Strange New Worlds is mine. You know how some people say the original series is theirs, or Next Generation is theirs? This one’s mine, and season 3 starts with a bang.
I got up at 3 in the morning for this, and trust me, I’m feeling it, because I haven’t had to do that in a while. All the normal shows have been good about regular release times and now all of a sudden we’re back on this schedule. I’ve been doing end of season talks with Mrs. Know-It-All, my number one, but this is Strange New Worlds, so she’s here for the two-episode premiere. We already know there are only going to be five seasons. These two episodes give us a big glimpse of what’s to come.
And Now, the Conclusion
For those of you playing at home, last season the Gorn made their move. They attacked an outpost. Batel was there with her ship. Pike had to swoop in and try to help, and the away team and the colonists were all taken by the Gorn. Pike’s barreling in, he’s got to figure out what to do, and somebody says “orders, Captain.”
“Hegemony, Part II” literally starts right there. And now the conclusion. Mrs. Know-It-All pointed out the way they did it and I said yeah, super Star Treky. That’s always been the vernacular of the two-parter when it comes to Star Trek, and I love it.
One thing I noticed right out the gate: Pike has the bridge give him ideas. Kirk almost never did that unless things were crazy. Whenever he checked in with Spock or Scotty, it was because the script needed him to. Here Pike is asking for everybody’s help and everyone’s throwing technical things at him. Diversionary tactics. Create a cloud. Jam their comms so they can’t coordinate attacks. And Pike goes, that’s it, that’s the one.
It’s the closest thing to technobabble I think I’ve seen from this era. Salty Trekker and I have pointed this out in the past: Star Trek technobabble didn’t really start until Next Generation, where the engineers would start saying highly technical sounding gobbledygook. The original series never did that. So with Strange New Worlds being such a flag bearer for that era, it’s interesting hearing everybody throw ideas out. Mrs. Know-It-All liked that they all participated and nobody hesitated to give an opinion.
Being Digested
On the Gorn ship, La’an is the first one to wake up. She’s got some PTSD, she’s still working through the trauma from when she was younger, with her brother. But she wakes up and I loved her first rule: wake up the doctor. Medical first. Last season we got an episode where we found out M’Benga was in the Klingon war, and I’m thinking, clearly he’s the right man to have in a situation like this. He’s a medic who also has experience taking out fools and saving people in the field.
And they were being digested. How crazy was that? I didn’t put two and two together at first. Ortegas comes out of the thing missing part of her hand, saying it wasn’t like this before. Then I noticed some of them have these red spots on their faces and I went, oh my gosh, that’s horrible. Mrs. Know-It-All said it immediately: I don’t remember them looking this banged up.
Meanwhile the Enterprise has to leave everybody. They figure out technical ways to track them, they go back, and Admiral April says don’t cause trouble. “We have an obligation to our member worlds, billions of lives. To rush into a fight right now puts all of them at risk.” We’re still recovering from the Klingon war. And Pike makes a very good point: “You are absolutely right. And the Gorn sense our weakness. We are prey.”
So April lands on, officially you’ve got to do this, but go figure out how to punch them in the face. Pike’s supposed to be patrolling the border. Really he’s going in to rescue his people and rescue his lady.
Skirting Continuity
Everybody forgets we don’t technically see the Gorn much until Kirk faces one in “Arena” in the original series. So this show is constantly skirting continuity. They find out there’s this binary star, and the Gorn send their ships to the middle of it and ride the gravity wave, which essentially throws them into a type of warp. Because gravity plays games, their home world is nearby but we can’t see it, which plays into the fact that we don’t know much about them.
I do love that Una and Uhura figure out the whole species is instigated by solar flare activity. It governs hibernation and when it’s time to move, like animals that hibernate versus the ones that get super active. According to their calculations the Gorn are about to get real riled up. And the solution is actually pretty elegant. Pike says we need to go make ourselves a flare.
They manage to put the Gorn back to sleep, and Pike says, “I can’t help wondering if we didn’t just create a problem for someone else to solve later.” Really? You laid that groundwork, exposition man.
Mrs. Know-It-All said something that made sense, which is that because this was an unofficial mission, that’s why Kirk only knows about them for the first time later. As far as I know, Kirk has never seen one until “Arena.” I’ve got to look it up, but I don’t think Paul Wesley’s Lieutenant Kirk was on any ship in the previous Gorn attacks, which means that aside from the name he wouldn’t have any clue what one looks like. And we’ve already established there are different castes of Gorn. You have the smaller ones we saw in season one. You have these bigger, elite attack ones. Chances are the one Kirk fights later, even though it’s a latex rubber suit, is some version of the command caste, the most humanoid looking, with the lizard face.
