Do you want to catch up on Strange New Worlds but not watch all 40 episodes?
Here is a list of the Top 10 episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, according to IMDB raters, in chronological order. One bonus episode concludes a season cliffhanger.
| Episode | Rank | IMDB Rating | Season | Episode # |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Memento Mori | #6 | 8.3 | 1 | 4 |
| A Quality of Mercy | #1 | 9.0 | 1 | 10 |
| Ad Astra Per Aspera | #4 | 8.5 | 2 | 2 |
| Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow | #5 | 8.3 | 2 | 3 |
| Charades | #9 | 8.2 | 2 | 5 |
| Those Old Scientists | #2 | 8.9 | 2 | 7 |
| Under the Cloak of War | #10 | 8.2 | 2 | 8 |
| Hegemony | #3 | 8.6 | 2 | 10 |
| Hegemony, Part 2 | #19 | 7.7 | 3 | 1 |
| The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail | #7 | 8.3 | 3 | 6 |
| Orders of Magnitude | #8 | 8.3 | 4 | 8 |
If you’re looking to watch Strange New Worlds for the first time, I’d bookend this Top ~10 list with season 1, episodes 1 and 2, and season 4, episode 10, as they provide a nice overall narrative arc.
Strange New Genres, Season 4
Here are the average ratings by season, showing a large decline from the peak in season 2, which has half the episodes in the Top 10. The first two seasons both make the top 5 of all 52 seasons of Star Trek so far, while the newest season makes the bottom 5.
| Series | Season | Rating | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strange New Worlds | 1 | 7.830 | #5 |
| Strange New Worlds | 2 | 7.970 | #3 |
| Strange New Worlds | 3 | 7.090 | #37 |
| Strange New Worlds | 4 | 6.270 | #49 |
The worst rated episode going into the season was, “The Elysian Kingdom,” from season 1 (rated 6.2 out of 10). So of course in season 4 they make a sequel to it.
Season 4 broke the record for worst-rated episode of the series three times in a row (!) then two more times (!!), ending fittingly enough with the sequel to “The Elysian Kingdom”: “Once La’An a Time” (rated 4.3 out of 10).
I actually think the nadir of the series was not that but the “puppet episode” (episode 5); to my mind, subsequent episodes aren’t worse: viewers are just exhausted. YMMV.
Every new low is in bold.
| Season | Episode # | Episode | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8 | The Elysian Kingdom | 6.2 |
| 4 | 1 | Valles Marineris | 8.1 |
| 4 | 2 | The Griffin Incident | 6.9 |
| 4 | 3 | Human Best Friend | 5.4 |
| 4 | 4 | A Case of Chiaroscuro | 5.2 |
| 4 | 5 | Level-Five Transporter Accident | 4.7 |
| 4 | 6 | Off-Hour | 8.0 |
| 4 | 7 | Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass | 4.4 |
| 4 | 8 | Orders of Magnitude | 8.3 |
| 4 | 9 | Once La’An a Time | 4.3 |
| 4 | 10 | Tomorrow’s Enterprise | 7.4 |
No episode this season was good enough to make the Top 100 Star Trek episodes. Four of these episodes are worse than the previous 10th worst episode.
At some point the showrunners began to think of Strange New Worlds as mainly being about “genre swings”, as TrekMovie put it:
The show was the first of the current era to embrace episodic storytelling, and embraced taking genre “swings” multiple times per season, further giving it a singular identity in the franchise as one of the most thematically diverse series in its 60-year history. As Goldsman said this spring in the lead-up to this season, “Our strange new worlds are genres.”
Kudos to the showrunners for the willingness to experiment, but most experiments did not pay off with viewers. Much to the chagrin of IMDB reviewers at least, there were lots of genre swings in seasons three and season four. But not season 5, according to Collider:
SAMANTHA COLEY: When I spoke with Paul [Wesley, who plays Jim Kirk] a few weeks ago, he mentioned that there might be a little less genre hopping in Season 5, as you guys only have six episodes to really land the ship. Can you speak to whether Season 5 will play out, episodically still, or will it be a little more serialized?
AKIVA GOLDSMAN: It’s definitely still an episodic show, but to some people’s delight and others’ dismay, there will be essentially no genre hopping. Which isn’t to say the tones of the episodes aren’t different, but they are fundamentally a suite of episodes that are about our goodbyes to those characters.
More concerning is that the show was nearly canceled at the end of Season 4, and Season 5 was then filmed without a stop afterwards, providing very little time for writing episodes.
As it is, quite a few Season 4 episodes have been partially and incompletely rewritten or had shots cut before or after filming:
- Episode 1 – An unfilmed scene exploring the crashed alien ship had ramifications for Ortega’s character arc.
- Episode 6 – This episode re-introduces Dr. Boyce and was missing an entire filmed scene that provided closure to the doctor and Chapel’s arc. That was unresolved and left the ending not making as much sense.
- Episode 10 – This was originally intended to be a three-year gap between the past and future, but was rewritten to be referenced as a one-year gap in dialogue, despite the changes being too substantial for that.
At this point, most SNW fans will be happy if the final season is just average (#27), as that will be a marked improvement over Seasons 3 and 4 (#37 and #49).
See also:
- Prequelitis in Strange New Worlds
- The Top 10 Songs from Subspace Rhapsody
- Strange New Worlds Is Not a Prequel, But a Soft Reboot
Photo credit: StarTrek.com.
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