They did the thing. Anybody who’s a Star Trek fan will tell you the one thing we remember the most, the thing we absolutely hated, was “to be continued.” So I’m not even going to bury that lede. There’s definitely a cliffhanger here, and the cliffhanger is the exciting part.
This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2, episode 10, “Hegemony.” Hegemony? Hegemony. You get the idea. It’s the season finale we’ve been waiting for, and it’s a good episode. Oh, yeah.
It comes on the heels of last season, when we got “A Quality of Mercy,” which was the sort of time travel retelling of the episode where the Enterprise faced the Romulans, done through Chris Pike’s perspective. So they had a high bar to hit, and I believe they did.
Her Name’s Marie
The episode starts with Captain Batel giving her captain’s log. Now, last episode, the minute we got her first name, Mrs. Know-It-All literally says, “What? Her name’s Marie? That’s it. She’s done.” I was like, what? And she goes, “Oh, yeah, she’s dying this next episode.” Oh my god. And then she goes, “She’s going on a priority one mission.”
So this is the priority one mission. According to her log, they’re outside Federation space, at a Federation colony called Parnassus Beta. The town has been made up to look very much like a Midwestern, 20th century type of town, sort of a jumping off point the colonists get to grow from on their own.
At the very beginning there’s this moment where you see the Cayuga while a solar flare is happening. Little did I know, that’s their version of Chekhov’s gun. You also get a brief shot of Chapel doing some inoculations. She’s apparently hitched a ride on the Cayuga on the way to her fellowship with Dr. Korby.
She beams back up, and then you get this message from Pike, who’s contacting Batel. He misses her, all of that. And I feel like this is one of those moments where the writers set it up so much that it almost feels put on at this point. I guess we’re supposed to be very cognizant of the fact that Pike has grown so much, and the reward for said growth is going to be, we’re going to icebox your girlfriend. I don’t know. As a writing tool, I think there was a better way to do that. Mind you, you can always go with the fact that she’s a Starfleet captain and she’s very capable, and I agree with all of those things. I just feel like using this as the motivation to get Pike and the Enterprise and everybody else even more hardcore motivated feels, yeah, whatever.
Very Independence Day
Midway through the conversation with Pike, the signal gets lost. Once it’s lost, they start to realize nobody on the ground can communicate back up with the ship. A shuttle comes crashing down from space. They don’t know what happened. And then, very Independence Day, this large alien ship comes looming through the clouds, and we now know it to be a Gorn ship, obviously. The shadow is cast on everybody and you’re just like, oh. Oh.
Cut back to the Enterprise, where Pike and them receive a distress signal on a priority channel. They only barely managed to get it out, and it’s Batel saying they’re under attack by the Gorn. So of course Pike kicks it in gear and they haul butt to get there.
On the way, Admiral April is concerned. He says it’s recon only. He doesn’t want any actions that might instigate the Gorn into a battle footing. And he asks, “Is there going to be a problem with this, Chris?” Chris turns around and he’s like, “Nah, no problem.” And all you can see in his face is, this man’s out for blood, bro. He wants to ride in like a knight on a white horse.
The Wreck of the Cayuga
The Enterprise arrives on one side, comes swooping around, and finds the remains of the Cayuga. It’s brutal. I’ll tell you what, it is rough. Don’t get me wrong, if you’ve seen Star Trek: The Next Generation, you’ve seen Wolf 359, you’ve seen some of these scenarios. This just felt more brutal.
Dave Blass, one of the production designers on Star Trek: Picard and some other stuff, was on Twitter. I’m sorry, X, whatever that’s called. Anyways, he was online and he commented that being able to see the actual deck floors from the destruction of the saucer section made it look that much more devastating, and I absolutely have to agree. You look at it and you’re like, wow.
Clearly the Gorn have deployed an interference field. Nobody can scan down. Nobody can beam down, nobody can communicate. So they know nothing, other than the fact that the planet is literally an arm’s reach away, the Cayuga’s wreckage is there, and a Gorn destroyer is now just kind of hanging out on the other side.