The Scotty We Know
Scotty was awesome. We were introduced to him at the end of last season, and they had to find a way to get him in. Mrs. Know-It-All knows very little about Scotty beyond what I’ve told her, and it’s making her love the character. I’ve always said he works so well under pressure because he’s so brilliant, and finding out he was a student of Pelia makes it even better.
He says “I can’t do this,” and she says yeah, you can, it’s not a big deal. Then Pike walks in, and Scotty tries to tell him the real situation, and she jumps in: we’ve got it under control. When do you need it? Yesterday. Okay, we’ll have it ready by then. When she walked out I paused it and said, she’s going to show him how to be the Scotty we know.
Now, a whole bunch of old Trek people are going to get mad about this. Their mentality is going to be, why does everybody have to teach Scotty, Scotty’s brilliant. Nobody’s saying Scotty’s not brilliant. But Spock, Uhura, now Scotty, they’re not who they’re going to be eventually. They’re on the road to becoming those characters, which means people clearly had to have influenced them. They didn’t all come out prodigies, fully formed.
To me this is the epitome of what a prequel is supposed to do. Han Solo discovering where he gets his gun from is the other kind. Here you get a Scotty who’s not that guy yet, and Pelia showing him that we make things happen because the captain asks us to. We figure it out.
There’s a later scene where they have to work out how to make the ship do the flare, and you see them talk it through. I joke about this with myself all the time. I’ll hem and haw and complain when someone asks me to do something that goes against my first reaction, and I always warn people I’m going to moan. Give me five minutes after. Then I go, but if I had to do that stupid thing, how would I do it? And I start thinking it through.
That’s Scotty. “Using the ship would allow us to modulate the exact radiation and EM signals we would need, but you’re basically talking about turning the ship into an artificial star. That’s nearly impossible.” Not impossible. As he’s explaining it, he’s working it out. Even Pike is watching with a smile like he knows what’s going down. Pelia comes in and pushes him a little more. He’s always brilliant. She didn’t make him brilliant. She’s making him learn how to think on his feet and be a leader.
Same thing when they’re trying to make the Enterprise read as a Gorn ship. He was failing just before she walked in. She runs in saying it’s too late, we haven’t got time, we’re all going to die, and he’s done. It’s working. She realized he’s got to stop second guessing and just trust himself, and as soon as he did, he did it right. I love that. And in the next episode he’s a member of the crew, an engineering lieutenant.
Spock, Chapel, and Feeding the Gorn
Chapel’s trying to figure out how to fix Batel, who was infected with the Gorn eggs. Pike says he’s going to send some help, and he sends Spock. Mrs. Know-It-All and I both went, uh oh. But Spock puts it all aside and realizes he’s there to help.
Everything they try could potentially kill her. So Spock asks what happens if they stop trying to do surgery and address the Gorn inside her instead. “What if we treated the Gorn inside of her? We know they emerge to feed. What if we feed them?” Satiate them to keep them from coming out. That is so stinking smart. Her body absorbs them, but the absorption process brings on various infections, and that’s what the Illyrian DNA they used as the fix is working on three months later.
Ortegas Flies the Ship
After they bust out of their little digestive tract, La’an works out the transporter codes. They can’t bring all the colonists with them, but they can give the Enterprise the coordinates to transport them from, and then steal a little ship and get out. La’an is determined to save them all, and good for her.
This next part I thought was convenient, and Mrs. Know-It-All figures some people will agree with me. Sam Kirk looks around and says, “Hey, this looks like an evacuation pile. Maybe whatever the ship can’t process, it expels.” And then he pulls out a gun, ready to go. Weapons from a crap pile. It does make sense that whatever they can’t digest ends up somewhere. I just think it’s super convenient that all the weapons are hanging around right there. Mrs. Know-It-All’s answer was that she’s not a storyteller like me, so for her it totally made sense. Why wouldn’t their clothes, their guns and their comm badges all be in the poop pile? Sure. Whatever Hollywood can afford.
Then they fight their way to the ship and Ortegas gets kebabed. The Gorn’s hand went into her and up. I swear it must have missed every organ, because she flew a ship with that whole gash up her rib cage. I loved this part. She’s the only one who can fly it and she knows it. Put me in the pilot seat. It has to be me. She had such fight in her.
I told Mrs. Know-It-All, oh my God, they’re killing her, she’s off the show. When M’Benga is taking her out of the pilot seat and she says “I’m Erica Ortegas. I fly the ship,” I swear I thought that was it. How did we not know she was leaving? Normally that stuff leaks.
