7 Ups & 1 Down From Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.1 — Hegemony, Part II

8. DOWN — No Credit Where Credits Are Due

There are a lot of great things to say about the opening credits to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds through their various iterations. Anson Mount's opening monologue is an elegant re-addition. Jeff Russo's variations on the Alexander Courage theme are the perfect accompaniment to link one captain of the Enterprise to the next. The backgrounds are stunning.

The problem, and this applies to every (standard) version of the opening credits to Strange New Worlds, is the ships. The Enterprise looks too good, too clean. The attempt to make it look as 'real' as possible, as close to a filming model as CGI can be, has produced the opposite effect — a slight feeling of the uncanny. In the new opening credits for season three, the Klingon D7 battlecruiser, the Enterprise shuttle, and Starbase One (particularly the domes) also look oddly unpolished and more than a little strange in movement.

It is worth remembering that 'uncanny (un- / canny)' is more literally 'unknown' (un- / middle English 'kennen,' 'to make known,' modern English/Scots, 'ken'). The fault, therefore, is not to realise that spaceships and alien worlds (of the Star Trek kind) are always unknowable in the first place, i.e., that which is not real is already uncanny. In that sense, the hyper-real opening credits to Strange New Worlds aren't just uncanny, they aren't nearly uncanny enough.