Seeing as how the second season of Star Trek – Strange New Worlds just wrapped up, I thought I’d follow up on my review of the first season. If you’ll recall, I was pleasantly surprised and looking forward to a second season:

I’m cautiously optimistic about the second season. Given results thus far, I’m willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that we won’t be overwhelmed by Kirks (Jim’s brother is on this ship, too, for some reason) and we’ll be introduced to more strange new worlds.

What gave me pause about the first season was the need of the writers to try and keep looping SNW back into the wider series mythology rather than do some really new stuff. Did we really need Kirks? Did we really need the security chief to be related (however distantly) to one of Trek’s greatest villains? Why weren’t the Gorn anything other than, you know, the Gorn we all knew?

I wish I could say all my concerns were alleviated, but the truth is that in season two SNW leaned into some of the things that I most disliked about the first season. That said, it was still damned entertaining and, maybe through sheer repetition, I’m starting to be worn down on those concerns.

Let’s start with the Kirks. James Kirk showed up in one episode of the first season, a nifty retelling of a classic episode from the original Trek. It made sense, but I worried where it would lead. Where it led was that Kirk appearing in three episodes this season, getting major screen time without any great effect. Simply put, there’s no reason that his role in those episodes couldn’t have be filled by a wholly new character. Kirk has now had multiple encounters, including a fairly personal one, with a person named “Noonien-Singh” and yet said nothing about that when Khan first showed up in the show. It’s a minor nit, but one that bugs me over and over – what’s gained by tying this into the established Trek mythos?

Likewise, the series appears to be doubling down on making the Gorn the Borg of this series. I’m not against creepy space monsters, but wasn’t part of what made the initial appearance of the Gorn in original Trek work so well is nobody knew anything about them? Why not create an entirely new beastie to menace this version of the Enterprise? Maybe my feelings here are partially colored by the fact that war Trek is my least favorite Trek variant and that seems to be the role of the Gorn moving forward.

That being said, I still really enjoyed this season for the most part. A big part of that is that, while at the same time grasping for connections to prior Trek lore, the SNW creative crew is also willing to really push the limits of what a Trek show can be. That came through loud and clear in two episodes from this season.

The first was a crossover episode with the animated Lower Decks series, in which two of the characters from that show travel back in time (and into live action) and interact with the Enterprise crew. I’ll admit that I don’t get Lower Decks – it’s too fast and hyper to be funny to me – but I thought this episode was really great, from the animated opening credit sequence to the animated outro with the Enterprise crew getting ripped on some sort of booze. And I appreciated the two Lower Decks characters, in a rare moment alone, making a joke about how slowly everybody talked. Good humored timey-wimey fun.

The second was the big musical episode. I’m not a huge fan of musicals and I found the actual music here pretty samey and dull (exception being the acapella version of the theme music in the opening credits, which was great) and the idea, that some outside entity is forcing the crew to sing their true feelings, is straight out of the better-executed Buffy musical episode, but, still, it’s hard not to like the curveball this episode was. And without it we’d never have gotten Klingons as the galaxy’s scariest boy band, a sight I wouldn’t want to miss.

My favorite episodes were a couple that dealt with characters grappling with their pasts. “Among the Lotus Eaters” took a quick line from the original Trek pilot about one of Pike’s regrets and fleshed that story out (a pretty good example of raiding the lore for story ideas) and spun it into an interesting meditation on memory and forgetting. “Under the Cloak of War” dove into Dr. M’Benga’s history and that of a Klingon war criminal and how they were struggling to come to grips with their pasts. I’m not a big fan of M’Benga’s ability to eat space spinach and go berserker on numerous Klingons, but I like the general idea of a healer growing out of a warrior. The Uhura-focused episode, “Lost In Translation,” was also pretty good.

All in all I found the second season of SNW a lot like the first – really good most of the time, with some choices that I wish had gone differently. It is by far my favorite of the nu Trek stuff. And, if anything, I’d like for a few more episodes per season to let things breathe a bit (the Spock/Chapel situation flamed out way too quickly). But mostly, I hope going forward they’ll heed the call to explore “strange new worlds” and give us more of that and less backward-looking connections to Trek lore.

I’ll be watching, regardless.