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.