Hugo winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch has watched Star Trek television and written Star Trek fiction for decades. This week she announced she is done with Strange New Worlds, and she picked the show’s puppet episode as the moment she stopped caring.
Rusch posted her reaction the moment the promotional images went up:
“Wow. Just saw the promo pix for the latest Trek Strange New Worlds episode and thought, “Well, another episode I’m not going to watch.” So far the series is batting zero for me. I doubt I’ll watch any more episodes. So sad. I have no idea why they decided to do gimmicky things instead of telling Trek stories. And there I was, sad there would be no Trek after their next season. Well…there’s no Trek now. Sigh.”
Rusch is not a casual complainer. She has written tie-in fiction across multiple franchises and edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for six years, and her name carries weight with a generation of readers who bought Star Trek novels when those novels topped bestseller lists.
Her former editor at Pocket Books, John Ordover, offered an explanation for what happens to a show once its ending has been announced. Ordover spent over a decade running Pocket’s Star Trek line, co-creating spinoff series like Star Trek: New Frontier and editing several volumes of the Strange New Worlds anthology line that predates the show. He said:
“I’ve seen this over and over. Once the writer/producers find out the show is ending, their focus switches to getting their next job, and they just go through the motions of putting on a show.”
Paramount confirmed Strange New Worlds will end after its fifth season. Season four is the second-to-last stretch of episodes the writers’ room will ever produce for this incarnation of Pike’s Enterprise, and Ordover’s read lines up with what viewers have been watching play out on screen since the season premiere.
The puppet episode itself was announced at San Diego Comic-Con, where showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers revealed the Enterprise crew would be turned into puppets built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop for a season four episode. It follows a season that has already run a black-and-white noir episode built around Una impersonating a Casablanca-style double, a body-swap comedy, and a horror-inflected outing before it. One reviewer covering the noir episode for TrekCore <cite index=”18-1”>wrote that the genre exercise no longer felt as gimmicky as it had the week before</cite>, which by itself concedes that the prior episode did feel that way. A review at AIPT covering the same episode <cite index=”17-1”>described the series as too often reading like theater kids doing an exercise</cite>. Coverage at MovieWeb of the same black-and-white outing <cite index=”21-1”>called the stylistic choice unnecessary for a Star Trek episode</cite>. A recap at Cooled Tured went further, stating outright that the gimmicks had become the whole point of the show and that they had grown tiresome to watch season after season.
Viewer comments piling up on the show’s Rotten Tomatoes season four page echo the same complaint from the audience side, with one viewer noting that three of the season’s first several episodes were gimmick episodes back to back and asking the producers to rework the finale to look more like season one.
This is not new behavior from the Kurtzman era of Star Trek. Alex Kurtzman, an Abrams protege who has overseen the franchise since Discovery, presided over a season two of Strange New Worlds that already leaned on a musical episode and a Lower Decks animation crossover before season four ever ran a single frame through Jim Henson’s workshop. What critics like Rusch are describing is not one bad episode. It is a pattern that started years ago and has now reached the point where a working Star Trek novelist, who has spent her career inside this franchise, says she is finished watching.
Rusch’s post and Ordover’s response are part of a widening chorus of Star Trek veterans, professionals who built careers on this franchise when it was selling millions of books and drawing tens of millions of viewers, now saying plainly that the version airing under Kurtzman is not the same show, and that fans who defended it for years were being sold something else entirely.
If the people who built Star Trek’s publishing empire in the 1990s are walking away from the current show, what does that say about who Paramount is actually making it for anymore?
irst contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.
Can you imagine if instead of joke puppeting the crew, they had gotten Jim Hensen Co. to, i dont know, make a really gnarly new alien creature/ race (on, say, a Stange New World) that couldn't be performed by a human? Crazy, I know.
The veterans have all been saying this isn’t Star Trek. The fans have been saying it isn’t Star Trek. Star Trek has been mostly dead since 2005.