strange new worlds rating from memory

14 Sep, 2026

my first English-language post on this blog!

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode guide from memory

Most of this show's episodes I have seen but once – and it was when they originally aired. Recent seasons of Strange New Worlds have been increasingly upsetting to watch for me, to the point where I often find myself either not finishing episodes, or skipping them altogether after getting a small taster. The biggest problems have been:

• episodes with gimmicky/joke premises have been there since the beginning, but their saturation seems to have gone from 1-2 episodes a season to being almost exclusively what is aired
• the gradual supplementation of the cast with TOS characters that share with them nothing excepting the name
• gradual increase in gore, emotional trauma and actors bringing their tour-de-forced

But I have wondered: maybe it has always been this way. Maybe it was never good. Before I jump into a rewatch, I decided to open up a list of SNW episodes on Wikipedia to refresh my memory and gave each a simple good/bad or see/skip rating with as little nuance as possible. That part didn't entirely work out, but anyway:

Here is my pre-rewatch retrospective rating of episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, complete with notes I jotted down about each, which are mostly very brief.

(next, I better make some graphs)

Season 1

• "Strange New Worlds"

first ep, i remember it begins with pike on a horse in the snow, it was a first contact prime directive episode

Good

• "Children of the Comet"

uhura episode, music comet, shepherds

Good

• "Ghosts of Illyria"

storm on a planet, Una origin reveal, plasma beings, light addiction

Good

• "Memento Mori"

gorn trap, la'an memory has the answer/solution ala newtrek

eh, neither good nor bad

• "Spock Amok"

shenanigans episode w body swap humor, enterprise bingo

Good, was my favorite of the season at the time

• "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach"

first servant planet

Good, but disturbing because of the whole [spoiler omitted] thing

• "The Serene Squall"

secret pirate

Good

• "The Elysian Kingdom"

where everyone is a fairytale character but its endearing actually because it's the first time they do sth like that or at least that's the way i remember it

good

• "All Those Who Wander"

ice planet, alien ripoff

eh, neither good nor bad

• "A Quality of Mercy"

alternate future where Pike encounters Romulans

it was ok, let's say good

Season 2

• "The Broken Circle"

wiki says something about false flag plan

don't really remember it

• "Ad Astra per Aspera"

una trial ep

good

• "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

time travel w la'an and alt universe kirk, setting-things-up-slop except it doesn't actually set anything up? won't they-won't they just like spock and chapel

eh it's okay i guess?

• "Among the Lotus Eaters"

amnesia planet episode

good, but kinda disturbong

• "Charades"

human spock

good

• "Lost in Translation"

uhura hallucinations, kirk

don't really remember this one

• "Those Old Scientists"

lower decks crossover which i did not care for one bit at the time but i did rewatch it once i got into lower decks successfully after ten attempts and it was:

ok

like, it wasn't good as an advertisement for lower decks, nor is it a good advertisement for snw. but if youre on board with ld humor, its sometimes pretty good

• "Under the Cloak of War"

mbenga kills klingon general in an mbenga ptsd season subplot i didnt care for

eh not good not bad

• "Subspace Rhapsody"

musical episode

it was o.k., first big example of a snw gimmick episode not actually going far enough or good enough into the genre it's doing to justify itself. laughed a few times

• "Hegemony" part 1

gorn gorn gorn, scotty joins the show, action smaction

I think it was like fine? don't really remember

Season 3

• "Hegemony, Part II"

idk part 2 to the gorn thing, i guess. sets up some real bad season long arcs

so eh?

• "Wedding Bell Blues"

fake wedding

bad

• "Shuttle to Kenfori"

klingon zombies, mbenga says "to the death" in a pretty funny way

eh not good not bad

• "A Space Adventure Hour"

holodeck ep somehow, seems mean toward the concept of star trek somehow

did not like

• "Through the Lens of Time"

evil cave, newly introduced medical officer character starts getting suffering-porned in his eye gore body possession horror thing

bad

• "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail"

kirk is in command with og characters, they use wired phones also, and there are scavengers who turn out to be humans

almost good but since these are legacy characters it's odd

• "What Is Starfleet?"

documentary episode

chose not to watch

• "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans"

chose not to watch

• "Terrarium"

enemy mine episode

did not watch but this one maybe i would like\

• "New Life and New Civilizations"

finale that resolves the excruciating season long arc

i don't think i watched it

Season 4

• "Valles Marineris"

dinosaurs

it was ok

• "The Griffin Incident"

the horror episode

did not finish, did not like

• "Human Best Friend"

drug trip episode

didn't watch

• "A Case of Chiaroscuro"

black and white episode

didn't watch

• "Level-Five Transporter Accident"

its muppets but they cant say muppets so they say puppets

chose not to watch

• "Off-Hour"

chapel and mbenga, apparently its similar to disaster?

didn't watch

• "Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass"

soap opera episode

it was ok

• "Orders of Magnitude"

badmiral episode, also concocted to be a kirk episode, if not for that part i'm gonna say it's

good

• "Once La'An a Time" – has not aired yet as of writing
• "Tomorrow's Enterprise" – has not aired yet as of writing

#review