It’s been almost two years since Star Trek: Strange New Worlds left us on a tense cliffhanger, and now it’s finally back to pay it off. It is perhaps an unfair pressure to put on the show, that circumstances outside of its control have kept this return anticipated for longer than it should have. But even beyond the context of its Hollywood strikes-induced delay, there was going to be pressure on Strange New Worlds to put its best foot forward regardless.
So… it’s perhaps not ideal that the series has returned with a bit of a mixed bag. A premiere of two episodes that couldn’t be further in tone from one another—one a grim, intense, high-stakes action conclusion to last season’s cliffhanger, the other a Spock character piece bursting with goofy, silly shenanigans—season three’s debut at its best speaks to the variety of storytelling modes Strange New Worlds can weave itself through.
But beyond the specific executions of those plots, these very different episodes both ring a bit hollow in similar ways, as they both struggle to both wrangle with the show’s episodic desires with increasingly serialized elements, and also struggle with how they handle their relationships to wider Trek canon.
Hegemony, Part II
The premiere episode itself, “Hegemony, Part II” (Strange New Worlds‘ first actual two-parter, made all the cuter by letting Anson Mount pick up with Star Trek tradition and lead us into the episode with the “And now, the continuation,” narration!), picks up like there hasn’t been a two-year wait to see just what Pike and the Enterprise crew will do to escape the wrath of the Gorn over Parnassus Beta.
Like Strange New Worlds‘ prior Gorn-centric episodes, “Hegemony, Part II” provides a masterclass in high-stakes tension. Albeit more action-forward than the creepy Alien horror vibes of past Gorn encounters, the episode deftly and cleverly weaves three distinct plotlines together around them. First, we have Pike and the Bridge team racing to try and rescue their captured crew and the missing Parnassian colonists and save the Federation from a potential Gorn invasion; then, elsewhere on Enterprise we have Spock and Chapel trying to save Captain Batel from her Gorn infection; and then we have the aforementioned captured crew themselves—La’an, Ortegas, Sam Kirk, and Dr. M’Benga—trying to escape alive from what can only be described as “The Collector Base from the ending of Mass Effect 2, but full of Gorn.”
It’s a lot, and it’s all filled with high tension and big action setpieces, from body-horror rescues to starship and ground shootouts, and again, it’s all cleverly weaved so everything climaxes together just so: each thread of the narrative ends with our heroes saving the day, in spite of the odds, and with the Gorn, Strange New Worlds‘ most persistent of threats, are seemingly done for.
All that sounds good and fun, right? Well, it mostly is from a spectacle standpoint. But If this really is the end of Strange New Worlds‘ envisioning of the Gorn (save for some potential lingering trauma this season, more on that next episode) and the show has had all it wants to say in setting up this connection from here to the classic Star Trek episode “Arena,” then “Hegemony, Part II” feels like a climax that really doesn’t have a vision for the Gorn beyond treating them as unequivocal monsters for the most part.
There was a fleeting moment in part one where Spock and Chapel felt a twinge of regret for having to kill a Gorn warrior that seemed to suggest that Strange New Worlds was going to have the potential to pivot and bring some nuance to a species that it had, up to that point, treated as little more than primally aggressive creatures. But while that particular beat is paid off in their shared handling of curing Captain Batel’s infection (by feeding the Gorn embryos the sustenance they need so it doesn’t fatally burst out of her, letting it absorb into her system), the rest of “Hegemony, Part II” just continues to do that for the most part. There’s some attempts made, sure, as part of the way Pike and the crew eventually discover how they can stop the Gorn from invading the Federation—their aggression, it turns out, is driven by increased solar activity in their home system, with the Enterprise managing to reverse the effect just in time to send a huge Gorn armada back into hibernation.
But even that small layer of depth to the titular Hegemony is largely shadowed by Strange New Worlds continuing to portray the Gorn as explicitly animalistic monsters. The Federation doesn’t even consider co-existence, it sees war with the Gorn as inevitable and wants Enterprise not to find a peaceful solution, but a way to “punch back.” The capture of the away team and the colonists reveals that the Gorn, when they don’t violently impregnate their victims to breed, just melt down their prisoners into biomass fuel in a long, excruciating, and horrifying process, an act of profound evil. Even when La’an and the mostly-not-melted Enterprise away team (save for poor Ortegas, who loses a good chunk of one of her hands from not being brought out of pod-capitivty soon enough) are making their escape, there’s no humanization or understanding: the Gorn are there to run at them in droves and be gunned down.
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