Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Review: Children of the Comet (Season 1 Episode 2)
The thing to keep in mind about Star Trek is that it almost always, at the very least, improves over time. Star Trek is bad for a season, maybe two, and then it becomes the best possible version of what it could be.
That isn’t to say that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 Episode 2, “Children of the Comet,” is bad — or even not good. It’s more something to keep in the back of your mind with any Star Trek series, especially as more and more of them come out in the coming years.
For Strange New Worlds, that should only be an encouraging thing to note. It has begun spectacularly and if the precedence is any indicator, it will only rise with more episodes under its belt. Frankly, that’s an incredibly encouraging prospect to consider.
Thankfully, “Children of the Corn” is very far from being a bad episode. In fact, it’s aggressively decent in the best way possible. This episode picks up a classic Star Trek trope that Discovery has done less with, which is to focus on a character and further their development via some space adventure.
Uhura is a natural character for the series to start out with, someone that is somewhat of a monolith within early Star Trek but also one that lore has attempted to crack. She’s a character that has often been present but is also malleable enough to be whatever the franchise needs her to be.
Strange New Worlds makes the right call out of the gate by centering distinctly her in song and musicality, a quality of hers that is as fundamental as her linguistic skills. It takes the two things that people definitely know about her and marries them together in a really terrific way.
Star Trek has always put an emphasis on her singing, to the extent that it has some kind of otherworldly powers of its own, and that carries through here. The episode makes this not just an essential skill but also a universal one. Her proclivity for languages and her singing both wore at the same interior goal for her: the desire to be understood and to understand.
While this point might be a bit too punctuated throughout the episode it draws a nice line between those two things as ways of reaching out and connecting across the universe. Languages and music are two of the most sure-fire ways of communicating on a base level and that’s something that feels profound on a simple scale.
There’s also a minor running theme on faith that feels a lot less well explored and handled. Through any conventional scenario, the Guardians are fanatics. The episode wants us to walk away believing that the end has changed that but they still are. Their faith isn’t precluding the possibility that the comet might destroy the planet.
Being right doesn’t make them more reasonable. The kind of blind faith that they are espousing is still dangerous and it’s not clear that the episode understands that.
What did you think of this episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs Thursdays on Paramount+.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.