Hey look, it’s an episode of Strange New Worlds where they visit a strange new world! What a concept!
Sarcasm aside, it is nice to see an episode that goes back to basics and isn’t a gimmick episode or yet another tiresome Gorn episode (though the ongoing Gorn mishegoss does play a role in this story). In addition, it’s a story that continues laying the groundwork for what we already saw in the original series, specifically the relationship between Christine Chapel and Roger Korby.
The original series episode “What are Little Girls Made Of?” established that Chapel and Korby were affianced, and that Chapel signed onto the Enterprise under Captain James T. Kirk as a nurse in order to find Korby, who’d gone missing. But another original series episode, “The Naked Time,” established that Chapel was in love with Spock, something she admitted while under the influence of the Psi 2000 virus that made everyone act a little binky-bonkers (Tormolen committing suicide, Sulu running around shirtless with a sword, Spock having an emotional breakdown, etc.).
Here’s the thing, and this is why I love what SNW is doing with Chapel, Spock, and Korby: “The Naked Time” came first (and that’s true whether you’re a sensible intelligent person and go with production order like I did in my rewatch or a big honkin’ doofus and use airdate order like the DVDs and streaming services inexplicably do because they’re big honkin’ doofuses). Plus, as I said last week, we’re seeing the evolution of Spock from someone who was willing to smile at the realization that the flowers on Talos IV stopped humming when you touched them to the guy who completely repressed his emotions by the time he served under Kirk.
Notably, in this episode that has Spock, Chapel, and Korby all on the same landing party (an original series term that is used amusingly interchangeably with “away team,” the term coined by TNG and which is much more in the public consciousness at this point), we see that Spock is much more closed off, much more logical, much less emotional. In other words, closer to the Spock Leonard Nimoy played from 1966 to 1969, as opposed to the one he played in 1964. On top of that, we’re actually seeing how much Korby and Chapel love each other, as they make quite the adorable couple, which has the added bonus of making the events of “…Little Girls…” that much more poignant.
And yes, I’m spending a lot of time showing the clever connections that bridge “The Cage” and the original series because I’m really really sick and tired of the complaints by folks online about how SNW (and Discovery) simply must be in an alternate timeline from the shows that aired from 1966-2005. Which conveniently forgets all the folks who insisted from 2001-2005 that Enterprise simply must be in an alternate timeline from the shows that aired from 1966-2001. Not to mention the folks who insisted in 1979 that The Motion Picture had to be in an alternate timeline from the TV show. It’s tiresome.
The story itself is a two-pronged plot that we often see in Trek: some folks are on the planet dealing with a thing and the people back on the ship are dealing with another thing. Sometimes the two things are related, as they very much are here. Korby and Chapel have discovered some artifacts on one world that indicate the possibility of an ancient civilization on another world, which has refused Federation membership. They do allow Enterprise to orbit and send a small party down, led by Chapel and Korby, and with a native guide, N’Jal (Ish Morris).
The placement of the artifacts on a particular item on the world results in a huge building appearing out of nowhere, and our heroes immediately investigate it, with Chapel allowing the door to prick her finger and examine her blood and then allow her ingress, along with everyone else.
The original plan was for a small team that included Chapel, Korby, Uhura, and Gamble. In fact, the episode opens with Gamble’s personal log, as the young nurse is thrilled to be on away team duty for the first time, having been requesting it for ages. With the huge building now to explore, Spock and La’an join the party. Originally Spock was going to stay on the Enterprise to avoid awkwardness, but this is too big a find for the science officer not to be present. Also taking the trip is Beto Ortegas (Mynor Luken, back from “Wedding Bell Blues”), recording stuff on the Enterprise for his documentary on the Federation Centennial.
Of course, things go horribly wrong once they’re inside. For starters, comms don’t work inside the structure. Procedure dictates that they should go back outside and report in, but there is much to see here—and Korby isn’t Starfleet, and he doesn’t want to leave. Spock, to his credit, asks N’Jal what he wants, since this is his world, and they’re his guests. Their decision to stay and investigate further is N’Jal’s.
And then more things go wrong as a device that Gamble picks up explodes in his face and blows out his eyes. Chapel and La’an take him outside so he can beam back to Enterprise. They continue searching, but then N’Jal sees something that he views as evil—it’s a visceral reaction, one that causes him to run to the door to leave—
—at which point he’s vaporized, and then the door closes and they can’t open it back up. It turns out that Chapel has to be the one to use the doors, and when anyone else uses the door without her, they get zapped.
