written knowing where they finish. The premise everybody names first is Pike’s own future. The original series established in The Menagerie that he ends up catastrophically injured, and this show has him know that, in detail, and take the ship out anyway.
A character who knows his own ending is a structure instead of a gimmick. Every decision he makes comes from somebody who has seen the bill, and the show needs no plot device to keep reminding the audience.
It also solves the prequel problem. A prequel’s weakness is that the audience knows the outcome, and this show made the protagonist know it too. Note that the same management produced Discovery. Whatever separates these two shows isn’t the executive layer. That’s worth knowing before attributing quality to whoever is at the top of a credit list.
What Its Defenders Point To
The praise is consistent across sources and it clusters around three things. The first is the return to episodic storytelling. After Discovery and Picard built whole seasons around single arcs, this show went back to standalone hours, and reviewers repeatedly cite that as the reason it feels like Star Trek again.
The second is tonal range inside that format. One week a submarine thriller with the Gorn, the next a courtroom drama, then a fairytale, then a musical. That’s the anthology instinct the original series had and which a serialized season structurally can’t do. The third is Mount. The assessment I found repeatedly is that Pike is the first likeable Starfleet captain in modern Trek, that he’s competent without being tortured, and that he makes decisions instead of agonizing about them.
Reviewers who dislike most recent Star Trek tend to make this exact exception. The line from one long-running reviewer was that it captured the spirit of the original series while carrying some modern sensibility, and that framing recurs almost verbatim in several places.
TrekCore, which covers the franchise closely, has called it their favorite of the Kurtzman-era live action shows, and said so even in a review of the third season finale that acknowledged the season’s problems.
The critical scores support all of it. The first two seasons were strongly reviewed and the third holds ninety percent with critics. That makes this the best reviewed Star Trek since the nineties.
The Episodes Most Often Named
If somebody is going to sample it instead of watch it, these are the hours that come up repeatedly in other people’s accounts.
Ad Astra Per Aspera is the one named first and most often. Number One is court-martialled over illegal genetic modification, the episode is largely a courtroom, and the argument turns on whether a law written to prevent another Khan is being used to persecute refugees. A Quality of Mercy closes the first season and is the other consistently cited one. Pike is shown a version of his own future in which he avoided the accident, and the consequence is a restaging of the original series episode Balance of Terror with him in Kirk’s place.
Those Old Scientists is the Lower Decks crossover, which puts two animated characters into live action, and it’s unusually well regarded for a stunt. My Lower Decks review covers it from the other side. Memento Mori is the Gorn submarine episode from the first season. Under the Cloak of War is the darkest hour the show has made, with M’Benga confronting a Klingon war criminal, and it’s the episode that divides people most sharply.
Subspace Rhapsody is the musical episode. That’s exactly as polarizing as that sounds, and Through the Lens of Time is named as the third season’s standout.
Beyond those, The Elysian Kingdom, Charades and Hegemony come up, the middle one being the sitcom-adjacent hour that some reviewers flag as the first sign of the tonal problem that arrived properly in season three.
What Its Critics Object To
The criticism is also consistent and it’s mostly about canon and tone instead of about craft.
The Gorn are the biggest specific complaint. The original series established them in one episode as a reptilian species capable of negotiation, and this show rebuilt them as a fast-breeding horror-movie threat with a war history nobody had mentioned in sixty years.
The objection is about the name. The series used it for a species that shares nothing with the original, and one reviewer asked the obvious question: why not simply invent a new species and skip the borrowed recognition? I agree with that complaint on principle before I’ve seen a single frame. Hanging a famous name on a different creature is lazy, and this franchise keeps doing it.
Scotty is the other one. He was introduced in the second season finale with a Gorn history the original series never hinted at, and played by an actor that several reviewers consider far too young for where the character should be at that point. The broader canon complaint is that the show places characters aboard the Enterprise who shouldn’t be there yet, in positions the original series contradicts, and does it often enough that one audience reviewer’s summary was that it doesn’t keep any Star Trek canon in mind.
The tonal complaint is separate and grew louder over time. The comparison that recurs is to a sitcom, with one audience review saying plainly that they didn’t want to watch Friends in space.
And a structural complaint that’s worth more than either is that the exploration is thin. The line I found best was somebody pointing out that Deep Space Nine did more space exploration than this, and Deep Space Nine is set on a station that doesn’t move. That Deep Space Nine line made me laugh out loud, and it’s the criticism I’d most want the show to answer when I get to it, because a series with this title owes its audience some actual exploring.
