Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 released its episode titles, and it sounds like this will be a season that focuses on one of the franchise’s oldest tricks. The fourth season just released its new episode titles for the new season, and the 10 titles all deal with one specific topic, and it is a format that Star Trek has used constantly over the years, dating back to The Original Series. These titles include names like “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” “The Griffin Incident,” and “A Case of Chiaroscuro.” While the titles could mean anything, there is a strong sense that Star Trek is going to go back to its old standby, time travel episodes, in the fourth season of Strange New Worlds.
If Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going to go with time travel as the season-long storyline, it will have the franchise going back to its oldest trick. However, it could also mark trouble for the series, which has made its name on a specific style of storytelling.
Star Trek has always loved to tell time travel stories, knowing well that it is one of sci-fi’s most used devices. In fact, one of the best episodes in The Original Series is a time travel story that has Captain Kirk and Spock trying to bring the world back to what it was before McCoy changed everything. Of course, this was in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and it put Spock and Kirk on a real-world Earth where the Enterprise does not exist, and Kirk has to make a decision between the woman he loves and the future of the universe. It has everything that makes time travel stories great.
It also wasn’t just the main Enterprise crew that had to deal with time travel, as one of the best Star Trek episodes in history, regardless of series, was the Deep Space 9 episode “The Visitor.” This sees an aging Jake Sisko spending his entire life trying to undo a temporal accident that trapped his father, Captain Sisko. It was a touching story with a heartbreaking ending, and it proves how great Star Trek can be when it is hitting on all cylinders.
There were even time travel stories that made movies great, with one of the best Star Trek movies ever released, Star Trek: First Contact, forcing the crew to travel back in time to stop the Borg from preventing Earth’s first contact with the Vulcans. Add in the Next Generation episode, “All Good Things…” where Picard jumped between his past, present, and future to stop an anomaly that could wipe out humanity, and it is clear there are some fantastic time travel episodes that elevate this popular franchise to the upper echelon of sci-fi entertainment.
There are other great time travel stories in Star Trek history, although few touch the level of the four mentioned above. However, at the same time, there have been some terrible time travel stories that fans would prefer to forget. The Voyager episode “Time and Again” was a shocking reset for the episode, with Janeway resetting the timeline completely, something that still doesn’t quite work well today. “Non Sequitor” was an episode that featured Harry Kim, who is a beloved Star Trek secondary character, but the episode left a lot to be desired. “Time’s Arrow” is a two-parter from TNG that had aliens travel to 1893 to consume human brainwaves, and the plot never really comes together.
When done right, Star Trek is among the best time travel stories, but it has been done so many times that there are just as many attempts that don’t work.
It seems exciting to see some time travel stories coming to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but this is also something to be concerned about. It isn’t the fact that Star Trek might be looking into time travel; it is the fact that this could end up as a high-concept season that has time travel as its central conceit. One thing that fans love so much about this specific show is that it returned to the more episodic format of adventures of the week. If the episodes all referring to time travel hint at an overall narrative plot, that will shake things up, and it might ruin what makes the show great.
Of course, there is still a good chance that the titles could refer to time travel, or they could just be fun titles that are callbacks to past Star Trek timelines, episodes, and events. There is supposed to be a puppet episode in this season (possibly “Human Best Friend”), so the chance for plenty of stand-alone episodic adventures is still a possibility. However, if Star Trek is going back to time travel, the overall quality of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds makes one hope it could be a callback to the best of the past, and not some of the more disappointing outings.
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