Strange New Worlds S3E9: Terrarium

One of the joys of Strange New Worlds is that Christopher Pike’s Enterprise seems like a nice place to work. Coworkers support each other, gossip about the latest inter-office romance, and the chummy captain cooks dinner for the gang in his quarters. Along similar lines, SNW seems like a great set to work on. Apart from anything else, the producers were understanding enough to sideline Pike for a few episodes when Anson Mount and his wife had a new baby. And when Melissa Navia’s husband died, the show limited Erica Ortegas’ screen time to one or two killer lines per episode.

So we’re overdue for an hour where Ortegas gets to be the lead. Enterprise is exploring a region of space where strange phenomena happen — not haunted, per se, but the next best thing. To explore this strange phenomena, Pike sends his best pilot through an asteroid field in a shuttle, and to keep the craft lightweight, she can’t have a copilot. It’s a blatant contrivance to get Ortegas into trouble alone, but as it’s what makes the episode work, we’ll allow it.

And of course she very quickly gets into trouble. A wormhole opens up and swallows the shuttle. From the Enterprise‘s perspective, Ortegas has simply vanished. She comes to in a crashed shuttle, too damaged to fly, on a small, apparently lifeless moon, with no idea where in space she is, or whether anyone’s close enough to hear her mayday.

This leads to an extended stretch of Ortegas talking to herself, and frankly she’s at her best bouncing off the other characters. In space, no one can hear you wisecrack. But we do get a nice montage of Starfleet resourcefulness, as she pulls parts out of the shuttle to jury-rig basic life support. She also explores the crash site, to find the moon’s orbit is going to take it dangerously close to a gas giant. When the moon gets too close, the atmosphere becomes a hurricane of toxic gas, and the damaged shuttle isn’t going to be enough to protect her.

So we get a classic Trek survival story, with a twist — the moon turns out to be inhabited after all. Ortegas encounters a cave where another crashed pilot is taking refuge, but this pilot is a Gorn. As the opening flashbacks remind us, Erica’s still traumatized from nearly being killed by a Gorn, and she’s slow to trust this one, even though she makes no move to hurt Ortegas.

Which makes the episode an interesting reversal of “Arena”, the original Star Trek episode where Kirk and a Gorn captain are marooned on a barren planet with no way of communicating with each other. Kirk has to find a way to use the planet’s meager resources to kill his opposite number. Here, Ortegas and the downed pilot have to figure out how to use the moon’s meager resources to escape, and not kill each other. Once that premise is established, it proves to be a good one, as Ortegas gradually warms up to her adversary, and puzzles out a solution.

In the end, we get both the satisfyingly difficult moral, and weird leftfield twist that were each the original series’ stock in trade (and have been mostly lacking from the Paramount Plus era of Trek.) And a long-overdue spotlight on the most endearingly sarcastic member of the ensemble.

Stray tachyons:
• In the B story, Uhura tries to convince Pike to keep searching for presumed-dead Ortegas, and eventually undertake a dangerous rescue mission. Spock lends a hand, and the rest of the ensemble doesn’t have much to do, which is fine. This show uses its cast extremely well, but it also understands you don’t need to give everyone a moment every single week.

• Humanizing the Gorn at this late stage is an interesting storytelling choice, as unlike previous Trek villains (the Borg excepted), Strange New Worlds has presented the Gorn as an adversary who can’t be reasoned with or understood. It will be interesting to see whether the show explores this further before the end, although understanding we have for the Gorn, the less “Arena” works in retrospect.

• This wasn’t a perfect episode, but after two of the series’ worst back-to-back, it feels like the show is finding its footing again… just in time for another too-short season to end, with next week’s “New Life and New Civilizations.”