One of the many criticisms that emerged from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ uneven third season was that the show struggled with the effective balance it had maintained in its first two seasons between classical action-adventure episodes in the vein of Star Trek‘s past and more outlier (and largely lighter-hearted) one-off episodes that put zany premises over building on character arcs and a broader seasonal narrative.
Those episodes are clearly not going away as we get closer and closer to Strange New Worlds‘ end—after all, we are getting an episode where the crew becomes puppets next season—but they may become a bit more sparse as the show tries to make the most of the time it has left with these characters.
“We’re making season five now, we’re trending towards that, which is probably the center line of Star Trek, right?” Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told Screenrant of Strange New Worlds‘ final episodes. “We’re trending now, and beginning with season four and through season five, to a much more singular sci-fi, action-adventure, emotional storytelling. And you know, the outliers are getting less and less as we kind of focus on saying goodbye to each other and the fans.”
It’s the latest in what’s been a bit of a promotional apology tour in the wake of season three’s release, which has already seen the crew behind the show promise fans that the show’s last batches of episodes will be stronger than the unevenness of season three. With season four being the last full installment of the series—season five will be truncated down to just six episodes—the series doesn’t have a lot of time to spend with either its version of classic original series characters and getting them on the path to their places in that show or its remaining original characters that, presumably, have to eventually move on from the Enterprise in one way or another by Strange New Worlds‘ end.
It might be a while before we start seeing the fruits of Goldsman’s promises, but at least there’s something to be hopeful for as we wait for season four and beyond.
After a bumpy end to a very uneven third season, it seems like Strange New Worlds is beginning to realize that its next mission is a course correction.
At New York Comic Con today, Paramount revealed our first proper look at the penultimate season of the Star Trek prequel show, after teasing some puppetry-based shenanigans at SDCC over the summer. The extended sequence strikes a much more serious tone in stark contrast, as the U.S.S. Enterprise‘s attempts to respond to a Starfleet mayday broadcast lead to the ship being trapped in a strange phenomenon that robs the ship of all but a smidgen of its power.
Even putting aside Captain Pike literally telling Number One (and the audience) that they wanted more strange new worlds, the choice of a more traditionally toned clip as our introduction to season 4 certainly feels like it’s aimed to address criticisms of Strange New Worlds‘ third season.
Although season 4 itself will not act as a direct response to those criticisms—filming wrapped this past August, before season 3 concluded airing—the choice certainly echoes recent commentary by Strange New Worlds producers Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers that the new season is aiming to address some of those criticisms regardless.
“We just had more time [for season 4]. Just had more time, more continuous time,” Goldsman told TrekMovie of the mixed reaction to season 3. “We didn’t have staffing changes. We didn’t have a strike. The strike caused change. Those things are real. And starting up and shutting down and starting up again is complicated.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is expected to return for its fourth season sometime next year. The show will then wrap up with a truncated, six-episode season five, which is currently in production.
The potential for what journalism looks like in Star Trek is a heady idea that’s been around as long as the series itself. What does reporting the news look like in utopia? What does it mean that the Federation has its own news networks, alongside a host of interstellar media organizations? What does freedom of information mean in a universe that has Starfleet? And yet, we’ve actually had very few characters appear in the series as fully dedicated journalists and reporters.
That changed a little with this week’s episode of Strange New Worlds, “What Is Starfleet?”, which, well… okay, yeah. It was pretty atrocious journalism. But Mynor Lüken’s Beto Ortegas joins a rarefied crew of professional media in Star Trek to have significant roles in the series, for better or worse. So speaking of for better, at least, let’s take a look at who’s got their press hat on tightest in the arena of boldly going.
Again, you should probably just read our recap of “What Is Starfleet?” to see why Beto is ranked here. There’s certainly an argument to be made that not necessarily all documentary filmmakers are journalists, but it’s pretty clear that Beto was, at least, trying to engage in investigative journalism in documenting life aboard Enterprise and its reflection of the Federation’s role. Emphasis on the trying there, because what he did really, really sucked!
On the one hand, Gannet probably shouldn’t be on here. Her job as a journalist was in fact deep cover for her real work with Starfleet Intelligence during the events of Enterprise‘s fourth season—work that got her accused by Archer of potentially being a member of the human-supremacist group Terra Prime. On the other, while ostensibly acting as a journalist, Gannet did both wiretap translator devices at a conference to record attending delegates and, through Mayweather, did ultimately engage in a sexual relationship with a source while purportedly working on a story about the NX-01. Slightly different realm of ethics for an intelligence operative, but definitely not ideal for her cover story in journalism.