Oh, and by the way, Starfleet sends them a message. The message is that Starfleet received a message from the Gorn. It’s an image showing space and a demarcation line. Essentially, the Gorn have unofficially drawn a line in the proverbial sand.
Break in Case of Gorn
Can’t beam down, so they’ve got to take a shuttle. Pike calls a meeting in the conference room and has the transporter room beam crate 32 in there. Ortegas says it best: “Break in case of Gorn.” It’s the Gorn care package. Apparently Starfleet’s been preparing for the possibility of a battle with the Gorn, and the next time they encountered them, they wanted everyone to be ready. Modified phasers, pulse rifles, the whole nine yards. Also nitrogen grenades, because obviously, how better to kill a cold-blooded creature than hyper cold? I’m like, okay, good. I’m glad they paid attention last time. I’m glad they’ve gotten prepared.
The basic gist is they’re going to take a shuttle and make it look like debris. They’re going to let it go floating through everything and then just look like it fell. Ortegas is the one piloting, because hey, she’s been asking to go on away missions. There you go.
She literally has to let the thing go in free fall. It’s spiraling out of control. Everybody’s holding on to their butts. And she’s like, no, no, we have to get to 1,500 meters above the ground looking like debris, and then we go underneath. Everyone’s like, okay. Even Pike’s hair is standing up, which is crazy for him. They hit the mark, they level out, and she’s like, “Woo!” That’s when Pike tells her, yeah, you were made for this, Ortegas, and it comes up that he was a test pilot too. Very cool.
Meanwhile, back up on the ship, the saucer has been spinning. As it spins, they happen to catch a brief shot of sick bay on the saucer section. So they zoom in and enhance. And sick bay’s gone. Like, it’s gone.
On the Ground
Arriving on the planet, the away team sees utter devastation. And you want to sit here and go, okay, obviously the daytime place was a real set somewhere, like a little mini town square you guys rented. But then at night it just becomes this studio set, with controlled fires and vehicles and whatever else. It’s things burning that probably should have burned out a long time ago. Anyways, a lot of overcast.
As they’re going, La’an tries her best to explain that there are most likely not many survivors. And that’s the very first time Sam gets a signal on his tricorder. They hide. You see one of the Gorn run through, and a little bit later you see more of them coming. So they duck into a barber shop and hole up there for a little while, in the hopes of waiting out this little mini patrol.
Even La’an’s like, this is weird. They should be fighting each other, and they’re working together. Just before that is when she points out that the one that ran through looks hungry. And if it’s hungry, ergo, there’s no more food. I don’t know how to make that less gross. It is what it is, man. This is a rough episode.
I think it’s interesting they made the decision to make the Gorn the enemies in Strange New Worlds at this point, especially with Discovery having had the Klingon war. Now we have the Gorn. I find it very interesting, what they’re doing.
A Very Clever Scotsman
That’s right when Sam Kirk gets a brand new signal, and it’s a human one. They follow it down and find this device that’s putting out human signals, and a force field drops around them. That’s when a very clever Scotsman named Montgomery Scott, lieutenant junior grade, by the way, shows up, and he’s like, yeah, hi guys, sorry, I built this to trap them.
He mentions in passing that he was on the survey crew monitoring the sun, with the sunspots and a special kind of flare. And he posits that as soon as the sun flare happened, that’s when the Gorn went nuts. Sam pipes up and says there are many creatures who get aligned with sun activity, and the Gorn may very well have evolved so that at a certain point in that cycle, that’s when they feed. So these giant sun flares have created an early feeding cycle, and that’s why this has happened. It’s an interesting take, and it’s really good intel.
Not far away, they find where the other people have been holed up, and that’s where they find Captain Batel. As many people as were there on the ground have survived with her. She’s very happy to see Chris, he’s happy to see her, and she’s very much like, I’m not leaving these people. You have one shuttle.
