Strange New Lows

Adam Kotsko boldly goes into season three of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” with high expectations.

By Adam KotskoNovember 7, 2025

• SF

• Television

Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers for the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

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WHEN STAR TREK returned to the small screen in 2017 after nearly a decade of absence, it was clear that the producers wanted not to churn out more of the same but rather to transform the venerable franchise from within. Each new series started with a distinct point of view—and, in the case of the first two live-action series, even a thesis statement.

The dark and complex first season of Discovery (2017–24) aimed to bring the franchise into the prestige era, exchanging the ensemble cast of past installments for a focus on a single main character, and the episodic format for an intricate serialized plot. Discovery also tried to inject genuine terror into two mainstays of franchise lore that had most often been played as campy and fun: the Mirror Universe, a realm of endless scheming and violence where everyone has an evil double, and the Klingons, the warlike species who had largely come across in earlier series as a biker gang in medieval cosplay. The first season of Picard (2020–23) took a similarly counterintuitive approach, converting what many had expected to be a Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) reunion show into an opportunity to question the supposed utopian future of the Federation.

As nearly always happens when a beloved franchise attempts to reimagine itself, a backlash ensued, leading to an attempt to placate dedicated fans with a return to more familiar territory. Discovery’s ambitious (and therefore controversial) first season was followed by a second that was so full of fan service that most of the new characters and concepts were crowded out. Desperate to prove Discovery’s bona fides as a prequel to the original series, it brought on Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Captain James T. Kirk’s predecessor as commanding officer of the USS Enterprise, along with his first officer Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and a young Spock (Ethan Peck). The legacy characters were so popular that Mount organized a fan campaign to launch a new series based on the Enterprise’s early adventures.

In keeping with its origins, the thesis statement of that series, Strange New Worlds (2022– ), at first seemed to be that the original Star Trek (1966–69) was fine just as it was and that all the changes introduced by Discovery and Picard needed to be discarded. The result, at least for the first two seasons, was an homage to the original series, returning to the more purely episodic format but with better production values and better-looking actors. Where each of the other series sought a uniform tone and pacing throughout its whole run, the early seasons of Strange New Worlds were self-consciously eclectic, shuttling back and forth from action to comedy while exploring tropes from science fiction, horror, and even fantasy. Many of the characters are younger versions of the crew from the original series, including Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), with Kirk (Paul Wesley) as a recurring guest star. The characters unique to the series tend to be young as well, giving the show the feel of a young adult drama—something like Star Trek: The College Years. The character arcs that emerged tended to be romance-focused, sometimes suggested by material from the original series (e.g., a slow-burn mutual crush between Spock and Nurse Chapel) but never strictly requiring knowledge of past lore. And to the extent that these things are knowable in the streaming era, Strange New Worlds appeared to be a genuine hit, garnering positive reviews in mainstream venues and even (briefly) bringing the franchise back for terrestrial broadcast during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike.

Sadly, the honeymoon has ended. In the long hiatus between the end of season two in August 2023 and the beginning of season three in July 2025, Strange New Worlds went from being the cherry on top of an era of ambition and expansion for the franchise to the last man standing. As the new season aired, the studio announced it had renewed the series for a 10-episode fourth season and a truncated six-episode fifth, at which point it would definitely end. And even that reprieve appears to have been unexpected, as the finale of season three wraps up essentially all outstanding plot threads and moves all the chess pieces needed to set up the original series. By all evidence, then, the showrunners thought they were closing up shop with this season. Under such circumstances, it was natural that the writers and producers would begin thinking about their work’s legacy—and that they would want to be able to say they had contributed something more distinctive and meaningful than a grab bag of random adventures.

