Seven episodes in, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just debuted its first original idea of the season. And then it ruined it with a documentary gimmick and perverted it by brushing aside the story’s big ideas in favor of, once again, obsessing over new characters.
The episode is called “What Is Starfleet?” and involves the Enterprise crew in a mission to transport a living weapon from the ocean surface of a planet to a neighboring species embroiled in a brutal war. The weapon turns out to be intelligent, suffering, and an unwilling participant. The Enterprise crew must grapple with the moral implications of following their mission while at the same time finding a way to communicate with this dazzling and deadly creature. Or at least that’s the story happening in the background.
Documentary style artifice in “What Is Starfleet?”
That story is a classic kind of science fiction tale, one we haven’t seen done quite this way before. Had that been the episode’s focus, this could have been one of the best entries in the entire series. Unfortunately, it’s not.
The real focus of the episode is a story that’s been building up for a while now on the show. Erica Ortega’s brother has been on the ship filming a documentary, and the episode plays out on screen as if we’re watching his finished doc.
Grainy footage from “What Is Starfleet?”
So, instead of seeing this beautiful butterfly-like creature billowing across the screen and battling with starships, we’re stuck watching what looks like pretty great FX work by the Strange New Worlds team through grainy security camera footage and off-kilter documentary angles, interspersed with The Office-style interviews with the crew.
It’s like they watched Ice Cube’s now infamous take on War of the Worlds and thought it seemed fun. It’s not fun. It sucks.
The real focus of the story is the documentarian filming everything, Beto Ortega. Beto has hidden and nefarious motives, and the episode eventually turns into a recruitment video for Starfleet, but not before also being a total indictment of the press. Beto’s there with an axe to grind and isn’t interested in telling the true story of what’s happening. Unfortunately, that story is all the audience is interested in, but Strange New Worlds doesn’t seem to care about its audience.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds can’t seem to get out of its own way. It continues to pursue overwrought character drama at the expense of good ideas. Usually, this is because the show’s writers don’t have any good ideas, but this time, they did. Instead of exploring them, the show threw them all away.
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