New Escapist Column! On How “Strange New Worlds” Walks Away From Omelas…

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. We’re doing a series of recaps and reviews of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is streaming weekly on Paramount+. The sixth episode released this week, and it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the series.

Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach is basically the most obvious sort of disaster that Strange New Worlds could blindly stumble into. It is an adaptation of a classic Ursula Le Guin story, but it is filter through the show’s uncanny valley of Star Trek storytelling as what might be best described as “a Prime Directive episode”, albeit such an episode written by a writer operating on the unspoken assumption that the Prime Directive was an unequivocal and unimpeachable good. The result is a horrifyingly cynical episode of television about how hard but necessary it is for innocent children to suffer as our characters look on.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.