The 2024 nominee list for the prestigious Hugo Awards have been announced, and two Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 episodes earned nominations.
2 Strange for the Hugos
The World Science Fiction Society has been honoring the best in science fiction and fantasy with the Hugo Awards since 1953. For 2024 Strange New Worlds has two nominations in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The two second season episodes nominated are the Lower Decks crossover “Those Old Scientists” (written by Kathryn Lyn & Bill Wolkoff and directed by Jonathan Frakes) and the musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody” (written by Dana Horgan & Bill Wolkoff and directed by Dermott Downs)
L-R Carol Kane as Pelia, Christina Chong as La’an, Ethan Peck as Spock in “Subspace Rhapsody” (Paramount+)
The two Strange New Worlds episodes are competing against episodes from Doctor Who (“The Giggle” and “Wild Blue Yonder”), Loki (“Glorious Purpose”), and The Last of Us (Long, Long Time”).
The two nominated Trek episodes are both fan favorites and stand-out installments of the already popular Strange New Worlds series. Both are held out as prime examples of the “big swings” the show is taking integrating different genres within its episodic format. If either were to win, it would be recognizing a moment where Star Trek truly went above and beyond to offer something new to the audience.
Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, and Anson Mount in “Those Old Scientists” (Paramount+)
Strange New Worlds becomes the third Paramount+ Trek show to be nominated for a Hugo Award, followed by Discovery in 2018 and Lower Decks in 2022. It is the first Trek show to get two episodes nominated in the same year since Enterprise in 2003. The last franchise Hugo win was for the TNG series finale “All Good Things…” in 1995.
Bill Wolkoff, who co-wrote both nominated episodes of Strange New Worlds, took to Twitter/X this afternoon to express how he was “humbled and speechless” to be nominated.
I am legitimately humbled and speechless… Subspace Rhapsody and Those Old Scientists are both Hugo Finalists… among other shows I am in awe of… 🤯 #StrangeNewWorlds pic.twitter.com/Ox8x92hE2K
— Bill Wolkoff (@flying_lobster) March 29, 2024
And Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan, who also had a hand in “Those Old Scientists,” shared the love of seeing that episode get recognition by the Hugo Awards.
Love seeing Those Old Scientists getting a ‘24 Hugo nom!🖖 pic.twitter.com/uP4GgauilZ
— Mike McMahan (@MikeMcMahanTM) March 29, 2024
Hugo voting will open in April and the awards themselves will be presented at The World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Glasgow in August.
Keep up with news about the Star Trek Universe.
First, congratulations for the nominations. Well deserved for both episodes.
And I’m sure the whining from the angry old white man contingent of the fan base will begin in 3…2…1…
And the profiling and name calling will begin in 3.. 2…
Oh wait…. you beat everyone to it.
As an old white man who doesn’t conform to the angry stereotype, congratulations to everyone at SNW for having your boldly going recognized! Good luck!
Pre trolling is also trolling. CLOSED
I’m an angry old white man, and I don’t like things that are different. Actually, I liked TOS, and quite a bit more than I expected because LDS is not for me. Subspace Rhapsody made me cringe. If you liked SR -great! Enjoy! But I don’t want to see your record collection.
Told you I was old
How about a collection of 8-tracks?
Ooh? Wanna jump in my Trans Am and listen to Freebird?
Amazingly enough, I only ever had Freebird on vinyl, as my 8-track recorder (weren’t many of those, this was by a company called Electrophonic) had already died. But I can tell you that listening to the tape of Jeff Wayne’s WAR OF THE WORLDS rockfest while cruising in my aged 66 Mustang was an outstanding experience, especially on Halloween.
Those Old Scientists was a good episode.
While I’m not a fan of Subspace Rhapsody, I’m glad it was nominated for fans of it because I do know it was popular for some.
TOS BABY!!!!! 😃👍
Easily my favorite SNW episode! I’ve seen it 5 times now. Well deserved!
Congrats to SR as well! Not really my thing but certainly a very creative episode.
It was a surprisingly emotional episode for me personally. I really liked it.
Subspace Rhapsody was certainly an episode of SNW as well.
The musical episode was fun, i didn’t like those old scientists. Its the worst episode for me since Rascals on TNG. I will still congratulate for the nom.
Probably the two best episodes of the season (might include the trial episode.) Makes sense they were nominated, but I assume it’s going to be The Last of Us.
Congratulations to everyone involved in making those wonderful episodes!
