The trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 dropped at CCXP Mexico yesterday, confirming a July 23 premiere on Paramount+. The season runs 10 episodes through September 24. Season 5 will close the show out next year.
The teaser promises a more serious tone than Season 3, with La’An warning that “any of these missions could be our last” and glimpses of major character deaths on the horizon as the show sets up its handoff to James T. Kirk. That correction is welcome. Season 3 finished with a 55% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes against a 90% critic score, the worst audience reception in the show’s run. Fans were blunt about why. One Rotten Tomatoes reviewer wrote: “I don’t want to watch Friends in space.” Another asked, “Why in the world do they think such silliness is what we want to invest our viewing time in?”
The proximate cause of Season 3’s collapse was the show’s continued commitment to genre parody over actual Star Trek storytelling. The Season 2 musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody” was the first warning sign. Critics praised it, fans pushed back, and multiple reviewers noted it was copying the Buffy the Vampire Slayer playbook from 2001’s “Once More, with Feeling.” Season 3 added a holodeck murder mystery episode and an episode comparing the show’s own format to a children’s TV program.
Season 4 will include a puppet episode. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is producing the puppet work, and the show’s director of the episode previously worked on Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock. Akiva Goldsman confirmed it at Comic-Con last summer, saying: “Could it do Muppets? Sure.” Ethan Peck’s reaction on learning about it was to tell TV Insider: “’What? Are you serious? That sounds totally insane. Are we actually going to do that?’” That description matches the audience response to the musical episode almost word for word, and Peck said as much in the same interview.
The Starfleet Academy show that ran alongside Strange New Worlds on Paramount+ was cancelled before its second season aired. Discovery was cancelled. Lower Decks was cancelled. Prodigy was cancelled. Strange New Worlds is the last show standing from the Kurtzman era, and its executive producer credits include Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, and Alex Kurtzman himself. The statement Kurtzman put out for the season announcement said the show has delivered on “what Star Trek has always stood for” across five seasons. That claim requires ignoring the audience score trajectory, the two years between seasons caused by production delays and studio decisions, and the fact that the show’s own cast has been describing individual episodes as “totally insane” before they air.
The SNW Season 4 teaser suggests the production knows it needs to pull back and play it straight for the final stretch. Showing characters potentially dying, foregrounding Kirk’s takeover, and framing the season as a countdown to the original series are all correct instincts. One reviewer who saw the trailer noted it was trying to show a “pivot away from some of the ‘more out-there’ elements of the third season.” The puppet episode is still in there.
Does Strange New Worlds have enough runway left to end on a high note, or has it spent too many episodes on gimmicks to recover its credibility with fans?
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