It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for Strange New Worlds. So hopefully you’re settled down for the evening, you’ve turned the lights down low, and you want to watch a nice, cozy, scary episode of Star Trek. Because that’s what this is. Episode 9, “All Those Who Wander,” is a horror story. That’s exactly what it is.
It’s an unusual one for me too. I had to go to the doctor yesterday and have something done, so I’m in a mild bit of pain at the moment. But I really wanted to see the episode, and I want to be consistent, so we’re going to keep this short and sweet.
A Rescue Mission and a Party
The crew has been sent to retrieve another ship that has gone missing. The captain of that ship left a voice message, and they find it. But it’s also a celebration. Uhura and one other cadet, whose name I can’t remember, have completed their cadet training on the Enterprise, and there’s an ensign who gets promoted to lieutenant. That’s the away team, plus senior staff: Hemmer, M’Benga, Chapel and Spock, as well as Pike.
There’s a second job on the board at the same time. It’s an aid mission, batteries for a space station, and if they take too long the batteries die and the station goes out. So La’an comes up with the plan early on. Split everybody up. The away team handles the planet, the Enterprise delivers those very special, very needed things, and by the time one is finished the other should be too, and the ship comes back to pick them up.
They all go down to the planet and find where the ship had to make an emergency landing. There’s a brief joke about how all landings on starships are essentially emergency landings, because starships aren’t designed to land. Or at least that’s not their preferred method of arriving.
Uhura Is Halfway Out the Door
There are a couple of threads running through this one, and the first is Uhura. She’s still very much trying to find out what her purpose is and who she is. Hemmer talks to her briefly and tells her his purpose is to fix broken things, and thematically that comes back around toward the end of the episode.
So Uhura is in the mindset of, all right, I’m just going to go home. Clearly, since I haven’t found it yet, Starfleet may not be for me. And that’s the mission she walks into.
The Gorn, Counted Down
On the ship they find out what happened. The crew had answered a distress signal and picked up some people, and it’s later confirmed that these people were actually refugees from a Gorn breeding planet. The entire crew of that ship is dead. You find them throughout the thing, and it’s jump scares the whole way.
Thematically with the season, they’re going to the Gorn again as a villain. On the planet they find a survivor, a little girl, who La’an immediately gravitates to because the girl reminds her of herself. There’s another alien of unknown origin, and ultimately he’s the one who has the Gorn in him.
They hatch. So you have four of them. One of them kills another immediately, right at birth, which leaves you three. Of the three, they attack another one, and ultimately you’re left with two.
Now, with two, everybody comes up with a plan to lure them into a specific area, mainly because Gorn don’t like cold. This is a cold planet. That’s why most of the other ship’s crew was outside: they’d actually managed to get the thing outside to help kill it. Meanwhile Hemmer and everybody get the ship powered up so they can eventually get it out into space and take it back. Their mission is to find out about the crew, rescue them, or at the very least bring back the ship.
It’s a real cat and mouse game they’re playing with the Gorn.
Sam Kirk and the Vulcan Thing
We’ve got that Seamus McKirk, whatever. I’m just kidding, I know that’s not his name. Samuel Kirk. He’s here to essentially be window dressing and to yell at Spock for being unemotional. I keep trying to figure out why he’s here, and the only motivation I can come up with is that he’s here to eventually get us to James T. Kirk. But, you know, whatever.
Then you see them act as bait. They’ve lured the creature into the air system, and it’s supposed to come toward Spock, and it’s not coming. La’an tells him, you’ve got to challenge him.
So Spock does this quick thing. People would say he tapped into his anger. But he actually does a thing, and by a thing I mean a Vulcan thing, because he says it very quickly and very quietly. Rage of my heart, anger, something something, come into my heart. Essentially he’s releasing the anger to be in him. With that proper motivation he goes out and challenges it, and he gets the thing to come out.
Now the two Gorn are trapped in an area together. One of them fights the other, and you’re left with the alpha, the survivor. And La’an realizes only one person is going to be able to outrun this thing, and that’s her, because she knows exactly what she’s running from. Ergo she will be very fleet of foot, as it were.
Hemmer
Ultimately Hemmer realizes he’s been infected, somehow, with Gorn eggs. So what he does is go outside, and he sacrifices himself.
Hemmer is now gone. It’s sad. I don’t know how I feel about the loss of Hemmer.
And the Gorn as the recurring enemy, this early on, I don’t know. I’m okay with it, I guess. But at the same time I’m trying to figure it out, because we never knew the Gorn to be this big of a threat. But again, I don’t lose sleep over that stuff. The show is amazing. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed what they were doing, the effects are phenomenal, and the jump scares are good.
At the very end you see a brief funeral, and then you get this really nice button moment. Uhura steps onto the bridge, and you get this slow pullback to the communications area. You get the sense that she’s going to stay, mainly because of what Hemmer tells her: stay with people, plant yourself down with people. They’ll surprise you and make you happier way more than they’ll disappoint you.
So I believe she’s going to make the decision to stay, and she’ll probably be an ensign at that point. I’m interested to see where that goes.
Two Empty Chairs
Just last week Mrs. Know-It-All and I were discussing the fact that for us to eventually get to the TOS era of Star Trek, there are some people who have to leave. This is an episode that’s got people jumping ship left and right. I say that, but it’s not really that bad.
At the very, very end, La’an discovers the little girl may have some relatives, and they’re outside of Federation space. So she asks for a leave of absence. That means Hemmer and La’an are both gone now. That’s the chief of security, and that’s also the chief engineer.
So what do you think the over-under is on whether we’re going to get a young Scotty? Or someone who predates Scotty? Or possibly someone else who comes with a junior officer named Scotty?
I have a feeling we’re going to start getting some more people, little by little. This is episode 9. We’re getting awfully close to the end of this particular road, and we know for a fact we’re going to get James T. Kirk next season. I’m very excited to see where that goes.
The Verdict
Strange New Worlds “All Those Who Wander” is a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I enjoyed it. I did enjoy it. I actually find no faults with this episode. It was good on all sides. I don’t know that it had anything I would’ve changed. Not really. I think I like everything about this episode.
And you know what that means. We’ve got our very first Star Trek 10 out of 10. Let’s go.
This is a fun episode. I didn’t bump into anything in it. And it feels like this episode is sort of the gateway to another level of what we’re going through and what we’re experiencing.
Drop a comment on the video above and tell me what you thought of the episode, and give me your over-under on Scotty: a young Scotty, somebody who predates him, or somebody who shows up with a junior officer named Scotty in tow. Mrs. Know-It-All and I skipped Trek Talk Tuesday this week because we’ve got a full review of The Orville’s season so far on the way. We loved seasons one and two, and we’ll talk a little bit about that.
