A Commander of Mars — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Valles Marineris” - Reactor

Strange New Worlds is back, both literally and figuratively.

The literally part is obvious: the fourth season debuted today with “Valles Marineris.” The figuratively part is much more encouraging: after a hit-and-miss third season, the fourth season debuts with a truly superb episode.

One of the landmines that SNW has had to deal with is the fact that it’s a prequel to a beloved show, and all too often the writers have stepped on those landmines to poor effect, focusing way too much on goofing around with fan theories and hey-this’ll-be-cool moments and sub-referencing over and over again and not enough on telling stories about a starship exploring space.

“Valles Marineris” is one hundred percent about a starship exploring space, and it’s fantastic. The Enterprise is assigned to examine a rare phenomenon, an interstellar squall. It has appeared around a star with no explanation, and the Enterprise is to study it for as long as it lasts (they’re usually, according to Spock, gone quickly). Pelia is the only person on board who has seen one before, and she says she may have been in a phone box when it happened. (Okay, I know I said it was one hundred percent about a starship exploring space, but I should’ve said ninety-nine percent, because that was totally goofing around with fan theories, as this is the latest unsubtle hint that Pelia has traveled with the title character from Doctor Who.)

Of course, things go horribly wrong, because if things didn’t go horribly wrong, we wouldn’t be interested in watching a TV episode devoted to it. They detect a distress call from a buoy, and they go in to investigate. The field chooses then to expand, of course, keeping them from making it out—and then when they do come out, the ship is rendered almost completely powerless. Even if they can fix the warp engines, they don’t have any uridium to ignite the engines. Worse, they have no idea where they are. There are three M-class planets in the system they’re in, at least, and one of them has uridium, so Number One, Ortegas, and La’an take a shuttlecraft to that planet to collect the uridium.

Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, repairs are interrupted by a ship snagging them in a very sophisticated tractor beam and announcing that they’re salvage. Pike tries to reason with Battle Commander Cassell (superlatively played by Saffron Burrows), and he eventually convinces her to come on board to talk. 

One of the more tired complaints about the current crop of Trek shows is that the producers of same don’t understand Star Trek. One of the things I’ve tried to make clear in my reviews of those shows is that that particular complaint is utter nonsense. With this episode of SNW, we have another piece of evidence to support that they understand Trek just fine, thanks, as we see some magnificent exchanges between Anson Mount’s Pike and Burrows’ Cassell. Throughout those exchanges, Pike is constantly putting forth the Trek ethos of communication over conflict, of understanding over violence. Cassell’s people—who look very Vulcanoid—are in conflict with the Dol’Drm, an insectoid species from a neighboring planet. While Cassell’s people have a lot of impressive technology—for example, they can phase through solid matter—they don’t have faster-than-light travel and they don’t have universal translators. Pike offers to help them communicate properly with the Dol’Drm, something they’ve never been able to do. It might lead to peace.

But there’s a wrinkle to all this: Spock determines the Enterprise’s location in space—and, unfortunately, in time. They’re in the Sol system, 65 million years in the past. The planet Cassell came from is Mars and the planet on which the landing party is fetching uridium is Earth.

Which means that the very large creature that the landing party is trying to get past is a dinosaur.

So now we get some fun cutting back and forth between Pike trying to convince Cassell not to salvage his ship on the Enterprise and Number One, La’an, and Ortegas trying to be careful not to step on any butterflies. (They don’t actually mention Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” but you can tell that all three of them have read it.)

The stuff on prehistoric Earth is tremendous fun, as they try to figure out ways of dealing with the dinosaurs that don’t involve killing them. (Solutions they wind up using including Number One firing a phaser on stun to the soft palate inside a Tyrannosaur’s mouth and La’an punching a raptor in the head, which impresses everyone with its effectiveness, especially La’an herself…)

Unfortunately, Pike’s attempt at helping mediate a peace between the Martians and the Dol’Drm fails when Cassell learns that the Enterprise is from the far future, something Pike goes out of his way not to mention. And in that future, Mars is a dead world that Pike’s own people only made habitable by terraforming. The giant crater known to us as Valles Marineris was created by a Dol’Drm weapon that killed millions, and left a permanent scar on Mars. Cassell wasn’t entirely sold on communication, and finding out that Pike lied to her burns out any interest she had in doing so.

Instead, they steal the Enterprise’s antimatter containment unit, intending to use it to destroy the Dol’Drm homeworld.

The landing party returns with uridium—which came from a crashed Dol’Drm ship, as it happens—and is able to power up the Enterprise. 