Borrowing a name buys recognition and inherits an obligation. If your species shares nothing with the established version, the name is costing you more than it earns, and inventing a new one is free. This is the same fault as the Klingon redesign in Discovery, which my review of that show covers at length, and the franchise has now made it twice. A title makes a promise. A show called Strange New Worlds is being measured against how many strange new worlds are in it, and the most damaging criticism of it is that a station-bound series explored more.
The Third Season Split the Audience From the Critics
Season three holds around ninety percent with critics and around fifty-two with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, from over five hundred user reviews. That’s the show’s lowest audience score and the widest gap in its run. The Nielsen pattern matches. The season debuted at number seven in the week of release, re-entered the top ten in its fourth week, and then episodes five through ten failed to chart at all.
What reviewers describe is a season of big swings. Comedy, zombie horror, self-parody, documentary format and outright farce. That’s genre-hopping instead of the tonal range the first two seasons were praised for. Two episodes come up as the breaking points. Four-and-a-half Vulcans is the farce that reviewers say struck a nerve, and Wedding Bell Blues is the one described as going the sitcom route far enough that people nearly switched off. The most useful fact is that the production appears to agree. Reviewers reported the writers acknowledging they’d missed the mark and saying the fourth season would return to what worked. That’s an unusually direct admission.
So the real summary of season three is that it’s well made, ambitious, tonally scattered, and that the people watching it weekly liked it considerably less than the people reviewing it. Both of those can be true and the gap is the interesting part.
The Structural Argument Underneath All of It
One explanation I came across is better than anything about individual episodes and it applies to every modern Star Trek on this list. The argument is that the production model changed. From the original series through Enterprise, the norm was a large writing staff plus a rotating pool of guest writers, including published science fiction authors, all producing scripts and redrafting each other’s work continuously.
That produced volume, and volume permitted selection. A staff generating far more scripts than it needed could choose the best ones and put every one through second and third drafts before anybody filmed it.
Streaming inverted it. Ten episodes instead of twenty-six, a small permanent room, no guest pool, and every commissioned script effectively getting made because there’s no surplus to choose from. That’s the same point my original series review makes from the other end. Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad and Jerome Bixby, none of whom were on staff, wrote the best hours of 1967, and no modern Trek has an equivalent pipeline. It also explains the failure mode of season three better than any complaint about tone. A season of ten big swings is what you get when every idea in the room has to become an episode, because there’s no reservoir of safer scripts to balance against them.
Whether that’s the whole explanation I don’t know, and I haven’t watched the show, so I’m reporting an argument instead of endorsing it. It’s the most persuasive thing I read while looking.
Volume permits selection and selection is what quality really is. A staff producing forty scripts for twenty-six slots can discard sixteen, and a room producing ten for ten can’t discard anything.
That’s worth applying to your own output. Anything you write that must be used will be worse than anything you write that might not be. A rotating pool of outside contributors is the mechanism modern television has lost. The best hours of 1960s Star Trek came from people who didn’t work there.
Look for the production model before blaming the writers. The constraint usually explains more than the talent does.
Where It Stands
On the evidence I’ve gathered instead of watched, this is the modern Star Trek with the strongest case for it and the one I’d try first.
The reasons are the ones its defenders give and they’re structural instead of a matter of taste. Episodic storytelling permits tonal variety, a captain who knows his own ending gives every decision a cost, and a known endpoint means the last two seasons were written toward something. The reasons against are also structural and they’re the franchise’s recurring habit. A borrowed species name attached to a different species, characters placed where established material says they weren’t, and a title promising exploration that reviewers say is thin. The third season is the warning. Ninety percent with critics and fifty-two with audiences, a Nielsen collapse across the back half, and a production that’s publicly said it missed.
What that suggests is that the fourth and fifth seasons are the ones to judge it on, since the writers stated they were returning to the earlier approach and the ending was known while they were making them.
My own position is that I haven’t seen it and won’t pretend to a verdict. When I do watch it, this page gets a number and my own account of why, and the survey above stays so anybody can see what the reception was before I weighed in.
Anybody who has watched it and disagrees with any of the above is better placed than I am. That’s the only honest way to end a page like this one.
Say when you haven’t read the thing. A survey of reception is useful and a borrowed opinion presented as a verdict isn’t, and the difference costs nothing to state. Readers forgive not knowing. They don’t forgive being told you knew.
A page that reports a disagreement is more useful than one that resolves it. The ninety and the fifty-two are both real and the gap is the information.
Should you watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
Unrated, because I haven’t watched it. The best reviewed modern Star Trek by a distance, praised for returning to episodic storytelling and for a captain who knows exactly how his story ends, criticized for borrowing the Gorn’s name for a different species and for exploring less than a show set on a stationary space station, and split ninety to fifty-two between critics and audiences in a third season its own writers say missed the mark.