Better known for her appearance in the Deep Space Nine episode “Profit and Loss” as a then-current professor of political ethics on Cardassia (and in actuality a radical member of the dissident movement fleeing the wrath of the Cardassian high command), Lang was previously a correspondent for the Cardassian Communication Service during the occupation of Bajor, working directly on Terok Nor. Unfortunately, it’s during that assignment that she met and fell in love with Quark, who promptly used her press access codes to directly steal money from the Cardassian government.
Good for Quark (although he was obviously not stealing from the Cardassian occupation forces for altruistic reasons), but deeply embarrassing for Lang.
Neelix briefly dabbles in the world of independent journalism early on in Voyager, when he attempts to kickstart a daily news program aboard the ship in “Investigations” called A Briefing With Neelix. Although Neelix does attempt to rigorously defend his hard pivot from general interest puff pieces to investigative journalism when he breaks the news that Tom Paris had purportedly been removed from the ship for collaborating with the Kazon, even when pressured by Tuvok to drop his investigation, ultimately he does end up collaborating with Captain Janeway and Tuvok to allow A Briefing With Neelix to be used as bait to catch the real collaborator, Michael Jonas. Can you be state media if the state is a single starship?
Do you know how bad everyone below Sylvia Ront on this list has to be at journalism to not even get past a character with a handful of minutes of screentime who simply just reads the broadcast news?
On the one hand, Jake gets away with an awful lot of his mistakes as a reporter for the Federation News Service on account of being a literal teenager on the front lines of one of the deadliest interstellar conflicts ever seen by the Federation. Hell, he reports from aboard the Defiant during military engagements and even willingly stays behind on the Dominion-occupied DS9 to report the stories of what is really going on there when the Federation is forced to abandon the station, even if his stories are ultimately censored from distribution by the Dominion.
On the other hand, kid or otherwise, Jake is kind of just not that great at his job. For one of his first stories, about a potential non-aggression agreement between Bajor and the Dominion, Jake sources key contextual information—that Captain Sisko, and through him the Federation, is against the pact—from offhand conversations with his father, who was unaware that his son had joined the Federation News Service. Ben shouldn’t have been discussing Starfleet matters with his son, arguably, but Jake also should’ve reached out to his dad as commander of DS9 and Starfleet’s primary representative for comment officially, instead of simply going “the source is literally my dad.” Speaking of that, what he should’ve done was have the story assigned to another reporter, given his direct personal relationship to important figures involved in it!
Marci Collins—the late ’90s 3 Action News reporter we see in Voyager‘s Y2K-era flashback “11:59″—doesn’t really get to do much other than be a consistent voice reporting on the events the audience is watching unfold in the episode, as we see the story of how one of Janeway’s ancestors was convinced to close their bookstore and make way for the construction of the Millennium Gate, the first self-sustaining civic environment, a predecessor to future interstellar colonies. But the fact that the simple act of being a journalist who does their job completely perfunctorily makes her one of the best Star Trek has put on screen speaks to the franchise’s peculiar history with the press.
We’re ranking her above Ront simply because she’s on screen a bit more.
A reporter for the Federation News Network who appears in Picard‘s very first episode, we as an audience are kind of meant to see Richter in part as a bit of an antagonist: she agrees to a very strict set of conditions in order to get access to interview the retired Jean-Luc, including the stipulation that she not ask questions about why he left Starfleet. She does so anyway, leading to Picard having an angry outburst on camera and storming off mid-interview, reflecting very badly on himself in the process.
So sure, boo, the episode frames it as our beloved hero is seemingly ambushed and made to feel bad by a “mean” reporter. But even putting aside whether or not Richter should’ve agreed to the interview on the basis of controlling what questions she can ask, she did ask a perfectly reasonable question that was of considerable public interest to a person who still wielded a great deal of political power. She wasn’t particularly combative with him; she just didn’t offer a softball interview either. Sometimes journalism is about the risk of making people uncomfortable by asking the right questions!
The reporter behind the exposé “Starfleet’s Shame” that uncovered the misconduct (misconstrued or otherwise) by Captain Freeman aboard the Cerritos during the events of Lower Decks season three’s climax, Nuzé is shown to be an incredibly rigorous reporter, especially in light of Captain Freeman’s panicked overreaction to her presence aboard the ship. Her extensive report is not only built on interviewing tons of sources, but also her getting around Freeman’s attempts to blacklist certain personnel from talking to the press (mainly Mariner) speaks to her diligence as a reporter.
