I’m not hiding the lead anymore. It’s the Gorn, baby.
If you don’t like spoilers, get out of here. You clearly haven’t seen the promos or anything having to do with the episode. This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 1, episode 4, “Memento Mori,” and we’re facing the Gorn this week. The Enterprise is on a routine supply mission to a colony planet, it comes under attack, and the security officer has to tell her captain that this enemy can’t be dealt with by conventional Starfleet means.
It’s not a bad episode. I actually like it. There’s a lot that happens in this one, and there are an awful lot of sweaty faces. A lot of sweating.
The Match Cut and the Pin
The episode starts with a really awesome view of the Enterprise. I always love it whenever you see her from behind. La’an is giving her security officer’s log, because they’re on their way to check on some colonists.
Right after that shot you get a match cut. In film, a match cut is where one picture ends and looks like the next one. There’s a similar one in Star Trek VI, where what looks like the Starfleet symbol for the United Federation of Planets turns into the top of Sulu’s teacup. Here you pan over the top of the Enterprise and you get this really neat transition to a pin. The pin says U.S.S. Puget Sound, and the pins are for a thing called Remembrance Day. It’s one of those holidays that’s sort of like Veterans Day or Memorial Day in today’s parlance.
Then we cut to Uhura. We all know that as a cadet she’s jumping from department to department, looking for what may end up being her permanent place in Starfleet, if she even stays. This week she’s working with none other than Chief Engineer Hemmer, and you kind of love the attitude he’s giving her. She makes the connection that language is very much like what they do in engineering. You make two things that don’t talk, talk. You make things that normally don’t want to play nice, play nice. It’s a really good moment, and you get to see the beginnings of what I hope is a mutual respect. Professional respect, if nothing else.
It’s a Trap
When they try to raise the colony, there’s no communications array. It’s been destroyed, and that throws up all kinds of alarm bells. So Pike makes the decision: we’ve got to go down and take a look. That’s what regulation says you do when something unusual happens. Guess what, you’re the investigating ship now.
La’an’s definitely on the away team, and this is definitely a La’an-centric episode, mainly because of everything she’s experienced. They get down there and the colony is pretty much laid to waste. Things are on fire. The entire place is in rough, rough shape. They’re in a security detail, so they’ve got some body armor on. I think it’s really just the plates from their EVA suits. There’s a short accident with a crewman and a dog, and everyone’s kind of laughing at him, and you can tell the tension’s very high right now.
Then out of nowhere a ship enters scanner range, and it’s in rough shape too. It’s refugees from the colony, about 100 or so of them, and they look bad, man. They were attacked. They didn’t really know why. The attack was very brutal and people were taken. Nobody can place who it was that hit them, so everybody’s left going, what’s going on, and where do we go from here.
So they attach a tether to the other ship and start getting people over, and eventually you get that scene from the sneak peek video of the little girl running down the hall. The little girl’s not that great an actor, but that’s okay. La’an looks at her and says, tell me what happened. The girl starts to explain some things, and she explains a sound. It’s the sound that makes La’an go, oh, this is bad.
She recommends they put the shields up, and they can’t, because of the tether running between the two ships. I was trying to find a better way to say this and there isn’t one. It’s totally Ackbar. It’s a trap. It’s literally a trap, bro. La’an explains that the Gorn left the colonists there to toy with, and specifically to draw others in and put them in a weakened position.
So the Gorn ship comes swooping in and hits some places strategically. The Enterprise gets damaged and obviously loses the tether. They manage to get their shields up, but they’re fighting for their life.
La’an in Survival Mode
Overall the episode’s got itself a lot of nuance, and by nuance I mean they’ve been telegraphing. We’re four episodes in now. They’ve been telegraphing the Gorn. They’ve been telegraphing La’an’s trauma. They’ve been telegraphing everybody’s trauma, to be honest.
What you’re facing here is La’an going into survival mode almost immediately, as soon as she realizes what’s going on. One of the things she tries her best to do is get as much information to the captain as candidly as possible, and it comes out a little too direct. Pike’s concern is, hey, you’re not helping, you need to be calmer. And she’s like, all right, I’ll make that shift. He’s not judging her and she’s not getting in trouble. But you’ve got to remember that in a position of authority, the people beneath you, your subordinates, can’t see you shaking. They can’t see you sweating.
