This week on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it’s Muppet Babies TOS! So congrats to Spock, Chapel, Uhura, and Scotty—and sorry to Dr. M’Benga, whose status as a minor player on The Original Series apparently doesn’t qualify him for the mission. After a season that has riffed on action epics, wedding comedies, zombies, 1960s detective stories, and Tomb Raider-style puzzles, this is yet another zippy action hour. To its credit, this one comes with a harrowing historical twist and a moral lesson too. That said, it also has me wondering about the limits of what Strange New Worlds has to offer to the Trek canon.
Before we get into that, however, let’s start with our leading man of the week. This TOS preview hinges on the return of Paul Wesley’s James T. Kirk in his first non-Shatner-spoofing appearance of the season. I’ve always found Wesley to be quite a fun addition to this early Trek universe, even if his Kirk doesn’t really remind me of the original flavor. (If anything, Anson Mount is the one channeling Shatner’s affable Kirk charisma.) Although given how often Strange New Worlds deploys Wesley in alternate-universe scenarios like the holodeck mystery in “A Space Adventure Hour,” it can be hard to remember just how little time we’ve actually spent with his “real Kirk” these past three seasons.
For a quick recap: We met alt versions of James Tiberius in both “A Quality Of Mercy” (a.k.a. the “Balance Of Terror” riff) and “Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow” (a.k.a. the La’An in Toronto episode) before we finally met the real thing in “Lost In Translation” (a.k.a. the installment where he helps Uhura process her hallucinations of Hemmer). Since then, he’s only appeared in the musical episode, where he spent a week shadowing the Enterprise ahead of taking his new commission as First Office of the USS Farragut. (Remember when he and Una had that whole musical number about the importance of connecting to your crew?)
Thinking through all that helped alleviate my concern that Kirk seemed uncharacteristically out-of-his depths here. I guess the truth is that with only two previous “real” appearances under his belt, we haven’t spent enough time with this version of Kirk to know what is and isn’t out of his depth. It also helped to revisit season two and remember that Kirk was specifically supposed to be the youngest First Officer in Starfleet history—breaking his dad’s record in the process.
So I guess his brief crisis of confidence upon being made acting captain makes sense for a young newbie in his first “major” job. Although opening this episode with a personal log where he explains he’s so bored he can barely remember the stardate anymore doesn’t exactly drive home the idea that this is all still relatively new to him. In fact, between this and Star Trek Beyond, I need Trek writers to understand that a handsome white man zooming up the career ladder and then immediately getting bored is not a relatable or sympathetic character flaw. (Get a new career path, then, Jim!)
Yes, yes, that’s ultimately the point of the episode, once space raiders attack the Farragut, leave Captain V’Rel (Zoe Doyle) incapacitated, and give Kirk his first big test run in the captain’s chair, with the Enterprise rescue team as his makeshift bridge crew. After years of being driven by cocky career ambition, Kirk realizes he’s now the dog that caught the car—or “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” to use the Vulcan idiom (and the episode’s title). It turns out making bold leadership decisions in theory is a lot easier than when you’re the one who has to live with the consequences. And what Kirk originally saw as V’Rel’s overcaution, he comes to see as wisdom.
It’s a nice enough message. And a lot of this episode really is fun and charming to watch—particularly back on Enterprise, where the rest of the crew get to run around being scrappy action heroes led by Pelia installing old-fashioned landlines to circumvent a communications block from the raiders. (I’m still laughing about how Carol Kane delivers the line, “When the novelty wore off, you got a little creepy!” to a Kit-Cat Klock.) But I’m just not sure that what this already pretty scattered season needed was a Kirk-centric hour—especially when characters like Ortegas and Una have gotten so little focus in this batch (or in this series, frankly) and since it’s not like we’re lacking for Kirk-centric Trek elsewhere.
Last season, it felt kind of revolutionary to use Kirk as a supporting player for an Uhura story. But using her as a supporting player in his is just business as usual—even if it’s sweet to see her advocate for his potential while the rest of her friends consider declaring him mentally unfit and taking control of the ship. (That’s kind of an escalation if you ask me.)
