After a misguided fourth season that jarringly alternated overarching, deadly serious mythology episodes with goofy larks, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds gets back on track in Season 4. And while actually leaning into the classic “mission of the week” structure when Paramount+ has already announced an abbreviated fifth and final season feels slightly like the show treading water before the final voyage, hey: at least it’s fun to watch.
Not to keep talking about the third season, but alongside the ongoing attack of the Gorn that has haunted the show since the beginning, Strange New Worlds also layered in a discombobulated plotline involving gods and creation that somehow connected back to the crew of the ship, and overall felt more like a leftover plot from Stargate than something from Star Trek. It just didn’t work, and continued to test the patience of viewers who have continued to enjoy the antics of this crew (it’s me, I am viewers) while being less than enthused about the show around them.
Adding to the mess of Season 3 was the slow, unnecessary march the series is taking to The Original Series, twisting the focus away from Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew to characters that eventually will pilot the Federation flagship in the show from the 1960s (and subsequent movies). It’s a frustrating choice because rather than focusing on what we are watching now, it paints Strange New Worlds as marking time until the real crew arrives. Which is unfortunate, because again: this is a fun and game cast who deserve time and exploration, versus being treated like stand-ins for the real deal.
That feeling doesn’t necessarily go away in Season 4 (six of the season’s 10 episodes were provided to critics for review) as Mount seems more than happy to cede his screentime – and authority – to other characters… Particularly Paul Wesley as Captain Kirk, who gets more to do bonding with Spock (Ethan Peck) and incongruously hanging around the Enterprise (the ostensible excuse is he’s visiting his brother) than many of the other main cast members of the series.
The addition of Martin Quinn as engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, who was introduced last season, goes a little more smoothly as his arc is tied this season to an ongoing rivalry with pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), and the two have a lot of fun bristling against each other. That said, that particular arc is also tied around Scotty slowly retrofitting the Enterprise with weird boops and beeps, and downgrading the equipment so that it’s more in line with the ‘60s stylings of The Original Series, versus the slick nu-Trek look of the 2009 movie Strange New Worlds aped. It’s the sort of unnecessary explanations (“hey, why don’t they have press buttons anymore?”) that only matters to die-hard fans on Reddit, versus regular watchers. The reason the ship looks slicker in this new show is that it’s coming out in 2026, versus 1963. And though the show figures out a way to make it work, do we really need a whole plotline about the captain getting a new chair, so that we understand later why Kirk has a different chair?
Similarly, a lot of time is spent on whether people want to leave their jobs and move to other jobs, again a way to explain why those characters are – or aren’t – in The Original Series. This is perhaps a little more palatable than plots about chairs, because characters (and actors) deciding to leave the concept of their TV show behind is a near constant of television. But given we know they do leave, versus, say, a show called Mark in Boston that ends every season with Mark wondering if he should leave Boston, there’s a level of inevitably there that weighs down the proceedings.
Okay, enough griping: what works about Strange New Worlds Season 4 is that it actually leans into the episodic nature, the done-in-one adventures with continuing, serialized character arcs that made the first two seasons such a joy to watch. Much of the season boils down to different parody ideas with varying results: a Hangover parody episode eventually wins your over by going utterly off the rails; a 24 “real time” episode doesn’t work merely because high stakes pseudo-real-time adventures is what the franchise gets into regularly anyway, just this time with more sliding panels on screen. But not every episode has to work as long as we’re seeing these characters hang out together.
And these characters are a fun hang! After ditching most of the dramatic angst over whether he’s going to end up in a sci-fi iron lung in the future, Mount’s Pike continues to be poofy-haired goofball, particularly in the absolutely unhinged season stand-out that turns all of the crew into Jim Henson Workshop puppets except Spock. Similarly, the show seems far more enamored with the extremely horny Spock than is perhaps necessary, but Peck does continue to nail the role and provide a good foil to those around him – and thankfully, this season takes pains to twist away from a bunch of women all being horny for Spock as their main attribute. That includes the excellent Christina Chong as La’An Noonien-Singh, who gets back to her own angst over her genetic connection to conqueror Khan, and Jess Bush as Christine Chapel, making a whole meal out of her role in the otherwise “just okay” 24 episode.
The real standout though is Carol Kane as the alien Pelia, who brings the right level of wildness to every scene. There’s the disconnect of having Kane as a regular on a Star Trek show at all, but the joy she’s brought to the screen in every role for decades shines through here, too. And as a bonus, the puppet version of Carol Kane is phenomenal; she’s already as close to a human puppet as we can get, and makes a perfect translation to felt under the deft hands of the Henson Workshop.
With Paramount+ not providing the final four episodes of the season, there is every chance the show could slide back into the heavily serialized, deathly serious, march to the final six episodes of the series that capsized Season 4… The tagline for this season is “Boldly go one step closer to where it all began,” which doesn’t exude a lot of hope they’ll be able to escape the gravitational pull of Kirk and crew. When instead, what Strange New Worlds really needs, and has always needed, is a 22-25 episode season to let these characters interact, have fun, be serious when necessary, and be thoughtful all other times. For now, though, we’ve got at least a 50% hit rate in the first two-thirds of Season 4, and that’s good enough to punch it to the finale. Let’s boldly go.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 premieres on July 23, 2026 on Paramount+
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays at 3 am ET / Midnight PT on Paramount+. Here’s what we expect from the full list of episodes in Strange New Worlds Season 4, with premiere dates.
- Thursday, July 23, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 1
- Thursday, July 30, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 2
- Thursday, August 6, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 3
- Thursday, August 13, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 4
- Thursday, August 20, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 5
- Thursday, August 27, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 6
- Thursday, September 3, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 7
- Thursday, September 10, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 8
- Thursday, September 17, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 9
- Thursday, September 24, 2026: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4, Episode 10 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
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