It’s been almost two years since Star Trek: Strange New Worlds left us on a tense cliffhanger, and now it’s finally back to pay it off. It is perhaps an unfair pressure to put on the show, that circumstances outside of its control have kept this return anticipated for longer than it should have. But even beyond the context of its Hollywood strikes-induced delay, there was going to be pressure on Strange New Worlds to put its best foot forward regardless.
So… it’s perhaps not ideal that the series has returned with a bit of a mixed bag. A premiere of two episodes that couldn’t be further in tone from one another—one a grim, intense, high-stakes action conclusion to last season’s cliffhanger, the other a Spock character piece bursting with goofy, silly shenanigans—season three’s debut at its best speaks to the variety of storytelling modes Strange New Worlds can weave itself through.
But beyond the specific executions of those plots, these very different episodes both ring a bit hollow in similar ways, as they both struggle to both wrangle with the show’s episodic desires with increasingly serialized elements, and also struggle with how they handle their relationships to wider Trek canon.
Hegemony, Part II
© ParamountThe premiere episode itself, “Hegemony, Part II” (Strange New Worlds‘ first actual two-parter, made all the cuter by letting Anson Mount pick up with Star Trek tradition and lead us into the episode with the “And now, the continuation,” narration!), picks up like there hasn’t been a two-year wait to see just what Pike and the Enterprise crew will do to escape the wrath of the Gorn over Parnassus Beta.
Like Strange New Worlds‘ prior Gorn-centric episodes, “Hegemony, Part II” provides a masterclass in high-stakes tension. Albeit more action-forward than the creepy Alien horror vibes of past Gorn encounters, the episode deftly and cleverly weaves three distinct plotlines together around them. First, we have Pike and the Bridge team racing to try and rescue their captured crew and the missing Parnassian colonists and save the Federation from a potential Gorn invasion; then, elsewhere on Enterprise we have Spock and Chapel trying to save Captain Batel from her Gorn infection; and then we have the aforementioned captured crew themselves—La’an, Ortegas, Sam Kirk, and Dr. M’Benga—trying to escape alive from what can only be described as “The Collector Base from the ending of Mass Effect 2, but full of Gorn.”
It’s a lot, and it’s all filled with high tension and big action setpieces, from body-horror rescues to starship and ground shootouts, and again, it’s all cleverly weaved so everything climaxes together just so: each thread of the narrative ends with our heroes saving the day, in spite of the odds, and with the Gorn, Strange New Worlds‘ most persistent of threats, are seemingly done for.
© ParamountAll that sounds good and fun, right? Well, it mostly is from a spectacle standpoint. But If this really is the end of Strange New Worlds‘ envisioning of the Gorn (save for some potential lingering trauma this season, more on that next episode) and the show has had all it wants to say in setting up this connection from here to the classic Star Trek episode “Arena,” then “Hegemony, Part II” feels like a climax that really doesn’t have a vision for the Gorn beyond treating them as unequivocal monsters for the most part.
There was a fleeting moment in part one where Spock and Chapel felt a twinge of regret for having to kill a Gorn warrior that seemed to suggest that Strange New Worlds was going to have the potential to pivot and bring some nuance to a species that it had, up to that point, treated as little more than primally aggressive creatures. But while that particular beat is paid off in their shared handling of curing Captain Batel’s infection (by feeding the Gorn embryos the sustenance they need so it doesn’t fatally burst out of her, letting it absorb into her system), the rest of “Hegemony, Part II” just continues to do that for the most part. There’s some attempts made, sure, as part of the way Pike and the crew eventually discover how they can stop the Gorn from invading the Federation—their aggression, it turns out, is driven by increased solar activity in their home system, with the Enterprise managing to reverse the effect just in time to send a huge Gorn armada back into hibernation.
But even that small layer of depth to the titular Hegemony is largely shadowed by Strange New Worlds continuing to portray the Gorn as explicitly animalistic monsters. The Federation doesn’t even consider co-existence, it sees war with the Gorn as inevitable and wants Enterprise not to find a peaceful solution, but a way to “punch back.” The capture of the away team and the colonists reveals that the Gorn, when they don’t violently impregnate their victims to breed, just melt down their prisoners into biomass fuel in a long, excruciating, and horrifying process, an act of profound evil. Even when La’an and the mostly-not-melted Enterprise away team (save for poor Ortegas, who loses a good chunk of one of her hands from not being brought out of pod-capitivty soon enough) are making their escape, there’s no humanization or understanding: the Gorn are there to run at them in droves and be gunned down.
