Strange New Worlds S3E1: Hegemony Part II

We start this season on the heels of the disconcerting news that Strange New Worlds will not only end after five seasons, the fifth season will only be six episodes (and the producers had to beg Paramount for those). This series always had a built in expiration date — at some point, Christopher Pike has to step aside and turn the USS Enterprise over to James Tiberius Kirk — but it still feels criminal that one of the best series the franchise has ever produced gets only 36 episodes, given it took Next Generation roughly that many episodes just to start getting good.

Alas, such is the streaming era, especially as overseen by the ongoing disaster that is Paramount Global. All we can do is enjoy, while we can, how expertly Strange New Worlds builds on the longer series that came before. Action, suspense, science, optimism, comradery, miraculous rescues — everything Star Trek does, Strange New Worlds does extremely well.

That list includes an old Trek standby, the season finale cliffhanger. We last saw the Enterprise and her crew in the midst of multiple disasters. The ship is in the middle of a firefight with their new/old enemy the Gorn. Captain Pike’s girlfriend, Captain Batel, has been infected by one of the lizard-like aliens, whose offspring is going to burst from her body, Alien-style, within a day or two. And those very same aliens have captured four of the crew and a group of colonists they were trying to protect..

Worst of all, Pike — who was shown in the previous season finale to be an all-around swell guy but maybe not the strongest person in a crisis — seems to be freezing up faced with multiple crises happening simultaneously.

Episode director Chris Fisher, however, rises to the occasion, as he effortlessly bounces us between storylines while keeping the story beats clear and using the entire cast well. (SNW has a core ensemble of seven, and we add to that Pelia, Scotty, Sam Kirk, and helmsman Mitchell, and the episode keeps every one of them busy.)

The episode also edges about as far into sci-fi horror as Trek ever ventures. The captured crew members — La’an, Sam, Dr. M’Benga, and Ortegas — wake up inside slimy alien pods in which they’ve been slowly digested. They’re bloodied, sick, and Ortegas has lost several fingers. And they’ve only escaped into a chamber full of more pods — some full of half-decomposed bodies, some holding colonists. There are too many to rescue one-by-one; they have to figure a way to get out of this giant alien stomach, off the Gorn ship, and back to the Enterprise.

The ship, however, has problems of its own. Scotty has rigged up a way to disguise the ship so it looks like a Gorn ship on radar, which allows them to sneak behind enemy lines. But that just means they’re surrounded, out of contact with the Federation, and stuck watching helplessly as an armada assembles to invade.

And elsewhere on the ship, Nurse Chapel tries frantically to save Captain Batel, with every possible course of treatment almost certain to kill her. With the doctor imprisoned, Spock volunteers to work with her, which is an excuse to revisit their simmering sexual tension. 

There’s a lot going on. And all of it is terrific. Carol Kane is a delight as always as Pelia, mentoring a still-wet-behind-the-ears Scotty. Christina Chong — a standout even in a cast comprised entirely of standouts — has perfected La’an’s mixture of traumatized vulnerability and steely resolve. And Pike comes through in the end, without ever completely losing those doubts we saw at the end of last season. He’s not Captain Kirk, and that’s part of what makes the show work as well as it does.

Another highlight are the Gorn. Unlike most Trek baddies, the Gorn feel truly alien. Their ship technology is mostly biological. They communicate via light. It’s not simply a matter of negotiating or getting their disruptor banks offline like Picard would do. They can’t be reasoned with, they just want to eat us or lay their eggs in our bodies. They’re not a puzzle to be solved as a lot of Trek’s aliens are. They’re just monsters, to be killed or avoided. And yet Strange New Worlds still manages to find another option (while calling back one of the all-time great two-parters).

It’s a terrible shame a show this good has to end before it’s time. But at least they’re making every moment count.

Stray tachyons:
• Speaking of disconcerting news: As we wrote this, we found out Paramount has cancelled The Late Show, presumably because Stephen Colbert publicly criticized Paramount’s (alleged) attempt to bribe convicted felon Donald Trump. The company settled a nuisance lawsuit with Trump for $16 million that ordinarily would have been laughed out of court, and it’s been widely speculated that the payment was encouragement for Trump to allow Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance. Colbert referred to it on-air as a “big fat bribe,” and now his show is ending in May of 2016. We picked a bad day to renew our Paramount Plus subscription! 

• The Trek braintrust has suggested they might follow up Strange New Worlds with a sequel series set on Kirk’s Enterprise, possibly finishing the five-year mission that was interrupted when the original Star Trek was cancelled in 1969. It seems like a logical next step, given SNW has introduced Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and Uhura. Personally, rather than rehash the past, we’d rather see a sequel series with the new characters — Una, La’an, and Ortegas — on a new ship. But given the way Paramount is treating the franchise, we’ll be happy if we get any new series after Strange New Worlds runs its course.