Opinion
Why ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Is the Best Sci-Fi TV Show for Romance
The advent of modern fan fiction is credited to the Star Trek: The Original Series fandom. Dedicated fans in the ’60s wrote fan zines with original stories starring the crew of the Enterprise. Now, almost six decades later, Strange New Worlds, a prequel to the original show, is living up to the flagship’s memory in more ways than one.
While J.J. Abrams‘ trilogy of Trek films (and the Zachary Quinto/Chris Pine vocabulary war videos) reminded fans that Star Trek can be sexy, Strange New Worlds is upping the ante. The spinoff series centers on the pre-Captain Kirk era of the starship Enterprise, with Captain Pike (Anson Mount) attempting to outrun a devastating destiny and a young science officer Spock (Ethan Peck) still learning to quell the half-Vulcan, half-human storm inside of him.
As the mission to boldly go where no man has gone before takes Pike, Spock, and the intrepid crew to the far reaches of the galaxy, they encounter different species and galactic enigmas that will shape them into the characters made popular by TOS so long ago. Strange New Worlds is using the diversity, equity, and inclusion ethos of Starfleet to bring varied and fascinating characters together and make them sweat through wild adventures.
Along the way, Strange New Worlds has become one of the most ship-heavy shows on television, giving everyone from angst-lovers to slow-burning enthusiasts something to enjoy.
(Warning: The following contains light spoilers for the Strange New Worlds Season 3 finale, “New Life and New Civilizations.”)
A flavor for every shade of the shipping rainbow
Star Trek’s Federation of Planets is a utopian conglomerate of different alien species, cultures, and languages coming together, mostly, in harmony. This means that Starfleet crews are made up of people and creatures from all over the galaxy. They have different skin colors, skin textures, and facial features. Some come from science-forward societies, while others come from farming communes or deeply religious sects. Star Trek is about celebrating the differences in everyone and making a strong team by bringing those differences together and learning from them.
That also means there’s a wide array of sexualities and an endless array of characters that you can match up and hope they kiss. Different missions of the Enterprise call for various skill sets, which means the characters are constantly working with different people, allowing you to see who has the most chemistry with whom. And Strange New Worlds gives you a taste of everything.
Marni Grossman / Paramount+
Do you want the two most emotionally shielded characters to only be vulnerable with each other? Strange New Worlds has you covered. Do you want the grumpy security expert to have her heart melted by the charismatic homecoming prince of a future captain? The show has that, too. The straight A student falls for the rebellious film geek (which also fits a best friend’s brother trope). They’ve even got a sexuality-not-explicitly-defined pilot sharing loaded looks and dialogue with the bisexual manic pixie dream girl of a ship nurse (Ortegas and Chapel are so a thing if you want it badly enough, and the Strange New Worlds AO3 tag agrees with me).
These characters all work together on the same ship, making them essentially all roommates. The forced proximity is very real, so there’s no escaping tension when the chemistry sparks. There’s also plenty of time for characters to get to know each other if you’re more of a slow-burn shipper. With a new adventure in almost every episode, the hijinks never stop, throwing different characters together and showing different sides of each other. It’s almost overwhelming how many different scenarios can bring your OTP together, or force them apart in heart-wrenching ways.
Strange New Worlds is a buffet of potential shipping options, but the most popular dish may be a character you never suspected.
A horny, hot Spock is the gift we didn’t know we needed
Star Trek purists will – and have – argue that a romantically inclined Spock goes against the iconic framework that Leonard Nimoy and Gene Roddenberry created for the logic-centric Vulcan. They’re not wrong. The original Spock is an exemplary asexual spectrum character, but Strange New Worlds is a prequel to the original series. It gives us an inside glimpse into the personal life of a younger Spock who has not yet matured into the first officer of the Starship Enterprise. Nimoy played a Spock that was much more at peace with being half-human and half-Vulcan, but Peck’s version is still figuring out that balance – and making plenty of mistakes along the way.
Marni Grossman / Paramount+
Instead of a buttoned-up science officer whose hormones only kick in during the Vulcan mating season of pon farr, we have a younger Spock who craves the affection and closeness he was excluded from during his early years on Vulcan. It’s not logical, and he struggles with those desires and how to act on them as they conflict with his stern upbringing. It causes angst and miscommunication galore. Simply put, a Spock that f**ks is the greatest gift for fan fiction writers and readers.