© ParamountStrange New Worlds‘ Gorn are treated as largely undeserving of understanding (if anything, making their aggression driven by natural stellar phenomena underlines that these Gorn could never comprehend the concept of diplomacy), monsters that the Federation must bend rules to defeat no matter the cost. And by resolving things, seemingly for good in terms of what’s left of Strange New Worlds through putting the Gorn into an early hibernation—that even the show has Pike acknowledge is just punting the issue down the road for someone else to deal with—Strange New Worlds avoids having to wrestle with that treatment, and how it impacts Star Trek‘s broader approach to treating even the greatest of antagonists with nuance and depth.
And even wilder, considering we know what Strange New Worlds is kicking the issue down the road to: it’s only six years after the fact when the events of “Arena” in original Star Trek take place. “Arena” is an episode of television almost 60 years older than “Hegemony, Part II” that somehow manages to give its singular Gorn a more nuanced and understanding portayal—and a more nuanced and understanding portrayal of humanity’s own path to Star Trek‘s utopian future, questioning the potential for both humanity and Gornkind alike’s potential for violence, and the hope in their striving to rise above it.
“Hegemony, Part II” instead only considers that the Gorn are animals, and deserve conflict until it can make treating them better another show’s problem. Among the slick spectacle of all the action and tension that really works here, it’s an oddly incurious move for a show in a franchise that prides itself on its curiosity.
Wedding Bell Blues
© ParamountWell, after all that seriousness, why don’t we move on to something fun! “Wedding Bell Blues” is an interesting parallel to “Hegemony, Part II” despite being radically different in tone, like the equivalent of a photographer at the titular wedding yelling “let’s do a silly one,” but as an entire episode.
If “Hegemony, Part II” was the contination of the show’s action-disaster, year-of-Hell type riffing seen in prior episodes of the Gorn arc across season one and two, then “Wedding Bell Blues” is, somehow, the third in a line of camp comedies that can only be described as the “Something Silly Happens During a Time of Tumult In Spock’s Love Life” genre. An oddly specific trend!
Picking up three months on from the events of “Hegemony, Part II”—a timeskip that allows Strange New Worlds to conventiently dump having to explore the lingering traumas of those events, for the most part, in order to wildly swing its tone—the episode sees Enterprise docked at Starbase One to celebrate the Federation’s centenary, only for things to take an awkward turn when Nurse Chapel returns from her fellowship not to romantically reunite with Spock, but reveal she is now actually in a very serious relationship with her mentor, Dr. Korby (guest star Cillian O’Sullivan) instead. Womp womp!
© ParamountOffered a strange drink by a mysterious bartender (none other than Our Flag Means Death‘s Rhys Darby) to soothe his heartache, Spock suddenly finds himself waking up in a reality where Enterprise is docked at Starbase One to intead celebrate his impending marriage to Chapel. From there, Strange New Worlds engages in a whole host of familiar comedies, as an unaffected Korby (and soon after a realizing Spock) race to try and snap everyone else out of the the mystery bartender-slash-wedding-planner’s illusion.
It’s a breezy and fun episode, but doesn’t really have much to do or say, even building itself around the interesting beat that we’re seeing a an inversion of Spock and Christine’s relationship in the original Trek (where Chapel pined after an unreciprocating Spock) as he wrestles with letting her go for good. The real hook is not necessarily that character arc, but instead the mystery of who Darby’s mystery illusionist really is…
To which, again, Strange New Worlds doesn’t really have a strong answer. Darby’s character has reality warping powers like original Trek‘s godlike being Trelane from “Squire of Gothos,” and certainly dresses the part (with the sideburns to match), but the climax of “Wedding Bell Blues” instead leans more to suggest that Darby is playing a Q, right down to a voice cameo by John de Lancie himself as a shapeless parent entity who shows up to stop the bartender playing with mortals so everyone can get on with actual reality.
