- Netflix’s “Ransom Canyon” Turns Up the Soapy Drama in Serviceable Second Season (July 23, 2026)
In a world filled with far too many real-life horrors, the concept of the cozy comfort show has become more important than ever. These sorts of programs—think Netflix’s “Sweet Magnolias” or “Virgin River”—tend to be relationship dramas focused on family and romance, and are really just here to have a good time. Full of picturesque small-town scenery, slow-burn love stories, and twisty, if largely predictable plots, they’re inoffensively familiar and don’t ask for much from you as a viewer beyond sitting back and enjoying the (entertainingly twisty) ride.
“Ransom Canyon” is Netflix’s Western-flavored take on this particular subgenre, complete with cowboys, horses, and the kind of family and communal rivalries that span generations. Set in the eponymous small Texas town, the series primarily revolves around the relationship between Staten Kirkland (Josh Duhamel), a widowed rancher trying to preserve his family’s legacy, and Quinn O’Grady (Minka Kelly), owner of the local dance hall. But despite its down to earth setting, the show’s first season took itself just a smidge too seriously, awkwardly attempting to balance the pair’s slow burn will they / won’t they romance with a larger plot about a corporate pipeline project that threatens to swallow up several local homesteads.
Thankfully, “Ransom Canyon’s” second season course-corrects many of the mistakes of its first. The pace feels more propulsive thanks to its tighter episode count, and the show has smartly jettisoned some of its more irritating subplots, including the complicated (read: dull) fight between Staten and his former brother-in-law about whether to sell their ranches to an Austin water and power company. It’s an abrupt shift, to be sure, but it does get the show out from under the shadow of the relentless “Yellowstone” comparisons that dogged its first season. And “Ransom Canyon” is finally free to lean into its soapiest and most over-the-top narrative tendencies without having to try and pretend there’s anything resembling prestige TV going on here. Instead, badly hidden secrets, equally poorly disguised yearning, and a little bit of overt scheming are the order of the day. And boy does Season 2 understand the assignment on that score.
RANSOM CANYON SEASON 2. (L to R) Marianly Tejada as Ellie and Minka Kelly as Quinn in Episode 201 of Ransom Canyon Season 2. Cr. Jeff Neumann/Netflix © 2025
Throughout its briskly paced eight episodes, new relationships, ill-advised flirtations, messy mistakes, and straight-up betrayals abound, all set against the backdrop of stunning Texas scenery and a parade of shirtless men doing various forms of construction and/or farm work. While nothing quite reaches the melodramatic heights of last season’s tornado incident, Quinn’s determination to boost Ransom’s local economy by launching a massive country music festival gives the episodes a cohesive central arc.
The show’s second season picks up six months after its first. Quinn, freshly returned from her stint with the New York Philharmonic, has brought a little bit of big-city shine back to small-town Texas with her. Not to mention an attractive NYC-based boyfriend (Ben Robson) whose open, uber-supportive vibe is very much the opposite of Staten’s difficult, closed-off approach to relationships. Staten, for his part, is engaged in an ongoing power struggle with his father (Brett Cullen), who, having lost his reelection bid, is inserting himself in the day-to-day running of the Double K Ranch. Elsewhere, Yancy (Jack Schumacher) and Ellie’s romance (Marianly Tejada) faces new challenges in the form of Sidney (Heidi Grace Engerman), a woman who technically happens to be Yancy’s wife. While Sidney’s character is woefully underdeveloped—like so many other things, her presence is yet one more roadblock in the way of their happiness—Engerman provides a much-needed spark whenever she’s onscreen.
And, if that’s not enough, teen cheerleader Lauren (Lizzy Greene), still reeling from the revelation that her alcoholic mother was responsible for the death of Staten’s son Randall (Hubert Smielecki), struggles to communicate her complicated feelings to her loyal, try-hard boyfriend, Lucas (Garrett Wareing), the same guy she spent all of last season trying to find a way to be with romantically. That she ultimately finds a sympathetic ear in his older bad boy brother Kit (Casey W. Johnson) is just the kind of emotional complication that “Ransom Canyon” loves to deploy, even if it doesn’t make a ton of sense from a narrative perspective. (He slept with her mother! And they somehow never really talk about this!)