Also, she’s literally named “Nuzé.” Talk about the perfect person for the job.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is, at this point, very clearly a series that is unafraid to dabble in its format on a regular basis. That can lead to episodes of Star Trek that don’t necessarily look or feel like what we expect of Star Trek, even if they still play with ideas and approaches that fit into what the franchise has done for generations now. This week’s Strange New Worlds definitely fits into both of those ideas, with an episode in a new format, an in-universe documentary, and an episode that tries to raise one of the oldest critiques of the franchise with one question: is Starfleet an organization of scientific inquiry or a martial tool of empire?
Unfortunately, this means this is an episode that wants to be two things at once… and ultimately spectacularly fails at being either.
“What Is Starfleet?” tells two stories at once. One is the Enterprise‘s mission to the Lutani—a non-Federation civilization which has requested aid in a conflict with their sister world, Kasar, through the transportation of a large spacefaring creature called a Jikaru, a giant part-whale, part-moth kind of psionically powerful sentient being for purposes unknown. It quickly becomes clear to the Enterprise crew that, despite their strict orders from Starfleet command, they have concerns about the Lutani’s treatment of the Jikaru and their intent for the creature in a war that they are in the process of losing badly. Although the story never explicitly details just how impactful the casualty figures of the Lutani/Kasar conflict are to their respective peoples, we are told that nine million Lutani had perished, to “just” 119,000 Kasar in comparison.
There is an interesting set of morals at play here that Strange New Worlds allows its vast swath of characters to come at from different angles, giving “What Is Starfleet?” a ton of potential. Ortegas is distrusting of working with the Lutani because the species purportedly supported the Klingons and raided Starfleet shipments during the Empire’s war with the Federation. Pike and Una bristle that Starfleet is giving them orders to follow without a fuller picture of the situation at hand. Spock and Uhura dislike having to follow these orders and instead hatch an alternate plan to find ways to communicate with the Jikaru itself. All this becomes an increasing dilemma when the Enterprise crew slowly discovers that the Jikaru is immensely powerful, that at least some Lutani object to their government’s plan for the creature, and eventually discovers that the Lutani have genetically engineered and mentally altered the Jikaru into essentially a sentient living weapon of mass destruction, one that realizes that it has been altered to think of only violence and death, while fearing that the same may happen to its children.
Eventually, as tension mounts and the Jikaru’s massive psionic outbursts threaten to potentially destroy the Enterprise before the crew can even morally reckon with the fact that a living creature-weapon has begged them to euthanize it, the Enterprise decides circumstances have evolved enough that Starfleet command’s initial orders can be challenged. Pike threatens the Lutani military with a very powerful enemy in the Federation if they do not allow Enterprise to escort the Jikaru to a nearby sun to immolate itself, and Starfleet moves to put the Jikaru’s home world under ecological protection to ensure that the Lutani cannot modify its children into similar results, seemingly inevitably leaving the Lutani to defeat and potentially genocide in their conflict with the Kasar.
All that sounds pretty good, and for the most part, it kind of is—getting to see individual elements of the Enterprise bridge crew wrestle with orders no one necessarily agrees with, for various different reasons, leads to some fascinating tension and friction. It touches on broader themes the episode wants to play around with that Star Trek itself has pondered in fits and starts for decades: questioning Starfleet’s role as a simultaneous exploratory scientific organization and a military force that can be tasked with either defending the Federation’s borders or intervening in non-Federation conflicts with impunity. What happens when those two halves of Starfleet have to be reconciled? Can they ever truly be?
Unfortunately, what I’ve just described is not the actual episode of Strange New Worlds that aired this week. The actual episode that aired is an incredibly poor documentary made by Ortegas’ brother, Beto (returning guest star Mynor Lüken), also called “What Is Starfleet?”, that has so little idea of what it’s ultimately trying to do that he should’ve looked at the footage in whatever the 23rd-century equivalent of an edit bay is, and decided to never let a member of the public see the shitshow he’s made.
“What Is Starfleet?”, both the Strange New Worlds episode and Beto’s creation as a filmmaker/journalist, is entirely in that documentary style, presented metatextually as if we are watching his work rather than an episode of Star Trek. Everything noted above about the Lutani mission is interwoven throughout camera footage from various sections and stations aboard Enterprise, or via Beto’s hoverdrone cameras. Either drone technology has not improved in a society where faster-than-light travel and near-instantaneous matter transportation exist, or Beto is deliberately going for a shaky-cam aesthetic to lend his documentary an air of cinéma-vérité, but regardless, he is an awful videographer, repeatedly shoving cameras way too close in people’s faces or capturing things at obtuse and overtly dramatic angles that make for an incredibly frustrating viewing experience.
