It’s Strange New Worlds day. A brand new Star Trek series has debuted, I’ve been looking forward to this one, and I’m not going to wait any longer. This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, episode 1, “Strange New Worlds.”
When one of Pike’s officers goes missing on a secret mission for Starfleet, Pike has to come out of self-imposed exile. He’s got to figure out how to rescue his first officer while he’s struggling with what to do about the vision of the future he’s been given.
I feel like this is them getting it right. And look, I’m not going to tell you you’re all idiots if you don’t agree. Nobody’s an idiot, everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, and I hate when people do that. But this is Star Trek. It’s Star Trek for the modern age, and you can still see the DNA in it. It’s exciting and invigorating to watch.
It Starts With Pike
When I watched Star Trek: Discovery and they introduced Pike, my first reaction was, oh God, please don’t. You see the Enterprise and it’s wearing that newer look, all the hull plating and the little metal detail. That’s something they started with the J.J. movies and then pushed a lot harder. Yes, you could always see the plates, but now it’s all much more reflective.
Then you get into his performance, and little by little it wins you over. By the end of that storyline on Discovery (spoilers for a series I never reviewed), you feel he’s that guy. You feel he’s Christopher Pike. Rebecca Romijn is doing amazing as Number One, Una. I’m enjoying this a lot.
We’re the Aliens
The episode opens with us walking down a hallway behind an officer in uniform, with a very familiar voice on the voiceover. She walks into a command center that looks like what you’d expect to see, and there’s a screen, and the talk is about what it’s like to encounter aliens for the first time. Then the camera turns, and the person we’ve been following isn’t a human from Earth. She’s from another planet. We’re the aliens.
Very cool switcheroo. It feels very Star Trek. The monitor clears up and it’s a Federation starship, single nacelle, a tiny long range explorer.
So a first contact situation is underway, and we cut to Earth. Bear Creek, Montana, stardate 1739.12. And man, are they doing a great job mirroring what’s happening. I just talked about Pike’s self-exile, and this is the dreariest place you could possibly imagine. It’s snow covered, it’s overcast, it’s literally black and white, and that’s just how the place looks. Then we match cut to a black and white shot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, the classic. I love that movie. I actually didn’t mind the Keanu Reeves reboot either.
Pike’s the one watching it. He’s cooking breakfast, very meticulous, and he’s got a guest who’s another captain. He turns around and we’ve got mountain man Chris Pike. All right, I’m here for it. He clearly didn’t have any hair product, because it’s all kind of fallen every which way, and that’s fine.
They sit down to breakfast and she asks him when he’s going to tell her what happened. He says it’s classified. She says, “I have higher security clearance than you.” And he’s like, I know, it’s crazy. Then she realizes he’s waiting for something. He was promised he’d have until the Enterprise was done in spacedock, which is about another week. Meanwhile his communicator keeps going off and he keeps ignoring it.
April Shows Up
So he goes for a ride on his horse, and we get the scene from the production stills: a shuttlecraft, an awesome modernized version of the classic design with a lot of angles, flying in. And we get our first introduction to Admiral Robert April.
I was loving this. The guy playing him is doing amazing work. But the exciting part for me is that these are characters from Star Trek, and the story is consistent historically. Canonically there was a Robert April who was captain of the Enterprise before Chris Pike. So we’re getting a character we’ve heard about, and now we get to see him. I know he was originally in the old animated series, but that series has been ruled non-canonical, and that’s fine. No offense, I’m not that kind of Star Trek fan. I don’t care. I’m enjoying watching the stories, and these are my new stories. It’s our mythology, and it’s wonderful and beautiful.
April tells him it’s Una. She was in command of that exploratory vessel when they registered a warp signature, and that’s General Order One, the first contact procedures, specifically when you initiate first contact. Pike says he was promised a week. April says it’s an emergency and the ship leaves in about 18 hours. Pike tells him to find somebody else. And April says, look, you can quit on your own time. I need you now. You want to quit when you come back, fine.
