You Can Now Watch One of the Best Seasons of Star Trek for Free

Star Trek’s grand return, first with Discovery, and now with what feels like a whole flotilla of series, transformed the franchise into a series of heavily serialized adventures for the most part—a distinct break from the style that had largely guided the franchise for half a century prior. With Strange New Worlds, it re-embraces that format once more: and in doing so, stands apart among its contemporaries as some of the best Trek around.

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Star Trek, from its very beginning, has been about a lot of things, but one thing above all: beautiful people performing competence porn. The idealized future utopia, the spaceships and costumes, the action and adventure, the sci-fi of it all, that can be brushed aside if Star Trek gives you people who really enjoy being good at their jobs. So what do you do when you take one of its brightest and imagine them in a place where they’re not quite sure they’re that good yet?

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Three weeks in and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is already settling into a satisfying groove: one part riff on a formula that Star Trek loves, one part focus on a singular character, one part classic morality tale. This week, you get bang for your buck with not one, but two formula riffs—and a whole lot more in a fascinating look at Rebecca Romijn’s Una Chin-Riley, better known as Number One.

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So far, so Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has given us a really solid formula between riffing on classic Trek premises and taking one of its main characters for a little deeper dive along the way. This week is no exception, but with an especially great riff: What if modern Star Trek did its own “Balance of Terror,”with a dash of “Year of Hell,” and even a little whiff of The Wrath of Khan?

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Any good episodic TV series knows how to deal with often dramatic tone shifts that, in our era of heavily serialized programming, might seem tone-deaf or jarring. Star Trek, of course, is no exception to this having been episodic for so much of its 50+ year history—some weeks you fight god, some weeks the holodeck’s Moriarty replica is trying to gain sentience and break free. That’s Star Trek, and Strange New Worlds is more than happy to re-prove that.

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So far, Strange New Worlds has found strength in simplicity: week in, week out, a new adventure, a new bit of fun, and it’s done and dealt with before moving onto the next. Even the higher-stakes moments have always ended with a clarity that our Starfleet heroes overcame hardship, did the right thing, and saved the day. This week’s episode offers something to challenge that, but it doesn’t always quite work.

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After last week’s attempts at more moral complexity didn’t quite hit the mark, this week Star Trek: Strange New Worlds re-centered on what’s worked for it in the past: a camp, tropey bit of action hung around a central member of the Enterprise crew. This time, Ethan Peck’s Spock took the limelight again—and although this was a little more self-serious on the surface than the last time that happened, we still had a lot of fun along the way.

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Although it has largely treated its characters with great care in its debut season, Star Trek: Strange New World’s general sense of episodic breeziness has also given those characters a light touch—moments of highlights, but nothing too deep with our crewmates. This week’s episode changes that, wrapping up one of its most sincere stories yet in the show’s most zany caper.

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Strange New Worlds has prided itself in its first season on a somewhat sense of ephemerality—that even at its direst of stakes, our enterprising heroes would come out the other side and move on to the next big adventure. This week’s penultimate episode of the season proved just how scary and incredible the series can be when it confronts arguably its truest idea of horror: lasting consequence.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a show both in love with, and unable to escape, its place in the Star Trek timeline. From the get-go it’s known that inherently—as a series following the captain of the Enterprise we know is going to be replaced by the captain of the Enterprise—Strange New Worlds would as much about destiny as it is legacy. But its debut season’s finale masterfully balanced those two threads together to create something magical.

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