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Strange New Worlds Season 1 available on YouTube [1]

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Date: 2023-06-08

To drum up interest in the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 premiere coming up next week, Paramount has released Season 1 on YouTube. Obviously, all the writing work on Season 1 was completed before the writers’ strike, and presumably this is also true of Season 2.

With the Writers Guild of America (WGA) already on strike and SAG-AFTRA very close to a strike, it looks like there won’t be any new Star Trek for a while. Bill Wolkoff, for example, writer of four episodes so far of Star Trek: Strange New World, is a strike captain. He won’t be writing any new adventures for Captain Pike or the future Captain Kirk anytime soon.

x Just getting set up at CBS Television City. Let’s do this thing. #WGAStrong #UnionStrong pic.twitter.com/DRvxgIyB62 — Bill Wolkoff (@flying_lobster) May 2, 2023

I’m well aware of the derision that “new Star Trek” gets here on Daily Kos. I know some of you are Star Trek fans who have vowed to never pay to stream any Star Trek.

I myself never signed up for CBS All Access, which was at first the only way to watch Star Trek: Discovery beyond the very first episode, nor have I signed up for Paramount+, which inherited the whole CBS All Access library. I have watched the first three seasons of Discovery on DVD.

But we have to acknowledge that streaming makes big bucks. According to revenue reports from Paramount, Paramount+ gained almost ten million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2022, and revenue grew 81%.

Are the writers seeing any of that profit? Apparently not, it’s one of the most important issues of contention in the contract negotiations, but not the only issue.

The writers are also concerned, rightfully so, about being replaced by artificial intelligence. Studio executives don’t care if the scripts produced by artificial intelligence aren’t as good as the ones produced by human writers as long as there are people who always pay to watch whatever the studios decide to produce.

With a franchise like Star Trek, there is plenty of existing material for a “large language model” artificial intelligence to glom onto and produce passable scripts. Has Dr. McCoy ever had an evil twin or been in a coma? ChatGPT could probably write that episode.

Even so, I like what I’ve seen of Strange New Worlds so far, I like it enough to doubt that it could be convincingly written by artificial intelligence. I saw the pilot two days ago and the second episode last night.

I think these writers have done a very good job of striking a balance between writing something that fits pretty well into established Star Trek continuity and has larger arcs (such as Captain Pike’s foreknowledge of his own death) but also has enough variety with episodes that each can stand on its own with no pressure to watch the next episode right away.

Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and U. S. President Abraham Lincoln (R, 1861 - 1865, Lee Bergere) have a little conversation on the bridge of the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek episode "The Savage Curtain."

Strange New World is also more about exploration, and less about finding Abraham Lincoln and an old Ford truck in space.

In the first episode, the crew of the Enterprise deal with a first contact gone wrong on a planet embroiled in a long-standing civil war.

In the second episode, a comet venerated as a god threatens to destroy a planet’s pre-warp civilization. The second episode also fills in a lot of background for Uhura, originally played on Star Trek by Nichelle Nichols, here played by Celia Rose Gooding.

I don’t know for how long these episodes are going to be available on YouTube. I intend to watch the third episode tonight and try to watch all ten episodes before Season 2 becomes available, even though I have no intention of subscribing to Paramount+ anytime soon.

Here’s the first episode posted on YouTube. Not sure if you can switch to full screen on here, but if not, click on “Watch on YouTube” to open in a new tab.

With this one, it gave me a lot of ads that I skipped.

So for the second episode, it showed me the same ad every time, and I couldn’t skip it: be all you can be in the U. S. Army. Don’t know whether to be offended or relieved that it doesn’t know I’m too old now for the Army. Or maybe I could still theoretically join the Army’s medical command, but that’s a whole other thing.

Idea for a Star Trek episode after the strike: a planet on the brink of catastrophe as a direct result of relying way too much on artificial intelligence to write everything.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/8/2173874/-Strange-New-Worlds-Season-1-available-on-YouTube

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