The planet plot proceeds nicely, as the landing party continues to explore the building, now also trying to find a way out. They move into another chamber only to find themselves separated in pairs: Uhura and Beto in one room, La’an and Chapel in another, Korby and Spock in a third. Except it turns out they’re all in the same room, just slightly displaced in time and space, which they only discover thanks to Beto’s cameras. (Beto also has a freakout at one point, as (a) he’s a civilian, and (b) unlike the other civilian on this mission, Korby, he’s not used to this nonsense. Uhura is able to calm him down, however, drawing on her own fears and difficulties as a newbie cadet back in season one.) Everyone contributes to the quest to get the hell out of the building, including Chapel having to trust a crazy-ass notion of Spock’s that is nonetheless rooted in logic. They also eventually determine that this is an interdimensional prison for creatures, one of whom was what attacked Gamble.
Except, as we eventually learn over the course of the shipboard plot, the creature didn’t just attack Gamble. It takes a while, but it soon becomes clear that there was a creature that invaded his mind and took over his body. It appears to have some telepathic abilities—it gets information about both M’Benga and a security guard that it could only get by reading their minds—and pretends to be Gamble until it grows strong enough.
In fact, M’Benga’s instruments indicate that Gamble is already dead, even though he’s talking to him. But Gamble is M’Benga’s protégé, and he refuses to accept that he isn’t still in there somewhere, even though by the episode’s end he’s killed two crewmembers, gotten into a huge fight with Batel (more on that in a bit), and is threatening Pelia, Scotty, and Sam. M’Benga’s distracting the creature is what allows Pelia to shoot and kill it.
I’m still not at all happy about the use of the Gorn on this show, but I do like that the cure Batel got in “Shuttle to Kenfori” is proving to be complicated. Her Gorn DNA responds instinctively to the presence of the creature that has taken over Gamble and they have a brutal fight in sickbay. There’s a sense here—in Batel’s response to the creature, in how deeply the creatures have been buried, not just in space, but in time, and in Pelia’s reaction to the creature—that this is a very ancient evil that has been hidden away for very good reason. And the final shot implies that it’s still in the Enterprise’s computer.
This episode also touches on another of Trek’s tropes, and manages to do it right and wrong at the same time. Chris Myers has been in each of the three prior episodes to this one, and he and the writers have given us a friendly charming character in Gamble. His death here carries more weight because we’ve gotten to know him and like him. In addition, N’Jal’s death is effective, as both the script and Morris’ understated performance make him feel like a real person, not just a plot device, and his death is mentioned several times over the course of the episode, not forgotten like side character deaths often are.
But then we have the poor science officer whom Gamble kills off-camera (we just see his corpse on the deck when security captures him) and the security guard that Gamble later kills when the creature gets strong enough to walk through the brig’s force field unharmed. While it’s nice to see that La’an’s security team is competent—they capture Gamble and the one guy only dies because of the unforeseen possibility of his not being affected by the force field—neither of those dead-meat characters get a name or a mention of their deaths after it happens. The penultimate scene has an eye-rolling comedy moment, as Pelia makes a stentorian pronouncement, not because she thinks what she’s saying is important, but because she wants to sound cool in Beto’s documentary. This results in a chuckle from Pike, which is so totally inappropriate for the debrief of a mission in which four people died.
At least the last scene gives us M’Benga making the condolence call to Gamble’s family himself, which was a welcome touch. I just wish the other two guys on the ship who died got even a fraction of the consideration.
I thought Gamble’s death was staged poorly. We saw that Pelia shot him, then immediately focused on the non-corporeal entity floating above his body. I didn’t even make that connection that Gamble had been killed until it was mentioned in a later scene. In a world with phasers set to stun more routinely, the script usually needs to justify making it a killing shot. I guess when you’re centuries old, and sense an even more ancient evil, you get a pass for going right to deadly force. But, as I said, it was not presented clearly. At least not to me.
Except Gamble was killed the moment the entity entered his body. He was an animated corpse on the ship, which is why M’Benga’s sensor readings showed him to be brain-dead. So he was inevitably going to be dead once the entity left him.
In story I agree with you. My point was simply that it wasn’t presented well dramatically. YMMV.
But we had already been told that Gamble was dead, so they didn’t need to explain it in the scene itself.
Indeed, since he was literally an animated corpse, a kill setting really shouldn’t have worked any better than a stun setting, unless its energy disrupted the possessing entity somehow.
Mixed feelings on this one. It was refreshing to finally get a strange new world, and the mystery was kind of interesting (though the science got really wonky at the end there), but they couldn’t resist tying it into their ongoing arcs, including the terrible Gorn stuff.
It could’ve been worse, though. For a moment I thought it was going to turn out that the entity Scotty trapped was actually Redjac, which was why it framed him for murder in “Wolf in the Fold,” but then I remember that Redjac was, well, Jack the Ripper, and thus had to be free long before 2261. Still, it’s hard not to wonder if these malicious entities capable of possessing humans are related to Redjac in some way, or perhaps to the Evil Pinwheel Thingy from “Day of the Dove,” or both.
