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.
Yep, exactly. Especially given how much the hype for SNW started with how much everyone loved Pike. He’s an alternative take on the whole Kirk thing, a modern reframing of the Star Trek positive masculinity. I also think continuing from The Cage with Number One etc was part of the excitement. Not a reboot or alternative timeline, but a lost story that could be told for todays audience.
I’m not sure how much hype was driven by TOS prequel potential. I’d bet not much at all (recall the negative reaction many had to the enterprise even showing up at the end of DISCO S1).
So, when TOS characters start turning up (Uhura counts here IMO), you have to be suspicious that it’s the studio hedging their bets over the money pot that a TOS reboot could be for them and forcing the show runners into it.