Paramount Canceling Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Is The Worst Possible Decision
Regardless of whatever cuts they make, Paramount needs to leave Star Trek: Strange New Worlds alone.
If you’re a fan of Star Trek, then the last 24 hours have been rocky ones. First came rumors that Paramount would be making a lot of cuts to the franchise, and by the end of Thursday it was confirmed that the upcoming Season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery would be its last. I’m here to tell Paramount that whatever news comes in the following days, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds better survive the purge or I will personally begin a political campaign targeted at all of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone spinoffs, with the goal of making it illegal to name TV series after numbers.
I am not happy about Discovery‘s departure, especially considering we’re now just shy of a third of the way through the final season of Star Trek: Picard. But it isn’t the 1990s anymore, and five seasons ain’t bad, particularly when you consider Discovery has had between 13 and 15 episodes per season so far, whereas so far both Picard and Strange New Worlds have both only gotten 10. And while Picard‘s current season is its best yet, it feels like the series has had its chance and then some.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, on the other hand, is just getting started. As the TV franchise’s first live-action return to episodic storytelling in recent years, it’s not only a breath of fresh air in terms of Trek, but for this new age of premiere streaming series as a whole.
With Anson Mount reprising the role he first took over in Season 2 of Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds renders Christopher Pike one of the most instantly likable captains in Trek history. Actors like Ethan Peck (Spock) and Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura) lend dimension to beloved original series characters while Rebecca Romijn (Una Chin-Riley), Jess Bush (Nurse Chapel), Babs Olusanmokun (Dr. M’Benga), and Gia Sandhu (T’Pring) inject welcome depth into characters we’d previously only seen once or a few times in the show that started it all.
No, I don’t want Star Trek: Lower Decks or Star Trek: Prodigy on the chopping block either. I genuinely feel Prodigy may be the franchise’s best series, and if there were ever any doubt in my mind that I would love Lower Decks, it was blasted out of my head as soon as Mariner and Tendi opened the third episode, “Temporal Edict,” with a heavy metal jam, as remembered by Memory Alpha. But leaving Trek’s only running series as animated ones feels horribly wrong.
Ideally, Paramount would come out with new series as well because it seems a little ridiculous that in a franchise that’s all about the future, the only surviving live-action series — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — is a prequel show. But short of the studio finally pulling the trigger on Star Trek: Section 31 or Star Trek: Janeway, Strange New Worlds absolutely needs to survive.
If nothing else, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds made the Gorn cool. You can’t make the Gorn cool and take them away from us. That’s a whole new level of evil.