RANSOM CANYON SEASON 2. (L to R) Lizzy Greene as Lauren and Casey W. Johnson as Kit in Episode 203 of Ransom Canyon Season 2. Cr. Jeff Neumann/Netflix © 2025
Duhamel continues to brood handsomely, whether he’s poorly smothering his obvious longing for Quinn or questioning his role at the Double K. And although Staten’s prickly relationship with his ex-politician father is woefully thin, Duhamel and Cullen go at each other with palpable gusto as their inter-family drama spirals out through much of the rest of the town. But it is Kelly who remains “Ransom Canyon’s” secret weapon, oozing warmth and genuine enthusiasm for the magic of small town life without becoming cloying.
As a duo, the pair still have chemistry to spare, but the show’s determination to drag out the slow burn relationship between Staten and Quinn remains incredibly frustrating. Season 2 is at least less random when it comes to the various obstacles that are thrown into their path, and even manages to give the pair a couple of very necessary heart-to-hearts about their shared history and anxieties about the future. But, at this point, “Ransom Canyon’s” reticence to allow their relationship to either genuinely move forward or truly end is the most frustrating aspect of the show. At least a delicious guest turn from Patricia Clarkson as Quinn’s self-involved mother adds a dash of entertaining snark to proceedings.
Still, “Ransom Canyon” Season 2 is a lighter and more shamelessly entertaining outing than its predecessor, and if it’s not exactly reinventing the wheel when it comes to storytelling, the show has figured out what it’s good at, and unabashedly leans into it. Yes, it’s often predictable, relentlessly soapy, and doesn’t give any twist more than a few minutes to breathe. But its practiced brand of easily bingeable escapism sure does go down easy.
All eight episodes screened for review. Premieres July 23 on Netflix.
- Cinema is My Calling Again: Nicolas Winding Refn on “Her Private Hell” (July 23, 2026)
Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn shared with audiences at the Cannes premiere of his new film “Her Private Hell” that a near-death experience inspired his return from the streaming desert to the world of making movies.
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark and partly raised in New York City, filmmaking is in Refn’s blood. The son of filmmaker Anders Refn (whose decades’ long career includes editing half a dozen films by fellow Dane Lars von Trier) and cinematographer Vibeke Winding, Refn broke out in the mid-90s with his “Pusher” trilogy starring Mads Mikkelsen, broke into the English-speaking film world with the 2008 black comedy biopic “Bronson” starring Tom Hardy and the 2009 adventure flick “Valhalla Rising,” and solidified his place in the pantheon on modern cinema with his Cannes Best Director-winning cult film “Drive” starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, and Albert Brooks.
Although Refn has spent the last decade working in streaming television with the Netflix supernatural noir-thriller series “Copenhagen Cowboy” and the Prime crime drama miniseries “Too Old to Die Young,” his latest film “Her Private Hell” is more aligned with his last two feature films–2013’s “Only God Forgives” and 2016’s “The Neon Demon“–both of which can be viewed as dark fairytales exploring hidden emotions and taboo subject matter like incest and cannibalism.
With high key bisexual lighting and Giallo style gore, “Her Private Hell” stars Sophie Thatcher as an actress named Elle whose lothario of a father, the impossibly named Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), has financially backed a film for her to star in based on a popular comic series called Candy Floss. Also starring in the film within the film are Elle’s ex-best friend (and likely one-time lover) Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), who is also her new stepmother, and a vapid influencer named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). In between film shoots, the women find themselves trapped in the liminal space of their lux, neon-lit hotel waiting out a mythical fog, which has brought with it a vicious serial killer named the Leatherman and a mysterious soldier named Private K (Charles Melton), whose young daughter was a victim of the killer. Jealousy, fear, and desire swell in the unrelenting haze as the score by long-time Brian De Palma and Dario Argento collaborator Pino Donaggio wraps everything into an operatic bow of love, hate, death, and resurrection.
Before the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival back in May, Refn spoke with RogerEbert.com about the film’s daddy issues, “Riverdale,” silent film, comic books, and the intoxicating structure of fairytales.
You’ve said that you decided you wanted to go back to movies because you died and then came back. Could you talk about that experience of realizing that’s what you wanted to do again? Did you see something?
No, no, no. Not that cinematic. I died, and I was dead 25 minutes and in the process up to that experience, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil. But in the end I realized I’d been given a gift. How many people get a chance of starting over again?