At the same time, we know we can’t keep everybody. Eventually we have to get Sulu, who’s the real pilot down the road, and Chekov, and people like that. But I also realized it’s foolish to think everybody’s lined up and Pike just says, now that you’ve got the perfect crew, peace out. My understanding is they’re going full-blown to the end of this: five seasons that represent the five years of their first five-year mission. Either Pike has his accident and Kirk gets the Enterprise, or Pike gets promoted, but we’re supposed to end with Kirk taking command. Even if he sits down in the last episode right before the credits, it ends as Kirk’s ship. And they’re talking about continuing after that in a new form. There are so many stories the original series didn’t get to tell. Mrs. Know-It-All asked what you’d even call that show, “Boldly Going” came up on the couch, and I said call Paramount, because that’s a great title.
Wedding Bell Blues Is a Tonal 180
We needed the breath of fresh air. The nail biting was over, and Mrs. Know-It-All really needed to know whether Ortegas had met her demise. She up and shows up.
The second episode is “Wedding Bell Blues,” and midway through it suddenly becomes a wedding episode. It goes from a hard, grizzled war episode to what I’d argue is the Trekkiest original series style episode ever, because this is what the original fans signed up for. The original series had episodes like “Hegemony,” serious ones. Then it had goofball episodes. Which brings me to Trelane. There’s always been a question about whether Trelane was a Q or not. He never once says his name in this episode. I’m calling him Trelane.
It’s three months later, and to me this is what season 3 is actually going to be, because we’re clear of the baggage of season two. Chapel’s been on her three-month fellowship and she’s returning to the Enterprise. They’re celebrating Federation Day, a big giant holiday. And poor Spock. He’s so ready. We see him dancing with La’an, he’s got gestures of romantic love lined up for when he sees Chapel, and she shows up with a guest.
“Welcome aboard, Dr. Korby. Will you be needing quarters?” No, she’s taking care of him. “Dr. Korby is my date.”
Every line, I hurt. I don’t like discomfort, especially not on this level. Spock has to play it straight and he’s clearly shouting inside.
The Bartender With the Mutton Chops
Before the big ball Pike wants to throw, they have a get-together in the lounge, and that’s our first glimpse of the bartender. In the reflection he’s a Vulcan. The camera moves up and it’s mutton chops, blonde hair, the jacket, the whole bit.
Everyone was complaining, how can this character be here, nobody’s supposed to have seen him. He’s clearly showing himself differently every time. The camera shows us who he really is just for our sake.
He asks Spock what he wants, and Spock regrets things not being the way they were with Christine. “I have just the thing.” “Don’t drink it too fast. It’ll go right to your head.” Spock wakes up the next morning engaged to her.
The only person not affected is Korby. They say later it’s because he loves her, and love is an emotion that overcomes all this nonsense. Spock figures it out when he punches Korby and everything clicks into place. So now he’s got to solve a problem he doesn’t necessarily want to solve, nobody believes him, and he has to work with his ex’s current boyfriend.
There’s so much good comedy in this, starting with La’an teaching Spock to dance so he won’t embarrass himself. Then Korby suggests he’s unaffected because of his intellect. “My rigorous intellect may have shielded my mind from the illusion.” And Spock says, “If one of our intellects could bestow immunity, I’m confident it would not be yours.”
There he is. There’s the Spock we know, the guy who later on will bust Bones’s balls about stuff. That’s exactly the backhanded nonsense Spock would say, and it was the Spockiest line in the episode. Ethan Peck, God love him, is an amazing funnel for that character.
We also meet Ortegas’s brother, which was a cute little side story. And Mrs. Know-It-All wants it on the record that Uhura’s hair looks amazing. In the first episode her wig was not good, and I understand why. It had been almost two years since they shot what came before, with all the strikes, and the second part hadn’t even been written yet. I like the hair because I feel like before the show is done we’re going to get her in the beehive, looking like the Uhura of old. Everything is pointing toward that stuff and I really dig it.
Pike takes more of a backseat in this one because it’s Spock’s story. I don’t know how people are going to accept this whole storyline, but I appreciate what they’re doing.
Papa Q Sends Him to His Room
When Trelane realizes he’s lost, he turns on everybody. “Prepare for a cavalcade of death. No one gets a wedding cake slice tonight. You’re going to die. You’ll be dead. And you with the crown. What were you thinking? Trying to outshine the bride.”
Then an energy cloud shows up, and I knew immediately. That also confirms he’s Trelane, because that’s exactly how he gets resolved in the original: someone superior above him. There’s a voice. “You have made enough of a mess. Please, let’s not make a scene.” “They’re not listening to me.” “And you are not listening to me.”
