Is Star Trek A Soap Opera? Strange New Worlds Just Made A Bold Statement
Maybe the Final Frontier is a little like a soap opera after all.
In 1976, when Kerry O’Quinn launched the magazine Starlog, he knew it could be a success. Not only was he confident that Star Trek — and its connected sci-fi fandoms — represented a large, untapped readership, but he also understood the business of magazines focused on news about TV shows. Why? Well, in the time before Starlog galvanized an entire generation of sci-fi fans and created the foundation for countless internet publications we all enjoy today, O’Quinn, along with his partner, Norman Jacobs, had previously created soap opera magazines in 1972. The creative leap to Starlog was easy: O’Quinn knew that the soap opera audiences, while separate from Star Trek fans, were somewhat similar.
Now, 50 years after the launch of Starlog, Star Trek is tipping its hat to the connection between soap operas and the Final Frontier. In Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 7, “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass,” Captain Pike (Anson Mount) finds himself trapped in a soap opera version of his own life, thanks to the meddling of the rogue Q, Trelane (Rhys Darby). And throughout the course of this melodramatic and self-aware episode, Pike unpacks all of it by talking to the ship’s counselor of the Enterprise in this time, Dr. Chivers, played by soap opera royalty, Deidre Hall. Speaking to Inverse, Hall says the connections between Star Trek and soaps like The Young and the Restless are certainly there, and nothing to be ashamed of.
Mild spoilers ahead.
Star Trek does a soap opera...and it works?
Spock’s evil “twin” Sybok (Ethan Peck) and a very different version of La’an in the soap opera version of Strange New Worlds.
“They each [Star Trek and soap operas] had their villains, they had their heroes, they had their fabulous wardrobe,” Hall says. “I think this episode hits all the important soap opera points.”
The tropes of soap operas that Hall refers to are numerous, and “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” makes good use of many stock plot twists: secret twins, unknown secret daughters, hidden mental illness, and more. However, as fans of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, and almost every era of Trek are aware of, many of these tropes work equally well in the adventure sci-fi tone of many iterations of the venerable franchise. If The Original Series was like a space western with a very specific moral conscience, many subsequent series, like The Next Generation, did have soap opera qualities.
Deidre Hall in 1985, at the height of her soap opera fame.
The interesting thing about “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” is that it seems to argue that there’s always something deeper under the hyperbolic storytelling. After all, Spock does really have a wicked brother lurking around out there, even though Sybok is not his twin brother. And Pike does have a secret daughter — from another reality — it’s just not Uhura.
At the end of the episode about Pike’s daughter, Juliette (Anna Mirodin) returns, allowing Pike to grieve and process the real thing that was embedded in all of the soap opera melodrama. In the Season 3 finale, Pike experienced an “Inner Light” style alternate life in which he and Marie (Melanie Scrofano) grew old and had a daughter. It wasn’t real, just like a soap opera wasn’t real, but as Dr. Chivers says to Pike: “She was real in your world.” The episode, more broadly, seems to be making the case that the same is true for soap opera characters and the comforting, often cozy (and sometimes over-the-top) characters of Star Trek.
Does the SNW version of the Enterprise have a permanent counselor now?
Could Deidre Hall return as Dr. Chivers?
Although we’ve not seen Dr. Chivers before in Strange New Worlds, the ship’s counselors of Trek have a way of sticking around. Obviously, aspects of Chivers’ blue uniform are meant to evoke a bit of Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) from The Next Generation. But as SNW Season 4 heads into its finale episodes, and with Season 5 in 2027 wrapping up the series, could we see Dr. Chivers again?
For Hall, the answer is, “never say never.”
“It would be great fun to go back and do more of what they’re doing,” Hall says. “And of course, she is a therapist, and heaven knows we need them on starships.”