It was good to give us the time to get to know a character before he was killed off. Although at the start of the episode, from the way M’Benga and Gamble interacted, I was half-convinced it was going to turn out that Gamble was M’Benga’s son and that he’d turn out to be the younger M’Benga that Booker Bradshaw played on TOS. (I mean, “Gamble” is almost an anagram of “M’Benga,” so it could’ve been an assumed name, or he could’ve taken his mother’s surname and changed it later.)
The alien ruin made pretty good use of the LED projection volume, with the changing CGI backgrounds being of major story importance, though it was hard not to notice that they were just reusing the same room over and over with different surroundings, to the point that it actually became diegetic that that was what was happening. On the other hand, while the exterior location was Just Another Quarry, at least for once it actually made sense that it looked like a quarry, since presumably the native excavated the ancient site, or discovered it while digging their quarry.
Also, Korby’s interest in consciousness transfer and immortality technology is a nice setup for what eventually happens to him.
I did think it was contrived that the script framed it as a choice between going forward then and there and giving up entirely once Gamble was injured. There would’ve been no harm in pulling back and reassessing before advancing further.
And as soon as they were all inside the tomb, I was saying to the screen, “Somebody prop the door open so you don’t get trapped inside.” Although as it turned out, that wouldn’t have helped anyway.
The quarry looked very similar to one near the drag strip on I-90 near Buffalo, which is geologically similar to the Toronto area. In this era, alien planets look like that instead of the Vasquez Rocks as in TOS.
I had an entire comment typed, which I didn’t save….Glad the comments are back! While I liked the initial plot, I was disturbed by the last scene. Pelia’s “quip.” Pike’s grin. Disrespectful to all the crew members killed in the episode. (I’m thinking back to TNG’s “Lower Decks.”)
Gamble’s death was meaningful in the sense that we got to know him previously. I am enjoying the actor’s portrayal of Korby. But, there is clearly something more to the character-as we’ve seen. Definitely a complicated man. Did not like the relationship drama. And I agree that M’Benga contacting the family at the end was a good way to finish the episode.
A new alien race at last! I certainly like the M’Kroon, if N’Jal is any indication. They’re defensive of their domain, but still willing to engage with the Federation on their terms.
I like the situation presented here, where Korby’s non-Starfleet status means he’s not necessarily bound by the same rules of the landing party regarding their survey, but he still defers to Spock’s authority, more than likely to appease Chapel.
I find it interesting that even though we do get a couple of grisly casualties planetside (Gamble and N’Jal), the majority of the carnage happens on the ship instead of the planet. The landing party overall had a pretty safe trip, other than Spock’s hand wound. At first, I thought the episode was going to redo Voyager’s “Twisted”, but the reveal that they were all in fact together despite the time/space displacement issue was a nice twist.
The episode also did its homework during the brig scene. It looked as if we were going to get yet another instance of an incompetent Enterprise security guard doing something tremendously stupid causing Vezda/Gamble to be set free, but the script smartly just had him punch a hole in the force field and kill the guard. While Gamble’s death didn’t have the same punch as Muniz’s death on DS9’s “The Ship”, it worked well enough for what it was. Like every other secondary player on SNW, the character was set up well.
Being a contact lens user, used to dealing with my eyeballs regularly, I wince every time I see any movie with characters getting their eyes damaged in any shape or form. It may be proving a dramatic point, but I’m not a fan of gory maiming on Trek. I wasn’t a fan of Preston being scarred beyond repair on Wrath of Khan, and I’m not a fan of Gamble losing both eyeballs like that. I don’t mind explosions or fire every now and then, but I like my Trek to be a little less ER.
One little nitpick: the Enterprise’s distance from the ground when it carved the opening to the dig site. It was very visible from the ground, meaning it was well inside the planet’s atmosphere. Theoretically, it should have been a bumpier ride for everyone inside the ship.
New aliens, exploration, but mostly old ideas reheated. evil entities in prison, evil entity taking over a crew member…on the other hand, the investigation to understand the purpose of the place and how to get out was relatively nice. but i would like to see some episode that deals with exploration and meeting new life forms in a less horror style…i even miss TNG’s diplomatic missions :)
Have you never been at a funeral or in a situation discussing recently-deceased friends? There is loads of humour and silliness in those conversations. That’s an important part of our coping mechanism (and usually it’s what our dearly departed friends would want.) I’ve been there a few times, and it’s a crucial part of it. So I fundamentally disagree with the idea that everything has to be ultra-serious and respectful in that sort of situation.