It’s the voice of John de Lancie. The voice of Q. He never gets called Q, and Trelane calls him Dad. To me that confirms Trelane is part of the Q Continuum. Star Trek fans have theorized about this for a long, long time. There was a book a long time ago, and I wish I remembered the title, that deals with Trelane and Q. That’s been non-canon forever, because unlike Star Wars, Star Trek books aren’t canon. What’s interesting is they’re making it canon now. Sort of.
I just love that Papa Q sends Trelane to his room. And the whole time Trelane is doing things with a snap of his fingers, which is very Q-like. Even Mrs. Know-It-All knows that.
Captain Pike saves the day real quick, the bar is open, and you get to see them all chill. I don’t know how Christine stays on the ship. I figured she just goes with dude, but I assume she’s here for the rest of the season and they figure out a transfer or something.
The Gorn in the Mirror
At the very end, everyone’s dancing and Ortegas leaves abruptly. She goes to the gym, she’s punching the bag, she stands in front of a mirror, and you see a Gorn soldier in the background. It’s in her head. As soon as you turn the TV off you’re saying that girl’s got some PTSD going on. And Pike watches her leave. He’s the captain, he’s got to know what’s going on with his crew, and he knows something’s going on with her.
It’s a sobering reminder that the season is still going to be grappling with the effects of the Gorn. I don’t know if they’ll be the big bad again, because that’d be two seasons, but I feel like there’s a world where they play a bigger role. It all comes down to how you stay within canon.
Salty Trekker and I have both said it, him more than me, and I agree: they need to just say this is an alternate timeline and move on with life. Then you don’t have to address continuity. That’s why nobody busted the balls of the 2009 J.J. Abrams Star Trek. Alternate timeline, cool, we’re good, I have nothing to argue about now.
Especially if what they’re saying is true. Akiva Goldsman has talked about it, and the showrunner mentioned in a recent interview that when the show ends, Pike is definitely handing the ship over to Kirk. I feel like that’s where you say we’re taking a break, and then you announce a new Star Trek show. Chances are Starfleet Academy comes out, and somewhere around its second season they tell us there’s a new show that continues where Strange New Worlds left off. Mrs. Know-It-All asked when Starfleet Academy comes out, and that’s a great question I was not prepared to answer. I know it’s in production or post-production. We just don’t know when.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds opens season 3 with two scores on the Know-It-All Index: a 10 out of 10 for “Hegemony, Part II” and a 9.0 out of 10 for “Wedding Bell Blues.”
Mrs. Know-It-All went first on the premiere with an 8.5. There were a couple of times I caught her sitting there all tense, really in it, and she told me to shush because she needed to know what happens. It was satisfying, it answered her questions and raised a couple more, and she said maybe she’d just missed Strange New Worlds. I did too.
I went much higher. I gave it a 10. For me it was a wonderful and perfect second episode of a Star Trek two-parter. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It dropped us right back in, and it resolved everything in a way that made sense and was exciting. She said she’d been conservative and wanted to change hers, so her number is a 9.5, because she knows there’s a 10 up the road and she saves her tens. I normally would play that game too, except this is Star Trek. This is my core. It fed everything I needed out of a premiere.
“Wedding Bell Blues” gets a 9.0 out of 10 from me because it felt cut right from the template of the original series, which used to give us all kinds of nonsense like this. Former Greek gods who were actually just alien beings. Trelane, who’s essentially a Q. Harry Mudd and androids. They came up with off-the-wall stuff all the time, and this was the epitome of that idea. It was very Star Treky and I’m down for it.
Mrs. Know-It-All gave it a nine as well. It was fun, it was fun to see Spock the way he was, and after the last episode it was something we needed. She wants to see what happens with Ortegas’s brother, who seems like a really nice guy. We were also introduced to a new member of medical, a new ensign. They only call him Ensign, and he’s going to be a lot of fun.
The second episode was a great palate cleanser. I’m still not a big fan of a two-episode drop, on any streaming service, especially when you got up at 3 in the morning. I was hoping for a “this season on Strange New Worlds” trailer. It wasn’t out when we watched or when we recorded. If they put one out, we’ll probably react to it.
Her last thought is the one I’d leave you with. She’s new Trek, she’s really enjoying this, and she knows she’s lucky to have Mr. Know-It-All next to her saying this is because of this and that is because of that. But you don’t need that to watch this show. I agree with that.
Drop a comment on the video above and give me your two numbers, one for “Hegemony, Part II” and one for “Wedding Bell Blues.” And tell me whether that voice at the end settles the Trelane question for you. Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
