8.2/10
95%
70%
78%
79%
Before I get into the review I’d like to give a little background to my relationship with Star Trek so you don’t think I am a hater of anything that isn’t TOS or TNG — I’m not that at all. A rerun of TOS is one of my first memories of watching anything on television, TNG got me through a dark period in my life and while I wasn’t an avid viewer of DS9, VOY or ENT due to life’s circumstance, Trek has always held a special place in my heart.
And then we get to what people are calling “Nu-Trek” — the Kurtzman era that brought us Discovery, Section 31, Starfleet Academy and the topic of today’s episode review: Strange New Worlds.
I didn’t mind that Nu-Trek played a bit fast-and-lose with established canon, I mean it was bringing in a new audience and if you want the franchise to survive you need to keep people’s eyeballs on it.
I also didn’t mind that they tried something a bit different with Section 31 even if it did fail miserably (mainly because the writer’s didn’t “get” what Star Trek was — read my Section 31 review here) and I didn’t mind when they targeted younger viewers with Starfleet Academy (read my season one review here), because not all Trek has to be aimed directly at me.
But when you take not just established canon within the Star Trek Universe, but actual real-world universe canon, laugh at it, stomp on it, set it on fire and then blithely ignore the ramifications of what you’ve just done because, meh! Who cares? DINOSAURS! We have a very, VERY big problem.
There will be some spoilers in this review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 1 “Valles Marineris“, but I’ll mark them as spoilers so you can skip over them if you want.
Oh, and I know this episode will be very divisive — it’s like marmite: You love it or you hate it. These are just my personal views and you are totally free to have your own and disagree with me. All I ask is if you do choose to leave a comment or ping me on social media you keep it polite please.
What’s Valles Marineris About?
In an effort to push aside his grief at losing Captain Batel 6 months earlier (she was turned into some sort of timey-wimey protection statue at the end of season 3) Pike (Anson Mount) has been pushing his crew to the limit; they’ve run 16 missions straight without any downtime and the stress is getting to them a little bit.
There’s no rest for the wicked though as Admiral Robert April (Adrian Holmes) comes to Pike with a new mission and an offer: accept a promotion to Commodore and Pike needs to decide by the time the mission is complete.
The mission is supposed to be a simple one: observe a massive interstellar storm. Pike thinks this will be a walk in the park as there are no planets in peril or ships in the way and the crew should be able to get back to some good old fashioned science. And they do! Until they detect a mayday buoy deep within the storm cloud.
Pike orders the Enterprise to investigate but the storm intensifies and as they are trying to escape they’re hit by a massive wave of solar radiation which seemingly flings them away from imminent danger but leaves the ship crippled with no sensors, weapons, transporters or shields.
In order to restart the warp core they need to find iridium and as luck would have it there’s some on a nearby planet which they can just about reach on half-impulse power and then use the Curie, the only undamaged shuttle, to ferry an away team down to collect it.
When Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn, La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navara) reach the planet’s surface they’re met with the sight of a volcanic world in the throws of multiple eruptions and right where they need to be? Well it’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex of course!
Back on the Enterprise, things aren’t going much better when the ship is captured by another vessel as salvage. Pike tries to convince the ship’s captain the they are not a threat and this leads Pike and the crew of the Enterprise down a dark and devastating path that will not only impact humanity, but the entire galaxy as well.
What Did I Think Of It?
I’ll go into detail of my main issue with the episode below so you can get my spoiler-free take on “Valles Marineris” here.
Plot issues aside, the episode was just above average for me.
Of course the acting was top-notch as always, especially given what the cast had to work with. The space special effects sequences were excellent, especially the solar storm explosion thingy. But on the ground things were a little less polished.
The effects looked rather cheap for today’s standards and in both ground locations it looked like someone had just discovered the sepia colour-grading tool in Davinci Resolve and had gone slap-happy with it.