I’m sorry that they were BOTH nominated, because it means the Star Trek vote might be split; I think we’d have a better chance of taking the Hugo if only one episode was nominated. But they were both stunningly good.
i have no clue what last of us is and loki is lame and boring like all super hero stuff so I hope it loses
but i am conflicted I want snw episodes to win but I also want the two doctor who 60th anniversary specials to win especially since the one was Bernard cribbins final performance he died not long after filming his scene for wild blue yonder
See, I’m a huge Star Trek fan, but I feel that Doctor Who’s “Wild Blue Yonder” was a superior episode. I won’t yammer on because we all have (and deserve) our personal opinions. But I’m rooting for the fourteenth Doctor this time out.
And don’t get me started on Cribbins… I just rewatched series 4 of “Doctor Who” and seeing his watery eyes broke my heart all over again!!!
DW might split its vote too, though from 2010-2014 it had three nominations and still won in 2010-2012.
Agreed, Ian. And while I EXPECT “The Giggle” to win (since it was Neil Patrick Harris guest starring), “Wild Blue Yonder” with virtually NO guest cast is the better of the two, conceptually.
Oh for sure. Haven’t enjoyed a DW as much as WBY since the Moffat era.
Has anybody suggested that ‘Yonder’ would be an excellent catchphrase for somebody in the big chair before they hit warp?
Maybe! But reminds me of when my friend was asked by a water if she was done with her food and she randomly went, “I’m still finishin’ mah taters!” …and then was immediately confused as to why she said it like that.
There are unfortunate associations with ‘yonder’ that might cancel out the nice association of ‘wild blue yonder.’ Am thinking of the old story of Tony Curtis in an early sword&sandals pic saying ‘yondah stands the castle of my fadda.‘ (though that is actually a myth, based on something Debbie Reynolds once claimed about him, but Curtis never actually said it.)
SNW is such a fine show and These Old Scientist is a modern classic. CONGRATS! Subspace Rhapsody, I don’t get. The music sucked. The chuckle with the Klingon K pop was the only good part of the episode. But that’s just me.
The fact that there are no feature movies nominated really says something about the state of movies and science fiction. I’m thinking (and I might well be missing a few here) the last great sf movies I’ve seen are a decade or more old, with HER, UNDER THE SKIN, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and CHILDREN OF MEN. Okay, INTERSTELLAR is very good too, better than EX MACHINA for me, along with honorable mention to SUNSHINE and GRAVITY despite the latter’s confusing screwup over gravity and inertia.
I should probably look up to see if any of these actually got nominated. My guess is that the Nolan film did and CoM since it has a literary basis.
Pretty good choices, except I’d drop INTERSTELLAR and add-in ARRIVAL, which I consider to be possibly (with the exception of 2001) the best film ever made on the subject of first contact.
I’ll expect to see DUNE PART 2 on the list of noms next year, though as with PART 1 it won’t be due to any lobbying on my part.
(And yeah, if George Clooney knew the difference between gravity and inertia he’d still be alive.)
George Clooney is very much alive.
I was (archly) referring to his character in the film.
I went back and forth about INTERSTELLAR, to be honest. There’s a ton to like visually (the shots where the camera is mounted on the hull are like stuff out of my unmade movies), but considering the pedigree of the advisers, I was amazed to hear them mention that a star system has got a black hole and a neutron star (plethora of anti-riches, I guess.) The ending with him reaching out and back to his kid still feels like it belongs to Spielberg, not Nolan.
And I still can’t figure out how that little ship takes off on its own from waterworld, a heavier than Earth planet, and gets up to orbit when it took a full rocket to get it from earth in the first place.
Feature films are nominated in the best dramatic presentation (long form) category. The 2024 nominees are:
Feature films and TV were split up into their own categories in 2003.
Both episodes were fun to watch a first time, I may go back and watch TOS again someday. I’m not a fan of musicals, so probably won’t revisit ‘Rhapsody.’ Anyway, congrats to all involved, clearly a lot of passionate work was involved on each.
I’m not a fan of musicals either, though I’ve enjoyed GREASE a number of times in a brain-disengaged way, and even owned the GREASE fotonovel (it had very PG’d lyrics compared to the film.) I do think ALL THAT JAZZ is an alltime great movie, but that’s because I think of it as a drama that includes musical moments, not as a musical, though I had huge fights with my whole family on that issue. (we also fought over whether Charlton Heston should have tried to save Ava Gardner at the end of EARTHQUAKE, so don’t think these are all highminded and logical discussions.)