There’s also the fact that it’s a little hard to believe that a character who feels this green here is going to become the captain of Starfleet’s flagship sometime in the next five years. Starting Strange New Worlds seven or so years before The Original Series is just an odd amount of time to do “younger” versions of the characters we know and love (particularly for someone like Spock, who’s got a two-century lifespan). Where the J.J. Abrams films made everybody youthful cadets to up the contrast, here we’re tracking the difference between Kirk at 27 and Kirk at 32, which is a much more nuanced time of personal growth. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do that kind of subtle character work in an episodic sci-fi show that’s mostly just here to have fun—especially with a character who isn’t a series regular.
From a canon perspective, it actually would’ve been far more intriguing to learn about Kirk’s relationships on the Farragut and how they shaped him into the man he is on The Original Series. (The fact that he served under a Vulcan captain feels like it totally recontextualizes his relationship with Spock.) But because the show has to use its main cast and because this episode wants to lean into the TOS nostalgia, it has Kirk learn his lesson via his future Enterprise pals and Pike instead, which is a more “fun” but less interesting choice.
And, unfortunately, it kind of feels like making the more fun but less interesting choice is Strange New World’s default—even in an episode like this, which is all about adding shades of grey to what initially seems like a Good Starfleet vs. Bad Space Raiders premise. Indeed, I quite liked the twist that the scavengers who have become legendary monsters across the galaxy are actually the descendants of a 21st-century human-science mission, a reveal that horrifies everyone in a way they can’t quite put into words.
I was reminded of The West Wing scene where President Bartlett asks, “Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?” and Will Bailey replies, “I don’t know, sir, but it is.” Objectively, there’s no reason the crew should have more empathy for these human space pirates than they would for an alien race with a similar origin story. But even a utopian society can’t erase all instinctual biases. And there’s something Pike and Kirk find especially unsettling about seeing human faces and American flags behind the terrifying masked figures and giant chomping space ships they’ve just destroyed.
The whole thing becomes a lesson in radical empathy for Kirk, on top of the lesson in listening to your crew that he gets from his future TOS pals. Which is nice. It really is. But it’s also kind of predictable and emotionally safe too. And there are times I wish Strange New Worlds wanted to be more than that. While the series launched by course correcting a lot of Discovery’s flaws, it could gain something by embracing that show’s ambitious attempts to say meaningful things too. This week’s twist sort of does that. It’s just a little harder to appreciate because it comes wrapped up in another one of the more fanfic-y installments of the season.
In fact, it’s ironic that an episode about the importance of appreciating the present rather than obsessing about the future comes within one that tries to rush us ahead to The Original Series bridge. There’s definitely room to make Strange New Worlds a show about Kirk befriending his future crewmates. But it’s more powerful when that evolution happens slowly and organically (as it has before) rather than when it’s shoehorned in as an overt gimmick.
Stray observations
- • It’s hilarious to open this episode with a “previously on” montage all about how the lives of Pike’s crew mean everything to him after an hour where Ensign Gamble died and literally no one but M’Benga gave a shit. Justice for Gamble!
- • Pelia was a roadie for The Grateful Dead! I feel much like M’Benga walking into her delightfully cluttered living space: “Your quarters are…exactly what I expected.”
- • I’m glad the sexual tension between Kirk and La’An is alive and well. They’re definitely my preferred side of the Kirk/La’An/Spock love triangle. (Sorry Carol Marcus.)
- • Given how much Spock has to be Kirk’s voice of reason here, it does kind of make you wonder why he isn’t the one who ends up captaining the Enterprise.
- • Also, I know actors often don’t play their real ages on TV. But IRL, Wesley is 43, which actually makes him older than most of the actors we’ve seen play First Officers on a Star Trek show (and eight years older than Shatner was when The Original Series started). So it’s kind of funny that we’re supposed to look at him and think, “Wow, how did a young whippersnapper get that job?!”
- • Kirk says he feels a little funny being called captain “while V’Rel’s alive.” Except, he’d still just be an acting captain with his same rank if she died. It’s not a hereditary monarchy.
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