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Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which returns for its second season on Paramount+. As with all of our coverage, this first review is free for all, but future reviews (and our reviews of last season) are reserved for paid subscribers. Here’s a full look at our summer schedule, and you can find out more about our coverage on our About Page.

Hey, we’re back! And in fine form as well. I’ll warn you straight off: it’s likely this review is going to get into nitpick territory, because that’s the level of consistency Strange New Worlds has achieved for me. The show isn’t perfect, obviously, but it’s reached a plateau where I don’t have to worry about the writers completely forgetting character motives from week to week, or losing the grasp on basic plotting mechanics, which means I get to dig in a bit deeper. That can be fun for me, but it can also read as grumpy or overly harsh if I don’t get the tone right. So if you left “The Broken Circle” in high spirits and aren’t in the mood for an Internet pedant to to indulge in some loving snark… well, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

One thing I can’t criticize: the pacing. It’s near perfection—fast enough to be engaging, even gripping, throughout, but never so fast that it forgets to allow for vital character moments. 

I spent most of last season complaining (in my positive, cheerful way) that this show really needed more episodes to move around in, and I still think that; but if the result of shorter seasons means this much care and polish, maybe there are worse things? One of the problems of the streaming era is “series outwearing their welcome by taking too long to get to a point.” You can call this the Golden, or Silver, Age of TV, but shows still struggle with how to hold our interest for full runs; in the old days, you had filler episodes, but at least no one acted like you needed to watch them all to know what was really going on. However, that is not a concern here, as “the point” remains the show’s strong suit. 

We pick up with the Enterprise in space dock; it’s the standard opening for any number of Trek big screen outings, which makes sense, because “The Broken Circle” is very much a movie-style adventure. There are plot beats in here that should be familiar to anyone conversant in pop culture, and here’s where we get to those nitpicks I warned you about. This hour is entertaining as all hell, but it’s also not particularly subtle about where it’s stealing from; and as happy as I am to see La’an Noonien-Singh again, I’m not sure that happiness would’ve been lessened if she’d been reintroduced in a more original way. The drinking competition scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark is possibly the easiest shorthand imaginable to show off a woman being a badass. It’s not a sin to revisit it here, but it does diminish my joy a little. 

Oh, and also: Spock decides to steal the Enterprise. He has a good reason to: Uhura gets a distress signal from La’an, who we last saw leaving to help the lone survivor of a Gorn attack, and Starfleet refuses Spock’s request to take the ship and provide assistance. Pike has already left to try and go help Una Chin-Riley, a story I’m guessing will be the focus of next week’s episode (Una was arrested at the end of last season for lying about her genetic identity on her job application), which means he’s not around to charm anyone into giving him what he wants. So Spock does the next best thing. With the assistance of the core ensemble, and new ensemble member (and soon to be Chief Engineer) Carol Kane as Pelia, he fakes a warp core breach and flees from space dock.

Which is exciting and neat and also, well, we’ve done this before too. You can say it’s an intentional reference—Search For Spock opens with the original series crew successfully pulling off a ship heist—but there’s something disappointing about making such a supposedly major, career-threatening choice into a standard, adventure of the week kind of deal. I can’t remember the exact phrase for it, but it’s a problem comics often run into, with their long running superhero stories and pressure to produce eye-catching novelty. It’s a kind of feature creep that takes any once exciting threat or risk and flattens it out, diminishing the dramatic potency—it leads to bigger risks and bigger threats, before everything has to be reset in yet another company wide-crossover. 

Here’s the thing, though: the heist in “Broken Circle” is fresh enough to not be completely tired, and it’s handled quite well. I was initially prepping to write a whole paragraph about how SNW’s biggest danger going forward is that its essential sweetness, the good-natured cheery hugs-for-all vibe, could tip easily into treacle if poorly handled. We saw it happen once or twice last season, and I have no doubt it will happen again, and at first I considered the ship theft and the way Spock suffers no actual punishment for that theft a bad sign. And while I’m still not exactly in love with how it all plays out—I get the desire to isolate the Enterprise to raise the stakes, but this story probably would’ve worked just fine if no stealing had been involved—it’s breezy enough that it just kinda works. The brass have a decent reason for only slapping Spock’s wrist, and with Una in jail it’s not like the show needed more legal problems to manage.

Plus, the show is just so good at this stuff I can’t really begrudge it the occasional lapse. Most of the major characters apart from Pike and Una get a chance to shine this week, and the dialogue is as zippy as it ever was. It doesn’t take long at all to remember why all these people are so likable, and why I’m so happy to have them back on my TV screen. And this time around, I’m appreciating even more how deftly the show manages to be clever without being smarmy or overly twee. The closest we get to the latter this week is a bridge crew discussion about what Spock’s catchphrase will be. And although it’s silly enough that I could understand having a problem with it (we’re getting perilously close to “So, that happened” territory), I couldn’t help loving it. I dunno. It’s cute and doesn’t make me want to die, and I may have even laughed out loud. I’m calling that a win.

Not that the whole hour is goofs and japes. La’an, in following the Gorn survivor to a mining planet, has uncovered a plot to re-open Klingon and Federation hostilities: war profits are the best profits, that sort of thing. I’m sure it’s come up before, but we get more information about Nurse Chapel and Doctor M’Benga’s experiences in the Klingon War, as the two of them risk their lives to defeat said plot. There are some intense action sequences (Chapel and M’Benga take a drug that makes them more or less super human), a coded message sent in desperation, and even a death-defying jump into space, providing Spock with a chance to get all angsty about Christine’s potential expiration. The good guys win the day, the bad guys are defeated, but there’s a hint at the end that an even bigger threat is coming. 

So yeah, all in all, “The Broken Circle” does what a season premiere is supposed to do. It gets us back in the swing of things with minimum fuss, re-establishes most of the core dynamics, and teases us with the horrors to come (that we can’t wait to see). That it can feel slightly… let’s say “well-traveled” in spots may be more of a feature than a bug. Last season felt like the show just starting to realize its own potential. Fingers crossed season two is wilder, weirder, and maybe a little more “strange” and “new;” however, this will absolutely work to start.

• I read an article, can’t remember where, that talked about the differences between the various Spocks, between the original series, the Kelvin Universe movies, and this show. The writer mentioned how Peck’s take on the character (supported by the scripting) is coded autistic, at least in the way TV shows often code autism, and now that I read that, I can’t unsee it. Nimoy’s Spock was more willing to be sarcastic, and not as prone to not getting the joke; there was a maturity to him that set him apart from the rest of the crew, aside from Kirk. Peck’s Spock is more wet behind the ears, for understandable reasons. I’m curious to see if he weathers as the show goes on. (He doesn’t need to; I’m fine with multiple takes on Spock, although I don’t care for Zachary Quinto’s.)

• So, Carol Kane, huh? She fits in well enough, and her backstory has potential. I still miss Hemmer, but as replacements go, they could’ve done a lot worse.

• They’re leaning hard into the “will they/won’t they” of Chapel and Spock. I remain into it, although I always have to remind myself to not think about the original series.

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