And I do want to see THE RED SHOES all the way through someday, it certainly looks spectacular. But seeing SCROOGED in the theater at a tender age really put me off musicals pretty much permanently, and even Montand and Nicholson can’t fully offset Streissand in ON A CLEAR DAY, though I did like parts of that when I saw it on TV in my teens. About my only unfulfilled musical notion is seeing (but maybe not hearing) Shatner pseudo-sing SpaceMan of LaMancha.
I thought both episodes were well-done, if pretty light and frothy for a Hugo nod. Still, it’s instructive to recall that in 1968 “The Trouble With Tribbles” lost to “The City on the Edge of Forever” by only six votes.
And Trials and Tribbleations was one of only two Hugo nods DS9 ever received. Hugo voters love tribbles, I guess!
😆
So Hugo awards are supposed to be for science fiction and a Disney Musical wins one with probably the most lame ass sci fi concept for the sheer stupidity of the episode.
It hasn’t been done before in Star Trek so it wins an award, wow the the bar has been set so low now what else do we have to look forward to in AG’s stupid gimmick federation universe.
We have Shogun on Disney which is absolutely fantastic and we have this really shallow Star Trek reboot series. I will be cancelling my sub after Discovery finishes.
Nominated. It’s not won anything yet. The in-universe justification for the gimmick was weak, but sci-fi has the flexibility to try new things and not be afraid of pushing the envelope. It’s not exactly how previous Treks would have handled it (if at all) but Star Trek’s long term survival depends more on bold innovating than it does treading familiar territory. Sometimes it means a Dominion War, sometimes it’s a divisive take on the 32nd century. But better we have a show busting its ass to do something new like an original musical than have fans complaining about overly-familiar stories as happened with Voyager and Enterprise.
I don’t really see the point of comparing any of the shows to Shogun. I never watched TNG and thought, “Man, this episode with all the Datas in the Wild West would never fly on LA Law.”
Perhaps the point being made is that SHOGUN does a better job of portraying ‘strange new worlds’ than recent Trek has managed?
(just guessing, I saw most of the original 44 years ago and really only loved John Rhys-Davies, and even though I like Hiroyuki Sonada going back to HELIX and SUNSHINE, I just didn’t feel compelled to give this one a go. Am doing THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW rewatch instead and loving nearly every minute of it, though for some reason, HBO-through-Prime broadcasts more than three-quarters of the eps in a vertically squished format. No rhyme or reason as to which eps got transferred properly, and we have complained, but usually just have to ‘wide’ the image to get it to approximate what it should look like in the first place.)
“Perhaps the point being made is that SHOGUN does a better job of portraying ‘strange new worlds’ than recent Trek has managed?”
True, but that pretty much applies to just about all Trek, not just recent Trek. In fact, you could make the argument that in terms of first contact scenarios it’s been mostly downhill since “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
As to “Shogun,” I think the new version looks awesome, light years better than the pedestrian version done in 1980. But I still haven’t been able to bring myself to take the plunge on yet another streaming service.
Invest yourself because it is fantastic, production ,story and acting.
Based on the clips I’ve seen (and a YouTube comparison of the old and new versions of the scene where Blackthorne draws a map of the known world for a fascinated Toranaga), my guess is that I would agree. But you know what? There are lots of fans of the 1980 version who are every bit as critical of the new “Shogun” as you are of SNW. And they’re no more objectively wrong than you are objectively right.
I especially relished the moment in “Larry Sanders” when a smiling Rip Torn informed an arrogant network executive that, having killed men in Korea, she doesn’t intimidate him all that much.
Yeah, he first mentions that he killed somebody in Korea who looked just like her, which is even funnier, given the woman looks kind of like Bibi Besch’a harsher-edged sister, so he must have been killing nurses.
We just saw a prime Torn moment on the show last week, when the subject of ethics comes up and he warns Larry that thread is nothing he should be pulling on. Christina has been referencing it daily ever since. The writing is just terrific, but the way Torn handles the material is exceptional. It is kind of like getting seasons worth of DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (and I remember suggesting on this forum that a JUDGEMENT CITY tv series would have had great possibilities!), but even better.
Shandling had Megan Gallagher and Kathryn Harrold playing wives of his; taste was exquisite. I wrote spec scripts with either Harrold or Bonnie Bedelia in mind during the years right before the series started, and then they have a show where Talia Balsam plays Harrold’s sister the very same year I’m writing CRITICAL ORBIT with her in mind. (I always aimed high.)