Yeah, I almost died at 14, so that’s why I was interested.
So you know the feeling a little bit.
Yeah.
It provides a perspective, especially on time. What time means. So when I came back, I realized I only had half the time left that I had already spent. I only had, you know, x amount of years left … good years. And so I thought, “Okay, well, the good news is that I’ve been rejuvenated.” My mind had forgotten everything I’ve made, meaning that all the experiences that I made prior have kind of vanished. So I can start over again, because I had run out of ideas.
Second, I realized that art is, again, like always, an important part of our existence. So I wanted to make movies, because I believe in the collective experience. It means that I wanted to make something that was first of all shown in a cinema, because cinema is a collective where people from all sex and life and status all meet on an equal terms. There’s no first class; there’s no economy class; it’s just central. It’s totally democratic, and it’s accessible and it’s cheap enough for everyone to afford it. That is where people should experience creativity. And then it can feed out in all these other formats afterwards, which is great. I love it, I love it, I love it, but that means that cinema is my calling again, so I have to go back and make movies.
I’m a classic film nerd and there’s so many different classic films mixed in here. I got a little film noir, got some giallo, and felt some campy ‘60s sci-fi, like “The Green Slime” or “Barbarella.” There’s like little tidbits of all these things.
And “Planet of the Vampires.”
I wondered, since you’re clearly someone who watches a lot of films, when you’re writing do you think in imagery? Do you think in emotions? How does that all mix in your brain and then come back out as your own stuff?
Well, because I’m dyslexic, I’m used to being dependent on the image, so it always starts with what I like to see. Thank God I’m not a writer because that would be really bad. I start with what I would like to see.
I am also dyslexic, and I feel like I also start with imagery when I write.
I think it’s because that’s our strength. It becomes our go-to place. Other people, especially if you’re a master of the written word, you approach it from a different perspective, and it can be from a character narrative, or you create a character that you then jump off from. But to me, I start with what is the canvas, what would I like to see.
I’m a big silent film fan, and I felt like Charles Melton’s character could have fallen out of a silent film. It’s almost completely his body, his emotions. How did you go about developing that with him?
Well, I’d seen him in “Riverdale” and I thought he was very good. I had this superhero character called Private K that he was going to play, and it was all going to be in his expressions, his gestures, his movement. It becomes like pantomime, because you can convey a lot of emotions without words. We’re so dependent on words today, because everything is about information secondhand. So I thought it could be interesting to have, again, a character that does not talk. It seems to be something I’m fascinated by.
Yeah, Driver from “Drive” doesn’t say much. I think that’s universal. That’s why silent film was so popular when it began, because you didn’t need to know anything other than what the human face can express.
It just showed you everything. I think it’s interesting that you say that, because last week my daughter Lizzielou suddenly came home from school and was asking about Joan of Arc and said she wanted to watch the movies because they’re making a new one or something. I said, “Wait, hold on, kid, if you’re going to watch anything, you’ve got to watch the original, the Carl Theodor Dreyer one [“The Passion of Joan of Arc”] from the 1920s.” So, we watched it together, and she cried because that performance [by Renée Jeanne Falconetti] is the greatest performance ever.
Similarly, I think all of the characters in this film, in particular, are emoting from the face. You really hold on their facial expressions. There’s a scene towards the end where Sophie Thatcher goes through at least ten emotions with her eyes. I don’t know that a lot of directors these days trust the human face, so I appreciate when a film does.
It’s the most effective and inexpensive commodity.
For me, this film felt a bit like Red Riding Hood, and I know you’ve talked about the influence of fairytales on your previous few films. Obviously, the Leatherman is a folktale in this film. I wondered If you could talk a bit about incorporating folktales and fairytales into your cinematic storytelling.
I started my career being very obsessed about capturing authenticity and making everything as real as possible, and their environments as real, and their emotions as real, and everything had to be really real, and I would shoot in chronological order to make it real. But then I realized at the end of the day that I was never going to make reality, because reality doesn’t work like that. So I decided to make unreality my canvas, and because I’m connected to Hans Christian Andersen, I felt like maybe fairytales are my language. That’s something we share in common, he and I. The thing about a fairytale is that it transcends genre, it transcends narrative, it transcends culture, it transcends sex, it transcends years, it’s ageless, and suddenly it has an endless amount of possibilities. It’s childish, yet it’s very advanced. It’s sophisticated. It’s psychology. It’s culture. It’s social infrastructure. Everything is tied up in that one word, fairytales, and I just find it so intoxicating. So, ever since then, everything I have made is a fairytale.
