Fans eat up Star Trek’s ‘Strange New Worlds’

Two generations after its 1966 debut, the universe of “Star Trek” has become a vast and sprawling mural in these heady days of streaming TV.

There’s the dark and bingeworthy “Star Trek: Picard,” a deep character study of an aging and beloved captain confronting his demons — and saving life as we know it twice in two seasons. There’s “Star Trek: Prodigy,” a rich, 3D-animated story aimed at kids and full of wonder. There’s the more traditionally animated “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” a wacky variation on the theme that unfolds on an also-ran starship and is brimming with fan-service moments.

And smack in the center of the mural sits “Star Trek Discovery,” the epic journey of a Federation starship and its crew across an entire millennium as it saves the galaxy not once (rogue AI!), not twice (“The Burn!”), but three times (“The Dark Matter Anomaly!”) in four seasons and counting.

Intricate story arcs. Deep serialization. A requirement for sequential viewing and a serious attention span. That’s a lot of commitment, even for a binger. So what’s a planet-of-the-week fan of the original series and its episodic aesthetic to do?

The answer, of course, is “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which is chronicling the voyages of the USS Enterprise before Kirk became its captain. Led by Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the show is essentially a workplace drama in deep space — the intergalactic equivalent of looking in on a really interesting office and getting various tastes of what exactly it is that everyone does.

“Strange New Worlds,” whose first-season finale “airs” Thursday on Paramount+ in the United States, has been a true errand of mercy for those “Trek” fans who love old-fashioned, self-contained episodes and want the opportunity to experience a Whitman’s Sampler of sci-fi from week to week.

So far, the show’s peregrinations — one-and-done plots, even as character development reaches across episodes — have been varied and wandering in the most satisfying of ways.

Season One has featured, among other genre journeys, forays into comedy, horror, submarine thriller, contagious-disease drama and full-on medieval fantasy. Each has been suffused with humanism, optimism, and the complex moral questions and allegories that made “Star Trek” so relevant in that other period of unrelenting upheaval, the 1960s.

Viewers — not merely longtime fans — are eating it up. The show has a preposterously high rating of 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and seems to appeal to both traditionalists and newer acolytes. But why does this iteration of the “Trek” universe hit so rightly at this exact moment? As Spock might say, a number of possibilities present themselves.

First, consider the baseball card and the postage stamp — both fodder for collectors for a century and a half. People love them for many reasons, but they share a key trait: Each, when collected, is an assemblage of variants of an appealing form. And though the form is familiar and generally consistent, inside its borders anything goes.

What’s more, not every specimen has to be earth-shattering (or galaxy-shattering). For every rare 1909 Honus Wagner card or 1918 “Inverted Jenny” stamp, there are countless others that are simply small glimpses of the day-to-day — the journeyman infielder, the forever stamp with the flower on it. They’re not world-changers on their own, but each is a sterling example of the breed, and together — when collected — they form a larger tapestry.

When it comes to “Strange New Worlds,” though, the appeal runs even deeper than that. Oddly enough, it’s also about normalcy.

The creator of “Star Trek,” Gene Roddenberry, pitched it originally as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” pushing out onto the (final) frontier. But boiled down, the original series — and “Strange New Worlds,” on a 21st-century level — is a meditation on the workplace.