Spock, T’Pring, and What Vulcans Tell You
Then we cut to Vulcan, and this is where some people are going to want to play gotcha. Well, Spock said this, and that’s not in the other show. Have we learned nothing about Vulcans from Enterprise, from Voyager, from Deep Space Nine? They tell you what they want you to know. They omit information all the time. Vulcans are incapable of lying, sure, but the truth you hear and the truth they’re telling aren’t always the same thing. That’s all I’m saying.
So it’s Spock and T’Pring, his betrothed, on an engagement date. We met her in The Original Series episode “Amok Time.” She pops the question. They kiss, and a chaperone shows up to say they’re going to have to do that somewhere else. I liked it.
Then you get this very intimate encounter between the two of them, and it’s more sensual than sexy. Their lack of emotion makes the whole thing a little sterile, and I think that was on purpose. But the performers are doing a really great job showing that beneath the calm veneer they’ve built as Vulcans, there’s heat in them from back in the day when they were barbaric.
His communicator goes off. She says don’t answer. He says he kind of has to, he made an oath. She says, you just made another one. It’s Pike, telling him Number One’s been lost. And T’Pring says she’s not going to go chasing around the galaxy just to get him to marry her, which is a total Easter egg, because in “Amok Time” that’s pretty much what she did. She chased him down to make him marry her, or release them from the obligation, or whatever.
Two Stories Pointed at the Same Thing
On the shuttle to the Enterprise, Pike’s reading personnel profiles and he stops on La’an Noonien-Singh. The first contact report says her family was attacked and captured by the Gorn. Yes, the Gorn. Lizard-faced. You know the ones. So she’s got some trauma, and there’s backstory there.
What I love is the structure. The Next Generation introduced the through line of A plots, B plots, and even C plots. In The Original Series you pretty much had the personal story and the episodic story, and the personal story was what the individual characters were going to learn. This episode does that. Pike is dealing with how to move forward knowing what’s waiting for him out there. At the same time you’ve got a first contact where a whole species is about to be introduced to its future, which is warp drive and everything that comes with it. Two mirroring storylines. I’m very much liking it.
Glossy, and Respectful
Of course you get the obligatory shot of the captain looking at his ship as he goes by. Then he gets transported straight off the shuttle. Site to site transport wasn’t really a thing in the old series, but I’m okay with it. These are hiccups I don’t bump into. I just point them out and keep going, because I’m here for the storytelling.
Has anybody noticed these are very glossy sets? J.J. Abrams was shiny. These are glossy. It looks like somebody hosed the whole thing down, and there are reflections everywhere.
But I love the design. Spock and Pike walk down the hallway and into the turbolift, and that’s where it really came to light. That’s The Original Series production design all day. It’s the little silver handles with the tapering light at the top, and the light in the middle that shows the thing moving. That’s what they did back in the day, because that was the 60s idea of the future: it’s going to be super cool, man. They’ve folded it into the glass and into the whole look, and it’s beautiful. There’s an aesthetic here that’s being respected, and I appreciate it.
Pike steps onto the bridge and meets La’an, who’s chief of security and also his acting Number One until they recover the real one. We meet a young, bright-eyed Cadet Uhura, who’s apparently some sort of linguistic prodigy. She’s got an exuberance I’m here for, and I really like her. Ortegas is very cool at the helm. And the Enterprise looks dope, respectful right down to the logo on the side.
Ten Years
Right after they clear the moorings, Pike has a vision. He looks down at the monitor on the captain’s chair and the reflection is himself in the future, injured, just like the old series episode “The Menagerie.” We’re getting a look inside his head. Spock catches it, and you see Pike look up and put his game face on. Then there’s a nice wide shot, he says hit it, and they go to warp.
