Strange New Worlds season 2 shows how far Star Trek has come

polygon.com:

Star Trek shows a vision of humanity’s future, but it’s always really about the present.

The Original Series was a portrait of optimism, the now-iconic narration beckoning to John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” speech. The Next Generation aired during the end of the Cold War, when many Americans felt they were at the “end of history.” So TNG showed a utopian future, reflecting viewers’ sense of security but urging them to aspire for more. Then Enterprise, the first post-9/11 Star Trek, shifted to something more paranoid — the entire third season was about the crew hunting the alien Xindi after they attacked Earth.

Which brings us to Strange New Worlds, the ongoing Trek prequel set a decade or so before The Original Series. The series, which concluded its second season on Thursday, purposefully uses the familiar Star Trekformula: episodic, message-based storytelling about the Enterprise charting the unknown. In the era of serialized streaming, that kind of storytelling can feel as alien as a Klingon or a Vulcan.

But not everything about Strange New Worlds is a throwback. Its social commentary is very 2020s, focusing on institutionalized discrimination, civil unrest, and PTSD. While the episode narratives are classical, the innovation of Strange New Worlds is taking the messages from those old episodes and reframing them with a modern lens.

One of the most famous message episodes of Star Trekis “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” when the Enterprise visits the planet Cheron. The inhabitants discriminate against each other because one half is white-skinned on their right side and black-skinned on their left. For the other half, it’s the other way around. It’s an antiracist message for sure, but one that paints racism as only