Either Harrold or Bedelia would suit me just fine. I don’t ask for much.
My late mother was really into reincarnation and absolutely adored DEFENDING YOUR LIFE. I’m pretty skeptical towards the concept myself — if you don’t retain your memories then what’s the point? — but enjoyed the hell out of it nevertheless.
From an SF perspective, DEFENDING doesn’t do anywhere near enough to explore the concept of a judgement city (hence my interest in seeing a series set there), since we don’t see anything about whether different belief groups going to separate but adjacent realms. The bit Torn says about dead kids automatically passing on to the next level is okay, but begs the question about how long a kid can live before being taken, or the circumstances of his death? It actually made me think of some questions in Fleming’s DR NO, when Bond ruminates on the late doctor after he gets buried alive by tons of bird guano, and whether a mad soul would go to the same place as a bad soul, or instead to where the good ones go (like his recently incinerated colleague Quarrel.) Shoot, I even remember thinking while first watching the movie that Judgement City has the initials JC and what that might portend (NOT thinking James Cameron.)
But we rewatch the movie endlessly mainly because Brooks’ character seems so much like me (his devotion to dire Streissand excepted, of course.) The Brooks-screwing-up montage includes an image as a chainsaw seems to wield him, and all of that seems so me it almost isn’t funny. That, and how much fun Torn is in a role that, despite being well-written, could come off as Basil Exposition in lesser hands.
You make a really good point about reincarnation — that ending on HEAVEN CAN WAIT where Beatty doesn’t really remember who he is ruined the movie for me for decades, though I finally rewatched it once a few years back and felt semi-okay with it at last — and I’d echo your concerns with it re: consciousness, but I’ve consoled myself with the notion that if you put energy into a system, it has to come back in some fashion. But then you have to wonder about select folks who have basically spent their lives taking energy, joy and cash out of our systems. Do they come back as a whole forest of trees that never get planted?
Enlightenment would be so cool if you didn’t have to wait for the lights to go out to get there (assuming you do, that is, which I don’t.)
I loathed the ending of HEAVEN CAN WAIT at first sight, for exactly the reasons stated above. Rationalize about the “essence” of the character carrying on all you like — Joe Pendleton as a unique individual dies, in fact is royally screwed out of his existence by the incompetence of angel Buck Henry and the apparent benign neglect of Someone Else. Moreover, as an audience we’re supposed to be down with it because Julie Christy and Joe’s undefined essence might one day hook up. It doesn’t spoil the movie for me, exactly, the rest of it being pretty wonderful. But I continue to loathe that ending to this day.
“But better we have a show busting its ass to do something new like an original musical than have fans complaining about overly-familiar stories as happened with Voyager and Enterprise.”
Hear, hear. From my POV, anyway.
So throwing out a crappy musical because you have crappy sci fi writers with no talent. Excuse me but no thank you, SNW season 2 was crap with awful writing.
My whole point about Shogun was it has excellent writing and what we have with Star Trek SNW right now is amateurish sit com writing. It is very weak TV.
My whole argument is trying a really out there over the top ( and to me an absolutely stupid idea) is not good sci fi unless you have a good explanation for it and this is nonsense on the marvel level. I am sorry but the episode was crap and the nonsense for it was even crapper.
My point is that shogun on Disney is fantastic and well worth investing in and my love of Star Trek is waning with current trek.
There was a time I couldn’t wait for the next Star Trek episode, Shogun has that for me and it is an unexpected hit for Disney but it is a hit because it is great and not because it is pop TV, it is really fantastic TV and really deserves it’s plaudits.
So it’s just boiled down to something purely subjective again. That’s fine, we’re all doing it, but it’s still like comparing DS9 to NYPD Blue. And frankly I also look forward to Shogun more than I have any other recent Trek besides Lower Decks, but I’m not looking at it through the same lenses and expecting Trek and Shogun to have the same kind of appeal or even approach to their fundamentals. One is original sci-fi, the other a second adaptation of historical fiction. Both have high production values that look wildly different. I can’t even compare the acting 1:1 – what Hiroyuki Sanada does is pitched completely differently than Anson Mount or Ethan Peck, for instance.
I thought the SNW musical was overrated, largely because the music and lyrics were forgettable, and the tenuous in-universe setup did not help. But I’m not upset that they swung for the fences.