You hear fairytale and you think they are for children, but really, folktales are the oldest form of entertainment for everybody. I love that your films are really rooted in what is something everybody can feel.
Everybody can understand it. Everyone can relate to it. It’s not a cultural difference. There’s not a barrier of intellect or knowledge.
I wanted to ask you about the Candy Floss comics. Can you talk a bit about developing the comics and its connection between Private K holding an issue and Elle appearing in an adaptation of one?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to draw. I wish I could be an illustrator. I grew up collecting comics, and I’ve always liked the medium very much, the visual medium of comics, whether it’s European or American. I very much still buy a lot of European comics. It just felt like an object that I remember from my childhood. Because I didn’t learn to read until I was thirteen, I could only buy them to look at them. Comics became my kind of go-to place, because I certainly couldn’t read books, I could only read images. So, I stuck with that idea. I thought in the movie the Candy Floss world is a pop culture world, it’s a chewing gum world. I thought the comic book represented that.
When “Neon Demon” came out, you talked a lot about how you were inspired by what it would be like to be a beautiful woman, and this one is very much about female friendship, female coming of age, about being a daughter and being a father of a daughter. I wonder if you could talk a bit about whether you were working through some feelings as a father of a daughter? It almost felt like this is your “Eraserhead,” you know how David Lynch made that film to work through his feelings about becoming a dad. I could projecting, but it felt–
No, no. It’s not off. I had two stories in the beginning. Two ideas to be precise. I had the idea of the Elle character, Sophie Thatcher, and I had the idea of Private K, but they were in DNA very opposite ideas. They were hard to connect together. So the third idea, which is the monster, created a triangle between them. Then the theme of Private K was very specific, because he was me in that sense that when you are going to die, you have to make peace with certain things. I made peace with my wife; we’d been together for thirty years. My eldest was old enough to exist without me. But my youngest wasn’t. And I had to come back for her. So, like Orpheus, if I could go to Hell, I would bring her back. That was my gasoline to stay alive, to come back. So, once that cemented itself in Private K’s DNA, then the father narrative began to infuse everything else and the father construction.
So then I had something that was beginning to make sense, and it had a mirrored image of “Only God Forgives,” which is about a son and daughter relationship in all its complexity, set in the world of fairytales. Then, I had this idea about Elle’s father marrying her lover and her lover taking her father away from her. Then this idea about Elle fantasizing an alter ego, who is a father who will go to Hell to bring back his daughter, because her father’s always leaving her, not trying to find her. Suddenly, everything began to make sense on an overall infrastructure, and then it was about how to translate it all into the film.
I think the way the film is edited is so beautiful, where you’re really not sure, is it the film, is it the film in the film, is it her dream? It doesn’t actually matter because you’re just feeling it. It’s a very intuitive film, I found. Then the score that wraps it up so perfectly. It really is that heightened Sirkian score. Can you talk about what inspired it?
I shoot in order, and I play a lot of music on set for the actors for the mood and for myself to figure out what we are searching for here. So, when I was done shooting, I realized that I wanted to make an opera, because it was shot very operatically. So, I said, “Well, who’s around and who do I like?” And there was only one, because I’ve been using his music for many years, like all the way back as a kind of source music for ideas when I am writing or shooting: Pino Donaggio. He agreed, “I want to make an opera.” He said he always wanted to make an opera, and his score is what tied the entire film together. His score took everything and made sure that there was a bloodline that ran from A to Z.
- Relive the Launch That Changed Gaming in “Halo: Campaign Evolved” (July 23, 2026)
It’s no exaggeration to say that 2001’s “Halo” changed the entire gaming landscape. A launch title for the original Xbox a quarter-century ago, “Halo: Combat Evolved” not only started its own still-running franchise (that included a recent Prime Video original adaptation) but influenced so much of the shooter landscape. It’s not only difficult to imagine Microsoft titles like “Gears of War” playing quite the same without it, but it’s blend of sci-fi and action inspired the direction that the “Call of Duty” series would take as well.