We get engineering too, and it’s a long tunnel, like it was in The Original Series. This ship looks much more like what I’d expect a starship to look like in scale. Gene Roddenberry used to talk about the Enterprise feeling like a more advanced version of a submarine, very enclosed. This is still enclosed, but everything’s wider and bigger. Still glossy.
Pike hands La’an the conn and goes to his quarters, which is something Kirk always did, so it feels natural. Spock shows up and conjectures a few things, and Pike confirms them. He’s seen his future. His life as he knows it ends about a decade out. And he says it doesn’t feel like a long time now that he’s said it out loud.
Ten years to tighten up and get everything done he wants to get done. That’s intimidating, man. Before he heads back to the bridge he looks into his brandy and sees that reflection again, and then you get the actual vision, the light and the chair and the whole bit. It’s really rough.
The Most Star Trek Scene I’ve Seen in a Long Time
The Enterprise arrives at the planet and it’s a cool shot. The ship is just there. That’s how I think it’d be when you come out of warp. I’m a sinner, but I like this better than how Next Generation and a lot of the others did it. Dude, you’re coming from light speed to sub light. You’re going to see the slow down happen.
There’s no subspace chatter, nothing. They find the warp signature, but something’s off, and La’an starts asking the right questions. She gets there fast: these people haven’t built a warp drive. They’ve built some form of warp bomb. Red alert, shields up because La’an was smart, and what I assume were ICBMs come up at them and don’t do much damage.
Then they’re in the conference room looking at the screen. It’s La’an, the captain, and Spock, and they’re just talking. This is the most Star Trek scene I’ve seen in a long time. They’re debating. I’ve been doing a bunch of rewatches over the last few months as the muse descends, and this is what the episodic nature of this series harkens back to.
Going Down Incognito
They decide to go down to the planet in disguise, find Number One, and find the source of that signature, because they’re convinced these people couldn’t have developed it on their own.
So they go to sickbay, and Nurse Chapel is a scientist here, a genetics expert. She uses a cocktail to make you look like another species on the surface, with no prosthetics, as part of an experimental first contact protocol for observing species right on the cusp without interfering. She’s got a great sense of humor, and the process is extraordinarily painful, which I thought was great. They get an anesthetic first. La’an refuses it.
There’s an exchange in there that feels very much like a message. Your body, your decision, your choice. Very poignant right now. I’m okay with it, because that’s what Star Trek has always done. Then Chapel gives her a kind of “be strong, my sister” moment that’s a little awkward. And when La’an changes, her face is rippling. I’d almost call it akin to the Wolf Man transforming.
Then one of the biggest changes in the series. On the transporter pad, we find out the transporter is going to replicate their clothing and universal translators and the whole bit. First off, I’m down. I think this is exactly how transporter technology should’ve always worked. It didn’t before, and that’s fine. Hologram technology and replicator technology live in the same universe: you take patterns and you generate something from them. The explanation I gave someone recently was the holodeck. When you sit on a chair in there, you aren’t sitting on hard light. You’re sitting on a replicated chair, and when the program ends it goes away. The only hard light is the people you’re interacting with.
Their city could be New York for all you know, and Pike wonders why it’s always an alley. There’s a big public screen with the news of the day, and it looks a lot like today: riots in the streets, police, protests. The building the warp signature is coming from has protesters outside it.
Two scientists walk by. La’an asks permission to act, gets it, and jumps out with a hurt ankle routine. Then she signals Spock: do your thing. People may criticize this, but Spock doesn’t become the Spock we know without traveling a road. The Vulcan nerve pinch will be his move in the future. For now, maybe it isn’t the first place he goes in his head, and that’s okay. She basically has to say nerve pinch, nerve pinch, and he’s like, oh yeah.
They beam the two guys up to copy their biology for credentials, because if we’ve got advanced technology, you can’t tell me we can’t hack this society’s antiquated tech. They’re supposed to stay sedated, and of course one gets away. He ends up in a turbolift with Uhura, and she did the homework, kids. She knows their culture. She tells him this’ll take him to the bridge to meet our captain, only she uses his culture’s phrase for a team captain. He says, wait, you know about my sport? It’s a pretty cool interaction, right up until they step out and Chapel knocks him out.
