Why Is 'Strange New Worlds' So Weird About Spock?
The 'Star Trek' series has put much of its spotlight on Spock, but all that focus has led to little satisfaction.
This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, up to and including the fifth episode of season four, "Level Five Transporter Accident."
Star Trek shows are ensemble pieces, and Strange New Worlds is no exception.
Well, maybe it was. When the show first began, it threaded a tough needle of trying to spend as much time as possible with its sizeable senior staff, but it became clear pretty quickly that the show was only really interested in a handful of characters: Captain Pike, Spock, Nurse Chapel, and La'an. Over the years, that focus has tightened more and more, leaving a lot of its cast feeling quite hollow, save for the one Vulcan the show just can't quit.
It's clear, halfway through the show's penultimate season now, that Strange New Worlds is a show about Spock. In some ways, this makes sense: while the series now has several of the characters that will make the transition from Pike's captaincy of the Enterprise to Kirk's, Spock is ultimately the most important bridge between those two eras of the crew, given his closeness to both captains. Ethan Peck has also turned out to be perhaps one of Trek's best-ever recasts of a legacy character, delivering a consistently great performance that feels both of his own and in conversation with Nimoy and even Quinto before him. It helps that Spock's legacy makes him a deeply fascinating character to want to explore as well, to mine the depths of his relationships and his struggle to balance his Vulcan and human aspects.
And yet, despite this potential, and despite receiving the greatest amount of focus any character on Strange New Worlds has gotten by a country mile, all I can think of when I think of Strange New Worlds' Spock is that the show's worst impulses come out in its fascination with him.