I want to start my review of the second-season premiere of Strange New Worlds with the last bit of it: at the very end of the episode before the credits, we get a black screen with the words:
For Nichelle
who was first through the door
and showed us the stars
Hailing frequencies forever open…
I’ll give you all a second to get the dust out of your eyes…
Fitting that the first episode of SNW produced since Nichelle Nichols’ death has a story where the episode’s action is catalyzed by the talents of Ensign Uhura at communications. In the months since the conclusion of season one, Uhura has graduated, been made an ensign and assigned to Enterprise as a communications officer. And yet, in that same amount of time, Number One’s court-martial hasn’t happened yet, and they haven’t replaced La’an or Hemmer.
With regards to the former, let us look at my biggest disappointment with this episode, which is what doesn’t happen, to wit, a resolution of the cliffhanger. “A Quality of Mercy” ended with Number One’s arrest, and those of us who were hoping that it’d be resolved, tough noogies.
In fact, both Pike and Number One are limited to a couple scenes in the teaser, ending with Pike buggering off to find a particular lawyer who hasn’t been returning Pike’s or Number One’s phone calls. That is the full extent of what we see of Captain Daddy and Auntie Una this week.
Which, I gotta say, really pissed me off for a bit, as I really want Number One back on the bridge and maybe actually getting to do something this season. But that’s not what this episode is about and I’m honestly—now that I’ve calmed down—okay with it, because the secondary characters get the spotlight this week, and it’s really good and it picks up on some stuff from Discovery.
It was established in Discovery’s “Brother” that Enterprise was kept far from the front lines during the Klingon war that took up that show’s first season. (What they were doing instead was nicely chronicled by my friend and colleague John Jackson Miller in the novel The Enterprise War.) But some of the crew did serve in the war, among them M’Benga and Ortegas.
Now that war is in danger of being started back up. There’s a planet on the border, Cajitar IV, which has massive veins of dilithium. The mining syndicate on Cajitar sold to both sides during the war. As part of the terms of the treaty that ended the war, the Federation and Klingons alternate getting the planet each month, and the Klingons’ thirty days just started.
Here’s the problem: La’an is on that planet. She took leave after “All Those Who Wander” to help Oriana, the only survivor of the Gorn massacre, find her parents. She found them on Cajitar. Unfortunately, several people on the world—including Oriana’s two moms—are suffering ion radiation poisoning. Dilithium won’t cause that, but photon torpedoes can. Plus a new mining syndicate is buying up Federation tech.
La’an is trying to learn more by posing as a seller, but she needs help. Since the planet’s under Klingon control, the best she can do for a distress call is a hidden message to Enterprise that Uhura is able to decode. Spock is left in charge with Pike off searching for lawyers and Number One in jail. (Spock is apprehensive about this, but Enterprise is docked at Starbase 1 for inspection, repairs, and upgrades, so Pike is fairly certain things should be smooth. Spock points out that those are what humans call “famous last words,” and Spock, naturally, is completely right.)
April refuses Spock’s request to answer the distress call. La’an isn’t currently even in Starfleet, they’re not completely sure it’s a real message from her, and it’s on a world currently controlled by Klingons, who will fire on any Starfleet ship that shows up and probably start the war back up. They’ll have to wait until the Federation gets the world back in a month.
Spock trusts La’an’s word, and so logically the only thing he can do is steal the Enterprise. This is, by the way, 100% in character, and anyone who argues otherwise should be forced to watch “The Menagerie,” “Operation—Annihilate!” The Motion Picture, and The Wrath of Khan to be reminded of all the times Spock has done some crazy-ass shit because logic led him down that path.
The trick is to get the inspection team off the ship. Mitchell fakes a coolant leak that will lead to a warp-core breach. While most of the inspection team follows the subsequent order to evacuate, the head of the team—Commander Pelia, played by the great Carol Kane—sees through the deception in about a second-and-a-half. However, she doesn’t report to Starfleet and even offers to run the engine room for the trip for three reasons: (1) she hasn’t been in space in years and she misses it, (2) Vulcans, in her experience, don’t do anything without a good reason, and (3) she’s friends with Spock’s Mom.
I have to say that, even if there was nothing worthwhile in the rest of the episode, it was worth it to give us Pelia. She’s a Lanthanite, a species of immortals who look human, and who lived among humans undetected on Earth until the twenty-second century. Kane plays her like a slightly calmer version of Simka from Taxi. She’s an absolute joy, giving the character a relaxed canniness that comes from having seen it all—and that cliché is not an exaggeration. Plus, she’s friends with Amanda and I’m now counting the nanoseconds until Mia Kirshner comes back to play Spock’s Mom so we can see her and Pelia together…
It soon becomes clear that the new syndicate, which is called the Broken Circle, wants to start the war back up, following the 34th Ferengi Rule of Acquisition that war is good for business (and not so much the 35th Rule, which is that peace is good for business). To that end, they’re building a fake Starfleet ship and going to use it to fire on a Klingon battle cruiser.
