Rob’s Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Rankings

Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds may have been the—well, strangest yet. Much of the season was dedicated to what on the surface appeared to be “genre episodes.” Noir, puppets, soap opera, the hangover—SNW truly broke new ground this season. Some people liked it, some did not. I’m not here to judge the season collectively; I’m simply here to rank these 10 episodes in my opinion from worst to best.

It’s kind of a good thing there’s only 10 episodes in each of these modern Star Trek seasons; it makes doing a top 10 ranking that much easier!

10 A Case of Chiaroscuro– This is the noir episode. If there was much character development or evolution behind the genre, I don’t recall it.

9. Human Best Friend. – This was Star Trek does The Hangover. On the positive side, they finally resolved the conflict between Scotty and Ortegas.

8. “Like Chronitrons Through the Hourglass” This was the soap opera episode. At least it was framed as experimenting with the soap format. There was a great performance by Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, who finally comes to terms with “the life he never lived.”

7. Once La’An a time This was a follow-up to “The Elysian Kingdom,” so there was some precedent, got it. This did give us a chance to see La’An work through the darkness that she had been dealing with for most of Season 4.

6. The Griffin Incident – This is, hands-down the best attempt at a suspense/horror-driven story in the entire Paramount+ era of Star Trek.

5. Level Five Transporter Accident – Say what you want, but the puppet episode was hilarious. If the Star Trek franchise cannot try anything new after 60 years, when can they?

4. Orders of magnitude – This was another case of vintage Star Trek action, drama, and suspense—very much a character-building episode for Jim Kirk.

3. Valles Marineris – The episode that took the Enterprise to the dinosaurs and finally gave us an ancient Martian civilization. There was so much plotting in this episode it was almost difficult to keep up with.

2 Off Hour – This was an absolute nail-biter that saw the Enterprise come within seconds of being torn to shreds. It was one of the first episodes where I really noticed that the writers packed as much story as they could into each 60-minute episode.

1. Tomorrow’s Enterprise – The Season 4 finale. This episode feels like it very well could’ve been a series finale (all good things…), but it also seems to double as a potential “backdoor pilot” for a proposed Star Trek: One. An outstanding performance by Celia Rose Gooding, as she carried the bulk of the episode playing both past and future versions of Uhura.

A Final Note on the Season

This is the order that I rank these 10 Season 4 episodes in. You’ll notice most of the “genre episodes” make up the bottom of the countdown. That’s probably not by accident, although I don’t think I’m nearly as tolerant of them as many of the other fans are. Some swings—like A Case of Chiaroscuro—were a miss. But when they managed to bend genres and still push character arcs forward, I couldn’t argue with them. And Level-Five Transporter Accident proved there is always room for straight-up fun.

The real reason the genre episodes populated the bottom half isn’t malice—it’s because when the writers sat down to script a traditional Star Trek story, they were absolute bangers.

Looking back, you can almost pinpoint the moment the creative team realized they weren’t going to get an open-ended run. Instead of wild, experimental gambles, they started bearing down to deliver classic, high-stakes Trek. Knowing that those final five or six episodes in Season 5 will have to wrap things up in a rush makes Season 4 feel like the last true, complete chapter of Strange New Worlds we’re going to get. It’s an incredible run, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s a bit of a case of unmet potential.

Let the debates begin…

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