'Strange New Worlds' Can't Imagine More for Its Women
As the fourth season of 'Strange New Worlds' wraps up, time and time it runs back to one well in particular for its female characters.
This post contains spoilers for the season four finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Tomorrow's Enterprise."
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has become weird about a lot of things. It's weird about Spock. It's weird about the concept of just making an episode of Star Trek, like it so often did in its first couple of seasons, treating them as rare treats in a sea of hackneyed gimmicks. It's also very weird about the women that make up its ensemble cast.
On the surface when it comes to gender binaries, Strange New Worlds is easily one of the most diverse Star Trek shows in franchise history, only really rivaled by contemporaries in the modern era like Discovery and Starfleet Academy. The majority of its senior cast are women. They frequently get the spotlight in episodes, and it's not only rare for the series to fail the bechdel test, it has sometimes even come close to failing an inverse version of it for its make characters. Women's stories are undoubtedly at the core of what Strange New Worlds does in ways that few Star Trek shows can match.
But that is the surface. Beneath that initial layer of visibility, Strange New Worlds has increasingly proven that, compared to when it laser-focuses on male characters like Spock or Pike, it rarely knows what to do with its female characters outside of one bizarrely specific trend that has kept popping up:
They just can't stop dating men from TOS.