Suddenly, the charmingly low-stakes, low-ambition amusement of Strange New Worlds was in search of a more ambitious thesis statement than “Star Trek was already great.” No viewer of season three could fail to recognize that the writers were trying to “say something” about the franchise. Nor, unfortunately, could any viewer clearly articulate what that “something” was. The result was the worst of both worlds. The failed attempt to converge on an overarching message distorted the storytelling and undercut much of what was enjoyable about the show, without providing any actual payoff in terms of thematic unity or insight into what might be considered important or enduring about Star Trek as a franchise. This lack of clear purpose plays out in the season’s plotting, which lays out a complicated mystery-box plot across the majority of the episodes but goes to great lengths to obscure that fact until the season finale.

The season begins, in classic Trek fashion, with the resolution of a cliff-hanger from the previous season. Previously on Strange New Worlds, the Gorn—a reptilian alien species familiar from the original series, who have been the primary villains for Pike’s crew so far—attacked a Federation colony where Pike’s girlfriend, Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano), was leading a resupply mission and is now infected with Gorn eggs. (Presented as lumbering dinosaurs in the original series, the Gorn’s Strange New Worlds iteration unexpectedly takes on many traits of the Alien franchise’s xenomorphs: fast, slimy, and terrifying.) The season ends with Batel’s fate unclear and a number of crew members stranded on the planet’s surface, with Pike under orders to withdraw immediately.

Unsurprisingly, the new season begins with Pike choosing loyalty to his crew over obedience to the chain of command. Everyone is rescued, the Gorn are neutralized, and Batel’s Gorn infection is halted through the timely application of a dose of genetically augmented blood from Number One. (The apparently human first officer’s secret identity as a member of a species that practices genetic engineering, which is strictly forbidden by the Federation, was a major plot arc in season two.) As with many season-bridging two-parters throughout Star Trek history, the conclusion to Strange New Worlds’ season three opener was anticlimactic, with seemingly endless action sequences that made it hard to track the emotional stakes. But this apparent resolution to season two’s finale unexpectedly laid down multiple plotlines for the remainder of the season. Not only will Batel’s Gorn problem persist, ultimately providing the solution to the season’s newly introduced big bad, but the ship’s young pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) is also wounded by the Gorn and will be persistently haunted by the trauma.

The misleading sense of turning the page after the season premiere was exacerbated by the radical lurch in tone to romantic comedy in the second episode, “Wedding Bell Blues,” which was released concurrently with the season premiere. It is the first of three comedy episodes, which all follow very serious installments. Here the mischievous extradimensional being Trelane (known to fans of the original series, and portrayed this time by Rhys Darby) grants Spock’s unconscious wish that Nurse Chapel could marry him rather than her new boyfriend Dr. Richard Korby (also known to original series fans as her long-lost fiancé), now played by Cillian O’Sullivan. “A Space Adventure Hour” anachronistically introduces the franchise’s trademark ultrarealistic immersive-simulation generator to present a Next Generation–style holodeck episode that sets a murder mystery in the milieu of a struggling science fiction series much like the original Star Trek. Not only does this episode gratuitously revive the least-loved episode format of the Next Generation era, but its tribute to the original cast and production team often verges on mockery as well. Worst of all is “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” where a transporter accident turns multiple human crew members into Vulcans, causing them to behave in ethnocentric and narrow-minded ways. In the series’ absolute nadir, the writers undercut everything we know about Vulcans—whose coldly “logical” demeanor is a cultural achievement, not a genetic trait—for the sake of some bad jokes.

The one crew member who did not participate in the tonal shift between the first two episodes was Ortegas, whose Gorn-induced trauma continued to haunt her. Things only get worse for her in “Shuttle to Kenfori,” which has Pike and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) trapped on a zombie-ridden planet alongside a Klingon captain out to avenge her father, whom M’Benga had killed in the second-season episode “Under the Cloak of War.” That episode was, in my view, easily the best of Strange New Worlds, exploring the trauma and moral compromises of war in a way not seen since the lengthy Dominion War arc of Deep Space Nine (1993–99). In that earlier installment, the Enterprise hosts the Klingon defector Dak’Rah (Robert Wisdom), whom M’Benga knows to have covered up serious war crimes in order to stay in his former enemies’ good graces. When an opportunity arises to kill him while maintaining the plausible deniability of self-defense, M’Benga does so, in a way that seemed to me at the time interestingly to push the boundaries of Star Trek’s sometimes simplistic moralism.

