Anytime you talk about fate, it feels incredibly, oppressively, inescapably final.
Some may see a comfort in the surely of preordained circumstance, but for many of us, what we will be, if it not left up to the exciting possibilities of self-determination, feels like a noose around the neck, cuffs around the wrists and a bond so tight as to be suffocating.
In short, we hate to feel like we don’t have options.
Just how much we hate not having options, or sometimes even having them and not knowing what to do with them – Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) I’m looking at you! – has been the driving blood surging through the narrative marrow of Strange New Worlds from the beginning, but it assumes a pivotal role in the final five episodes of the first stellar season of the latest Trek show on the galactic block.
No more so than in the final episode of the first season, “A Quality of Mercy” in which Christopher Pike, a captain who breaks the mold somewhat with a jocular, relaxed, retro-quoting air that feels refreshingly casual and convivial, once again has to grapple with whether he’s fated to die in quite the way that the Klingon monks on Boreth have foretold.
His, without going into major spoilery details, is not a death you’d wish on anyone, and while it comes with implicit great honour and heroic sacrifice, Pike, for reasons you can readily understand, is none too keen to let go off this mortal coil just yet.
In an episode that includes a reckoning for Spock and the entire Federation as well as for our current favourite captain who – SPOILER ALERT!! – also gets to spend some quality screen time with one James T. Kirk, (Paul Wesley), fate is squarely front and centre on an expansive and intimately personal level.
The overriding question is whether fate is an immutable quantity, something that cannot be shifted in any way, shape or form, or whether you can in fact avert it or perhaps at least shift it enough that the future that is foretold does not come to pass.
The end of “A Quality of Mercy”, which comes with quite the cliffhanger for Una Chin-Riley / Number One (Rebecca Romijn), would suggest fate is set and there is nothing that can be done about it, and one thing, among many, that makes coming seasons of Strange New Worlds watching is how they tackle this thorny issue.
Frankly, it could be the making or the breaking of the show.
It would be tempting and no doubt this has crossed the writers’ minds to wave some sort of magic timey-wimey wand and make the grisly end that awaits Pike go away but then its absence, welcome as it would be because who wants to say goodbye to someone as authoritatively in charge and yet as likeable as Pike, would gut the spirit of a show that seems content, much of the time at least, to dwell in the uncomfortable shadowy grey areas of life.
In truth, Star Trek has always been happy to call this place home, offering some searing stories across all its many incarnations, most obviously in Deep Space Nine which was one confrontingly real morality tale writ large, but it’s in modern Trek shows like Discovery and Strange New Worlds that we are forced again and again to deal with the fact that life is really as simple and sunny as all will it to be.
In fact, character after character in these five tautly-written, character-rich and groundingly honest episodes finds themselves trapped in the grey areas, left having to ask themselves if they have any choice left in how their life plays out, and if they do, whether that will really gain them anything.
Take Uhura for instance.
Even though we know she opts to stay with Starfleet despite her lack of surety about whether it is the life for her, watching how Strange New Worlds dealt with her existential struggle to work out what the next step is has been damn near fascinating.
It’s most arrestingly and compellingly explored in the ninth episode, “All Those Wander”, which has more than a few overtones of Alien/s, where Uhura, at the end of her rotation on the Enterprise and with a glowing list of recommendations behind her form just about everyone on the ship, has to decide whether she stays with her new shipboard family, which Chief Engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) assures her will bring the reluctant, grief-stricken commitment-phobe more joy than sadness, or leaves for, well, what exactly?
That is the six billion dollar question, and one that injects some wholly resonant humanity into an episode where action, gripping though it is, definitely plays second fiddle to fate for a number of key characters, not least Uhura.
An earlier episode, “The Elysian Kingdom” also does a moving job of examining the fate of another key character, or rather, of someone very near and dear to them.
Dr. Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has been doing his best, you will recall, to find a cure for his terminally ailing daughter and while he comes agonisingly close in “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach”, surely a clarion call for Pike and the rest of the crew placed in fate’s unforgiving spotlight, if ever there was one, it is in the eighth episode, when Enterprise ends up looking like futuristic spaceship and more medieval fairytale – quite why should be left to the watching a story which appears whimsically playful and in part is (Mount in particular has a ball playing against type) but which packs a powerful emotional punch towards the end – that the good doctor has an upfront and deeply personal look at the unerring hand of fate.
If you are not crying at the end of this then one might assume you are Gorn younglings battling for survival, but suffice to say, “The Elysian Kingdom” works the hardest of any episode, and that’s saying a lot of a field of five movingly written episodes which deep dive into humanity in ways that can help but affect you, to look at fate and wonder if the seemingly inevitable might be averted.
The answer is quite possibly, but the costs are great, something that Pike also has to confront in his episode 10 journey which makes it clear the cost is indeed great, even if the outcome differs from that of M’benga’s.
In the end, though Mount, Gooding and Horak, everyone really in a cast where this is not a weak link, do their best in fine performances to tip fate’s hand one way or another, Strange New Worlds is adamant, in a nuanced, fun and often moving way, that we do not shift our destinies easily or at all which will come to play a key role once again, you would assume in a second season which already all set to throw nature against nurture against fate and see who emerges the winner.
Truth be told, however, it plays out, it will be thrillingly compelling to watch in a show that has used its classic Star Trek episodic format to brilliantly creative and highly imaginative effect, and in so doing, has shone, as this franchise is winningly wont to do, a light on humanity, fate and belonging and how whatever the future has in store for us, it is the living now that counts the most.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is currently streaming on Paramount Plus.