Beto is also likewise an awful interviewer. Intercut through all the above are 1:1 interviews Beto conducts from behind camera with various members of the crew. Some are better than others, and occasionally make an interesting use of the editing format to convey the message Beto wants to convey (for better or worse, as we’ll get into). He contrasts interviews where Pike acknowledges the duty of Starfleet to uphold the values of the Federation, with candid footage of him bristling at command’s orders, or interviews with La’an where she discusses the necessity of security and the last-line option of being forced to engage in lethal conflict with footage of her in a slick, leather training uniform performing phaser-kata in a training drill. But overall Beto’s documentary suffers because he has put too much of himself into it for it to be considered as a challenging piece of investigative journalism into, as his opening narration frames it, whether or not the Federation is a diplomatic entity engaged in peaceful exploration of the galaxy or a colonizing empire with Enterprise as its flagship weapon of war.
But broadly the majority of the other interviews Beto conducts for “What Is Starfleet?” are at best probing to the point of a clear attempt to construct a pre-established argument—about 80% of his documentary, as haphazardly shot and constructed as it is, is clearly intended as an exposé of Starfleet as a nefarious, untrustworthy entity, masquerading warmongering militarism with a veneer of frontier diplomacy—and at worst deeply, personally invasive to his subjects. We cut from footage of Doctor M’Benga and Nurse Chapel failing to save the life of a Lutani scientist mortally wounded by the Jikaru after attempting to stop Enterprise from escorting it from its homeworld straight to an interview between Beto and M’Benga, where the former probes the latter about his military service in the Klingon-Federation war. Similarly, in his interview with Uhura—for who Beto has been introduced this season as a potential romantic interest—he cruelly surprises her with the revelation that one of the only friends she made at Starfleet Academy was killed in action aboard the U.S.S. Cayuga during the events of last season’s finale in an attempt to provoke a shock reaction, taking advantage of their closeness in the process.
Again and again throughout the bulk of “What Is Starfleet?” Beto establishes a very clear bias in his framing, with little in the way of real tangible evidence outside of the combative tone of leading questions, or the irritance he attempts to provoke by shoving his drones in everyone’s faces. It undercuts the valid question at the core of his argument about Starfleet’s conflicting duties and ideals for the audience, fictional or otherwise, because the documentary becomes less and less about that question, and more and more about why it seems that Beto wants to ask a question he apparently knows the answer to in the first place. Even though he is largely off camera throughout, “What Is Starfleet?” as a documentary makes its documentarian the subject—and although that is a perfectly reasonable approach for the medium in many ways, it almost certainly isn’t for a documentary made off of the back of what is believed by that documentarian to be investigative reporting aboard a perceived military warship.
It’s not helped then that around 80% of the way in, “What Is Starfleet?”—both the documentary and the episode—turns its vision on a dime. After Uhura communicates with the Jikaru and learns of its desire to be euthanized and the extent to which the Lutani have bioengineered it into a weapon, we see a stark sit-down between herself and Beto from an off-angle where she plainly tells him that he came into making this documentary angry and with a point to prove out of spite: he was mad that his sister joined Starfleet and left him behind, and he was mad that she got hurt in service of the organization that took her from him. Being told off, in combination with the Enterprise‘s decision to go against its initial orders and aid the Jikaru in killing itself, turns the final act of the documentary and episode into a noble celebration of Starfleet’s ideals. Actually everything’s fine, and Starfleet is very good, and at the end of the day, as chintzy interview narration from Uhura tells us as the documentary closes over shots of the Enterprise bridge crew sharing dinner in Pike’s quarters, the answer to “What Is Starfleet?” is the people that serve in it.
And with that, “What Is Starfleet?” fails to be both an effective documentary and an effective episode of Star Trek. Even putting aside that Beto’s anti-Starfleet bias came out of nowhere in this episode, despite his prior appearances, the result of the last-minute tonal change renders both the documentary and the episode’s potential critiques of Starfleet as an organization impotent. The documentary framing means the episode’s narrative around the Lutani mission is not given the chance to decompress and consider the emotional impact on any of our characters; they just get to be shown having a nice time and having dinner together. Given its metatextual existence as a documentary, Beto’s clarity of vision as a filmmaker is muddied into flip-flopping from one extreme to another, from hit piece to puff piece, because he got told off by a girl that he likes. If this were a real documentary, Beto changing his mind should’ve led to it being reconstructed in the edit process entirely—even to make the fact that he came into this process with a preconceived notion that was ultimately challenged and proved incorrect the narrative arc of the piece, if not just to avoid the final product looking like two fragments of two radically different documentaries.
“What Is Starfleet?”, both as an episode and as a documentary within the universe of Star Trek, ultimately has no idea what it actually wants to say about the question that Star Trek has tried to wrangle with for over half a century at this point. And if that was going to be the case, then maybe Beto should’ve killed his story before it ever got on air.
