It’s time for Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 4, “Among the Lotus Eaters.” Returning to a planet that dredges up tragic memories, Captain Pike and his landing party find themselves forgetting everything, including their own identities, as he confronts a ghost from his past.

The planet in question is a little fan favorite: Rigel VII. Rigel something or other is always a planet in Star Trek, and of course there’s The Simpsons mocking it, because the aliens are apparently from Rigel 7, the numeral seven, not the Roman numeral. But that’s not why it matters.

Why Rigel VII Matters

If you go back in the crates, way back to TOS in the early days, you’re going to find “The Cage,” later on “The Menagerie,” parts one and two, which had the original Christopher Pike. One of the things they discussed was a particular incident that happened on Rigel VII. He led the away team, and they lost three crew members, including his personal yeoman, Zac.

I love how Strange New Worlds continues to sprinkle in Star Trek lore. It lets you really grab onto the essence of what the original series was. What they’ve been doing is writing between the lines. It’s what we see with Spock, it’s what we’ve seen with Uhura as this keeps moving forward, and they’re doing a brilliant job of it.

Pike Sabotages a Good Thing

The episode actually starts with Pike and his girlfriend, Captain Batel of the Cayuga. They’re trying to steal away for just a little bit and have some dinner. He’s cooking for her, and as he goes in to give her a kiss, boom, somebody chimes in needing approval for something. He says he’s incommunicado for at least the next 30 minutes. Same thing again: they start to get a little bit close and the Cayuga calls over wanting a course correction, and she’s telling them to just give her time.

It’s constantly this back and forth, and ultimately Pike comes to a conclusion. It’s really difficult for the two of them to steal minutes here and there, and he thinks it’d be best if they took a break. She is not happy about that decision. She’s not happy at all. Even Una tells him later that he sabotages things all the time and he’s got to stop. He says, “I do that?” And she says yeah, totally.

Then they get invited to a mission by Starfleet, back to Rigel VII. They take pictures of species that have been messed with that shouldn’t have been, with the equivalent of a Hubble telescope or something, and what Pike sees in them is a delta symbol. Obviously his people left something behind. So the entire situation is Starfleet’s way of saying, as Pike so eloquently puts it, go clean up your own mess.

The Away Team

We come back after the intro to Erica Ortegas. Mija, prima, I love this woman. Not only is she an awesome pilot, she’s one of my sisters, and by that I mean Latinas. Let’s go.

She’s excited to be going on an away mission. She meets up with everybody and she’s got a cute little hat from the culture, because they’re going in completely clean and don’t want to bring anything down with them. Then Spock says there’s some asteroid debris going on, probably from some old celestial bodies that crashed, and they’re going to need somebody who’s really an expert pilot to get the ship through it. Ortegas immediately gives him the “oh, you suck,” because she clearly wanted to be on the away mission. Spock’s standing there like it’s not his fault.

So the rest of them go: Pike, M’Benga and La’an. You realize later why Pike chose those two. The doctor part is probably the default. He picked them both because they have excellent combat skills, and M’Benga’s a little insulted by it. It’s just what a doctor wants to hear, that he’s being chosen for an away mission because of his combat skills.

They have to hike in something like 20 kilometers, because they fly in under smoke and debris from a volcano or some other MacGuffin reason. When they get close, they can see from far away that the locals are armed with phaser rifles.

King of the Kalar

The species there is the Kalar, and there are two kinds: the field Kalar and the palace Kalar. The field Kalar are forgetting things, and little by little that’s happening to the crew too. It starts with losing time. La’an is the first one to show it, then M’Benga, then Pike starts to experience it.

They get captured. It’s that scene in the clip you guys saw, where Pike and the others are watching the locals with the phaser rifles, and they come over and he gives them the “I’m from the north” routine. They tell him, oh yeah, we know who you are, Captain Pike.

When they’re taken into the palace, you find out that the captain’s personal yeoman, Zac, has become king. He’s king of the wicker people. No, I’m kidding. He’s king of the Kalar, and he has his memories, and nobody knows why the people in there keep theirs. He’s angry, of course, about being left behind. Pike tries to tell him, but they get kicked out and sent to go work in the fields.

What Goes Deep

Meanwhile we cut back to the Enterprise, where you begin to get signs that people are starting to lose time. It begins with Uhura. There was another clip released earlier this week that shows her suddenly asking what’s going on, and she can’t remember anything. Ortegas volunteers to take her down to sickbay and make sure she gets there.

Down there you learn how it works. You’ll forget your name, you’ll forget who other people are. Things you have that go deep, you keep. Things you have to remember, you lose. But if you love something, that stays, and you get a sense for that later as the story progresses. Right then Chapel gets a notification that six more crew members are coming up. It’s happening, and it seems like it’s happening faster on the Enterprise.