© ParamountIt’s such an odd play to nostalgia, because Darby’s riff is neither explictly made out to be Trelane or a member of the Q Continuum in the text of the episode, but kind of a mish-mash of both, an aesthetic here, a particular handmotion. Which is, itself, a seperate play to nostalgia: there’s long been a fan theory that retroactively establishes Trelane, who’s real nature was never covered in “Gothos,” as a Q. It’s been touched on in Trek books, and even Strange New Worlds itself, via Lower Decks characters Boimler and Mariner joked about it in last season’s crossover episode as a nod to the theory.
This is the closest on-screen Trek has come to floating it as canon, but again, the episode leaves things vague and unanswered: a cloud voiced by John de Lancie comes in and tells Rhys Darby off, he turns into a cloud himself, and off they both go. What does Strange New World get by digging into this fleeting moment of fanon, but then only gesturing rather than saying anything explicit? What does whether or not this is Trelane, or a Q, or those are both the same thing, push out of our characters? Spock’s whole arc of reconciling how he feels about Christine moving on could’ve easily happened without the diversion of shenanigans.
It speaks to a strange relationship with ephemerality that Strange New Worlds has had as it’s progressed. The show’s desire to maintain that episodic vibe, switching up tone wildly from week to week with little carryover, is brushing up more and more with the times it wants to have things of consequence happen with its characters. Spock is perhaps the rare exception as we’ve seen him have to process first his doomed betrothal to T’Pring, and now losing Christine. But Chapel herself is put aside in the process of that latter arc, her romance with Korby happening entirely offscreen and then having to be defended on merit through the filter of this reality-warp-wedding-drama (interestingly, the arc of their entire would-be-romance kind of takes place almost entirely through these more comic episodes—getting together after Spock briefly became human in “Charades,” cutting their relationship off during the musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody,” and now this).
© ParamountThey’re not the only two characters impacted in “Wedding Bell Blues” either. The three-month timeskip lets La’an essentially acknoweledge that she can now be over her traumatic childhood encounter with the Gorn now they are dealt with and seemingly won’t show up again, meaning we do not get to really sit with her as she sits with concluding a defining element of her character. There’s also Ortegas, who has struggled to exist on the show so much that at this point all the show can do with her is have her say “I’m Erica Ortegas, and I fly the ship” instead of have an actual character. She literally did that again in “Hegemony, Part II” after being put through the wringer being horrifically injured during her capture and the escape—a truama “Wedding Bell Blues” brushes over for the most part, using its timeskip again to even literally handwave her losing part of her hand in the last episode (at least there you can thank Starfleet’s advanced medicine).
“Wedding Bell Blues” tries to give Ortegas something more by introducing her brother Beto (Mynor Luken), but he immediately instead becomes a potential romantic foil for Uhura, away from Ortegas’ orbit. But it then also concludes with the revelation that, understandably, Ortegas is indeed dealing with trauma over her capture and injuries at the hand of the Gorn: a character depth the episode had spent its entire runtime ignoring, and essentially La’an’s own prior character arc now just transferred over to her. Which they can do, because she’s not really had much of a character so far, but also because Strange New Worlds‘ relationship with what actually matters for its characters from week to week has become so weird.
“Hegemony, Part II” and “Wedding Bell Blues” are a likewise weird set of episodes to pair (perhaps unfairly, as the decision to release both at once is likely not a creative decision on behalf the show, but on Paramount), but they reflect something that’s been a flaw in the background of Strange New Worlds for a while now. The series wants to do big, deep things with both its characters and its connection to wider Star Trek continuity, but it also doesn’t want to commit with what it means to stick with some of those things in order to maintain its episodic variety. The show wants to jump from horror-disaster-action epics right into camp comedies and clean the slate each time, but cleaning that slate leaves its characters in an odd limbo.
Maybe this is just a particularly off combo of episodes to amplify this flaw, but it’s also perhaps that Strange New Worlds is now in its third season—and the reality that there are now 24 finite episodes of its runtime ahead of it—and well into a familiar, comfortable pattern with itself. These are both episode formats we’ve seen the show execute on multiple times before, and now we can see the pattern ourselves… and some of the cracks in its approach, beneath the slick sheen.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
English (US) ·