I need to say something that is going to sound crazy, and I need you to let me get to the end of it.
I just watched the last episode of Strange New Worlds. Not the last episode of the season. I know there is a season five, I know it is six episodes, and I know Kirk gets the chair. I am telling you that I sat there with the credits rolling and every part of me that has ever worked on a television show said: that was the end. That was a series finale. And that is not an accident. That is on purpose.
Here is the part I could not shake. It did not feel like The Original Series. For an episode with those uniforms, with that hair, with that bridge, it gave me way more Next Generation than it gave me Kirk and Spock, and I could not tell you why.
I can now.
This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 4, episode 10, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise.” Two Uhuras. A time ripple. Kirk in command of a ship he does not have yet. And a whole lot of people who are about to tell you this is what the show should have been all along.
The Finally Crowd Has the Ending Backwards
That is the word this week. Finally. Finally, real Star Trek. Finally, no puppets. Finally, a serious hour.
I think the people saying it have the ending backwards, because this was not the show finally becoming something. Strange New Worlds just gave The Original Series its finale, the one it never got. They built it on purpose out of the only Enterprise finale that ever actually worked, and once you see the shape of it you cannot unsee it.
I am not going to defend this season again. I did that last week. I made the case that the gimmick episode is the real Star Trek, that the fantastic hour is the format, that the gangster planet and Trelane and Robin Hood in tights are the show and not the exception. Go watch that one if you missed it. I am not walking it back and I am not repeating it.
I am going to say something different this week.
Go back to The Original Series, the 79 episodes, and sort them by how serious they are. By my count you get about 15 that are what people mean when they say serious science fiction. “Balance of Terror.” “The City on the Edge of Forever.” “The Doomsday Machine.” “Space Seed.” That handful. And here is the thing about those 15. They are the ones we hold up. They are the paragons. When somebody says The Original Series was great television, those are the 15 they are picturing, and they are picturing them so hard they forget the other 64 exist.
This episode belongs to the 15. I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is a serious hour, an earnest hour, a big science fiction idea played completely straight.
That is not the show finally becoming something. That is what the 15 were always for.
Because here is what nobody in the finally crowd wants to sit with. Endings are earnest. Every one of them. You do not end a show on a costume party. You do not say goodbye with a puppet. When a story is closing it gets serious, because closing is serious, and that has nothing to do with the room losing an argument about tone. It is about what an ending is.
So when somebody tells me they are giving this episode a garbage score because they are mad about the other nine, I hear it, and I am not going to do it. Everything gets judged on its own merit on this channel. Every time. The hour, not the argument about the hour.
One concession up front. Time travel is the easy get. It always is. It is the easy place for a Star Trek writers’ room to go when it wants a finale to feel big. I know that, and I do not care, and the reason I do not care is the reason this whole piece exists.
Because if this hour belongs to the 15, the question is which one it is built like. And the answer is not any of the 15.
The Ship That Never Got an Ending
The Original Series never had a finale.
Sit with that, because we all know it and none of us ever think about it. The last episode of Star Trek to air on NBC was “Turnabout Intruder,” June 3rd, 1969. It is an ordinary hour. It is not even a good ordinary hour. The cast knew about the cancellation before they finished shooting it, in January of that year. No goodbye. No last mission. Nobody got to say anything to anybody. The ship that every single thing in this franchise runs on, the one the whole universe is built around, was never given an ending. It just stopped.
The Next Generation got one. May 23rd, 1994. “All Good Things.” If you have not watched it in a while, go back, because here is the shape of it. Picard is unstuck in time. He is in the past, seven years back, on the day he took command. He is in the present. He is 25 years in the future, an old man at a vineyard. The whole episode is him moving between the three, seeing the crew he is going to have before he has them, seeing what they become, and the last mission is really a goodbye dressed up as a mission. That is the finale. That is the one everybody agrees is the finale. Every Star Trek ending since has been trying to be that episode.
