(courtesy IMP Awards)
Happy days! Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back for its penultimate season and it kicks off with an episode that ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- sends the Enterprise and its crew back 65 million years! Hurrah for fiery galactic anomalies and their ability to make merry temporal mischief. The doesn’t realise they have gone back in time of course; they know the stars are in weird and unexpected places and a strange ship claiming to be from a very blue and water-filled Mars is claiming them as salvage – the storm which blew them way back in time left them in a sorry, broken state and they look for all the world like a wreck – but it takes a while for the penny to drop, courtesy of the Martians who figure it out faster than Captain Pike (Anson Mount) or Spock (Ethan Peck). It’s only when the where-are -hey becomes a when-are-they that they realise the M-class planet that Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) have shuttled to get much-need irridium to jumpstart Enterprise, is in fact … TA-DAH!!! – Earth. There our intrepid Away Team come across dinosaurs, which are criminally unrepresented save for the ubiquitous T-Rex and flocks of pterosaurs, and while you might think there’d be some cheesy One Million B.C. vibes in an episode of a show that has shown a fun willingness to GO THERE, most of “Valles Marineris” concentrates on the agonising decisions that just be made when you can’t do anything to change the timeline.
That element of the narrative is pretty much expected – what time travel show wouldn’t concern itself with making sure it doesn’t screw up the future (or for that matter how to get back which the Enterprise’s crew accomplish conveniently easily) – but it’s how it accomplishes it that injects some much needed emotional weight in an episode that isn’t sure if it wants to be a time travel lark or a deeply introspective examination of fate and certainty. “Valles Marineris” lands somewhere awkwardly in-between and while it does have some really searingly incisive moments, it also suffers from its inability to commit to one or the other vibe. One thing it does have fun with ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- is the way in which the actions of the crew lead to the end of a now-long gone fifth planet, the creation of a mountain-sized asteroid which kills of the dinosaurs, the drying up of life on Mars and, wait for it, the evolution of humanity! Yep, one starship does all that and its probably the most imaginative clever part of an episode which aims really high but which, while entertaining, doesn’t quite knock it out of the park.
Episode 2: “The Griffin Incident”
The second episode in is supposed to be some sort of super creepy haunted house, or should that be, haunted ship story. On their way back from a retreat for future leaders of Starfleet, Spock, James Kirk (Paul Wesley) and La’an pick up a distress signal, and being the good Starfleet officers that they are, they follow it and discover the weirdly pristine wreck of the USS Griffin, which disappeared nine years earlier in unexplained circumstances. How on earth it still looks shipyard ready is beyond anyone’s ability to explain, as is the fact that the ship, once they beam inside, looks like everyone walked away just yesterday. Something seriously freaky is at work here and you settle in expecting some sort of seriously unnerving dissent into paranormal horror with a no doubt hugely emotional and insightful Star Trek core. But while season three’s “Shuttle to Kenfori” went to some seriously dark and horrifying places, and left you hiding under a blanket for much of its hugely engaging story, “The Griffin Incident” feels like an underwhelming retread of earlier Star Trek episode from any one of four or five shows. The mystery of what happened to the crew who all perished in some darkly diabolical ways soon gives way to the fact that ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- some creepy alien presence, though that is never admitted to, did a real number on the crew of the ship. Yep, the old murderous delusions card is played, and while that might have worked if any of the characters actually went to any seriously dark places, it all feels a little too lightweight, surfacey and lack in any sort of meaningful emotional impact.
Each of the crew onboard the Griffin do go to some truly terrible places, their long nights of the soul visiting past trauma and loss, issues with an innate sense of self or disquiet about present life choices, but for all the seriousness and nightmarish intensity the episode aims for, it all falls a bit flat. You rationally know that each of the characters are facing some truly horrific things and the episode doesn’t stint on how this affects them all, but for all the emotional weight thrown around, it all lands like a fluffy cloud and not hard stones of grim truth, which you presume is the effect they wanted. Like episode one, it’s absolutely watchable and you’ll likely find things you’ll enjoy in it, but by and large “The Griffin Incident” feels too much like a pastiche of past Star Trek narrative glories, which is a real pity because the team behind Strange New Worlds has shown time and again that they have the ability to not only think outside the box but to deliver on it too. Quite why this episode felt like an echo from an earlier Star Trek show when it could easily have been so much more, but you can only hope that as the season progresses, the creative team stopped trying to be a reflection of past franchise narrative high points, and went for broke just being their own weirdly original selves which has paid huge dividends in the past and made this show so wildly, originally watchable.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+