Featured Essays Star Trek Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Bumpy Third Season Highlights a Core Problem in Modern TV Blaming comedy hardly seems fair when there’s a much larger elephant in the room… By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on September 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The general feeling toward Strange New Worlds’ third season has certainly been more tepid than the previous two. And while everyone rushes to give their opinion as to why, there’s a common theme developing that concerns me. Namely, a lot of blame is being placed on the more comedic episodes of this season, to the extent that it’s possible the series showrunners felt need to provide some reassurance. An interview over at Cinemablend has co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers promising the season four will be the show’s “best work,” but also that— “I think that we’re probably a little more serious in four[…]” Mr. Myers, say it ain’t so. In fairness, the majority of the interview reasserts that “genre-hopping” will still occur, and that the showrunners themselves thought any unevenness in the current season could be attributed to the various Hollywood strikes occurring while they were attempting to get season three made. But that interests me far less than how quick viewers were to jump on comedy being the culprit in Strange New Worlds’ series woes. We’ve come back to this old fight, I see. It’s no secret that plenty of fans don’t like it when Star Trek gets “goofy.” In many minds, a science fiction series that takes itself seriously has no business engaging in shenanigans (or hijinks, as T’Pring would have it) of any kind. When Trek goes off the rails or jumps that shark, their socialist utopian future is giving up a little of its hard-won pedigree, as it were. I’m no big fan of pedigree in general, but I would like to point out that this take is flagrantly subjective and equally “goofy.” Many of Trek’s most famous and beloved episodes are among its silliest, and it’s not reasonable to expect a series that used to run 22-plus episode seasons to have morality plays and deep thoughts aplenty every single episode. Pretending that comedy brings Star Trek down is akin to claiming that a key spice is ruining the flavor of a dish; you may not like the amount of said spice, the flavor balance overall, but you cannot make the soup without it. Image: Paramount Volume would seem to be part of the complaint on many-a-viewer’s lips—the Cinemablend piece linked above specifically notes that season three contains three lighter-leaning episodes, making up nearly a third of the season’s ten-episode run. Too many, it would seem. But I’ll cry foul on this one: To start, that was the same number as last season (“Charades,” “Those Old Scientists,” and “Subspace Rhapsody”). So if you enjoyed season two, you’re misplacing your ire. But when we get into successful Star Trek seasons in general, “more than a quarter, less than a third” is a good rule on lighter episodes. For example, take the Original Series itself, and its highly successful second season. Of a 26-episode run, I count at least seven comedic/lighter stories (sorry, “Catspaw” counts, it’s a flipping Halloween episode). That’s 26.9%, or 27% rounded up. Only a few points shy of Strange New Worlds’ 30%, notably. And, perhaps even more relevant, the third season of the Original Series is counted as dismal fare overall by even the most devoted Trek fans. You know how many comedic episodes that season had? Zero. Unless we’re counting “Spock’s Brain” as intentionally comedic. Which… we can if we must, I suppose. The truth of the trouble is, there are several points working against Strange New Worlds in its basic construction, and these problems were always bound to creep up as time wore on. The first and most egregious culprit: It simply doesn’t have enough episodes. Star Trek: Discovery, the initial salvo in Trek’s resurgence on television, started out with 15-episode seasons. This is a great sweet spot, one that sits between what we had in classic series, and what we’re currently getting. Lower Decks capped out at 13 episodes per season, which isn’t ideal, but still better than Strange New Worlds, and the more typical episode run in our age of streaming TV. Prodigy gave us whopping 20-episode seasons, and managed to do more in its limited run that most of the shows getting a “full” five seasons. (Bring us back to seven seasons, I beg you.) Star Trek: Picard only had 10-episode seasons, and you could argue that it worked to the show’s detriment, particularly where its new characters were concerned. But even that’s not a fair comparison to what’s happening with Strange New Worlds—why? Because that was series focused on one of the most beloved characters in Star Trek’s history, a man with more narrative attached to his name than nearly any other, the eponymous Jean-Luc Picard. The show also worked under the auspices of arc-based television, meaning that those 10 episodes were intended to tell a complete story; not so with SNW’s episodic plots. Image: CBS / Paramount+ By the time Strange New Worlds ends—don’t forget, the final season is set give audiences just six episodes—it will only truly have two seasons worth of episodes when comparing it to Trek as we knew it. An entire series comprised of 46 stories. There are only three shorter Trek series: Prodigy, unceremoniously cancelled before it could prove its mettle; the Animated Series, made to bank on audience fervor in the wake of TOS’ cancellation, and thought of by many as an extension of the Original Series itself; and