Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 1, “Valles Marineris.”
Cowboys and dinosaurs!
But also… whoa. The USS Enterprise crew is responsible for… the creation of the human race!?
After the rash of high-concept Strange New Worlds episodes in recent seasons – musicals, animated hijinks, retro TV space adventures, etc. – getting a good old-fashioned adventure-of-the-week story here to kick off Season 4 is refreshing. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is – a fun, cool story for Captain Pike and the crew that also happens to lean into the mind-blowing “can you believe they went there?” zone.
Things kick off with Pike (Anson Mount), La’an (Christina Chong) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) on horseback on an alien world, where they’ve just dropped some medicine that will apparently save the planet’s population. Pike’s in his groove here – he’s got his own saddle, you know! – but after six months straight of intense missions, back on the ship Una (Rebecca Romijn) asks him if it isn’t time to slow down?
Pike is of course still mourning the loss of Captain Marie Batel, his lover who was lost to the vagaries of the space-time continuum at the end of Season 3. Dude’s had it tough; he also has his own impending fate weighing on him constantly, even if he doesn’t talk about it much these days. He’s losing himself in his work to escape the reality of these things.
So when Admiral April (Adrian Holmes) shows up with not just a new, chill mission – go check out this rad interstellar storm, hang out, and take some readings – but also a new job offer – a promotion to commodore – Pike will finally have some time to sit back and think. Or so he believes, if not for the whole getting thrown back in time to the age of the dinosaurs thing.
While Una, La’an and Ortegas’ (Melissa Navia) mission to what turns out to be prehistoric Earth is enjoyable, and certainly the more flashy “show it off in the trailer” of the two main plot threads here, it’s not always convincing from a visual or dramatic perspective. Strange New Worlds’ reliance on the LED Volume allows it to visit exactly that – strange new worlds – but that doesn’t mean the experience is always believable. Plus, Una versus a T. rex probably would’ve played better as scary rather than funny, which is how it’s handled here. These guys are being very casual considering their situation! (Star Trek vs. dinosaurs should’ve just gotten its own episode.)
No, the A storyline back on the ship is where the money’s at in “Valles Marineris.” While the dinosaur adventure is happening down below, the disabled Enterprise is captured by an unfamiliar alien race who turn out to be warlike Martians! Saffron Burrows (Wing Commander, Deep Blue Sea) represents these folks as the hardened Battle Commander Cassel, and it’s her interplay with Mount’s Pike that carries the show as they debate the very Federation concept of working together versus the very Martian ethos of killing all your enemies. As Spock might say, it’s quite… stimulating.
(Meanwhile, a conversation between Ortegas and La’an down on the planet drives home this debate. Ortegas takes the compassionate side, while La’an is pretty stone cold. But her increasingly aggressive posture is touched on again during the episode’s postscript, where we learn that she’s worried that her genetically enhanced nature may be getting the better of her lately. Khaaaaaaan!!!)
Burrows is the kind of high-quality guest star who can really elevate an episode of Star Trek, and her steely, emotionally restrained turn as Cassel – who is clearly devastated by the horrors her world has endured in its war with the insectoid species the Dol’Drm – mixes well with Pike’s aw-shucks can’t-we-all-just-get-along-isms. When Pike happens to say the word “alone,” the universal translator presents it to Cassel as “widower” because of her species’ many different interpretations of the word based on the speaker’s inflection. She offers her condolences to Pike, who after all, is essentially a widower now. He certainly feels that way, it seems.
That this all climaxes in a clutch moment for the captain where he must, on a hunch, decide to allow Cassel to destroy the entire planet of the Dol’Drm – while also sacrificing herself – is pretty ballsy. Of course, being one of Starfleet’s finest, he was right to follow his gut, and this entire caper has been one big time loop. The Enterprise had to come back in time in order to trigger the events that would cause the destruction of the Dol’Drm, which ironically enough will lead to the death of Mars as a habitable world as well as the dawning of a new age on Earth where humanity will rise. Awesome.
But perhaps where this story thread stumbles is in Pike’s easy acceptance of his decision. He did, after all, enable the genocide of an entire species – time loop be damned – and while we’re supposed to believe that this adventure has helped him come to terms with the notion that he needs to live in the here and now rather than continuously rushing off to avoid his problems, I’m not sure the script quite sells that. “I want to focus on my now, and that’s here, with Enterprise,” he tells the Doc. So he’s Rikering his promotion offer. This time.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- Pike and his saddle… big Picard energy going on there.
- A 15-minute long cold open before the title credits is… a lot.
- The crew has just done six months of missions, but aren’t they already on a five-year mission?
- Another Doctor Who reference. That’ll do at this point, Pelia, that’ll do.
- “Tract-OR beam.” Is Ethan Peck putting his own spin on Leonard Nimoy’s famous “sen-SORE” pronunciation of “sensor”?
- So the phasers have a new disintegration setting… but Ortegas insists on calling it the “vaporization thingee” just to annoy Scotty (who isn’t even there!).
- Wait, Una wasn’t already a commander?
- “Sometimes it’s just recipes.”
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