Dropping a Saucer on the Problem
Meanwhile, Pelia and Uhura have reverse engineered the blocked signal to where it’s located, on the dark side of the planet. They can’t fire on it. But there’s an awful lot of debris they could maybe drop on it, and that becomes the plan.
Spock determines they’re going to drop the saucer section on it, and he’s literally the only person qualified and capable of setting up the rockets. I think deep down inside he also wanted to take a final look for Chapel, and he even says he owes it to Nurse Chapel to try. As far as he’s concerned, if they can’t find any life signs on the Cayuga, that means the survivors are down on the planet, and we can’t help them if we can’t stop that thing. So he lets himself free float away from the Enterprise.
Cut to the Cayuga, and we find out that Chapel is alive. She wakes up and, I assume because of her great training during the war, she manages to rig up the life support for one more hour. Life support is about to die, you hear the computer voice kind of die, she’s plugging in some things, and then poof, everything powers up. Chapel’s a bad woman. You’ve got to admit it. I’m super impressed with the character they’ve built into her.
Spock arrives and begins placing the rockets. While he’s doing that, Scotty and the away team back down on the planet get to their shuttle and go after the device, their quote unquote Gorn cloak.
Back on the Cayuga, Chapel hears someone trying the computer. Access denied, access denied, command code not recognized. She thinks it might be Spock. Come to find out, it’s one of the older Gorn soldiers.
Now, they’re still keeping the canon. The soldier we’re seeing is a lesser soldier, like what you saw on Enterprise. The canon is still that nobody saw any of the elite, top of the hill Gorn until Kirk sees them in the episode from TOS. So what you end up with is another one of those guys who looks more like the ones from Enterprise, the show. There’s the little guys, there’s these middle guys, and then there’s the elite class.
This Gorn is trying to hack into the computer system for whatever crazy reason. Spock happens to be placing the last of the rockets when it attacks him. That’s when Chapel walks onto the bridge. There’s a huge scuffle, and between the two of them they take the dude down. It’s glorious. It’s a good victory, and they have a moment.
Meanwhile the rockets engage and the saucer begins to fall. They float out of the saucer section as it continues toward the planet, and it flies straight down and crashes into the thing.
Ever the Optimist
Back at the shuttle, there was a moment where a Gorn was going to catch them. Batel put herself in front of it, and it stopped and went away. That obviously wasn’t a good sign. And you find that out just before the saucer section hits.
Pike is talking to her, and her plan’s basically, I’m going to take the shuttle and crash it into that tower so you guys can get everybody else out. She wants to sacrifice herself. Pike is like, you’ve got to give me a chance, man. You’ve got to give me a chance to try to help and save you. She’s like, oh, ever the optimist.
Ultimately the decision is taken out of their hands. It’s funny, the planet looks dark on the sensors, and as soon as that tower is gone it immediately lights up and everyone can see everything. Quick, start transporting people up. They get Spock and Chapel over, because they immediately communicate. They get Pike and the rest of them up. They can’t get the rest of the colonists, because apparently the Gorn ship has already done that.
Admiral April is ordering them to vacate immediately, to haul butt. More Gorn ships have shown up. The Enterprise is being attacked by the small little fighter guys. Everyone’s looking to Pike for a decision.
I know, right? Oh!
You don’t know the pain of dealing with a “to be continued” until you’ve lived through “The Best of Both Worlds,” part one and two, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But this is coming in a close second, and I’m excited for it. I can’t wait for season 3, and who knows when that’s going to be, with the various strikes going on.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, episode 10, “Hegemony,” is a 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a part one of two, clearly. But they did a really good job making me want to keep watching. So I’m giving this a solid nine. This was a nine, and I’m happy with it.
I’m going to do my best to keep the channel rocking out new content, especially when it comes to Star Trek, as we move forward. I know we’re supposed to be getting Lower Decks supposedly soon, and I’m excited to see where they go with that as well.
Drop a comment on the video above. Let me know how you thought the finale ended the season, and what you’re excited for coming up in season 3. Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
