Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2 Finale Pokes Fun At The Franchise's Low-Budget Past
This post contains spoilers for "Hegemony," the season 2 finale of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."
Although it takes place in a vast, exotic galaxy full of high-tech starships, strange aliens, holodecks, and food replicators, "Star Trek" has often functioned best when it's straining against a budget. Not that plain green monochrome skies looked good, or that styrofoam rocks added texture and dimension to the drama, but the franchise's writers tended to find more interesting stories when limited to six starship sets and a handful of dedicated actors. When the show did want to visit an alien world, the studio typically bundled the cast and crew onto vans and drove to a natural preserve just outside of Los Angeles to shoot. Kirk (William Shatner) famously fought the Gorn captain (voiced by Ted Cassidy, physically performed by Bobby Clark, Gary Combs, and Bill Blackburn) at Vasquez Rocks. The planet from "The Paradise Syndrome" was merely the Franklin Canyon Reservoir. The locations are well-known to SoCal residents.
"Star Trek" continued this cost-saving measure throughout its lifespan. In the 1990s, the Starfleet Academy building was, in fact, the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Facility, located in Van Nuys. The "Next Generation" episode "Justice" also made use of the facility, as well as the Huntington Library in Pasadena. Every alien world imaginable is never more than a 90-minute drive from Burbank. And, of course, "Star Trek" always made extensive use of the sets that had already been built on the CBS backlot; if aliens forced the Enterprise to visit a planet where everyone behaved like 1920s gangsters, it was straight to the fake streets built just outside the studio.
The latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" continues that tradition by stating in dialogue that a distant Federation colony, Parnassus Beta, was coincidentally built to look almost exactly like the show's filming location in Ontario, Canada.
Parnassus Beta
"Hegemony" begins with Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) on a mission with Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush). They are checking in on Parnassus Beta and distributing supplies and vaccinations as they are needed. In a voiceover, Batel notes that the colony's founders "designed it on the 'Small Town' model, made to look like the Old Midwestern United States."
This is, of course, a hand wave. "Star Trek" has never established that its colonies follow any kind of pre-set community models. Occasionally, the Enterprise might find a distant settlement that still lives an agrarian lifestyle or still behaves like it's late 19th-Century Ireland, but these seem to be framed as deliberate utopian experiments, bold community exercises employed by tech-wary idealists who want to get "back to the Earth." These aren't presented as pre-set civic templates for potential Federation worlds. Although one might amuse themselves imagining the brainstorming sessions of the community planners: "We need to build a new colony. Let's make this one look like, I dunno, Peoria in 1989. Use Peoria Template 361-F. Be sure to include a VHS rental store. Get them back to the Earth."
One might imagine that a "Small Town" model might be similar to the way the Amish live in the present day. They reject modernity and embrace tradition. That philosophy may also be applied to cost-saving as well.
But even the most stalwart Trekkies are likely amused enough by the show's cost-cutting measure to bother folding the logic of Parnassus Beta into "Trek" canon. More than anything, we all appreciate the subtle wink at the fact that an alien world looks almost exactly like a small town in Ontario where "Strange New Worlds" films. Sometimes, a show's cheapness can be part of its charm.