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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Review

The second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered on Paramount+ in 2023. It’s another very good season of this wonderful show.

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“All things seem trivial in the face of death“

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The Broken Circle is a pretty good premiere that had a solid emphasis on the Klingons and their relationship with the Enterprise while setting in motion Una’s arrest and eventual courtroom drama that happened in Ad Astra per Aspera, which is one of the best episodes of this season. Pike recruits Illyrian civil rights attorney for Number One and this leads to a spirited debate at the court that was genuinely well written and intense.

The acting was fantastic throughout and the episode genuinely achieved its emotional resonance in the final act. The Enterprise crew truly felt like family in this season and that was first planted in this wonderful episode. It did not treat its themes of discrimination particularly subtly, but it was so entertaining and heartwarming that it did not matter at the end of the day.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow focused on La’an. Christina Chong is among the best actors on this show as her performance is always on-point and her character quite layered. This is her finest moment where she was transported to a different timeline and she fell in love with Kirk himself. Their romance was actually sweet and they made for one of the best couples on a season full of romantic pairings.

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Among the Lotus Eaters offered one of the rare opportunities for Pike to shine on a season that mostly sidelined the captain unfortunately. This episode had a solid concept and it was well executed overall, but even more SF elements could have been added to this season that favored characterization over action and genre thrills.

Charades is fantastic. This was Spock’s finest moment – an episode that makes him human for a while, which led to a great examination of his complex character. This is where Nurse Chapel-Spock romance really started and they were the best pair on this season. Chapel herself is much more interesting this time around and I loved her final moment in this episode that acknowledged the corruption and biases of academia and how ultimately your own pursuit of knowledge matters more than any academic accomplishments.

Lost in Translation is a very strong Uhura episode that introduced a very intriguing mystery that led to a twist that made sense and was quite interesting. It’s a very good episode that ultimately would have benefitted from aliens being depicted as the series continued to save their budget on many of these episodes. Those Old Scientists is the first of two experimental episodes, one that mixed Lower Decks characters with Strange New Worlds ones. I have yet to see that show, so the references were lost on me. This was a fun enough episode that was endearing and humorous, but too irreverent for my taste.

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Under the Cloak of War is stupendous. This episode developed the character of M’Benga beautifully. Chapel is also terrific here and I appreciated their great friendship, but this was the doctor’s moment to shine and they both humanized him and made him more complicated and flawed. He was almost an antihero on this episode that was quite morally complex. As for Subspace Rhapsody, it’s a one experimental episode too many on a season that favored comedy more than drama. It’s a full musical episode, and although very entertaining and featuring surprisingly entertaining and catchy numbers, it was too fluffy at the end of the day. Hegemony is a solid finale that tackled the Gorn once again. They continue to be illogical creations in my opinion, but the cliffhanger was excellent, the action was superb and the VFX work phenomenal.