A few weeks ago in Strange New Worlds‘ up-and-down third season, “A Space Adventure Hour” delivered a deeply unsubtle paean to the creation of Star Trek. This week, Strange New Worlds does much the same: but this time the birth of Star Trek is within the text itself, making for a much more interesting lens on the birth of an icon.
From the moment that it opens, it becomes clear that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” (named for a Vulcan idiom that Spock uses later on) is not going to be a typical episode of Strange New Worlds. Not in that “oh, something’s going to be kooky and fun!” way that you might expect after last week’s dire-stakes episode and the season’s general back-and-forth in tone swaps so far, but because we do not open on the Enterprise, or with her crew at all: instead, on the personal log of Commander Kirk, aboard the U.S.S. Farragut.
At which point the planet the Farragut was monitoring—and Kirk was butting heads with his captain, V’Rel (Zoe Doyle), over beaming down and surveying—explodes. Just like last week, everyone immediately locks in, especially Jim, when V’Rel is incapacitated by the extreme damage caused by the Farragut‘s proximity to an exploding planet. But things go somehow even more badly when, of course, the Enterprise beams to respond to the Farragut‘s distress signal—beaming over an assist team of Nurse Chapel, Scotty, Spock, and Uhura. As everyone races into action and Kirk begins slowly realizing that he’s getting the command experience he’s been waiting for at the worst possible time, the vessel responsible for destroying a planet in a single blast, a massive, tendriled junk ship comes flying along and gobbles the Enterprise up before promptly warping away.
The Farragut is alone, and barely holding together, let alone capable of pursuit. It’s operating on a skeleton crew, most beamed away to Enterprise before its abduction. And James T. Kirk is staring at a captain’s chair, with Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, Uhura, and Chapel at his side.
If “A Space Adventure Hour” was an episode talking about the metanarrative about the birth of Star Trek as a television show, then suddenly, you realize: this is an episode about the birth of Star Trek, the team that we know will go on to appear in the original series. At long last, the crucible that will one day forge one of the franchise’s defining heroes has begun.
So it’s great then that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is really an episode about rocking Kirk’s shit for 45 minutes. The episode splits between the Farragut and the captured Enterprise, disabled in the interior of the junk ship as its systems are drained of power, effectively doing one of Strange New Worlds‘ “disaster on a spaceship” episodes twice over. Kirk has to rally a group of officers who don’t really know, and don’t really trust, him as he tries to figure out what kind of a leader he is in time to rescue Enterprise and stop this junker ship on a collision course with destroying another world called Sullivan’s Planet. Pike, meanwhile, has to deal with shadowy infiltrators sucking his ship dry, a ticking time bomb that will kill both the Enterprise crew and the Farragut‘s wounded.
The stuff aboard Enterprise is fun and definitely tense, even if it is also definitely the b-plot of the episode. Pike and La’an have the mystery of the junkers to solve, Carol Kane gets to ham it up and get everyone to wire up rotary telephones to overcome the ship’s power loss and communications blockage. There’s intrigue and whimsy, but still, the focus of “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is clear: this is the making of Kirk’s moment.
It gives Wesley material that, for the most part up to now, he’s lacked the chance to chew on. Most of Kirk’s appearances on Strange New Worlds have been technicalities: alternate realities, through the lens of goofier episodes like “Subspace Rhapsody” or “Space Adventure Hour” and its holodeck metanarrative (thankfully, Wesley does not go hard on the Shatnerisms as he was encouraged to then). This is Kirk, the man who is going to become Captain Kirk, and he has been thrust into an incredible challenge, with a team that he doesn’t know yet and arguably before he may even have really wanted to be in it.
Thankfully, Strange New Worlds realizes that it’s important to not suddenly supercharge this character into the man that we already know. We see elements of the man we will come to love in the original Star Trek, his braggadocio and his desire to always challenge and take risks, but crucially, we also see the deeply human elements of Kirk that people often forget in their memories, especially amplified here in his younger self. This is a Kirk that doubts, and loses his cool, and is allowed to react to the stress of the situation he’s found himself in, and react poorly, and fairly so given the circumstances.
Likewise, this gives the proto-TOS crew that he finds himself leaning on to get the Farragut even remotely close to shipshape a chance to react to this Kirk, and begin to feel out the seeds of what will become their relationships. It’s fun to watch Martin Quinn’s Scotty absolutely hate working with this guy, a thickheaded commander who wants to push systems an engineer knows can’t be pushed, just as it’s fun to watch Kirk’s relationship with Uhura, and the trust they already established together last season, flourish even further as that bond deepens.
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