The franchise is huge at this point – as big as Star Wars or Doctor Who, but it often feels like it was at odds with itself and somewhat embarrassed to exist in a way that these other franchises are not. He’s like an angry teenager who really wants to do tricks or treat his family, but does not want to meet friends if they make fun of him. Strange New Worlds is not like that. This show understands that you can be serious and stupid and you can still tell very good and fun stories. It is not a shame to exist. And, yes, many of them are due to an amazing cast – led by Anson Mount as Christopher Pike and Rebecca Romijn as the second, Una Chin-Riley (or Number 1, if you’re familiar with the original Star Trek show) . But beyond a great cast appearing on a great show, what really struck me was how Strange New Worlds is happy to embrace the full episode. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and Una (Rebecca Romijn) in one of the biggest episodes. Image: Marni Grossman / Paramount Plus Filler episodes are defined as those that are not related to the general stories of a series. They are often episodes for a break or it is the weird, funny episode in a typically dramatic show. They exist because, by the time the stream was released, most TV series had orders of more than 20 episodes. At the same time that many series are now coming out of six to 10 episodes, the screenwriter’s rooms should usually come out a little closer to the 22 scripts. This meant that things could get weird. Many of these 20 episodes could have serial plots: Mulder and Scully and their fight against the Cigarette Smoker and the Consortium or the myriad “The Doctor Who Loves” plot in the ER. But the shows would also have episodes that had experimental or silly or just plain content so as not to increase the stakes at the “end of the world as we know it”. Part of the reason Picard became Borg-ified had such a big impact on Star Trek: The Next Generation was because we knew he was also the nerd who liked to play a private eye on the holodeck. As short episode orders and plot series became du jour on television, the full episode went out of style. The cast of Star Trek: Discovery does not accidentally play a fairy tale about the fun of a fourth-dimensional being soon. But I would argue that the full episode was also what set television apart from movies as an art form. Shows like Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus are like movies, carefully separated into several weeks. One of the biggest complaints about many new shows on Netflix is ​​that they feel like big movies. The plot is always noisy and we never have time to just sit with a character and get to know him. And the appeal of television for so long – the reason it often inspires huge online fans – is because you spend so much time with those characters you know better than those with whom you spend two hours in a theater. Okay, and this is from a higher betting episode, but they’re fighting Gorn! Historically, these are some low betting bad guys! Image: Marni Grossman / Paramount Plus Six episodes in Strange New Worlds were not afraid to take a breather and let us enjoy these characters – just as Trek fans did with the previous series. So we can have an episode where Captain Pike, who learned his own tragic future in Star Trek: Discovery, is trying to come to terms with it, and we can have an episode that makes the extremely stupid Gorn Kirk once face a fairly scary threatening. But we can also have an episode where everyone is enjoying their break and two characters accidentally change bodies and negotiate some diplomatic terms. The show has seemed a bit unfocused in recent episodes, however; Shows like Stranger Things could learn a lot from the milder plot. Sometimes we do not need seven episodes towards the end of the world. Sometimes we just need one or two – you know, to have time for this bodybuilding episode or “Groundhog Day”. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds shows new episodes every Thursday on Paramount Plus.