Strange New Worlds S4E1: Valles Marineris
Star Trek is not in a good place. Since last year’s terrible season finale, Paramount Plus launched Starfleet Academy and quickly cancelled it (although a second season still might air in 2027), several movies were announced and abandoned, and Strange New Worlds — once the confident flagship of Trek’s streaming era — became unmoored from everything that made it great, plagued by silly writing, unearned sentimentality, and wild shifts in pacing and tone.
All of those things are still present in “Valles Marineris,” but there’s at least less of the bad, and at this point, with Worlds the last remaining outpost of Star Trek for the foreseeable future, we’ll take “less bad.” And in fairness, it’s quite a bit less bad than last season’s worst.
Enterprise gets sent on a safe, routine mission to observe a stellar phenomenon called an “interstellar squall” — basically a big mess of golden CGI in space. Naturally, the mission turns unsafe in a hurry, as the ship gets a distress call from inside the deadly storm, and Enterprise itself is sucked in. The ship is damaged and adrift, and the storm has carried it somewhere unfamiliar. Una, La’an, and Ortegas beam down to a lush, volcano-strewn planet in search of a power source that can get the Enterprise running again, while the defenseless ship itself is attacked by mysterious aliens who want to scrap the ship to help their war effort.
Ship-in-danger, away-team-in-different-kind-of-danger is a classic Trek formula, and that’s largely because it works every time. The ship being captured means the away team has to fend for themselves when giant, hostile creatures show up. The away team being waylaid means, in turn, the ship remains powerless to escape. Both halves of that equation work here.
But they don’t work as well as they should. There’s a central reveal that both parties figure out at roughly the same time. We can’t talk about the rest of the episode without spoiling that, so if you haven’t watched it yet, stop here.
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The giant, hostile creatures are dinosaurs. The planet Number One beamed down to is Earth, 65 million years ago, because the interstellar squall threw the Enterprise back in time. And the attacking aliens are from Mars — a blue-skied, heavily-populated Mars that, at some point, becomes the barren red planet we know and love. In the meantime, the Martians are so warlike because their very existence is being threatened by insectoid predators who can’t be reasoned with.
It’s a killer premise. Pike has to rescue his crew and get back to his own time. His instinct is to help the Martians fight off the insects. But one false move, and he erases the entire history of humanity. The Martians dying out is a tragedy, but saving them might mean that humans never exist. And because Pike makes the effort to get to know the Martian commander, her people’s extinction isn’t an abstract tragedy, it’s right in front of his face.
Valles Marineris, the episode’s title, refers to a real-life 2500-mile canyon on Mars, but the episode makes it the scars of a horrific battle, in which the Martians had to destroy part of their own planet, and sacrifice millions of lives, to rid themselves of just one wave of invaders. These Martians are doomed underdogs, and the commander manages to be sympathetic despite her hostility to Pike and determination that violence is the answer to every question.
That one-dimensional thinking is where the episode falls down. “Marineris” does a good job of establishing why the Martian is so war-obsessed; she’s desperately fighting for her own survival. But it makes for a very one-note character, and Pike’s plan to dissuade her from scrapping the Enterprise is to give a few very cloying speeches about friendship and teamwork. Yes, a Federation made up of a diverse group of aliens who see their differences as a strength is a nice model for a society. But when Pike was fighting the Gorn last season, he was doing it with phasers, not with the power of cooperation.
The dinosaur mission was less cloying, but it also felt a bit flat. There was no redshirt to get eaten to raise the stakes, so you knew our trio of characters was never in danger. Once the ancient Earth reveal happened, there wasn’t much for them to do but distract the dinosaur so they could get to the energy source, which doesn’t require anything terribly clever.
Despite all this, the ending still packs a punch. Civilization-ending stakes, that nonetheless have a personal connection, are one of Trek‘s stocks-in-trade, and again, the franchise goes back to that well often because it’s a trick that always works. The episode climaxes with Pike having to make an impossible moral choice, and then having to live with its fallout, and even at the end of an uneven episode, the moment hits hard.
Except the episode can’t just leave it at that. We get an epilogue where the crew sits around a table saying obvious things about time travel. How could we have caused the thing that happened before we got there? Maybe it was meant to be. It all fits together somehow. Very useful dialogue for the viewer, assuming you’ve never heard of time travel or watched an episode of television before. It feels very much like the overexplaining TV executives assume the audience now needs because we’re looking at their phones while we’re watching.
Which feels like the perfect metaphor for where we find Star Trek in 2026. All the elements of a great show are still here, but everyone feels more than a little distracted.
Stray tachyons:
• Our cold open finds Pike and La’an on horseback on an alien planet. They’re having too much fun riding around to end the mission quite yet, although it’s never explained why an alien world with gravity-defying rock formations has regular old horses. We assume Paramount+ just has a lot of horses lying around from every other show on the network.
• As much as Strange New Worlds has been gradually setting up a full-on Original Series reboot, the dinosaur storyline felt like a backdoor pilot for an Una/La’an/Ortegas series which, frankly, seems more interesting. We already know what happens to Kirk and Spock. And Pike telling newly-promoted Commander Number One that she’ll have her own ship one day was less heavy-handed than all of the, “nice to meet you, I bet we’ll have many years of adventures together!” exchanges between legacy characters we got last season.
• There’s a side story where Uhura has to mentor a new cadet from Vulcan. Other Trek shows have taken the opportunity to add depth to the franchises’ pre-existing alien cultures. Strange New Worlds instead opted for, “Vulcans are pedantic dicks. The end.” It’s one-dimensional and not nearly as funny as the show thinks it is. In this instance it also doesn’t work as a C-story, as the cadet is introduced, disappears for roughly 40 minutes, and then gets a pat resolution to a storyline we’d already forgotten about and never cared about in the first place.
• Maybe the Vulcan cadet storyline would have had a little time to breathe if the show hadn’t felt the need to pad out the end of the episode with a sweeping vista of prehistoric Earth. It feels like an unearned victory lap for the VFX team — Jurassic Park gave us realistic dinosaurs over 20 years ago, so the vista just feels like an eminently skippable video game cutscene.
• While the episode was eager to show off its dinosaur effects, the Martians were just humans with a different kind of pointy ear than the Vulcans. Even Next Generation‘s makeup department put in more effort.
• Pelia offhandedly mentions that the last time she saw an interstellar squall, she “might have been in a phone box,” implying that she was travelling with Doctor Who, or possibly Bill and Ted. It’s a cute throwaway reference, but more than a little gratuitous.
• La’an punches a raptor-sized dinosaur in the face, which is equal measures silly and cool. But back in sick bay, she makes a note that she broke her hand in the process and doesn’t feel any pain. Which might have something to do with the genetic enhancements she inherited from her great-great-great-grandpa KHAAAAANNN!!!! We’re sure this will be followed up on in the coming weeks, but La’an the wounded trauma victim who’s learning to reconnect with people is just so much more interesting as a character than La’an the descendent of Trek’s most famous villain, so we’re a little wary that the show’s digging up the “hey remember this” side of the character.
• While we’re fairly critical of this episode, it’s still a fun, watchable episode of television. But the earlier seasons of this show were so well written that the just-okay episodes just make us pine for how much better this episode could have been.