Back on the planet, Pike meets a local who’s basically trying to explain it to him. They have totems. The forgetting takes away the reasons they know things, but love goes deep. Pike remembers that Batel had given him a gift at dinner, a little seafaring captain’s charm that’s supposed to help you find your way home. He has it, he knows it’s something special, he knows it was a gift, and he can’t figure out what it is.

Same thing with M’Benga. When La’an tries to fight somebody and gets injured, he immediately jumps to taking care of her, and he realizes: I’m a healer of some kind. I’m a doctor.

The guy believes in this totem concept, and he tells Pike they live in the moment. The now is all that matters. If this is your now, if this is your moment, I’ll help you. And he helps them try to get back to the palace.

My Name Is Erica Ortegas and I Fly the Ship

Back up on the ship it’s getting very bad. Spock, in a very intelligent move, has begun giving everybody PADDs with their profiles on them, until they forget how to read.

Erica’s supposed to be flying them through all this, and she wakes up after one of those episodes and doesn’t remember anything. She stumbles out into this chaotic, asylum-type scene, all tilted cameras and angles, and she manages to get through the ship. At one point she faces Chapel, who literally just looks at her blank and walks off. They don’t know each other.

She’s speaking out loud to the computer, because she’d said “home” earlier, and it tells her what deck her quarters are on. She asks where that is, and it tells her to follow the colored lights. You see the lights start doing their thing, and she follows them back to her quarters.

Once she’s there, you can see the asteroids outside her window. She’s telling the computer she doesn’t know what to do, make it stop. The computer says course corrections have to be made, and you’re the one who has to make them. She says, what? And it tells her: you are Erica Ortegas, you pilot the USS Enterprise.

She realizes who she is, at least in that moment. If you remember early on in season one, being a pilot goes deep for Ortegas. Very deep. So she grabs onto it, and she’s running through the halls heading back to the bridge saying, “My name is Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship. My name is Erica Ortegas and I fly the ship.” It’s actually really cool.

She gets up to the bridge and Spock asks her if she knows what she’s doing, if she knows how to fly this thing. She says, “My name is Erica Ortegas. I fly the ship.” It’s one of those innate things in her, so she just starts doing it, and it’s great. She’s flying them through the meteor shower and the whole bit.

The Casket That Isn’t There

On the planet, Pike wakes up from another blackout in the middle of fighting some of the guards. M’Benga helps him, gets a little clipped and can’t continue, so he says he’ll stay and guard the gate: you go inside and get our memories back.

There’s a totem myth that says the people inside the palace have a casket that keeps everyone’s memories, and that’s why they can remember while the people outside don’t. It’s designed to keep the people doing the work. Even Pike says this sounds awfully convenient, that some people do all the work and other people don’t.

He goes in, fights, and encounters Zac again without remembering him. Pike beats him, and Zac says of course, why wouldn’t you be the one. I kicked you out, I figured you’d wander around aimlessly and confused, and instead you end up starting a revolution. That’s the stuff that sits deep down inside Pike, that justice stuff.

Pike’s getting angry and he’s about to kill him, and Zac tells him his memory should be back any second, since he’s been inside long enough. Then Zac explains it. A long time ago a meteor hit the planet. The meteor causes the forgetting, which is what they call it. It’s a radiation that comes off of it. The castle is made of an ore that shields against the radiation. So it isn’t that the people in the castle have some special power. The building itself is shielding them from the forgetting.

Pike gets everybody back, collects up all the stuff that Zac had, and they return to the ship. Ortegas had already gotten them outside of the field. They take the meteor that landed, pull it out with the tractor beam, and throw it back up into space to join the other asteroids, the idea being that hopefully it’ll stop the forgetting from happening.

The Verdict

Strange New Worlds “Among the Lotus Eaters” gets a solid eight and a half on the Know-It-All Index.

I liked it. It was fun, it was campy, it referenced old Star Trek stuff. It’s not the greatest episode of Strange New Worlds ever, but I thought it was great and I enjoyed it a lot.

One more thing. You’re going to clearly notice in the video that we’re on the brand new set of the all-new Mr. Know-It-All show. There’s still some soundproofing to happen, so I apologize for the sound issues, and I’ll get that corrected very soon. I’m very excited to be here. Now that I’m back, I’ve also got space explorer uniforms available that don’t infringe on copyrights of any kind. I do it primarily because I’m a big and tall guy, six foot seven, 300 plus pounds, and I can never find stuff. Most uniforms online stop at 3X. I’m working on putting together some from Picard season three as well as the ones I normally wear.

Let me know what you thought of the episode. I’d love to engage with you guys more on this one, and the conversation lives in the comments on the video above.