The direction was okay, this was Chris Fisher’s 4th outing as a SNW director so he knows what he’s doing, I just felt there could have been a bit more danger/tension given the stakes of the episode. Of course that is also down to editing which was, again, just “okay” as it overused a particular technique which was fun and novel at first but after the first 60 seconds had gone on far too long spoiling the effect.
The music, however, was phenomenal and I really enjoyed Nami Melumad’s score which was what probably made the episode just about watchable.
What Was The Point Of That?
Slight spoilers ahead in this section but they don’t give away any major plot points, just some scenes and a new character.
I have two “What Was The Point Of That?” moments.
The first is the opening cowboy horse riding sequence. It serves no real purpose other than to highlight that Pike is a bit “free-er” when he’s riding a horse (or an away missions in general I guess). The scene was used in the Season 4 preview trailer and seemed to indicate we’d be getting an actual cowboy episode. But no it was Pike, La’an and M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) riding horses for 5 minutes with no plot or story development in sight. It was a complete waste of time and probably cost over $1,000,000 to shoot so I have to ask: What was the point of that?
We also got introduced to a new character, the Vulcan cadet Cadet A’Sha (Bianca Nugara) who is on-screen for a blink-and-you’ll miss it couple of minutes. She’s just there to wind Uhuru (Celia Rose Gooding) up, setting Uhuru up as a good, patient teacher I suspect. A’Sha takes no part in the events of the episode apart from bookending it so I have to ask: What was the point of that?
Strange New Worlds has had an odd way of handling non-legacy characters by dropping them into one episode, ignoring the fact that they exist for most of the season and then wheeling them out when they need to kill off a character when it obviously can’t be a main cast member (See: Ensign Gamble in Season 3 as a prime example of this poor treatment).
Have You Even Seen Star Trek Before?
Time travel isn’t a new concept in Star Trek. Let’s take a quick look at a few previous episodes involving time travel:
We have the TOS Episodes Assignment Earth had the Enterprise sent back to the 1960s, as did “Tomorrow Is Yesterday“.
But who could forget “City On The Edge Of Forever” when McCoy gets drugged up, goes back to Earth via a time portal and accidentally stops the US entering World War II, forcing Kirk to fix it by allowing the woman he loves to get splatted by a car.
In TNG we have the 2-part episode “Times Arrow” where Data’s head is found buried in San Francisco and Picard bumps into Guinan who helps him solve the head mystery. And of course there’s the movie First Contact (my review here) where the crew of the Enterprise-E must travel back to 2063 to stop The Borg assimilating Earth in the past.
There is DS9’s 30th anniversary special “Trials and Tribble-ations” where the crew travel back to the events on Space Station K-7 to stop someone attempting to change historical events that occurred during the TOS episode “The Trouble With Tribbles“.
It seems DS9 was quite fond of messing with history as “Little Green Men” has a ship malfunction transporting Quark (Armin Shimmerman), Rom (Max Grodénchik) and Nog (Aron Eisenberg) back to 1947 Earth where they become involved in the Roswell Incident.
DS9 also has the 2-part episode “Past Tense” which sees a transporter accident beam Sisko (Avery Brooks), Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) and Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) back to 2024 and the pivotal Bell Riots which helped shape public attitudes to the poor and needy, paving the way for a more unified Earth (after the Eugenics wars and World War III I guess).
Voyager’s main time-travel episode was Future’s End, a two-parter that sent the ship back to 1994 where they had to stop an evil tech-bro using stolen future technology from changing the course of human history.
The Enterprise episode “Carpenter Street” has Archer (Scott Bakula) and T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) travel back to 2004 to stop a bio-weapon being unleashed on unsuspecting humans. “Storm Front” sends the crew back to 1944 where Nazis have teamed up with an alien race called the Na’kuhl and are now winning World War II thanks to the alien’s intervention.
And, of course, there’s the One With The Whales (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) where the crew must travel back in time to 1980s Earth to find a whale in order to stop future-Earth’s destruction.
Why do I bring all of these examples up?
Because in each and every single one of them the crew are actively trying not to get involved in events that take place in the past, the Temporal Prime Directive forbids this after all.
