Television

I think "genre episodes" is more fitting than "gimmick". On the one hand, I like the meta-ness of SNW exploring all the genres of film and television. And I like to imagine how much fun the actors are having, being able to act in so many genres and some their charterers in different ways. On the other hand, it's tiresome. This kind of thing only works well written it's the occasional episode, not the whole season/series.

I say this as someone who found the soap opera episode hilarious. The problem is that the episodes become more about the genre-of-the-week than it does about the story.

They are telling Star Trek stories. This season, the stories are about the crew. Each one of them went through traumatic experiences, and this season is about the crew working through their trauma and coming out stronger on the other side. Plus, the way they provide in-universe explanations for each episode's format is simply brilliant. You call it gimmicky, I call it art.

I’m enjoying them very much. I can see why they wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But to my mind they’re still Star Trek episodes, they just have another genre’s filter over them. Most of them share pretty standard Star Trek episode premises, they’re just borrowing flavour from some other genre.

They seem to be really leaning in to having a very episodic format with the storylines having something to say about a specific topic and using a particular framing device to explore it. I gotta say that I can feel them aligning with TOS.

There's 9 episodes left and they have to move a few characters along to smoothly lead in to the TOS remake that will likely happen to gain back an audience after the Ellisons push for Right Wing Conservative Trek and sink the franchise.

Should be amusing to watch all the grifters who have been bleating about Woke Trek proceed to not watch any of it once it's been specifically made to pander to them.

This is a pretty common sentiment from what ive seen. The musical episode worked really well in part because the rest of the season was so strong, I think. Ngl ive still gotta catch up on the last few episodes of this season, I thought id be more excited every week but im just... not.

I liked season 1. I want strange new worlds, new life and civilizations.

Yeah, I agree. The musical was great in part because it stood out from the rest of the season. I do think there's some good Trek in the genre episodes and it's actually not too far off from the other series doing their holodeck/time travel/western etc. episodes but with half as many episodes I wish it was more consistent in tone.

This season has just been garbage unfortunately. I don't know what they're thinking. S3 wasn't great, and they doubled down.

https://seriesgraph.com/show/103516-star-trek-strange-new-worlds

I don't like them. I didn't watch the puppet episode, and I didn't watch the musical episode. I shut off both as soon as I realized what they were.

But, I guess some people like them, so they keep making them. I don't know.