This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds was definitely passable. It was also definitely derivative.
The episode is “Terrarium.” It’s an Ortegas episode, and it takes place on a planet, which tells you the volume, the close sets, the single-location build. Nothing grand. This is the cheaper episode of the run, even with an alien presence in it, because there is one. There’s a Gorn.
Lately there have been a lot of complaints in the space about Strange New Worlds feeling like it’s constantly going back to the well of the original series. For this season so far, I kind of have to agree.
Let me make this abundantly clear before anybody runs off with the wrong idea: I am enjoying this season. Season one I enjoyed immensely. Season two I thought was really good as well. I’m enjoying the journey we’re on here, the highs and the lows, especially as we barrel toward season four and eventually the final season, season five. But this season is starting to feel sloppy.
Not in execution. In execution, the episode is fine. It works. It’s functional. Is it the greatest episode of Star Trek ever made? No, probably not. Then you get to the very end, and the very end is what really did it for me, because the very end felt mildly lazy. In retrospect the whole episode feels lazy, but it’s not executed poorly, if that makes sense.
Functional Is Not the Same as Good
Last week’s episode felt disjointed to me, but it had a series of genuinely good and capable scenes that just happened to be thrown together. There were things I didn’t like and things I did, and once I turned my brain off and said okay, let’s just have fun here, I did have fun with it.
This week’s episode is extraordinarily functional. It wants to be exactly what it wants to be, which is a Temu version of “Arena.”
From a different perspective, it’s as if someone looked at “Arena,” the original series episode with Kirk and the Gorn, and asked: what are the themes here, what are the aspects here, and what happens if we flip them? Because spoilers, we get the Metrons.
You’ve heard me say this constantly, whether it’s here or on NERDFIGHTS: where’s all the supernatural stuff? Where are the fantastical things? Where are the bigger species, the strange aliens, the whole nine yards, all that fantastical sci-fi that Star Trek actually established? This show keeps trying to give us what it thinks the original series was. Last week that meant randomness, the every-episode-is-a-different-thing approach, because it believes that’s what episodic television is. When it isn’t doing that, it’s doing this: giving us familiar things in new settings.
The problem is that we all have long memories.
The big promo they dropped says Star Trek lives here on Paramount. The problem is that Star Trek lives there on Paramount too. We’ve seen the episodes. We know the lore. We know the history. So when you sit here and try to build brand new lore or brand new history out of the old, you’re also a slave to where you placed the series.
The Short and Skinny
The minute they mentioned gravimetric forces from an unknown origin, I said out loud that it was going to be a rift or a wormhole. Sure enough, wormhole. We’re Star Trek fans. We know what we’re looking at.
Ortegas gets sucked in and crashes on a planet, and from there you have two storylines running. On the planet, it’s survival first, then the discovery that there’s a downed Gorn there too, and she has to try to help it and communicate with it. On the ship, the crew is trying to locate and track down where she ended up, with everybody feeling solemn and sorrowful about it, and it becomes a question of who’s willing to sacrifice what to make sure their friend comes home. That’s the less important storyline, because the planet is obviously the main event.
She manages to make water. She finds a shelter of some sort. The shelter turns out to be controlled by a Gorn, and the Gorn uses her as bait to catch something and then ultimately offers her food. So it’s this whole back and forth.
It’s Enemy Mine. It’s Enemy Mine, it’s Enemy Mine, it’s Enemy Mine all day. The Dennis Quaid movie. I believe it was the eighties.
We’ve seen this story a thousand times, in Star Trek and everywhere else: the trope of enemies who have to work together to survive some insurmountable situation. So one, seeing that rehashed in general, I thought okay, well, maybe they’ll do something original with it. Making it the specific enemy she’s had to work through in her trauma isn’t exactly part of the trope, but it felt equally contrived. Her getting over it felt contrived. How they eventually survive felt contrived, even though it made sense, and at the same time it didn’t.
