I’m so excited to share this fan edit that creates a prequel to Star Trek Strange New Worlds! With only four episodes and a total run-time of 2 hours and 43 minutes, it’s short enough for viewing in one sitting. Would love to hear any feedback.
For those who may not know, Star Trek Discovery Season 2 was a sneaky introduction to Captain Pike and Spock as supporting characters, along with a couple appearances by Number One, before being spun off into their own series. Unfortunately, even if you were open to watching 12+ hours of TV to get an idea of what happened before SNW Season 1, you would be lost half the time as Discovery is highly serialized and relies on knowing what happened during its own season 1.
Flawed as Discovery is in general, season 2 gave me plenty of material for four episodes that I’m calling Season 0 of Strange New Worlds. No Red Angel. Only as much Michael Burnham as the plot required. No need for any understanding or outside knowledge from Discovery. Episodes are encoded in H265 and maintain near blu-ray quality at only 2.8 to 3.7gb.
With cutting 14 down to 4 (reasonably short) episodes, an exhaustive change list is just not going to happen. I’ll run through the major elements though:
-I open with title cards for the project (accompanied by the first few bars of the Discovery main theme) then dissolve to the new Star Trek intro and fanfare included with every SNW episode. It does not play at each of my episodes, just the beginning of the project.
-Episode I (A Sense of Discovery - 39 minutes) starts with the first and last couple minutes of the Short Trek episode Q&A, allowing me to begin the story with Spock and the Enterprise. The rest of my ep I is parts of Discovery Season 2 episodes 1, 2, 4 and 5 (1 starts things off, followed by a custom SNW credit sequence, a short scene from 2, followed by 5 then 4 driving the episode plot)
-Episode II (Not Every Cage is a Prison - 41 minutes) is primarily episode 8 as the A story & part of 7 as a B story, with a scene from 4 (and Number One) at the beginning.
-Episode III (Through the Valley of Shadows - 50 minutes) has pieces of 9, 10, 11 and 12, in that order.
-Episode IV (Such Sweet Sorrow - 47 minutes) is entirely made up of the two-part finale, eps 13 and 14, significantly reduced in length. 13 makes up the first quarter of the runtime and 14 is the rest.
-I did use some random ship establishing shots and reactions from other episodes as needed.
-My custom Star Trek Strange New Worlds opening titles let me credit the cast of this season (including major Discovery characters) while keeping the feel of SNW.
-The end titles are from Discovery S2 E3 with music from 13 (an alternate arrangement of the fantastic intro music).
Hopefully that’s enough info to pique people’s curiosity. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.