Into the Cloud
Listen very carefully as soon as Pike starts asking about the brown dwarf and the nebula and the dust cloud. There are a few musical notes from The Wrath of Khan in there. I had to pause it and play it again. I was like, okay, let’s hear what you guys got going on. It was very cool. I like it.
Because that’s what this is. They’re going to play the cat and mouse game. As they talk it through, that cloud is the best place to go, because it means no shields, no sensors, nothing. But it puts the Gorn in the exact same position. A giant gas cloud of death. Why not?
They have a quick staff meeting and Pike is essentially like, listen, I need everybody to really think outside the box. I really love this next part. They go in, and almost immediately Spock says, Captain, you asked us to think creatively, I think I may have something. He believes they can use the navigation array.
For those of you playing at home, here’s space travel 101. When you hear them give a heading, something like three four seven point two seven eight, mark four, they’re giving you spatial X and Y, and then the mark is essentially a universal rotation. Remember, there’s no up and down in space. Everywhere is everywhere. You don’t get to say I want to go left or I want to go right. You want to go there, and there, and there. X and Y cover your side to side and your front and back, so the mark is how you account for the other part, the getting up and the bending down.
The navigation array is a passive system aboard Federation ships. It keeps track of the dust and the space particles, the things the deflector dish has to push out of the way. So as the Gorn ships travel through this nebula, that passive array is going to let the Enterprise detect the eddies they leave in the dust. Pike says it way better than I can. He goes, Mr. Spock, do you realize you just turned a navigation array into a radar?
It’s kind of brilliant and super Star Trek, and I’m like, right on, man.
One Torpedo and Some Lazy Writing
Then they have one torpedo left.
Okay. There’s bad writing and then there’s lazy writing, and this is lazy writing. The episode is actually a very well written episode. But then you get a moment like this, and either whoever’s writing it didn’t catch it or the showrunner didn’t catch it.
They mention very quickly that in the initial volley the torpedo bay was hit. If all the torpedoes were damaged or destroyed, they would have exploded. Now, the argument can be made that they have to be armed first. Our nuclear submarines are the same exact way. If a torpedo isn’t loaded in and actually armed, it’s just a large tin can, and unless you break into it and damage the housing, it’s not really going to do anything. It won’t even explode, really. So I kind of get that.
Spock also points out they can’t shoot it inside the dust cloud, because the cloud interferes with the torpedo’s navigation the same way it interferes with theirs. It would just wander and go crazy. So Pike comes up with a brilliant idea. Using the new eddy navigation thing, they’re going to come around in front of the Gorn ship and over it, and then just drop the torpedo manually. And I’m like, okay, why not arm the thing and push it out an airlock? Shoot it out the airlock that’s facing the ship.
Anyways, it totally does the job. It destroys that ship.
She Can Handle It
We’re all excited, they destroyed the ship, and then three more signals show up. Two smaller ones and a much bigger one. The Gorn purposely baited the Enterprise into destroying one of their own. They sacrificed a ship to place her location, and now they’re coming after her. Now the Enterprise is really under the gun.
So they decide to head toward the black hole. There’s a brown dwarf that’s falling apart into it, and the debris field, the nebula of space dust, is where they’ve been hiding. We’ve all seen black holes. It’s that little half curvy looking circle thing with a disc around it, and the disc is really just stuff being pulled in and looping around. That’s where they go.
And I really love this about Pike this episode. The whole time he’s like, Enterprise can handle it. She can handle it. I know she can. She’ll take good care of us. And I’m just like, yeah. Somebody trusting his ship. I love it.
Nobody ever treated their ships the way they’ve always treated the Enterprises. They really haven’t. I’m sorry. Maybe Excelsior under Sulu, possibly. But Pike trusts the Enterprise to get them through there. Not to mention you’ve got to trust Starfleet engineers. Corps of Engineers, just saying.