But when the revenge plot of “Shuttle to Kenfori” makes it clear that M’Benga had deceived the captain about killing Dak’Rah solely in self-defense, Pike shrugs it off. In fact, he seizes on the fact that their current mission—which violated Klingon space in order to seek out a rare plant that will allow them to stabilize Batel’s condition by splicing Gorn genes into her DNA—was unauthorized as an excuse not to report him. Meanwhile, back on the ship, the poor, traumatized Ortegas, emboldened by the illegality of their mission, defies orders to execute a highly risky rescue attempt, for which action she is temporarily relieved of duty and assigned extra training. It is difficult to know what to take away from this episode other than the idea that orders and even laws are for the little people—surely a very anti–Star Trek message.

“Through the Lens of Time” is the season’s midpoint and its most overloaded episode. It is also the most graphically violent, as a young ensign on his first away mission has his eyes ripped out by a demonic alien who then possesses him and uses his body as an avatar to terrorize the ship. Out of nowhere, Batel (conveniently visiting the Enterprise) goes feral and physically subdues the possessed crewman when no one else can. Presumably, this is her Gorn DNA at work, though she never uses this ability again. Meanwhile, back on the surface, the remaining away team works through a multidimensional time-travel puzzle in a way that helps Spock bond with Korby even as Chapel learns to live with the fact that series-original character La’an (Christina Chong) has replaced her in Spock’s affections. The away team ultimately learns that the multidimensional time-travel puzzle was in fact a prison for the evil beings who possessed the poor ensign and that they would ravage the entire galaxy if they ever got loose. I can imagine a version of this story centered solely on the puzzle aspect that would have worked as a classic Star Trek episode, but what we actually got involved juggling so many different (sub)plots and themes that it felt garbled and almost random. In particular, the introduction of evil demons seemed both overkill and contrary to the spirit of Star Trek, where every adversary holds the potential for redemption.

Perhaps the best episode of the season, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” focuses on Lieutenant James T. Kirk, the youngest first officer in Starfleet history, who takes command after his ship, the Farragut, is attacked and his captain temporarily disabled. The Enterprise sends over a rescue crew consisting of Spock, Chapel, Uhura, and Scotty (Martin Quinn, who joined the cast in the season two finale)—essentially all the show’s legacy characters who will “later” serve under Kirk in the original series. The Enterprise itself is attacked by a mysterious ship-eating vessel, and we get to see Kirk in his first substantial command role as the battered Farragut attempts a rescue. It is the kind of prequel concept that makes one nervous, but the writers handle it deftly. We see that Kirk already has his trademark bold and brash style, but he needs tempering from the rest of the ensemble, especially Spock. One lingering question about Strange New Worlds has always been why so many legacy characters turn out to have served under Pike, but this episode justifies it with the best kind of retcon, showing that Kirk is only the sort of leader he is because his crew helped him get there.

Much less successful is the attempt in “What Is Starfleet?” to clarify one of the biggest questions in Star Trek lore: is Starfleet a proper military or a peaceful exploration and diplomacy force that just happens to get into all kinds of violent scrapes? In-universe, the episode shares the title of a documentary produced by Ortegas’s brother Beto (Mynor Luken), who has been looming in the background for several episodes. The film itself turns out to be a highly tendentious attempt to discredit Starfleet—not out of any political commitment but simply because he resents the fact that Starfleet took his sister away from him and put her in danger. Prior to this revelation, we never see any evidence that they are especially close siblings. In fact, he spends much of his screen time flirting with Uhura, who urges him to focus on the fact that Starfleet is a supportive “found family” for its members. The question of why this “found family” needs to be so heavily armed remains unresolved.

