The Vezda are back in a big bad way, and we finally get resolution to several plot threads that have been strung through this entire season. But did that gamble pay off?

This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3, episode 10, “New Life and New Civilizations,” and the title is doing real work by the end.

At the core of this episode there’s a conceit I’m a little frustrated by. I want to say that up front. But I don’t hate this episode. In fact I like it quite a bit. The season overall was definitely a mess. It wasn’t a horrific mess. I was able to go with them on the journey they were taking us on, rough episodes and all, and I think you were too.

The Captain’s Table

We open on Pike throwing a party for Batel, who’s celebrating her promotion, and the crew doing a captain’s table, which we’ve seen before.

This gives Scotty the exact same treatment Uhura got in the very first episode of season one. He shows up fully dressed, in uniform, ready to go, kilt and the whole nine yards, and of course the entire thing is a prank. I liked the situation and I liked the introductory encounter they built out of it.

You also get a really cool namedrop while Pelia is telling stories. Remind me to tell you about the time I spent with the time traveling doctor I once knew.

And I went, oh. Okay.

It could just be an Easter egg, something they threw out into the world and moved on from. But there has always been that joke that Star Trek should meet with Doctor Who, and if there was ever a show to actually do it on, Strange New Worlds is clearly the utter and total chaotic mess that could carry it. Personally, if it were up to me, I’d want it to be Matt Smith’s Doctor.

Tell me in the comments what you think about that crossover ever actually happening. I’d love to hear it.

Korby, Gamble, and the Ley Lines

During the episode we learn that Korby is on an expedition that was inspired by the Vezda, the alien species we’ve seen as those little energy balls, the ones being held in that prison. The lead is linguistic. There’s a word the Vezda said that closely resembles the name of a place on a planet called Skyawan, which nobody in this episode pronounces the same way twice, including the cast.

Skyawan has these enormous floating city structures. Korby goes there, and that’s where we find out Gamble is somehow back.

If it isn’t Doctor Korby, the man who wants to live forever. Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Yeah. Our favorite medical ensign, who honestly looked like a genuinely cool character, comes back. The explanation arrives during some routine maintenance in sick bay: the medical transporter was used, and when it was used, a copy of Gamble’s energy got made. And then, they say, that energy left the ship and took a quick ride on galactic ley lines.

We know interdimensional space folds along those, what do you call them. Ley lines.

If you know anything about ley lines, they’re supposedly points of energy that crisscross the planet. This is their version of that idea on a galactic scale. He hopped on one and hot tailed it right back to Skyawan.

That’s the prevailing theory the episode lands on, and I thought it was absolutely insane. This is where the writing gets real liberal with itself. Very tongue in cheek, a fair amount of hand waving. I noticed. I went with it anyway.

The Door and the Poem

On Skyawan there’s a door that leads back into the Vezda prison, and it’s one of the many, many doors we saw inside that prison. Gamble, our second Gamble, can’t open it alone. He needs another person.

So the away team goes down, and what they find is writing all over the door. M’Benga is the one who picks out that the words are Swahili, and Uhura helps him work out what he’s actually looking at.

It’s his story. As a child. A young boy was not yet a man, but his time had come to kill or be killed, a knife in his hands.

An epic poem. Now it’s about me.

He’s the one who is purposed to go in. That’s why he’s needed. Sure enough, he touches it, and it opens.

He says they have to close this before Gamble shows up. Guess what. Gamble’s here. So now they go in together.

Kirk, Spock, and the First of Many

Pike then has to figure out how to get his people back in, and they determine that with enough energy they probably can. They pull it off with the help of Kirk’s ship.

The Farragut is one of the nearby vessels, and its Vulcan captain reckons she owes them, so she comes. We really only ever see Kirk on the bridge, and I’d bet that’s all they filmed, but he shows up and he helps.

To synchronize the two ships, Spock and Kirk perform a mind meld.

Okay, Mister Spock, but be gentle. My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.

And this is probably the first of what will become a whole lot of their relationship and their friendship. Aiming isn’t the hard part here. The hard part is that you cannot screw this up without blowing up the entire place. They charge it, they thread it, and Batel and Pike go in.

Batel, the Guardian, and a Lifetime in Minutes

Here’s the piece the whole season was quietly pointing at. Batel is the guardian we saw inside the Vezda prison.

What guardian, Mister Know-It-All? I’m glad you asked. Remember the posed statue thing sitting at the center of that table structure? That’s apparently her, frozen in time, standing guard in whatever form she’s going to take. There are several moments where Gamble fires energy at that statue and it shows up as wounds on Batel. It’s a whole thing.

Then Pike gets knocked down, and when he wakes up, he’s past the event. He’s in his own future. He and Batel have ended up together. They got married. They have a child. We watch them move through a life, and there’s this mysterious knocking underneath all of it.

Clearly this isn’t what it looks like. It’s a It’s a Wonderful Life moment, except not really, it’s more like a fast forward through their entire lives together.

Fans of Star Trek will say this feels familiar, and not in the way some other things this season have felt familiar. We’ve seen this in Next Generation episodes. We’ve seen it in original series episodes. An eternity in minutes. That’s exactly what this is.

Now that Batel is becoming the guardian, she has some access to manipulating space and time, and she uses it to give Pike a lifetime of experiences, because she is not going to be able to stay with him. Even inside that little pocket world, he goes on the mission that’s eventually supposed to kill or injure him, and he comes back and says he doesn’t know what happened, nothing happened. Because none of that was the point. The point was that the two of them got to spend their lives together.

I thought it was really beautiful, and it felt very much in line with things this franchise has done before.

Then Batel takes her place as guardian of the Vezda, and she disintegrates all of the bad guys, because it’s funny. And it is very hand wavy, the way that happens. Honestly, it felt like all of this existed to accomplish one thing, which was writing Batel out.

So we were all wrong. The reason she went in the first place is that something happened in her eyes when Gamble instigated all this, and they looked shimmery in exactly the way we’d expect if she were becoming Gorn. She’s not going to be the Gorn queen after all. Those were red herrings, and that’s totally fine.

The Comet and the Five Year Mission

At the very end you get this wonderful moment where Pike and his crew go onward, fueled by a star chart they pulled from Skyawan. It opens up a whole slew of uncharted worlds, and somebody says out loud that it’s about five years worth of exploring.

Somebody asks what course. And then a comet flies by.

The implication is that it’s Batel, because you saw a comet in that little pocket world. It’s a beautiful moment, and as endings go, I liked it a lot. I’m here for it.

There’s also a brief beat at the very, very end where Spock and Kirk share a drink, and you understand these two are much stronger as friends now. And yes, Spock’s relationship with La’An continues.

The Verdict

So what does next season hold? That’s a great question, and I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that this was a really good ending to a really rough season. Not the worst season of television ever made, because it absolutely wasn’t. But there were moments in this run that tested my fandom, for sure.

Judging this episode only, and this episode only, Strange New Worlds season 3, episode 10 gets an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. Rough season. Good episode.

So there you go. Now you know.

Let me know down in the comments on the video above what you thought. Did you like it? Was I wrong? Is my score wrong? Did the whole season ruin it for you, and should I have bailed out by now? I’ve also got a video coming on some of what they announced at Star Trek Day, because there are a couple of things we should probably look at.