Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is either good or it’s just so comforting that I don’t care

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If the modern Star Trek shows have all felt a little off to you, Strange New Worlds may be what you've been waiting for.

The modern era of TV Star Trek has been more than willing to experiment with what a Star Trek show is. Discovery and Picard both focus on heavily serialized season-long plotlines. Lower Decks is an animated sendup of (and love letter to) Trek's cultural peak in the '90s. And the computer-animated Prodigy aims for a younger audience, with simpler storylines, a lighter tone, and tween-y interpersonal melodrama aplenty.

What none of these shows has explicitly tried to do is replicate the format of older shows like the Original Series or The Next Generation-monster/alien/glowing-godlike-being-of-the-week stories where no matter how bad things might look for our heroes, everything will be more or less wrapped up at the end of the hour.

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