Complicating matters is that M’Benga and Chapel have been kidnapped. Having gone to a med tent to treat Oriana’s parents and the other folks suffering from ion radiation poisoning, the Broken Circle takes them to their fake ship to treat their own ion radiation sufferers. This is where we find out just how traumatic being a doctor in a war was for M’Benga, as he’s sliding down a PTSD razorblade from the moment the Klingons kidnap him. Babs Olasunmokun magnificently sells M’Benga’s trauma, particularly in his eyes, when they first get onto the ship.
Unfortunately, shortly after that is when the episode goes a bit off the rails. M’Benga and Chapel inject themselves with green goo that gives them Super Space Adrenaline, or something, enabling them to beat up Klingons. This leads to several very long, very tiresome fight scenes, which are pretty much there to give us some Action! Scenes! yet which wind up being the most boring part of the hour.
It’s one of two missteps, the other being La’an’s first scene, which is yet another drinking competition that’s a riff on Marion Ravenwood’s drinking competition scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which we’ve seen a billion times before. It follows the exact same beats as that of the forty-two-year-old movie and does nothing to add to it, or to the episode, as you could excise the scene and nothing changes.
It does show that the Klingon makeup is back to something closer to that seen in the movies and the 1987-2005 spinoffs rather than the redesign done for the Bad Robot movies and the first two seasons of Discovery. (I’m sure Discovery’s legion of haters will use this as an excuse to show that SNW has nothing to do with the other show, never mind that the entire episode is built around the events of Discovery’s first season.) Personally, I don’t give a good goddamn—while the makeup is indeed similar, it’s not exactly the same. For that matter, the movie makeup from the first six original series movies is not the same as what we saw on TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and the TNG movies. I’m more wondering where the smooth-headed Klingons from the original series (which were established as a subset of the species in Enterprise’s “Affliction”/“Divergence”) are…
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The standout in this episode is Ethan Peck. He continues the stellar work he did in Discovery season two and SNW season one, giving us a younger, less sure of himself Spock. And yet, you see so many of Leonard Nimoy’s mannerisms and speaking patterns here. (His talk with April at the end of the episode is particularly Nimoyish.) It’s a tough trick to give us a new look at a well-established character, but Peck and the writers are doing a great job of it so far.
It helps that they’re giving him a journey to go on. His deliberate breaking down of his emotional control in “All Those Who Wander” is something he still hasn’t recovered from, but we know that, several years’ hence, he’ll have much better control. To that end, M’Benga diagnoses him with stress and suggests music having charms to soothe the savage breast, and hands him a ka’athyra—a Vulcan lute, which we know Spock plays regularly years hence in the original series. And M’Benga is the one who gave it to him! Which is fabulous!
Meantime, Spock’s still struggling his way through command in ways both dramatic (waiting until the last possible second to fire on the fake ship in order to give M’Benga and Chapel time to escape it) and humorous (part of how he convinces the Klingons to not start a war and believe his claims about the fake ship is to get drunk with them).
And I particularly like the dynamic that’s developing between Spock and Chapel. The best prequels are ones that add texture to the thing that it’s a prequel to. As I’ve said before, giving Chapel and Spock this history adds tremendous texture to the dynamic of the two of them on the original series, particularly “The Naked Time,” “Amok Time,” “Plato’s Stepchildren,” and “Return to Tomorrow,” among others. It makes it much more than Chapel having a dewy-eyed I-can-never-have-him crush on Spock. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this proceeds.
In the end, Spock is forgiven, because Star Trek characters are always forgiven when they disobey orders. I especially love April’s response to Spock’s declaration that he will accept any punishment the admiral will mete out for his keeping the Federation out of a war. April says that the Klingon hangover he’s suffering through is punishment enough…
With luck, we’ll have Mom and Dad back next week, and Number One will have her day in court.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the contributors to the Weird Western anthology The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Edited by Jonathan Maberry and to be published by Outland Entertainment, the anthology includes a story by Keith called “The Legend of Long-Ears,” which features Bass Reeves and Calamity Jane. There are also stories by Trek scribes Greg Cox, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, and Aaron Rosenberg, as well as New York Times best-sellers Josh Malerman and Scott Sigler, and ten more great authors. Please consider supporting it!