Now look at what you just watched.
Two Uhuras. One at the very, very beginning, and one in her prime, working the same problem across a gap of time. I want to be careful with that word, because the press keeps calling the future one the older Uhura, the end of her career, and that is wrong. She goes on to Kirk’s five years. She goes on to the movies. The woman in that uniform is not at the end of anything. That is the Uhura we grew up with, at the top of her game, and she walks into that era with surety, with confidence, with character. What this show is playing is not the end of her career. It is the beginning of the mature era of her life.
Kirk’s bridge, shown to us before it exists, with the uniforms and the hair and Bones getting mentioned before he has ever set foot on the ship. The crew we know, referred to before they arrive. The captain we have, in the room with the captain who is coming.
That is not a “Yesterday’s Enterprise” homage. The title is a Next Generation title, sure. But it is built like a different Next Generation episode entirely. It is “All Good Things,” on the original ship, for the original crew.
That is the Next Generation feeling I could not place.
Where It Stops Being a Feeling
Akiva Goldsman got asked, in an interview that went up the morning this episode dropped, how close the future we see here is to where the show actually ends up next season. He did not say alternate timeline. He did not say what if. He said, and I am quoting, “I don’t think this is an alternate future. I think this is an interstitial future.”
Interstitial. In between. On the way there. He said it exists in continuity. And when Henry Alonso Myers was asked what would change between what we saw and where they land, his answer was one sentence. Scotty doesn’t die. That is it.
So that bridge you saw Kirk walk across is not a maybe. The men who made it say that is where the show ends.
Now the dates, because this is where it gets on purpose.
Paramount announced in June of last year that season five would be the last, six episodes. Season four filmed from March to the end of August. This episode is the last one shot. So it was on the stage in the weeks after the room knew the show was over. I cannot tell you when it was written. I can tell you when it was made, and it was made knowing.
And they had a choice about how to end it. Goldsman has said Paramount’s first idea was a movie. Two hours, wrap it up. The room said no, two hours would be awful, and went back and forth until they got six episodes. Here is how Goldsman describes those six. He says there is going to be, quote, “essentially no genre hopping.” He calls them “a suite of episodes that are about our goodbyes to those characters.” Six goodbyes. One tone. Ending on Kirk’s first day in the chair.
But the one that got me came eight days before this episode aired. Goldsman sat down with Radio Times and said the thing out loud. “Nobody’s called. The sets are gone.” And then this. “At least for me, my time with Star Trek is over now.”
The sets are gone. The bridge Kirk walks across in this hour has been struck. The man who built it says his time is over. He said it a week before I did.
Season Five Is the Epilogue
Here is where I land, and I am going to say it as plainly as I know how.
This is the end of Pike’s story. Everything of consequence that does not point forward to Kirk and his Enterprise happened here, in these four seasons, and it closed tonight. What is left is the overlap. Season five is not the end of Strange New Worlds. You just watched the end of Strange New Worlds. Season five is the epilogue.
And I can prove the overlap is the overlap, because the episode showed me the seam.
Uhura, in the future, says La’an’s name. And Kirk reacts. Not a big reaction. A real one. Something happened between those two, and we do not know what, and when Goldsman got asked about it that same morning his entire answer was: you will have to watch season five.
Think about that for a second. The one thread this hour leaves hanging on purpose is the one that points at Kirk. That is the rule, right there, in the text. What points to Kirk is held for the overlap. What does not is finished.
And it is not a random thread. Last week I told you La’an spent the whole fairy tale following strangers, the fake versions of her friends, because being guided by somebody who does not know you is easy, and being seen by somebody who does is the hard part. Now the man who flinches at her name in the future is the one person in this entire franchise who knows her from a week that nobody else remembers.
It Was Never the Captain’s Show
So if the show is over, let me tell you who it was about. It was not the captain.
