Star Trek Sets Course For STRANGE NEW WORLDS

Star Trek: Discovery has been a pretty mixed bag through two seasons. The production values are top-notch and the characters eventually started to grow on me, but the storytelling has been wildly uneven. That said, one of the series' indisputed bright spots was, against all odds, the arrival of Captain Christopher Pike, Lieutenant Spock and Number One from the USS Enterprise. The fan response to Pike & Pals was so positive that the internet quickly demanded a Pike-centric spinoff be added to the list of 17 some-odd Star Trek projects in currently in development.

What the internet wants, the internet gets. CBS All Access has officially announced a full series order for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which will see Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Ethan Peck reprise their iconic roles as the command crew of the Enterprise in the decade before James T. Kirk takes the reins. Strange New Worlds is a title I can really get behind, as it hopefully implies that this series will focus a bit more on old school Trek space exploration. The more serialized approach taken by Discovery and Picard has its merits, but at this point I'm ready for something a little more sprawling and, well, fun.

Sidenote: kudos to Anson Mount - the guy not only bears a remarkable resemblence to Jeffrey Hunter who played Pike in the original failed Star Trek pilot, but he really made the role his own and crafted one of the most compelling Trek characters in a decade. Mount previously had the dubious distinction of starring in the only Marvel franchise to fall flat on its face immediately out of the gate. Remember Inhumans? MCU fans may have gone all in on a gun-toting cyborg racoon and his talking tree, but apparently a giant teleporting bulldog and a woman with a weaponized ponytail were a bridge too far. Good on Mount for carving himself a place in another marquee franchise.

In the meantime, head over to CBS All Access to check out the latest round of Short Treks as we await the premiere of Discovery Season 3 sometime later this year.