An interesting, deliberately thought provoking 🤔 question for a lazy long weekend Sunday morning…
Setting aside whether specific fans like specific ‘gimmicks’ (crossovers, musicals, bringing back Kirk or Khan) or tropes (transporter malfunctions), Space.com is posing the hypothesis that the proportion was too high in Strange New Worlds second season.
There’s no arguing that the season was successful in drawing in large audiences week after week. Taking a look back though, was there too much trippy-Trek™ dessert and not enough of a meaty main course? YMMV surely.
For my part, I can both agree that trippy Trek is something I’ve been wanting more of, and that I would have welcomed 2 or 3 more episodes were more grounded or gave the opportunity to see more of Una as a leader and dug into Ortegas backstory.
The 90s shows seemed to be bit embarrassed by trippyness, although Voyager found its pretext allowed even stern Janeway to pronounce ‘Weird is our business.’ One can argue that the high proportion in SNW is a feature, not a bug.
I’d still prefer a 12-15 episode season though.
@StillPaisleyCat I would agree, they did over gimmick things, but as I commented somewhere else, the original Star Trek was a low budget show, and here they have a much, much larger budget, so what can you do? What should you do? And what will the fans accept? I think this season is very much about finding that out, and makes me wonder what’s coming season 3.