Twenty-five years after its release, Xbox Game Studios have reimagined that original experience in “Halo: Campaign Evolved,” a remake that enhances the strengths of the source with upgrades throughout the expanded narrative. Seen from the POV of a 2026 gamer, it’s a remarkably simple experience that recalls the relatively recent rebirth of “Doom” in how it emphasizes weapons and enemies without the clutter of upgrades, side missions, or other elements that often weigh down effective shooters with extra baggage. “Campaign Evolved” is sleek and effective, arguably a bit thin on a design level for 2026 but a game that plays as an effective throwback to a simpler time without feeling overly dated.
Get your squad together (either four-player online or split-screen at home) and jump into the story of “Halo: Campaign Evolved,” which actually opens with new missions that set the stage for the imported narrative of the original game. The stage is set with something known as “Operation: Meteorite,” in which protagonist Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 and the United Nations Space Command first encounter the Covenant forces. This unfolds over three missions that organically segue into the ten from the original game, most of which take place on the Pillar of Autumn or the planet Reach. The main enemy, a force known as the Covenant, remains the same, joined later in the game by the Flood, parasitic enemies that look like “Doom” cast-offs, or further nightmares of “Alien” designer H.R. Giger. The blend of traditional warrior-like enemies and later sci-fi/horror ones help keep the gameplay and storytelling of “Halo” from getting stale, but it is a game that follows a relatively predictable model: Enter room, kill everything in, move on to the next room, repeat about 50 times.
To make “Campaign Evolved” feel fresher to an audience with different expectations than those in 2001, the developers have integrated nine new weapons, alongside all of the previously available ones. Fans of “Halo 2” will recognize firepower like the SMG, Fuel Rod Cannon, and Sentinel Beam, and relish the opportunity to deploy them in the franchise’s origin story. You can also get your hands on the Energy Sword in this game, although good luck wielding a melee weapon in a game in which everything is shooting you. (I never found it very useful, sticking mostly to SMG, Assault Rifle, Plasma Rifle, and Needler whenever they were available.) Like most shooters of this era, “Halo: Campaign Evolved” is a cycle of weaponry as you run out of ammo and pick up firepower from the enemies you kill. With the game’s relatively bland environments, the variety comes down to enemy types and weapon types, but there’s something almost refreshing about a game that keeps it this simple in a time when too many feel cluttered.
If the environments sometimes feel 2000s, the cut scenes feel somewhere between then and now, upgraded and remade with much of the same voice cast as the original, and designed in a manner that makes them feel of a piece with the dated aspects of the game. The developers at Xbox take the upgrade a step further by expanding vehicle usage, and, somewhat controversially, allowing you to sprint. Finally, the creators introduce a collectible element from other “Halo” titles called “Skulls,” which can mix-up the gameplay even further by varying the experience, and open up something called “Campaign Remix,” an all-new mode that can basically make “Halo” into a Roguelike with randomized enemies, weapons, and other variables.
It may not be the deepest video game criticism but “Halo: Campaign Evolved” is exactly what people expect it to be: a game that’s both nostalgic and current, entertaining while also reminding gamers how far the industry has come. In fact, its biggest controversy may be the fact that it’s being released on PlayStation at the same time as Xbox, with some insinuating that meant the end of the console wars (and Sony had won). Back in 2001, the exclusivity of “Halo” helped define the Microsoft gaming brand, but the incredible breadth of gaming options 25 years later has helped lead to a day when access feels more important than ever. And now everyone, even Sony gamers, can appreciate the legacy of “Halo.”
Microsoft provided a review copy of this title. It will be released for PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on July 28, 2026.
- HBO Max Spin-Off “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” Wastes Clever Concept (July 22, 2026)
It feels like something that came to creators Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn, and Bill Brady after a couple drinks: What if we took characters from our show named after the beginning of the universe and hurled them into the end of it? The answer to this hypothetical “The Big Bang Theory” spin-off is HBO Max’s “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” a ten-part original comedy with a few admittedly clever ideas here and there connected by repetitious joke writing, thin plotting, and just not enough to stay engaged. Spread out over weeks, it’s the kind of thing that’s too forgettable to feel insulting, especially at each episode’s remarkably short runtime, but the binge-viewing necessity of TV criticism reveals its many flaws. Most importantly, the end of the world will probably be funnier.
Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman) started as a minor, recurring character on “The Big Bang Theory,” developing into a larger presence on the show in later seasons (he was listed as main cast for seasons 8-12). The owner of Comic Center in Pasadena is joined on “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” by three other “BBT” ensemble members: Brian Posehn as Bert Kibbler, Lauren Lapkus as Denise, and John Ross Bowie as Barry Kripke. In the show’s pilot, the world has already collapsed into “The Last of Us”-esque chaos, complete with dwindling supplies and supernatural enemies. Stuart and Bert are using Comic Center as a base, throwing things into an interdimensional rift that they don’t really understand.
One day, an alternate reality version of Stuart comes to our reluctant hero and tells him that he’s the key to saving mankind in this timeline and beyond. Stuart and his three allies end up traveling across alternate realities, ostensibly to try and save the universe, but they’re basically just jumping from frying pan to fire and back again. The structure is simple: Drop the quartet of multiverse travelers into a new concept and watch as they try to figure out how to escape before the episode ends. It can be as simple as a reality in which everyone has telepathy or as ludicrous as one in which everyone eats grass and chews their cud like cows.
The timeline jumping gives “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” the structure of a comic series: Same characters, different adventures every chapter, recurring guest stars (including some from “BBT” that shan’t be spoiled but become a bit of a crutch early on as we’re more interested in who pops up next than the developing leads). The characters become, at best, secondary to the concepts. Sussman does alright holding the show as Stuart, but Lapkus is given almost nothing to play as his love interest Denise, and Bowie’s schtick gets exhausting in its alternating punchlines of horniness, cruelty, and mocking people with speech impediments. Posehn is great at this kind of “gentle giant” thing, but even he struggles to stand out.
The overall issue with “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” is a simple one: It’s just not funny enough. Standing back and looking at its ambitious concept gives it a few style points, for sure—it’s not just “Big Bang 2,” which I’m sure CBS would have backed up money trucks for the creators to make—but the humor writing is shallow and predictable, almost defiantly so in light of the bigger ideas in the outline of the show. It’s as if they knew they had an “out there” premise, and so the writers’ room intentionally tied it to depressingly predictable sitcom writing. We get it: Kripke is a horny dick with a speech impediment. It’s a joke that grew old on another show, which means it feels stale on this one despite its first season status. And it feels like even the writers know they don’t have enough material here as episodes are consistently under 18 minutes long—the seventh one lands at a depressing 14 minutes without credits.
There are, admittedly, glimpses of ingenuity on “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.” The opening credits play with the idea of skipping stream introductions with different messages every week, set to a great theme song by Danny Elfman. And there’s one episode that completely shifts the dark tone as the gang land in a utopia that’s never heard of things like ownership or monogamy (and completely destroy it). These blips aren’t enough to recommend “Stuart,” but they do hint at where the show could go in future seasons, leaving behind so much of the “BBT” baggage that it willfully brought on this inaugural trip for a brighter reality.
“Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” premieres on HBO Max on July 23, 2026. Whole season screened for review.
- “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Keeps Boldly Swinging in Tone in Season 4 (July 22, 2026)
As a “Star Trek” fan, it’s hard not to feel the bittersweet sting of another set of Wilderness Years coming. With Paramount feeling the sweet sting of budget cuts and an impending merger with Warner Bros., it feels like the higher-ups at the Big Blue Mountain are closing up shop on the Final Frontier. Its now-flagship show, “Strange New Worlds,” has a mere two seasons to wrap up its five-year mission, and its last gasp at a hit series, “Starfleet Academy,” is burning off a pre-shot second season and closing its doors, hobbled by its expansiveness and the fact that no one seemed all that interested in it. (I didn’t think it was all that bad, in the final estimation.)
To that end, “Strange New Worlds” has the lonely duty of carrying on the “Trek” torch for a few more episodes yet, even as its luster faded a bit by a fairly uneven season 3. The show’s episodic nature is as much of a blessing as it is a curse; yes, it’s neat to get a modern, feature-quality upgrade of the original series’ model of episodic weekly adventures, but sometimes the swings got a little too ambitious. Showrunner Alex Kurtzman et al. learned all the wrong lessons from that musical episode in season two: If comedy episodes are such a hit, why not make them half of our show?