Picard, which was never intended to be a full series, and only went on as long as its leading man was interested in going along for the ride. Is it any wonder that we’re feeling cheated already? Season three of Strange New Worlds isn’t working for many fans because we’re being given mid-series story arcs without the amount of narrative needed to back those arcs up. Spock’s we’re-not-labelling-it romance with La’an? It’s adorable, but it does seem to spring out of nowhere, founded entirely on the actors’ incredible work in their dance sequences. Actors Ethan Peck and Christina Chong are forced to sell the relationship on chemistry alone with absolutely no buildup—audiences can fill in the gaps, but the gaps we got used to be far smaller than these. As a result, it makes Spock appear either confused or kinda fickle, and vaults right over the steps La’an needed to take in order to be ready for a relationship. (The woman who sang “How Would That Feel” literally five episodes previous is not there yet! It’s only been a few months since then!) How about Pike and Batel’s partnership speedrun and tearful goodbye? Marie was never much of a fan favorite as a character (and some of the reasons here are complicated, but plenty of them are rooted in weird sexist ideas about who is the right match for Captain Papa Hair Wax), but the choice to have her essentially give up her life to be a time guardian against Ultimate Evil is… it’s just bad, y’all. Particularly when she argues that she never fit anywhere since she was saved from being a Gorn incubator, when she literally nabbed her dream job two episodes previous. And the lifetime-in-a-bottle sequence that we’re supposed to mourn over? Sorry, Farscape and The Magicians did it better—and plenty of other series besides, including TNG’s eternally famous “The Inner Light”. You know what might have helped? Seeing this relationship bloom over three full seasons of television. It’s difficult to focus on the tragedy of Pike and Batel not getting their rote, highly abridged, extremely heteronormative lifetime—their daughter is gonna marry Admiral April’s son? really?? you had no other ideas?—when we’ve barely seen them together as a couple, and any depth to their partnership only got focus in this season. Photo Credit: Marni Grossman / Paramount+ How about Erica Ortega’s difficulty adjusting back into her job after almost being murdered by a Gorn at the start of the season? Hate to say this, but it’s hard to care much about that arc when we don’t really have a full picture of Erica as a person. Melissa Navia is one of the most charming actors on the show, hands down, but what do we actually know about Erica? That she’s great at her job, likes pranks, and loves to razz people. That’s about it. (Oh, and that she’s a bit, uh, xenophobic when compared to her companions, which is awkward as hell, particularly when the show doesn’t address it much.) There’s plenty we can guess at, but again, when it comes to on-screen development, we’ve been given practically nothing. When we finally get something real juicy—like La’an killing Erica’s new Gorn friend, assuming her to be a threat to Erica’s life in a moment of split-second trauma-backed terror—the complexity of that pain is mentioned, but not truly explored. Which brings us to another problem that Strange New Worlds is uniquely poised to drown under: It wants to be a show that plucks at that nostalgia harp every chance it gets, while also offering something sexy, bright, and new. The result is a lot of confusion around who should be getting focus in the series: while the show has a better female main character cast balance than nearly all Trek shows on record, it’s clear that there’s some fear around spending too much time with those characters in favor of Pike and Spock (and now Scotty and Kirk). For the record, I’m not one of the fans who gets annoyed every time dear ol’ Jim shows up—I think he should, much in the same way Doctor McCoy is constantly on the bridge of the Enterprise when he has absolutely no reason to be. I want to watch Kirk and Spock flirt bond at every available opportunity, and have enjoyed most of the choices SNW makes in filling in the edges of well-known and beloved characters. But this confusion means that I’m not getting enough of either the newer characters or the legacy ones. It results in a lot of uncomfortable storytelling choices; ones where characters make decisions too quickly to understand their motivations or changes of heart; ones where female characters get plenty of screentime, but none of the depth that their male counterparts receive; ones where bioessentialism paints entire species with crude brushes without a second thought. And again, the answer is simple: Give us more. I know more about Deanna Troi than I may ever know about Una Chin-Riley because despite being far less central to Next Generation’s overall narrative, I’ve spent days, weeks even, with the counselor. That’s how much narrative space she takes up. Television has forgotten that much of our love of the medium was born of time, plain and endless. The glimmer of prestige led streamers to copy television formats with powerful arcs and singular narratives when most of the allure TV used to provide was company. What Strange New Worlds has accidentally proven is that you can’t have “episodic” TV without a whole lot of episodes. It would be nice if someone holding the cash at Paramount realized it, and finally gave us back what we’ve all been missing.[end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’</i> Bumpy Third Season Highlights a Core Problem in Modern TV appeared first on Reactor.