This whole series started with Uhura. Go back to the first episode. She walks onto that ship a cadet. Advanced placement, does not even know if she wants to be in Starfleet, half a foot out the door. And in the last real stretch of this show, Pike gives her a field promotion. The captain whose show this was is the one who pinned it on her, last week. She walks off this episode Lieutenant Uhura. The one we grew up with. Taking her place properly. On some level this entire series has been through her lens, and I do not think I fully saw that until tonight.
Now think about who they handed the time travel to. Goldsman has said, on the record, that Spock and Uhura have endings The Original Series already wrote. They are locked. There is nothing to decide. So the room gave the one job that could change anything to the one person aboard who cannot change where she ends up. And what does she do with it? She does not touch her own life. She spends it on somebody else.
That is why this ending is hers. The only person on that ship who cannot rewrite her own future is the one who gets to decide how the ship gets there.
And Celia Rose Gooding. Man. She leads the charge in this one and she carries it. They have done a wonderful job placing her as a lead, and every scene she is in, she is holding the floor. Here is the thing I noticed. They tried to play the present day version of her as young, as the one at the very beginning, the kid. I almost think that is a misnomer, because what I saw was not a kid. What I saw reminded me of who she was when she first showed up on this show. That is an actor holding four seasons in her body at the same time and letting you see whichever one the scene needs.
That is how you solve two Uhuras. Not with a wig. With a performance. And it is, and I mean this, an honor to Nichelle Nichols.
The Movies as the Outline
You are going to tell me the Scotty and Uhura thing is not from the series. You are right. It is from The Final Frontier. 1989. It was never in the show. The room took a liberty there, and honestly, they took it a little hardcore.
And I am fine with it. I do not feel bad about it at all. Because Myers said out loud that same morning that they are writing from what the movies implied, giving these people things to play that the original show never let them play. A prequel that treats the movies as the outline is doing the bold version of the job. The safe version is pretending the movies do not exist. They did not take the safe version.
One itch. One. And it is the same itch I have had all season. I still cannot tell if Paul Wesley is trying to do a Shatner cadence or if that is just how he talks. It is stilted. It has got that thing in it. And I have decided it is fine. Whatever.
Two Easter eggs and I am out, because everybody else is doing 40 of them today. The cat officer who hands Kirk something in the shuttle bay, that is M’Ress. Lieutenant M’Ress, the Caitian communications officer from The Animated Series, in live action, because they can do that now, and I love that they did. And Chapel’s girlfriend works for the Department of Temporal Investigations, which is a Deep Space Nine joke wearing a 1966 uniform, and the Lore Reloaded crowd is going to lose their minds over that one.
There is also a bird looking officer on that ship, straight out of the cartoon, and I am going to let you tell me who that is, because I have got a guess and I would rather hear yours.
The Verdict
Strange New Worlds “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” lands at a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Look at what is sitting here. An hour that belongs to the 15, judged on its own, not on the nine that came before it. A finale built the way the only Enterprise finale that ever worked was built, for the one ship that never got one. A showrunner saying in print that the future we saw is continuity, that the sets are gone, and that his time is over. A show that started with a cadet and ended with her sitting down at that station as Lieutenant Uhura, and handed the one job that could change anything to the one person who could not change herself. The movies as the outline and a room bold enough to use them. And a Kirk who talks funny, which I have decided is fine.
Today the fan and the producer felt the exact same thing, and I am not going to run from that. So there is one score, and it is a 10 out of 10.
Sixty years ago the Enterprise just stopped. No goodbye, no last mission, the lights went off in January and the last episode aired in June. Tonight a cadet who walked onto that ship four years ago sat down at her station as Lieutenant Uhura and gave it the ending it never got.
Season five is not the end. You just watched the end. Season five is the part where they hand Kirk the keys.
Drop a comment on the video above: which Original Series episode is on your 15, the serious ones, the ones you hold up? And tell me if I am crazy for calling this the end. If you think season five is more than an epilogue, bring the receipts. You know I will read them.