(Brief digression: the Enterprise is still able to power up because they have a backup antimatter containment unit, and I wanted to dance a damn jig when that happened, because something that has driven me crazy about so many science fiction shows, the various Treks among them, is ships that are on allegedly long-term missions far from home, yet don’t have spare parts for important things. So it was extremely gratifying to see an actual spare part, and nobody even makes a fuss.)

With sensors back at full bore, Spock is able to determine that the Dol’Drm come from the fifth planet—not Jupiter, rather another planet about the same size as Mars that is between Mars and Jupiter.

The Enterprise moves to try to intercept Cassell’s ship to stop her from using the antimatter to blow up the Dol’Drm homeworld. 

And then at the last minute, Pike orders everyone to stand down. The presence of a fifth planet changes everything, and Pike realizes it just barely in time.

It’s an awful, horrible decision. It’s one that visibly affects everyone on board. But it’s also the only decision possible. Because he knows that 65 million years in the future, there is an asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.

Which means that everyone has to watch as an entire world—an entire civilization—is destroyed before their eyes. As is a ship full of Martians, as Cassell’s was a suicide mission, her own ship caught in the wake of the explosion. 

However, the explosion also provides the energy the Enterprise needs to get back to the twenty-third century, and they do so, creating the very squall they were sent to investigate. (Also the distress buoy they picked up was their own, sent after they lost power.) Spock confirms that the Dol’Drm homeworld is now the asteroid belt, but also that one piece of debris from the explosion struck Earth and created the extinction-level explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs. In addition, Mars’ orbit was changed, which resulted in destroying the planet’s atmosphere.

The episode doesn’t softpedal the awfulness of the decision Pike has to make here. Oftentimes, doing nothing can be the worst thing to do—but in this case, it’s necessary. Pike of all people knows the inevitability of the future. And yet, these are also all people who, from their perspective, have been dead for 65 million years, and would be regardless of Pike’s actions.

Truly, this episode has everything. There’s the cool CGI adventure with Number One and the gang fighting dinosaurs. There’s Pike’s very Trekkish pleading for Cassell to try to talk to her enemies. There’s Cassell’s obvious desire to try peace swimming upstream against the long, dreadful war that she’s spent a lifetime fighting—and ultimately losing that fight thanks to Pike’s lie-by-omission. (I can’t say enough about the dignity and gravitas that Burrows imbues Cassell with, aided by a superlative script, credited to executive producers Akiva Goldsman & Henry Alonso Myers, off a story bv Myers and co-executive producer Alan B. McElroy.) And there’s even fun with space cowboys, as the opening has Pike, M’Benga, and La’an riding horses on an alien planet, where they’re delivering supplies covertly, which is mostly there to put the time Mount spent on Hell on Wheels perfecting his equestrianism to good use.

There are some lovely little touches here, more subtle than Pelia’s phone-box line. The Martians are Vulcanoid, and in the early concepts of Star Trek, Spock was supposed to be Martian. On top of that, M’Benga points out that the DNA he detected in Cassell and her people can be found in many Alpha Quadrant species—which is a continuity hit, believe it or not! In “Return to Tomorrow,” Spock mentions the Vulcan theories that their species might have originated on another planet. In that context, he thinks it might be Sargon’s people who did it, but it could be the Martians, also. (For that matter, Cassell’s descendants could possibly be Sargon’s people also.)

And we continue to see that this is a younger Scotty, as he’s been putting in alert lights whenever Ortegas pushes the engines beyond their specs. I love the fact that Scotty was conservative in his younger days. Just in general, the show has done an excellent job of showing us younger versions of the characters we know, and seeing the process by which they evolve into the ones we’re more familiar with from the show that aired sixty years ago.

The story is very pulp-y, it’s true. The notion of the asteroid belt being a planet that was destroyed in a war with Mars (or with another solar planet) is one that has whiskers on it, as is the notion of life on Mars. Indeed, the episode itself calls back to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the novel that introduced John Carter and chronicled his trip to Mars (or Barsoom, as the locals called it). 

Speaking of tired tropes, we also have April offering Pike a promotion to commodore at the top of the episode and Pike refusing it at the end, which is one of Trek’s more boring clichés. Although it does result in Number One getting a promotion to full commander, which is good to see. In addition, Uhura is mentoring a Vulcan cadet who is spectacularly snotty even by Vulcan standards, and I spent pretty much every scene she was in waiting in vain for Uhura to upbraid her for speaking out of turn to an officer, which a properly trained cadet would never do, yet which she did constantly.

Still—SNW is back! And in both senses, it’s about damn time…