REVIEW: ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 4 Is All Over The Place

With Star Trek’s 60th anniversary fast approaching and little to show for it besides a string of recent cancellations and disappointments, Trekkies need a bit of a win right now. Here’s some good news: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 is largely a return to form. At its best, the first six episodes deliver feats of genre shape-shifting, switching between wildly different styles while maintaining the central ethos the series is known for.

However, this range ends up both a gift and a curse, because while most of these one-offs are strong, a lack of overarching connective tissue makes this latest run feel a bit too disparate at times, like a so-so album with some killer singles. Bold, out-there episodes are a fundamental tenet of Star Trek, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 could have used a few more “standard” (but sharp) cases of space diplomacy and heady exploration. Oh, and at least one fewer puppet excursion.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 reunites us with Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew aboard the Starship Enterprise, as they “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go,” well, you know the rest. So far, this show has been a rare series entry that most fans actually agree is good, but the previous season wasn’t nearly as well-received as the first two.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 takes some big genre swings, with some hits and misses.

The main issue was that it lacked the kind of standout episodes that have made this prequel shine, such as season 2’s “Ad Astra per Aspera” (a gripping legal drama that delved into Starfleet ethics) or “Under the Cloak of War” (which interrogated the nature of revenge and justice). While the third season wasn’t outright awful, it spent too much time on a bigger plotline about an evil alien who liked to explode people’s eyeballs out of their skulls.

Compared to this more serialized structure, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 is the opposite, focusing almost entirely on episodic adventures. Thankfully, many of these one-offs are excellent. One of the best examples is “A Case of Chiaroscuro,” a moody noir thriller filmed entirely in black and white.

Everything about the episode evokes a specific era of vintage cinema as it channels films about resistance against Nazi occupation, like Casablanca (Klingons serve as stand-ins for the Germans). Hazy grays and pearlescent whites mix with Dutch angles, art deco backdrops, and a persistent hum of tragic inevitability. It’s brilliant. And beyond working as a great standalone, the episode also taps into existing character conflicts which keep it from feeling too disconnected.

Rather than an overarching plotline, Season 4 focuses on episodic adventures.

On the tonal end of the spectrum, there’s “The Griffin Incident,” a ghost story that fully commits to haunted-house terror. This isn’t the first scary episode of Strange New Worlds, but it is the first to feature someone’s entrails being sucked out of their body into the vacuum of space. 

In fact, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 has some of the goriest sequences the series has ever seen. Beyond mere shock value, these unsettling sights tie into the crew’s existing traumas, ensuring this isn’t just a self-indulgent genre exercise but a genuinely well-crafted piece of psychological horror.

The last standout in the batch is a high-stakes medical/disaster drama that’s like if the Enterprise crew found themselves in the middle of a disaster procedural like 9-1-1. While mortal danger is par for the course at Starfleet, aesthetic choices like a literal ticking clock and a lineup of nightmarish triage scenarios make this tense ride stand out.

However, although half of the episodes are quite strong, the other half, provided at the time of review, were a bit weaker, albeit no less disparate: there’s a bacchanalian vacation with heavy shades of The Hangover, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Muppets. It’s all over the place.

It may be a bumpy ride, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 makes its mark.

In a vacuum, all the episodes are entertaining to some degree (except for the Muppet one, which jumps the shark in its final moments), but this focus on intensely unique scenarios and visuals becomes an overcorrection from the previous season. At a certain point, it feels as if showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, and the writers’ room, prioritized novelty above all else.

Again, this approach would have worked better if there were at least one or two more “normal” episodes to bridge the gap (like the season premiere), letting us settle back into the “comforting” rigmarole of deadly exploration and weirdo aliens, before pushing us into the deep end.

Still, while Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 doesn’t reach the heights of the first two, it’s hard to fully fault its ambition and willingness to lean into the type of episodic storytelling that can be rare on TV these days. Compared to the previous season, which all blended together, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 has episodes that Trekkies will likely talk about for years to come. It may be a bumpy ride as a whole, but that’s no small feat.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 premieres globally Thursday, July 23 on Paramount+. New episodes will be available weekly on Thursdays through Thursday, September 24.