Peck’s Spock isn’t the first iteration of the character with romantic urges. Nimoy had sparks of it. Quinto’s take on the character in Abrams’ Trek movies was also romantically entangled, but we meet that Spock already in the middle of a relationship with Zoe Saldana‘s Uhura. Strange New Worlds introduces us to the Vulcan on the night of his engagement to T’Pring (Gina Sandhu) and then takes us through the rollercoaster ride of his romantic adventures throughout the series. We get to spend more time watching how these feelings develop, and it is, in Spock’s words, fascinating.
The logic versus human emotion conflict makes Spock a personified slow burn, which is catnip for professional shippers (which I assume is everyone reading articles on Swooon). His head is constantly warring with his heart, making all of his romantic interactions layered and often clumsy. His DNA is the conflict, which makes him an incredible shipping partner with multiple people on the Enterprise, and Strange New Worlds has not wasted those opportunities.
At the end of Season 3, Spock is in an unspoken love triangle with La’an (Christina Chong) and Captain Kirk, while still healing from a traumatic breakup with Nurse Chapel. It is a mess, and Strange New Worlds is all the more delicious for creating this relationship quagmire. The characters don’t often speak directly about the entanglements, but the episodes are rife with longing looks and pained subtext.
The yearning is elite as their various misadventures force them to contend with feelings in unexpected ways, like Kirk and Spock having to dig deep to convince a temporarily Vulcan La’an not to start a race war against the Klingons. Eventually, these two will become surrogate-brother-level best friends. How do their mutual feelings for the same girl complicate that relationship? I am begging someone for 10,000 words on AO3 about that very topic and the revelations of their Season 3 finale mind meld.
And those 10,000 words can set these characters in almost any reality, because that’s the beauty of sci-fi and Star Trek.
Did someone order an AU delight?
Maybe starships, phasers, and warp speed don’t scream fan fic and shipping potential, but sci-fi very much lends itself to alternate universes. Different magics, undercover assignments, and other universe phenomena are constantly causing havoc for the Strange New Worlds crew, making many episodes feel like fan fiction fever dreams.
In Season 1, the ship flies into a sentient star field that tricks the entire crew into acting out the favorite fairy tale of Doctor M’Benga’s (Babs Olusanmokun) sick daughter. In Season 2, a warped improbability field inspires the crew to break into song when they are overwhelmed with emotion. In Season 3, La’an gets trapped in a 1960s murder mystery virtual reality simulator that pits her against her beloved crew members and reveals burgeoning feelings for her most recent lab partner.
There is always a space enigma or a meddling alien about to shift the perspective of the series and put the characters in strange new situations that either reveal deep secrets or force them to face demons they’ve been avoiding. They haven’t made the characters work at a coffee shop or bakery yet, but there has been a fake wedding and a body swap episode. These are tropes that have been beloved by fan fic writers and readers for decades – since the original Star Trek writers created them, probably. It’s so satisfying to see it onscreen and to enjoy characters you love in scenarios that go so far beyond the Enterprise bridge.
Watching an episode of Strange New Worlds is watching your wildest AU dreams become canon. You never know what wacky adventure is going to make the characters confess or what connections are going to emerge as the different plights force the team to work together in different ways. You won’t need that coffee shop AU when Strange New Worlds is trapping people in a dimension-bending prison and forcing them to solve deadly puzzles to have any hope of seeing their friends again. (I promise, there’s still so much coziness in this show.)
The sci-fi procedural structure of the show allows for so much imagination and thus invites fans to see their favorite characters in new lights as their various adventures shape them throughout the series.
The Star Trek franchise has always aimed to show the audience what society could be, and Strange New Worlds is continuing that legacy. The series isn’t afraid to be romantic, in every sense of the word. The bittersweet Season 3 finale endeavored to show that love is the strongest force in the universe as Captain Pike and Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) made a noble sacrifice to protect the galaxy. It was heartbreaking, but also a prime example of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds being the perfect show for shippers, lovers, and all those obsessed with romance, like us.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Seasons 1-3, Streaming Now, Paramount+
