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STRANGE NEW WORLDS S3 E9-10: “Terrarium” and “New Life and New Civilizations”
(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s been a wildly inconsistent season for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, something which has been directly commented upon by co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers who are promising far more consistent goodness in season four due in 2026.
And yet for all that, it’s also been hugely entertaining; sure, the big tonal and narrative shifts might not always have worked as they could have, and some episodes were all thrilling premise and not enthralling execution, but still, you have to admire any creative team who tries to go all out for something way out of the box because at least they are trying new things and hoping their cool ideas will stick.
That’s far more exciting that creators who simply sit back, do what worked best in earlier seasons and simply let the tropes-and-cliches train wildly along the track until the end of the episode run.
Thankfully Goldsman and Myers aren’t those people and so, both “Terrarium” and “New Life and New Civilizations”, while pivoting on some tried and true Star Trek narrative styles, still felt fun to watch and emotionally impactful where needed.
In episode nine, Lieutenant Ortega (Melissa Navia), who has been struggling with major Gorn-sourced PTSD all season, finally has the mother of all therapy sessions on an arid moon that revolves around a planet that, wait for it, sits at the other end of a wormhole that appears out of nowhere.
Forget the wormhole of Deep Space Nine which is home to some benevolent, if very weird aliens, this is a wormhole that goes nowhere good, and while the crew of the Enterprise are trying to rescue Ortegas before the clock runs out, helped by Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) who bends the rules to facilitate said saving of a crewmate with Pike’s (Anson Mount) quiet assent, Ortegas is learning that her trauma doesn’t mean all Gorn are evil.
She actually becomes friends with the one stranded on the same moon she crashes onto and no one is more surprised than her; it’s not a new story for Star Trek which loves the whole sort-your-sh*t-out-while-crashlanded storyline but it works well and is actually quite affecting by the end.
Similarly, final episode, “New Life and New Civilizations” doesn’t bust the box into amazing, never seen before pieces but it does allow us to dive deeper into the great agony Pike faces as he races down to his all-but-certain fate.
You’d think the celestial powers-that-be would cut the guy a break given how much heartbreak awaits him but no, the universe is cruel that way, sacrificing the love of his life, Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano) as part of a rather truncated and successful bid to stop the great evil of the Vezda which we first scarily came across in episode two, “Wedding Bell Blues”.
That story, while gripping, takes a back seat to Pike living an entire lifetime with his love in the blink of an eye, again a well-trod path for Star Trek but which works reasonably well in an episode which goes emotionally in a way that makes you feel for a character who gives so much and yet is doomed to lose it all.
So, yes, season three may have been hit-and-miss but it was still fun to watch, an enjoyable diversion from life that also offered some truly funny and moving moments, and which offered just the right amount of escapist storytelling with characters you love to spend time with even when they’re not at their absolute best.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+
FOUNDATION S3 E8-10: “Skin in the Game”, “The Paths That Choose Us” and “The Darkness”
One of the most fascinating things about watching Foundation is that it grapples with the idea that we have control over our respective destinies.
It’s an intriguing idea because while we often, but not always, have agency over what we do, we don’t often have any degree of control about those freewill-driven decisions take us or how they will ultimately manifest themselves.
Foundation, based on the sprawling series of books by the late, great Isaac Asimov, has from its very start posed the huge question about whether we can affect any form of real control over where we, or humanity as a whole goes with everyone from Dawn, Day and Dusk of Empire (Cassian Bilton, Lee Pace, Terence Mann respectively) to Hariton “Hari” Seldon (Jared Harris), who created the foundation which gives the series its title to authoritarian renegade upstart “The Mule” (Pilou Asbæk) struggling to answer the question with any real authority.
They don’t see the struggle of course, too consumed with the arrogant rightness and mightiness of their positions to see they are nothing but paper tigers full of puff and swagger, but as these three thrillingly action-packed episodes made abundantly and graphically clear, it is because of this blindness that all three are brought ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- to their knees in ways that leave no remove for any form of self delusion.
Already teetering on the edge, Empire, who is the very embodiment, titular and otherwise, of the imperial body politic over which he nominally rules, self combusts in spectacular fashion as season three ends, with Dusk, fearful of death, going rogue and murdering ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- Day, who returns on a quixotic quest to free Lady Demerzel (Laura Birn) from her servitude to the Cleon dynasty with a robotic artefact, Demerzel herself and any sense of the Cleons as a cohesive ruling force.
