Star Trek’s Most Fun Show Has Moved Beyond Canon

What a difference five years make. Back in 2020, the two live-action Star Trek series that hit Paramount+ were Star Trek: Picard Season 1 and Star Trek: Discovery Season 3. With plenty of bright spots, overall, both of those seasons were deeply earnest, full of anxiety and bloodshed, and certainly created division among the various sects of Trek fans. Today, Strange New Worlds — which ironically began as a Discovery spinoff — is now the near tonal opposite of where the franchise was very recently. And with Season 3, Strange New Worlds is remarkable because, unlike the various course-corrections in Discovery and Picard, this show isn’t really trying to reinvent itself at all.

Strange New Worlds is, if you squint, a live-action version of Lower Decks, albeit a much more mainstream one. For fans who loved the two previous seasons, Strange New Worlds Season 3 is simply another season of that same show: a breezy episodic structure combined with a quirky tone, and quick to set phasers to fun (almost) every time. And so, judging by the first five episodes of Season 3 that were given to critics, Strange New Worlds is doing all of that again, with only one difference: Unlike Season 2, there seem to be fewer gimmicks. No musical episode. No crossover with another show. Instead, the series is confident that fans will enjoy the very specific soap opera woven around the newish crew of the Starship Enterprise.

Strange New Worlds isn’t a serialized show in terms of big overarching sci-fi plotting, but it is a serialized show in terms of emotional character arcs. And it’s for this reason that the one thing to know about Season 3 of SNW is that it expects that you’re more invested in the characters than the sci-fi. Arguably, this is a strategy that comes from the heyday of The Next Generation. Back then, Michael Piller shifted the style of the show to deliver episodes focused on single characters. The Next Generation Season 3 (1989-1990) then shifted into the era where we got “Worf episodes” or “Riker episodes,” an episodic style that suited that show, and works decently well with Strange New Worlds Season 3, too.

And, like The Next Generation before it, SNW Season 3 seems increasingly less concerned about matching up perfectly with Trek canon. While Discovery Season 2 bent over backwards to retcon how that crew fit in with the larger puzzle of pre-Original Series canon, the current machinations and character situations in Strange New Worlds seem not anti-canon per se, but certainly exist in a different tonal world.

To put it another way, The Original Series gave us hints at the romance between Spock and Chapel, while SNW has turned that subtext into the actual text of the series. Ditto minor one-off characters like Roger Korby, who, appeared in one episode of TOS as Chapel’s estranged former fiancé, but in SNW Season 3 is a major force, a recurring character with a lot to say and do. Did we get the sense in the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” that Spock knew the original Korby this well? Not really. But that’s been the conceit of SNW all along. Kirk interacts with Pike way more than we’d assumed, Uhura is on the Enterprise for much longer, and now, after his introduction at the end of Season 2, Martin Quinn’s new take on Scotty is charmingly front and center in Season 3.

It’s tempting to say that SNW succeeds because, of all the newer Trek shows, it’s the one that feels the most like fan fiction. Or perhaps, to put it another way, it’s Star Trek version of Marvel’s What If? In this case, the “What If?” scenario that is floated in nearly every episode is “What if the 60s Star Trek show were made today?”

Generally speaking, on this note, the episodes in SNW Season 3 succeed, but only in the sense that they feel like modern versions of episodes from Season 2 of Star Trek: The Original Series (aka, the season most jam-packed with comedic episodes like “I, Mudd” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”). Strange New Worlds Season 3 is certainly fun, though occasionally at the expense of presenting stakes that are higher than simply emotional. If you allow yourself to say that this show is about the characters and how they feel, then you will love it. If you’re looking for something that is closer to For All Mankind or Foundation, you should watch those shows as a kind of counterbalance.

In a kind of reversal from Season 2, some of the better episodes of SNW Season 3 are the more serious-minded ones, including the excellent first episode, which is a direct sequel to the Season 2 cliffhanger, “Hegemony.” In fact, the Season 3 premiere episode of Strange New Worlds is much better than Season 2’s somewhat forgettable opener, “The Broken Circle.” While SNW has some loose ends to tie up, it doesn’t rush to fix everything the way Season 2 did in the first two episodes. Some events from Season 2, particularly in reference to Captain Batel, still linger in Season 2. And, as mentioned before, we’re far from being done with Spock/Chapel drama.

When the episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” subtly reset the SNW timeline in 2023, the show seemed to be making a not-so-subtle statement: This show is no longer a prequel. And despite the massive amounts of TOS characters that make up the backbone of the show, this season cements that statement. The legacy of Strange New Worlds in the larger pantheon of Trek is, for now, unknowable. Because we’re getting Season 4 and Season 5 after this, in some ways, we’re still very much in the middle of this journey. Where the series will boldly go next might be somewhat predictable, but it’s still very much one of the most fun sci-fi shows on TV.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 debuts with two episodes on July 17, 2025, on Paramount+.