The One Bit of Jiggery-Pokery
Spock’s Vulcan physiology is shifting him back quicker than the others, so they have to get him a booster, and they do some jiggery-pokery I don’t know if I agree with. I’ve always felt the transporter was enough of a get out of jail free card already. Now they transport the medicine into Spock’s bloodstream. Let that sink in for a minute. They transport physical matter into his physical body. I feel like that should come with a more severe warning label. But whatever. Move the story forward.
In the elevator one of the locals is checking out alien Pike, and then she notices Spock’s ear do a little wiggle. They track Number One to a cell down below, and she’s been shot in the leg. On the way out they get into a fight, and let’s be honest about why. Spock says, Captain, I’m beginning to change back and it’s excruciating, touches his head, and lets out a bloodcurdling scream. It’s fantastic. It feels very Spock.
We Gave Them Warp
In the elevator they get the truth. Nobody handed this species warp. We did it, by accident. The big event at the very end of Discovery happened nearby, their version of a Hubble telescope caught it, and they did what our theoretical physicists do: they reverse engineered the concept. And what they built with it was a bomb.
Pike’s looking at his reflection in the elevator while they dissect General Order One very quickly. Since Starfleet was ultimately the cause, they’ve got a responsibility to fix it, and that does jibe with the order. Later, with the planet’s leaders, they make the point that they should’ve been more careful about where they showed off that kind of thing. Totally down. That makes a lot of sense.
Pike sends everybody back up, and he and Spock get themselves arrested. Take me to your leader. They explain flat out who they are, and she’s all rhetoric and bluster. He’s making a great argument, that we were just like you, and she says the one with the biggest stick wins. He says, oh really? He calls the Enterprise, tells them to drop into low orbit, and shows this species a starship.
That’s what The Original Series was like. A parallel culture that develops along the same lines we did: bipedal, two arms, the whole nine yards, with everything else adapting to location.
Then the scene from the trailer, where he interrupts their meeting. He shows them us. Footage that looks like right now, somebody with a picket sign about auditing the vote, and he walks them through it. This led to a civil war, which led to the Eugenics War, which led to places on Earth exploding. The people of this planet are terrified. It blows their minds. And he tells them they can go to war and kill each other, or they can join us.
You see kids at school with drawings of the spaceship. You see people analyzing the ship design. They want to be a space faring culture. It’s brilliant.
The Enterprise Is Home
The Enterprise warps away, one of the coolest warp shots I’ve seen in a long time, and we get a starbase. April asks Pike whether he’s leaving or what. And he tells him they’re a heck of a crew, and nobody’s ever going to know everything they did, because it’s classified that high. Which is the reason we don’t know it. You can call that neat and tidy. So what. I love it.
Then Pike has his moment in the captain’s log, and where it lands is that the Enterprise will always be home.
I was so excited, because I’d just said it in one of my earlier Picard reviews. I want a show with an Enterprise. I want an Enterprise, man. And we got one, and it’s the original. It’s the OG Enterprise.
We meet a Lieutenant Kirk, and no, it isn’t James T. We see our Andorian, who’s been invited to the party, and that feels kind of like a Dr. Phlox situation, so it’ll be interesting. Then the classic: Pike on the bridge asks what the mission is, somebody gives him the seek out new life answer, and Uhura’s just shy of jumping up to clap.
Give It to Me
I love this show. It’s episodic Star Trek and I’m so here for it. It felt like Star Trek. The moral debates were actual debate, people having discourse and talking it through. Oh God, I’ve missed this kind of Star Trek. Give it to me, man. I’m down.
My love of Star Trek is what’s making this channel grow, and I’m realizing more and more how much I’ve missed it. I can’t wait to do this again next week.
Drop a comment on the video above and let me know what you thought of the pilot. Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