As they go deeper, Spock tells him they’re losing some lower decks because the ship’s starting to buckle. So Pike says all stop, keep us right here. The other ships start moving in, and sure enough one of the Gorn ships crumples. It can’t take the pressure. Done. That’s one little guy and a mother ship to go.
The Lights
Then they notice flashing lights. The two Gorn ships are flashing lights at one another.
La’an knows they can’t bring the ship up out of the cloud to stick their head up and see what’s going on, because they’re immediately going to be set upon, and the Gorn will know where they are inside the cloud. So she makes the suggestion: what if we get in a shuttlecraft? Spock and La’an take the Galileo up, stay in the wake of some things, hide in the sensor blind spots, and that’s where they witness the strobe light thing.
She’s been seeing someone in her head this entire episode, and you find out it’s her brother, who died during the whole thing. She’s the lone survivor of her family, remember. Her brother discovered the lights are a form of communication, and he gave her a way to cipher it. So she can communicate too, and what she tells them is that humans have infiltrated the other ship.
She knows immediately what’s going to happen. They destroy it. They totally blow up their own ship, because the Gorn don’t take weakness. They’re survival of the fittest, which of course they are. They’re an animal monster species. Why wouldn’t they be?
The Pike Maneuver
Now you’re stuck with just the big ship, and they come up with a brilliant idea. For anybody who’s been worried that Pike hasn’t been doing nothing, this is what captains do, right here. You assess all the parts of the thing and then you come up with a crazy strategy. Even Ortegas says at one point that if this works, it’s going to be called the Pike Maneuver.
Pike asks Spock whether they can use the gravitational forces to slingshot around the black hole and free themselves. Spock says of course they can, but the Gorn are going to see it.
At the same time, Hemmer and Uhura have been down below in the cargo bay, where they got stuck when the attack happened. Hemmer broke his hand, so he’s talking Uhura through fixing a system that’s trying to overheat. She’s sitting there babying it, and they have an exchange. It’s fine. It’s modest in terms of the whole storyline. It’s character growth, it’s wonderful, and I’m not saying don’t watch it.
She gets super close to fixing it, but it’s too far gone. They’re going to have to eject the thing to save the ship from exploding. So Pike has them put on their EVA suits, and sure enough they’re going to use it as a massive explosive.
Pike gets in really close underneath that disc of breaking up debris. The cloud’s getting sucked into the black hole, so they’re going to have no cover soon, and he’s got to come up with something. That’s where the slingshot came from. The bigger Gorn ship is trying to see where they’re at. Hemmer and Uhura latch down to the deck in their EVA suits, the bay opens up, and of course there’s drama. Oh no, she came loose, and he’s holding her hand. I think the part they didn’t get to cover is that Hemmer clearly is holding on with his bad hand. That’s a cool touch. He’s going above and beyond to save her life, and that’s wonderful.
The thing explodes, and it’s a fairly spectacular explosion. The Gorn decide, all right, well, I guess they must be destroyed. Yes, they must be. Nobody speaks, by the way, in case you haven’t watched the episode. That’s just what I hear in my head happening on the bridge of their ship. They leave, the Enterprise comes slingshotting around, and the Gorn are gone.
The Stitches
There’s a little side plot in medical too. Number One took some damage early on in the attack and has to get some stitches, and M’Benga’s asking, I hear you’re familiar with archaic forms of medicine. They have all their tools, but medical’s down and there’s no power, so they don’t have the med beds or the surgical beds. All the things they’d normally use, the transporter, the lasers for any cuts, none of that is there anymore.
Where I Land
It’s Remembrance Day, so La’an puts the pin on. The episode ends kind of abruptly, I will say that. I was like, wait, what’s going on now?
But overall it wasn’t too shabby. I like this episode, very much. It’s our second La’an-centric episode, and I’d kind of love to see a little more Spock and Pike. And maybe Hemmer. I’d love to actually get to know him a little better. Right now we’re getting to know him in relation to how he reacts with other people.
I also want to thank you guys for being patient with me. I’d like to say thank you for also being a part of my family, and I appreciate those of you who checked on us.
Let me know what you thought about “Memento Mori” and how it all fits in for you. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