It felt very surface, mainly because I’ve seen the same story done better elsewhere. Even though it’s considered a B movie, I think Enemy Mine is one of the best versions of this idea you can imagine from a sci-fi position.
The relationship they develop between Ortegas and the Gorn is contrived, but I do like how they develop it. The threat of the monster creatures the Gorn hunts for food is interesting. Then it culminates in a climax where Ortegas gets the crazy hare-brained idea, with tension bolted on because the wormhole is going to close and they have to use a shell of one of those things.
Those solutions felt very Next Generation. They felt techno-babble adjacent. Which, again, is not what the original series was about.
An Original Take, Not an Original Story
I know there are no original stories under the sun. So what am I expecting? I expect some version of an original take on it if you’re going to do it.
Here’s how I’d put it. If you got into a Star Trek writers’ room and put every type of episode that exists on the board, you’d have a pretty significant list of just types. Then the job becomes: well, what did the others do with this one? And I don’t necessarily want to copy that. I want to ask, what does my version of that kind of episode look like?
The problem is that I think this episode is the answer for writers who clearly aren’t up to the task of doing what they’re doing right now. I don’t know if they’ve changed a lot of people in that room. I don’t know what’s happened. But season one I thought was excellent, season two was really good, and this season is starting to feel sloppy.
Not in execution, and it shouldn’t be. These shows pretty much make themselves at this point regardless of who’s in the director’s chair most of the time, because you’ve built a shorthand about how this stuff gets done. Everybody’s acting fine. I have no major criticisms other than the fact that it’s not a very original story.
The Metron Problem
I don’t necessarily know that I like the Metron usage, because it feels like a McGuffin. When everything froze, I thought it was going to be interesting.
For everybody playing at home, let me backtrack. The Metrons are the ones who brought Kirk and the Gorn to that planet in “Arena.” At the end, when Kirk shows mercy, they turn up and say they don’t think humanity is ready for them yet. That’s essentially what they do here. They go so far as to say they’re going to erase the crew’s memory of them, and maybe erase their memory of the Gorn, of how they see the Gorn in general.
I interpreted that to mean how humans perceive the Gorn, once somebody came up with the idea to use the Gorn as the primary antagonist of this show. The Klingons were the antagonists in the original series. The Romulans, primarily, in The Next Generation. Now we have the Gorn in Strange New Worlds, and I feel like nobody making that decision stopped to think, well, someday we’re going to have to correct this. Or it got hand-waved: yeah, no, we’ll write it out, we’ll fix it, whatever else. Expecting that you’re going to be worth a damn at fixing the problem.
So now you’re tripping over your own feet. Now we’re in a we-have-to-fix-it scenario, and the fix is the thing driving the episode.
Here’s the other thing: it didn’t have to be the Metrons.
And the design bugs me. The original Metron in the original series was sort of blonde, sort of Greek looking. They’ve gone for something much more alien here. This Metron reminded me of a species you might have seen in Farscape or something. The voice work was great, especially the echoes of it all. But I feel like they should have just married the look and put somebody in a blonde bob to do the thing. That’s a personal preference, but that’s my thought.
The Verdict
The episode is tired. It’s a tired trope, and it’s a tired trope I feel has been executed better.
I know I say not to judge these things on any merit but their own. The problem here is that you so blatantly and clearly have this exact same story done better, not just elsewhere but inside Star Trek itself. And I’m not even talking about “Arena” until you bring the Metrons in.
So as a result of that, I’m giving this episode a 6 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I’m genuinely still on this ride. When I look down the barrel at things like the puppet episode coming next season, that honestly doesn’t scare me compared to just seeing average episodes like today’s.
Were you tired of this trope too, or did you love it? If you loved it, tell me all the things you loved, because I really do want to love this with you. Actually explain your criticisms though, because “this show sucks” in one sentence helps nobody. The conversation is in the comments on the video above.
