Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be episodic, which brings back one of the franchise's best aspects and places the prequel series in line with the other classic Star Trek shows. In Strange New Worlds, Anson Mount returns as Captain Christopher Pike. Alongside Rebecca Romijn as Number One and Ethan Peck as Lieutenant Spock, the Starfleet trio will continue the voyages of the Starship Enterprise years before it comes under the command of Captain James T. Kirk. All three actors were introduced in Star Trek: Discovery season 2.
The first five Star Trek shows - The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise were all episodic. This was in keeping with how people watched television, both on networks and in syndication, from the 1960s to 2005 when Enterprise was canceled. In the decades before DVRs and On Demand streaming services, most TV series weren't serialized. DS9 was the first Star Trek series to break the mold and embrace serialization in its latter seasons, which was controversial at the time (but it also helped the series remain relevant and even prescient today). Star Trek: Discovery premiered in a much different TV landscape in 2017; serialized shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Stranger Things ushered in the Peak TV era. Discovery and, later, Star Trek: Picard, was designed to bring the Star Trek franchise in line with the dominant TV format of today.
However, Strange New Worlds re-embracing the franchise's roots as an episodic series aims to restore something valuable Star Trek has lost, even with Discovery and Picard's feature-film quality special effects, incredible acting, and complex storylines. As executive producer Akiva Goldsman explained to THR, Strange New Worlds will bring back the "fluid" aspects of Star Trek's storytelling harkening back to the style established by The Original Series. By returning to an "episode of the week" format, Strange New Worlds will reinject variety into Star Trek. As Goldman explained, in TOS, "Sometimes Robert Bloch would write a horror episode. Or Harlan Ellison would have 'City on the Edge of Forever', which is hard sci-fi. Then there would be comedic episodes, like 'Shore Leave' or 'The Trouble with Tribbles.'" The eclectic nature of Star Trek was part of its charm and that has been lost in the intense serialization of Discovery and Picard.
Strange New Worlds will be adventure-of-the-week with serialized character arcs so that fans can chart the growth of Captain Pike and his crew but still indulge in the show honoring its title by exploring "strange new worlds". In fact, as a series set aboard the USS Enterprise, it's crucial that Strange New Worlds is an episodic series because this is the only way to honor the starship's (and Star Trek's overall) mission statement of "seeking out new life and no civilizations... To boldly go where no one has gone before."
Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard both tell one overarching linear story per season and that doesn't allow for the sheer variety classic TOS and TNG era Star Trek shows could have. It's hard to imagine a zany comedy like DS9's "Take Me Out To The Holosuite" baseball episode on Discovery, and some fans were disappointed that Picard intentionally veered far away from TNG's style of Star Trek. By contrast, Strange New Worlds can delve into every genre, from hard sci-fi, to horror, to comedy, to even a courtroom drama like TNG's "Measure of a Man", which is a beloved aspect of Star Trek that allows the franchise to encompass every style of storytelling.
Although J.J. Abrams' Star Trek trilogy was set aboard the Enterprise of an alternate timeline, the nature of feature films prevents exploration of space in favor of what those movies were, special-effects bonanzas, and roller-coaster action yarns starring a young Kirk (Chris Pine) and crew. Many longtime Trekkers bemoaned that what was lost since the heyday of the TNG era was the kind of cerebral and moral problem solving that Captains Kirk (William Shatner) and Picard (Patrick Stewart) faced each week. Hopefully, Strange New Worlds will bring back that classic aspect of Star Trek along with its episodic format.