Tuesday TV Touchbase: Star Trek - Strange New Worlds

 So much TV and so little time! 

What to do? What to do?

Last week was the the premier of season 3 of Only Murders In the Building and I really want to talk about that! 

Also last week was the mid-season finale of Outlander and man, do I need to share what I thought of that!

And there's some major stuff going on with My Adventures With Superman and I really would like to talk about that! 

Not to mention whatever the hell is going with What We Do In the Shadows! 

And there's FUBAR! What the hell is FUBAR? I'm gonna tell you.  But not today.  

As you can see from the title, the roulette wheel of "so much TV and so little time" lands on the 2nd season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

Today's Tuesday TV Touchbase will ask the question: "Is season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds the best Star Trek ever?"

OK, let's not oversell this.  The answer to the question "Is season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds the best Star Trek ever?" is...  maybe.  

Your mileage may vary. 

I will say that  season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is the most daring Star Trek ever.  

I think that is a fair assessment for a series that did a crossover with an animated series AND a musical episode in the same season.

"Those Old Scientists" is about as near perfect as one might imagine a crossover between live action Star Trek and the animated Lower Decks.  

The episode kicks off with the opening titles and themes now accompanied by an animated sequence. That strange creature sucking on the Cerrito's warp nacelle in the Lower Decks opening? There it is attached the Enterprise's nacelle.

The episode opens in standard animated Lower Decks style with Boimler, Marriner, Tendi and Rutherford investigating an old portal that suddenly activates and portals Boimler back in time where a very much live action Jack Quaid pops out in front of the Enterprise crew.  

Boimler is trying to adhere to Starfleet rules and regs about time travel but damn, he is nerding the freak out!  The crew manages to technobabble a way to get the portal working again to send Boimler back to his own time but it's juiced up for only one more trip but before Boimler can make that trip, Marriner (Tawny Newsome)  hurtles through the portal to rescue Boimler.  

Now the Enterprise has TWO time travelers to contend with.   

As much fun as it is to throw these two different Star Trek series together, there is still some advancement of various plot lines and character arcs that we've been exploring in Strange New Worlds for Spock, Chapel, Uhura and La'an.    

Two weeks later when we get to the musical episode "Subspace Rhapsody", the inherent gimmick of the cast breaking out into song and dance numbers is not done at the expense of the show. Pike, Uhuru, Spoke, La'an and more experience significant changes in their status quo. Yeah so those changes occurred during Broadway worthy show tunes is beside the point.  

But while Strange New Worlds embraced the outer boundaries of what is possible in a Star Trek show, it could still deliver some really serious intense drama. And nowhere was that more apparent than in the 8th episode of the season, "Under the Cloak of War".  

Besides being a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series, Strange New Worlds is also a sequel to the 1st season of Star Trek: Discovery which if you may recall from those long, long ago days was taken up with an especially violent war between the Federation and the Klingons.   

A Klingon ambassador who known as an especially brutal general during the war visits the Enterprise and some of the crew who witnessed that brutal handiwork on the front lines find that their trauma from that time has far from healed. 

Dr. M'Benga particularly is still damaged from his time in the Klingon war, something we got a look at in season 2's opening episode.  Here it wells up to the point that M'Benga kills the Klingon ambassador. Chapel was a witness and asserts it was self defense. Maybe but it also looked straight up to be a revenge killing. 

We haven't see a turns of events so dark since the depths of the Dominion War in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. 

The season ends with "Hegemony" which finds the Gorn overrunning a colony they insists is in their space and will kill any and all who dare to venture across the line that divides their space from the Federation. Captain Batel, Pike's girlfriend, are among those that are lost across that dividing line and Starfleet orders be damned as the Enterprise makes it's way to the doomed planet.  

There are a lot of technobabble reasons why the Enterprise can't just beam up a bunch of survivors on a quick fly so Pike leads a landing party with Ortegas maneuvering a shuttle to look like space debris.  

There's a lot of balls in the air that don't necessarily land where they're supposed to be but it looks like the crew's crazy fly by the seat of their pants strategies are going to work. 

Until they don't.

And everything that can do wrong goes wrong.

And we fade to black and...

TO BE CONTINUED! 

Well...

FUCK!!!!

There is some criticism from fans on how this series is playing fast and loose with canon. I find a lot of these complaints to be nitpicky, like complaining Batel can't be a captain after the TOS episode "Turnabout Intruder" established women can't be Starfleet captains which was stupid then and even more stupid now and needs to be overlooked.  

But SNW's use of the Gorn does a serious number on the events of the TOS episode "Arena" which completely re-writes everything we learned about the Gorn in that episode. I would like to see SNW's writers reconcile what's happening with the Gorn in SNW with "Arena".   

So....

"Is season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds the best Star Trek ever?" 

Well, over the course of 10 episodes, the season did not have what I would call a dud.  ("Charades" where in Spock is stripped of his Vulcan genetics and is left totally human just as T'Pring's judgmental parents are coming for a visits wobbles a bit with it's 1960's era sitcom shenanigans.)  

And where it swung for the fences like the Lower Decks crossover and the musical episode, Strange New Worlds exceeded expectations and dare I say set the standard for any future Star Trek projects to attain.  

I would pronounce season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds as a whole as very good. 

Coming up in next week on the Touchbase:  

FUBAR and Only Murders In the Building!

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.  

*********BLOG BIDNESS**********
Taking time off from the blog.  

We'll be back on Saturday as the summer play list continues.