The penultimate episode, “Terrarium,” is an homage to the original-series episode “Arena,” in which the Gorn debuted. It revisits a perennial Star Trek trope: being stuck on a planet alone with a hostile alien. In this case, Ortegas is stranded on a planet on the far side of an unstable wormhole with what turns out to be a female Gorn. As the two learn to overcome their differences (including the untranslatability of the Gorn’s click-based language), Uhura leads the charge to mount a rescue of Ortegas—cooking the books along the way to make the mission appear less risky than it is. This provides a chance for Pike to display one last failure of leadership, as he reveals that he knew all along she was falsifying the data and chose to let it go and pursue the mission anyway. The moment is baffling, but we have no time to dwell on it as the rescue mission turns tragic. Security chief La’an, who has her own long-standing Gorn trauma, immediately opens fire on Ortegas’s new Gorn friend, killing her. Time then stops, and Ortegas receives a message from the Metrons, the transdimensional aliens who will arrange Kirk’s encounter with a Gorn in “Arena.” We learn that they have been engineering all of the Enterprise’s encounters with the Gorn as part of a broader exploration of whether the two very different species can live together. In addition to being a satisfying episode in itself, “Terrarium” helps to ease the fears of fans who worried about how the new lore about the Gorn introduced in Strange New Worlds lined up with what we knew from the original series.

Up until the finale, the season appeared to be highly episodic, with a wide variety of tones and genres represented. What plot arcs existed—Ortegas’s Gorn trauma, her brother’s documentary, Batel’s Gorn-related medical issues—seemed to have been largely resolved. As “New Life and New Civilizations” reveals, however, that impression was mistaken. It turns out that the entire season had an overarching arc centered on the demons that possessed the poor ensign in “Through the Lens of Time” and are now on the verge of escaping. It also turns out that Batel’s apparently random afflictions and cures amounted to a quest to collect power-ups so that she could serve—via various time-travel paradoxes—as the eternal guardian of the multidimensional puzzle box in which the demons were imprisoned. Prior to assuming this grim duty, she and Pike are treated to the vision of an alternative future where they enjoy a long life together, fulfilled by marriage, family, and even grandchildren.

This long dream sequence works as an homage to Pike’s original-series appearances in “The Cage” and “The Menagerie,” which both deal with themes of fantasy and loss. But it emphatically does not work as an organic outgrowth of the season of television we have just watched. The notion that Batel has secretly been the main character of this season is absurd—she is always a B or C plot, always only passing through. We are given no reason to care about her and hence no reason to mourn her loss. What is more, the focus on Pike himself feels out of place, as he has increasingly become a spectator on his own ship and his own show. Part of the problem is that the writers repeatedly indulge the widespread trope that an exceptionally handsome man must always and only be used as comic relief. (In this respect, Jon Hamm has a lot to answer for.) But another, bigger part of the problem is that Anson Mount lacks the gravitas, and frankly the acting chops, to carry the role of captain in the long run. There was always a sense in which he was just a placeholder for Kirk, but the yawning gap between how much the finale expects us to care about Pike and how little reason we have been given to do so is the clearest evidence yet that the series has no idea what to do with its ostensible main character.

The final scene of the season—which I suspect the writers saw as potentially the final scene of the series—is a tacit admission of the issue, as Pike more or less asks the crew what they should do next. I don’t know, and it’s clear that the writers and producers don’t know either. The fact that the strongest episodes of season three of Strange New Worlds were directly setting up Kirk (“The Sehlat”) and fixing a continuity mess of their own making (“Terrarium”) is surely symptomatic of the show’s increasing directionlessness. When they announced that Strange New Worlds would have only one-and-a-half more seasons, I felt sad that it would be so few. Now I fear that it may be too many.