Star Trek is becoming the packaging instead of the story
Strange New Worlds was my last real hope for modern Star Trek.
Early on, it felt like a return to what made the franchise work: competent officers, episodic storytelling, scientific problems, moral dilemmas, strange worlds, and a Starfleet that actually behaved like a professional organization from the future.
Lately, though, it feels increasingly as if the writers start with a gimmick, an emotional theme, or a genre exercise and only afterwards ask how they can wrap Star Trek around it.
The problem is not that characters have trauma, fear, grief, or emotional problems. Of course people in the 23rd century would still suffer. Space is dangerous.
The problem is how often modern Trek now builds character episodes around the exact same structure:
A character has an issue, refuses to talk about it, a sci-fi plot device amplifies it, they are forced to confront it, they finally open up, and the episode ends with emotional catharsis.
Older Trek had plenty of character episodes, but they usually worked differently. Tapestry does not have Picard explain his personality in therapy-speak. It shows us the reckless young man he used to be.
The Inner Light does not tell us what family and loss mean to Picard; it lets him live an entire lifetime. Duet develops Kira through a moral confrontation, not through a device designed to make her discuss her feelings.
Old Trek often asked: What will this person do in an extraordinary situation?
Modern Trek too often asks: How do we force this person to finally talk about their emotional problem?
That is a very different kind of storytelling.
There is another issue I find even more frustrating: the future no longer feels socially futuristic.
Star Trek was never just about better technology. Its people were supposed to come from a society that had also matured. They were not perfect, but they were usually more professional, more disciplined, and better at handling conflict than people today.
Now we have warp drive, advanced medicine and interstellar diplomacy, but many characters behave as if they work in a 2026 office drama.
A good example is the Scotty/Ortegas conflict. If Scotty modifies a pilot’s interface because he dislikes the way she flies, that is not a cute workplace prank. He is altering a safety-critical system.
If Ortegas covers up or ignores safety warnings because they annoy her, that should be a disciplinary matter.
And if Ortegas can actually fly the Enterprise outside safe parameters badly enough to damage propulsion, then the interesting question is not whether she and Scotty get along.
The interesting question is: Why can she do that at all?
Where are the limits, interlocks, automated protections, and override procedures?
That could have been an excellent Trek story about human control versus automation. Instead, it becomes interpersonal bickering.
The puppet episode pushes this even further. Spock suddenly has to run multiple departments by himself because most of the crew cannot use their consoles.
Are we seriously supposed to believe that a starship in the 23rd century has no meaningful automated emergency mode?
Modern spacecraft are already built around redundancy, fault tolerance and automation. The Enterprise should easily be able to maintain course, manage life support, monitor propulsion, avoid collisions, scan for threats and alert Spock when actual decisions are needed.
Instead, the ship suddenly becomes less capable than modern technology because the script needs Spock to become overwhelmed.
Why? So he can learn that he should not try to do everything alone.
Again, the technology is bent until it produces the desired emotional lesson.
The same episode also contains a more basic logic problem. Scotty wants to break a transporter record by beaming to another ship roughly 29,000 km away. Shortly afterwards, we are told that no ship is within two days of the Enterprise.
Both things cannot sensibly be true.
The script needs a nearby ship for one scene, then complete isolation for the next, so the nearby ship simply disappears from the logic of the story.
And then, at the end, we get the ultimate escape hatch: it was all a dream.
Dream stories can work. Buffy did it brilliantly with Restless, because the episode operates on dream logic from the beginning. Space, time, dialogue and perspective are deliberately surreal.
The SNW episode, however, is mostly presented like objective reality and only later declares itself a dream. We see scenes involving people who are not with the dreamer, conversations the dreamer could not know about, and events continuing while the supposed dreamer is unconscious.
At that point, “it was a dream” does not feel like the concept of the story. It feels like a reset button.
And this connects to the bigger problem.
It increasingly feels as if the writers’ room asks:
“Do we want a musical episode?”
“Sure.”
“Puppets?”
“Why not?”
“Horror?”
“Romcom?”
“Whatever.”
The issue is not experimentation. Classic Trek experimented constantly. TOS could be completely ridiculous. DS9, TNG and Voyager all played with genre.
The difference is that the world usually remained coherent.
Now it sometimes feels as if the gimmick comes first and Star Trek comes second.
You can almost imagine a new intern walking into the writers’ room with coffee.
“What do you think about Star Trek?”
“Not really my thing. I love the Muppets, though.”
“Perfect. Let’s do a Muppets episode.”
That is exaggerated, obviously, but it describes the feeling surprisingly well.
What makes this especially ironic is that Lower Decks, the animated comedy that was supposed to be the silly one, often understands Star Trek better than the live-action shows.
It makes fun of Trek constantly, but the jokes come from inside the universe. Starfleet remains Starfleet. Boimler becomes a better officer. Mariner has serious emotional problems, but the entire universe does not have to stop functioning so she can process them.
The SNW/Lower Decks crossover worked for exactly that reason. Boimler and Mariner were chaotic, but Pike remained Pike, Spock remained Spock, and the Enterprise still felt like the Enterprise.
The comedy did not require the universe to become stupid.
There is also the basic prequel problem.
We already know that Spock, Kirk, Scotty, Uhura and Pike survive long enough to reach the stories we already know. So when an episode spends several minutes pretending that Spock might die, there is very little real tension.
This is where Better Call Saul is such a useful comparison.
We already know Jimmy McGill becomes Saul Goodman. The suspense is not whether it happens. The suspense is how it happens.
Which decisions push him further? Which lines does he cross? What does he lose on the way?
That is how Strange New Worlds should use its legacy characters.
The question should not be “Will Spock survive?”
It should be “How does this Spock become the Spock we know?”
Pike is even more interesting because he knows his own future. What does that knowledge do to his judgement? Does it make him more reckless because he believes he knows when his fate will catch up with him? What does free will mean when you have already seen part of your future?
Those are Star Trek questions.
Fake death scares are not.
And unfortunately, Star Trek is not the only franchise suffering from this problem. Doctor Who increasingly feels similar: emotional beats and genre concepts sometimes seem to come before the actual science-fiction idea.
Star Wars has its own version of franchise exhaustion, where every character and every timeline gap can become another piece of content.
But Andor proves that this is not inevitable.
Andor is very modern television and very different from classic Star Wars, but it understands exactly why its story belongs in that universe. It asks how authoritarianism works in everyday life, how resistance forms, what rebellion costs, and what compromises people make along the way.
The story grows out of the world.
That is the key difference.
Strange New Worlds had already shown that modern classic Trek could work. It did not need to imitate TNG. It just needed to preserve the core idea: competent people from a more advanced society facing scientific, ethical and cultural problems that do not have easy answers.
They can be flawed. They can be traumatized. They can fall in love, argue, fail, and occasionally even turn into puppets.
But the universe has to take itself seriously.
Starfleet has to behave like Starfleet. The Enterprise has to behave like a 23rd-century starship. And the story should exist because somebody has something interesting to say about this future, not because somebody wanted to try a random genre gimmick.
The question I increasingly find myself asking is simple:
If you remove Pike, Spock, the Enterprise, the uniforms and the Star Trek logo, is there anything left that specifically needed to be Star Trek?
More and more often, I am not sure there is.
And that is what worries me most.
Not that Star Trek is changing.
That it increasingly seems to have forgotten what made it Star Trek in the first place.