It’s in that tradition that Season 4 continues mightily, in a crop of episodes as exhilarating as they are frustrating. This season was shot back-to-back with the previous one, so it makes sense that the approach is the same, balancing more earnest explorations of the galaxy and our characters’ interpersonal relationships with goofy romps that make ample use of our ensemble’s comic chops. (We were doomed for this course as soon as the showrunners saw a) how skilled Ethan Peck is at doing farce and b) how big the musical episode from season two hit for fans, for good or ill.)
What’s more, this back half of episodes has an even more constricting mission to fulfill: set the “Enterprise” on course to fit the crew roster of “The Original Series.” The fate of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) has been baked into the show’s premise since its beginning, with the future Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) popping in for frequent visits on the show in ways that stretch credulity (not to mention Starfleet regulations, considering he doesn’t even go here yet). Season 3 added Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) to the cast, leaving only Sulu, Bones, and (maybe) Chekov to add in here before the day is out.
Is “Strange New Worlds” looking to close out with the exact same crew configuration as the original show? Who knows. But the pieces are starting to fall into place, which leaves the whole thing feeling a bit like time is running out. Much like Pike himself, time is running out for this particular crew to enjoy their time as a little space family, and it’ll be bittersweet when it’s finally over.
(L-R): Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and Ethan Peck as Spock in season 4, episode 2, of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+, 2026. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
The first six episodes flit between standard Trek fare and these big-swing comedy premises, same as season 3, in ways that are both delightful and whiplash-inducing. The show’s premiere, “Valles Marineris,” is a stern, somber adventure ostensibly in the classic Trek mold, with time warps and moral dilemmas abound as Pike grapples with the ultimate Prime Directive question: do you interfere in cosmic events if they might lead to the creation of the human race? It’s a bit of Cold War thriller, a bit of that Adam Driver dinosaur movie; its tonal swings are a bit too vast to feel any grounding.
Just as the episodes caterwaul in tone, so too do they modulate in quality. A grim “ghost ship” episode (replete with some of the most stomach-churning gore effects you’ll see in a “Trek” show; think “Alien: Resurrection“) will bounce right into a light-hearted “Hangover” riff on a pleasure planet whose atmosphere intoxicates its inhabitants, in which Ortegas (Melissa Navia) must haul a zooted-out Scotty through the hazy bacchanal of the previous night. It’s a fun hour, admittedly, aided by fleet-footed comic direction from “What We Do in the Shadows” EP Yana Gorskaya and a neat guest turn by “Kids in the Hall” alum Dave Foley. (We also get Rebecca Romijn‘s Number One singing a Klingon cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”; Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam, Bonnie Tyler.)
But the gimmick of throwing our cast into “Trek”-styled riffs on popular movies wears thin, as another episode limply gestures at the black-and-white wartime intrigue of “Casablanca” on a planet whose atmosphere literally removes the color from our perception. Then, sigh, there’s the much-ballyhooed puppet episode, in which a “Level Five Transporter Accident” turns our crew (save Spock, of course) into Muppets. It’s a fine premise that they do a surprising amount with—it’s a hoot to see Carol Kane given the Jim Henson Workshop treatment, and it neatly ties into a running character beat about Spock’s growing anxiety. But the show’s insistence on hour-long runtimes leaves them running out of things to do with the puppets pretty quickly.
(L-R): Rebecca Romijn as Una, Christina Chong as La’an Noonien-Singh, and Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas in season 4, episode 1, of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+, 2026. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
But it’s the sixth episode, “Off-Hour,” that rights the ship nicely, bringing “Strange New Worlds” out of the realm of pastiche and goofiness into a stirring, straightforward disaster episode that sees the crew working together to bring the ship out of a slipstream wormhole that threatens to tear the Enterprise apart. For a season that has bogged itself down with myriad interpersonal relationship dramas whose endings we already know (Spock’s dalliance with Christina Chong’s La’An, Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel wondering whether to stay on the Enterprise), this crisis seems to pull together the crew in ways that make them feel, however temporarily, like the true inhabitants of the ship fans have known and loved for sixty years now. And if “Strange New Worlds” can recalibrate its energy to maintain this particular matter/antimatter balance, we should be in for a satisfying bow to one of “Trek”‘s most consistently entertaining chapters.
Six episodes screened for review. Premieres July 23rd on Paramount+.
