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'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' was afraid to say anything in season of gimmicks
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It didn’t take long for fans to figure out that the fourth season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" was going to be unlike any season of "Star Trek" before it. The entire season was one giant gimmick, and that gimmick was shoving "Trek" into as many genres as possible and often directly adapting classic films from those genres.
You could argue that an entire season of gimmick episodes is a bold risk: putting the characters in fun, wacky situations to see how they react. It could be interesting, but the season we got never made the most of the concept. It was all so safe and paint-by-numbers, and, most importantly, it didn't have anything profound or interesting to say.
That should trouble any Trekkie. "Star Trek" — a show built on progressive ideals, thoughtful characters, and boundary-breaking television — was completely and totally afraid to say anything at all.
To be clear, "Star Trek" is no stranger to genre mashups, and they're not inherently a bad thing. Trek has been running for nearly 1,000 total episodes, and they've been doing mashups since the very first season of "Star Trek: The Original Series", which featured gangster, historical fiction, and war-themed episodes.
The holodeck took things further, giving the writers an excuse to set the action anywhere they could dream up. No more alien planets that look suspiciously like Earth were necessary to completely flip the series’ genre; just work up a hologram malfunction and suddenly "Trek" is a Sherlock Holmes-esque mystery or a noir thriller. And even without the holodeck, genres are fluid things that often take from each other to tell stories within each other’s realms.
But while "Trek" has always dabbled, it's never done an entire season of genre episodes… in fact, that might be unprecedented in all of science fiction TV itself, let alone "Star Trek". This season of "SNW" didn’t use occasional gimmicks to take a break from space fare; it was all gimmick, all the time.
* Some of you are screaming that Episode 4 was a noir. It was not. Not everything in black and white with fedoras is noir.
"Strange New Worlds" season 4 was genre-blending at scale. This wasn’t a hint of another genre influencing the episode; it was full-blown immersion into each and every one.
In the past, when other genres have come into "Trek", the series still felt tonally consistent; the characters never bent to the will of the genre, and its direction stayed the same. That was not true of this season. Characters, directorial style, and tone all bent to the will of the selected genre instead of fitting into the already established universe. There were multiple episodes this season that felt nothing like a "Star Trek" episode.