This week Paramount+ announced that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been renewed for its fifth and final season, a month before the third season has even debuted. 

Originally pitched as a prequel, the show now has to be conceived of as a reboot on an alternate timeline, based on its own changes to the timeline and to the development of its characters.

Nor should this be a surprise. The future of the 1960s show didn’t quite pan out. We know the original Star Trek timeline isn’t our own, as the following predicted events never happened:

(Nor, of course, did the 1990s show’s predictions happen in 2024 for Irish reunification and the Bell Riots.)

The Strange New Worlds Season 2 episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” makes it clear that the Eugenics War happened in our century rather than in the 1990s, as stated in the TOS episode “Space Seed.” Speaking to Cinemablend, Akiva Goldsman, said: 

This is a correction. Because otherwise, it’s silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe…By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It’s a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won’t be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the ’90s, you’sre kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world.

Diagetically, time travel has changed the timeline, something that has been part of the world building since The Original Series.

Outside the fiction, it means that there is the Prime Timeline, the Kelvin Timeline, and the … New Trek Timeline? (“Discovery Timeline”? “Strange New Worlds Timeline”?) (I was going to call it the NuTrek Timeline but apparently NuTrek is pejorative.)

New Character Development

Sadly, TOS did little to develop background characters like Chapel and Uhura in any detail, so it’s not a surprise that Strange New Worlds has changed their characterization while developing them in detail. Chapel now has had a range of love interests (mostly off camera), and Uhura has a tragic backstory.

This character development makes TOS now seem rather absurd in places. For instance, to pick just one example, the TOS episode “Amok Time” assumes a much more reclusive Spock than the one we’ve witnessed: there’s a scene where Chapel reminds Spock her first name is Christine, as if the two barely know one another. Uhura, in TOS, doesn’t know about T’Pring, whom she has met in SNW. In another example, the episode “Galileo 7” isn’t Spock’s first time in command any longer, as that now happens in the SNW season 2 episode “The Broken Circle.”

Fortunately, SNW abandons the sexism of TOS, not all of which can be blamed on the times. Herb Solow pointed out that the TOS female characters “were the antithesis of the [roles played by the] actresses starring in the other dramatic TV series of that era: Barbara Bain (Mission: Impossible), Amanda Blake (Gunsmoke), Barbara Anderson (Ironside), Stephanie Powers (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.) and of course Barbara Stanwyck (Big Valley), all playing characters of substantial independence and distinction.”

Soft Reboot

The showrunners are gradually introducing characters to fill out the whole TOS crew. They introduced Kirk, initially as Lieutenant Kirk of the USS Farragut. They introduced Scotty in the Season 2 finale. Now that SNW has been canceled, the long-term goal seems to be for a Kirk-led spinoff to update and replace TOS and make it compatible with our timeline, for the moment.

Top 10 Lists

With the third season debuting next month, here are the Top 10 episodes from the show.

EpisodeIMDB RatingSeasonEpisode #
Strange New Worlds8.111
Memento Mori8.414
All Those Who Wander8.219
A Quality of Mercy9.1110
Ad Astra Per Aspera8.522
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow8.323
Charades8.225
Those Old Scientists8.927
Under the Cloak of War8.228
Hegemony8.6210

If you want to integrate some of the top episodes featuring Spock and Pike from Discovery, here’s a top 10 that does that (dropping the three SNW episodes rated 8.2 to fit these in).

EpisodeIMDB RatingSeasonEpisode #
If Memory Serves8.2DIS 28
Such Sweet Sorrow7.3DIS 213
Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 28.2DIS 214
Strange New Worlds8.1SNW 11
Memento Mori8.4SNW 14
A Quality of Mercy9.1SNW 110
Ad Astra Per Aspera8.5SNW 22
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow8.3SNW 23
Those Old Scientists8.9SNW 27
Hegemony8.6SNW 210

See also: Prequelitis in Strange New Worlds.

Photo credit: Promotional image from StarTrek.com.