He also ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- destroys three constituent groups in the empire in bloodthirsty “death star” like fashion, slaughtering billions and vanquishing even the faintest whiff of Empire as any sort of moralistic force (a dubious claim at the best of times, anyway) which deserves to keep the thousands of planets under its rule.
Already exposed as every bit as corrupt as the empire it once challenged as the sole force capable of preserving humanity once the millennia-old imperial dynasty crashed and burned, foundation has already lost a great deal at the hands of “The Mule” who has taken New Terminus, converted many of the people to brainwashed acolytes (“I have never known such love”) and loses even more as the second foundation’s Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- confronts “The Mule” (who’s not who they appear to be!) with events not going as the powerful psychic envisages.
The season ends thus in impressively twisty fashion with Gaal on the run, Empire in tatters, and “The Mule” hobbled if not destroyed, proving that while you can have all the agency in the world, that that does not guarantee you will be the final and complete arbiter of your destiny.
Everything ends with a massively huge reveal; if you’ve read the books, you know it all leads back to Earth but this reviewer hasn’t read the series and so found the revelation stunning in the robotic extreme and excited for what the just-confirmed fourth season holds in store.
Foundation streams on AppleTV+
INVASION S3 E3-6: ‘Infinitas”, “The Mission”, “Point of No Return” + “Marilyn”
What’s been fascinating about Invasion since it started four years ago, and is all the more empathetically explored in these four episodes, is how astonishingly differently people react to adverse events like, say, an alien invasion.
The government and military go full on authoritarian which is pretty par for the course but it’s the individuals in Invasion who really prove interesting.
The first three episodes of this batch concentrate for the most part on the characters who have been there from the beginning – Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna), Trevante (Shamier Anderson), Jamila (India Brown) and Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani) – only of whom could be said to have had any sort of happy ending (though of course it can only be temporary because while everyone else assumes the downing of the mothership was the end of the invasion, Mitusiki, Trevante and Jamila know better).
Aneesha is happily married to Clark (Enver Gjokaj) and as episode three opens they are living in suburban bliss, their blended family getting along well and the aliens a millions miles away from care.
Then Trevante and Jamila show up, wheels are set in motion and with Aneesha back in the alien-hunting saddle thanks to son Luke (Azhy Robertson) getting those pesky visions again which suggest, as does an online group called Infinitas which Clark is following unbeknownst to Aneesha, and what they discover suggests that the aliens are far from done with our pleasant blue planet yet.
In fact, just as the gang all finally come together – well Mitsuki, Trevante and Jamila anyway though Aneesha is all that far behind along with Clark for the first time ever; yep, it feels like they’ve always been together but that’s simply not the case until now – the aliens ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- do their thing and huge tentacles come out of all the portal sites and the Hunter Killers, previously wi-fi’d and thus able to be cutoff from the hive brain, are now hardwired into the alien mothership and that much harder to stop.
The only solution it seems is to go into the Dead Zone around the mothership and cut the aliens off at the source; it’s a suicide mission but Travente, Mitsuki etc aren’t given much choice in the matter and it looks like this is where the rubber is well and truly going to hit the road for them.
But this is where Invasion does something quite clever, and even more importantly pulls it off – it introduces a whole other perspective into the show, that of cult leader Verna aka Marilyn (Erika Alexander) who starts off as an EA extraordinaire and who ends up, after seeing what she believes are benevolent aliens in a migraine aura tornado swirl up in the sky, as an extraterrestrial messianic terrorist who kill for her loopy beliefs.
The interesting thing here is that she knows things she couldn’t otherwise know after communing with the aliens and it makes you wonder, her extremist interpretation of these visitations aside, whether there may be a more benevolent aline faction lurking somewhere in the mix.
Likely not, and Verna/Marilyn really is just a hard, cold killer alien religious nut job, but suffice to say she is the first split we see in humanity’s ranks, someone who believe the aliens mean good, not ill – not sure how she explains the toxic-to-humans terraforming or the endless slaughter of innocents but true believers exist ina cognitively dissonant bubble and Verna/Marilyn is no different – and it means that suddenly an already interesting show, which takes the time to let its humanity shine through some fairly epic events, is getting even more so.
We have four episodes left to see where this all leads this morning but given Verna/Marilyn’s propensity for all kinds of violence and hardcore believing, it can’t be anywhere good.
Invasion streams on AppleTV+