The whole point of time travel within the framework of Star Trek is not to change anything in any way.
So what happens in SNW “Valles Marineris“? Pike inserts himself directly in to history and its events.
The Pike Problem
Now on to the spoiler-heavy part of the review — you have been warned!
When Pike realises they have travelled back in time, 65 million years to be precise, he should have limited contact with Commander Cassel (Saffron Burrows). Instead he invites her onto the Enterprise, gives her a nice tour, explains how technology such as shields, weapons and transporters work and in the midst of all that accidentally lets her see that in millions of years time her home world of Mars would become a barren and inhospitable wasteland (until it’s terraformed and colonised in 2069).
Pike feels that he’s doing the best thing for his ship and crew — after all, in order to get home they will need to be freed from Cassel’s energy beams but how on Earth (pun intended) does he think showing her future tech is the way to do it?
Cassel has openly said that the Martians are at war with the arachnid species living on Dol’drm, the fifth planet of the Solar System, so how does Pike know that showing this tech to Cassel won’t change the course of the war in an unintended way?
He doesn’t. He has no way of knowing and all of this is done purely on “gut instinct”.
Pike’s proven to have a great instinct in the past, but after Cassel steals an anti-matter pod from the Enterprise and launches it at Dol’drm, how does Pike know that’s the correct course of events?
He can’t.
Yes, we know that the 5th planet in Pike’s future timeline is Jupiter but there is nothing to say that Mars doesn’t explode and Dol’drm shifts orbit to take its place (See: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Ceti Alphas V and VI) which could/would kill all the Dol’drm thanks to the change in climate, leading to the “Mars” we know today.
And how does Pike know that the anti-matter explosion will be the key to getting the Enterprise back to where it should be?
He can’t.
It’s all guess work.
I mean sure, it all worked out, but what if it hadn’t? Dol’drm could have exploded knocking Mars out of orbit, maybe changing the gravitational pull in the region causing Earth to shift orbit too and then it’s bye-bye humanity.
The whole premise of messing with the entirety of human history is ridiculous, ludicrous, preposterous, absurd and inconceivable.
And more importantly, it’s not what Star Trek is supposed to be about.
Spectacle For The Sake Of… What Exactly?
I get the impression that they we sitting around in the writers room asking themselves “How can we outdo ourselves? I mean we had a fairy tale come to life, we had that musical episode, everyone knows we’re doing puppets. So what else is there?” and from the back of the room someone shouted “DINOSAURS!”
There are a million ways you can get dinosaurs into a Star Trek storyline that don’t involve time travel, having Pike be complicit in the genocide of billions of sentient beings or having La’an punch a Velociraptor in the face. Yes, that happened.
The dinosaurs were limited to a T-Rex in a totally not-ripped-off scene from Jurassic Park, a few cut-and-paste Pterodactyls and the aforementioned Velociraptor, not very thrilling if you ask me. And the CGI effects for ye olde Earth were almost cartoonish in their rendering. I dread to think how much money this episode cost, but whatever it was I don’t think it was worth it.
Final Thoughts
I could go on for a 1000 more words on what a terrible idea this script was, how badly is was executed and what it will do to Trek moving forward but I’m sure you all get my point already.
Star Trek is now saddled with the fact that a Captain from the 22nd Century travelled back in time, and by taking no action assisted in blowing up a planet that killed an entire species while simultaneously murdering all the dinosaurs.
What the actual F….
And it did it seriously too.
Maybe I could have enjoyed it more if the story was a bit more in the realm of camp, or it was revealed to be an alternate timeline or something but alas, no.
This is canon now.
And it’s something that is going to be very, very difficult to fix or explain moving forward.
Star Trek it seems, is no longer being written as Star Trek and that makes me sad.
Of course, this is just the first episode of 10 in the penultimate season and one can only hope the series finds its way back to its Star Trek roots quickly otherwise the show will be going out with a whimper rather than a deserved bang.
