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.
I really hope that SNW keeps any more references to the TOS crew to either one-shot episodes or really short cameos, because I genuinely dig it when SNW does it own thing.
It’s cool to explore Spock, Uhura, and Chapel at this point in their careers, and I’m starting to warm up to including Kirk as a semi-regular on the show, but stuff like putting Scotty in an episode where it would’ve been fine if he was replace by a different character is where I can see it going in an unhealthy direction for the show. We, the viewers, don’t need a ton of these call forwards to the TOS crew because we can reasonably say “oh, they’re all in training/serving on different ships right now” and be ok with it - we don’t need to see Chekov, Sulu, Bones, or anybody else from TOS here if it’s gonna be at the expense of the show itself.