(courtesy IMP awards)
One of the things, of many, which I have loved about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) from the very start is its embrace of genre-hopping, a willingness to be darkly serious one week and goofily quirky the next.
The Original Series (TOS) and Next Generation (NG), mission-of-the-week episodic undertakings on which SNW has modelled itself, had some of the same sensibility but nowhere is it better on show and better utilised than on SNW in which Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew find themselves finding rapacious predatory monsters in the Gorn in one episode only to have a Q pop up in the next story and make merry with reality to see what might happen in the affairs of the human heart.
It may sound narratively chaotic and tonally wacky but it works, and works beautifully, and nowhere is this better evidence, at least so far anyway, than in the following two episodes which open SNW’s third season.
“Hegemony, Part II”
When we left the intrepid crew of the Starship Enterprise, the landing party composed of security chief La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) on her first away mission no less, Dr Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte) were down on a colony planet trying to fend off the Gorn who, fun fact, love to use other living people, Alien-like, to gestate their young. You may recall that La’an is a survivor of such an attack when she was a girl and has spent her life dreading the return the return of a race which is active, as it turns out, in sleep and active cycles with long periods of dormancy between the two.
In this episode, they are well and truly active and their young are chomping their way through a ton of colonists while a good many others, some two hundred in fact, are trying to save themselves from a fate that, La’an will assure you, is actually worse than death thanks to the time it takes for the gestation to occur. Trying to stop their bloodthirsty childrearing practices is Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) who is as inventive and clever as always, devising, amid all the chaos, a way to cloak himself so the Gorn see him as one of them.
But things aren’t looking good at the end of “Hegemony Part 1” with the Gorn beaming up the away team and the colonists – Scott, and his captain (and Pike’s love), Marie Batel (Marie Scrofano) end up on the Enterprise but alas Batel has a baby Gorn starting to gestate inside her – and the Enterprise under attack from a Gorn armada that is intent on reducing the ship to ashes.
That’s where we pick things up in season three, with Pike and his team including Number One / Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romjin), Spock (Ethan Peck) and Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), doing their best to avoid annihilation while trying to save the away team and the colonists. This is all happening while Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) is trying to save the life of Batel in some tension-filled scenes in the sickbay.
As second parters go, and Star Trek alas does tend to rush them and not do them full service, “Hegemony Part II” actually works, delivering thrills and spills, heightened emotion and searing narrative tension so palpable you are on the edge of your seat the entire time.
It is vintage Star Trek – full bore action married with some searing, emotionally intense character moments, especially for La’an and ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- a happy ending that sees colonists live, the ship and crew survive and La’an get freed from years of waiting for the other Gorn shoe to drop.
“Wedding Bell Blues”
Remember that observation about SNW loving to mix its genres like nobody’s business?
Proof positive is the seccond episode of the third season which, in the service of a fairly serious exploration of the affairs of the heart, primarily Spock’s and Nurse Chapel’s, has a great deal of fun twisting and turning realities so that what was once the case is no longer.
Well, to be fair, reality itself hasn’t changed so much as everyone’s perception of it with a mysterious figure, played with impish delight by Rhys Darby (Our Flag Means Death), taking the fact that Nurse Christine Chapel has come back during her three-month fellowship working with Dr Roger Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) on archaeological medicine, and rather than falling to Spock’s arms as he’s expecting proof fellow, is actually in another relationship.
With Dr Corby.
Which only emerges when Christine and Dr Corby beam in to the Enterprise to help celebrate the centenary of Federation Day.
Yep, totally awkward.
It’s a crushing blow to Spock and might have led to some very serious chats between Nurse Chapel and himself save for the fact that the aforementioned figure, now confirmed to be the son of Q (John de Lancie) – this isn’t clear in the episode, and while it doesn’t harm the storyline one jot, making that crystal clear might have underscored that Dr Corby was not the only nod in the episode to TOS lore – decides to mess with the natural order of things and send Spock and Nurse Chapel off down the aisle.
The only person who remembers things as they were? Dr Corby who has to convince Spock and the others that they are being merrily played with by a higher galactic being.
As Q episodes go, this wasn’t quite as chaotic as you’d expect, though Darby plays son of Q as a little more openly malevolent than his dad – likely due to the fact that he’s only 8000+ years old and thus a Q kid, in effect – but it was fun, using some lighthearted remaking of reality to sort out where Spock and Chapel sit with each other.
Now if you’re a Q fan, then this likely delighted you, but even if you’re not, and this reviewer hates the guy, “Wedding Bell Blues” still does a nice job of being lighthearted and serious all at once, and functioning as a story-of-the-week while dealing with the small amount of arc building SNW engages in.
Star Trek: Strange New World streams on Paramount+