It’s fair to say the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was a bit of a mixed bag. Despite some highpoints, there was a sense of the show struggling to balance its high-concept episodic experiments with its serialized storytelling—especially when so much of that serialized storytelling was tied up in romances that, frankly, never worked as well as the show wanted them to. (I hope you’re enjoying life as a statue, though, Marie Batel!) Given that season four was already filming as season three aired, I was slightly worried the show wouldn’t have time to take in that feedback before moving forward. Thankfully, however, this premiere suggests the writers didn’t need an outside push to know they needed a fresh start.
“Valles Marineris” isn’t an amazing installment of Strange New Worlds. In fact, for an episode about the Enterprise traveling 65 million years into the past to literally create life on Earth as we know it, it’s oddly straightforward and simple. But, in this case, that simplicity is more of a feature than a bug. This is an episode that re-anchors the show as a fun but thoughtful adventure-of-the-week sci-fi romp with a likable cast and an interest in themes about fate and destiny. It’s wacky in a way The Original Series could be (director Chris Fisher conveys time travel by literally just rotating the screen 360 degrees) while also showing off all the impressive special effects of Alex Kurtzman-era Trek. If it all feels a bit workman like, well, I’ll take that over some of the messy lowpoints of last season.
The fun of this episode is just how big it swings—from Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) riding in on a horse on a Wild West planet to Lieutenant La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) punching a dinosaur in the face on ancient Earth. While Trek tends to anchor its time travel stories to the 20th and 21st century, the idea of traveling back tens of millions of years to meet a hitherto unknown civilization who once lived on Mars is really out there. The show is now all but canonizing the idea that Chief Engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) used to travel with The Doctor and this episode is Strange New Worlds at its most Doctor Who. (Specifically, “Dinosaurs On A Spaceship” mixed with “Empress Of Mars.”)
“Valles Marineris” anchors that bigness through the lens of two characters in particular. On the one hand, we’ve got Lieutenant Commander (now newly promoted Commander) Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) leading an away mission as part of her ongoing efforts to climb the ranks through Starfleet. On the other, we’ve got Pike processing everything he went through last season, as well as his ever-looming future disfigurement, by throwing himself into six months of non-stop space adventures until he’s suddenly forced to confront a situation where he’s the one making decisions about another captain’s future.
They’re both storylines that tie into our meta knowledge that Strange New Worlds will be ending with a shortened fifth season next year. Yet they’re also both storylines that acknowledge we’ve still got 15 episodes to enjoy before that happens. Una’s dream of captaining her own ship sets up an easy, non-traumatic way for her to leave the Enterprise before the events of The Original Series begin (and potentially take characters like Melissa Navia’s Erica Ortegas with her). Meanwhile, Pike gets yet another chance to reaffirm his desire to live in the present without constantly being bogged down by his fear of the future. One day he’ll accept the promotion that will lead him one step closer to his accident. But, for now, he’s happy staying in the captain’s chair a little longer.
Indeed, the most interesting idea at the heart of “Valles Marineris” is its exploration of perspective. Once the Enterprise crew realize when they’ve landed (after pretty recklessly flying towards an interstellar squall, I might add), their first priority is to preserve the future as they know it. Even killing a T-rex might cause a butterfly effect they can’t predict. For Martian Commander Cassel (Saffron Burrows), however, protecting their timeline is irrelevant. “We live now, not in the future,” she notes. Protecting the Enterprise’s timeline would mean rooting for her own people’s destruction and that’s just not something she can do—even if she’s willing to sacrifice her life and the lives of her crew to protect her homeworld from an arachnid species known as the Dol’drm, who they’ve been at war with for years.
Though it would have been easy to play Cassel with the intense demeanor of a Romulan (she’s certainly got the ears for it), Burrows makes the more intriguing choice to play her in a gentle, contemplative manner. She’s not war-like by nature. In another life, she would have loved to have been a doctor. But she’s trying her best to meet the moment she’s been thrust into. It’s a compellingly unexpected portrayal of a wartime captain.
The trouble is, the gentleness of the performance, the all-powerful nature of the Martian’s phasing technology, and the way Pike pretty much just throws the Temporal Prime Directive out the window to try to help Cassel make peace with the Dol’drm kind of robs the episode of a sense of stakes. “Valles Marineris” tries to make up for that by putting Una, Ortegas, and La’An in a dinosaur action movie. But the two halves of the episode never quite cohere into a thrilling whole—especially when it turns out this was all a closed loop time travel story anyway. Everything that happens here is what had to happen to create life in the solar system as we know it. (After all, there’s not currently a planet full of giant ant people between Mars and Jupiter.)
That makes this hour more interesting as a thought experiment than anything else. I suspect some will find it a bridge too far to make the Enterprise crew this directly responsible for all life on Earth, just as others will find it a bridge too far to have Pike allow a planet-wide genocide to take place to protect his own future. I can’t necessarily disagree with either of those arguments. But there are grace notes here that still worked for me—La’An and Ortegas sadly contemplating the death of the crashed Dol’drm colonists; Commander Cassel’s quiet disbelief that a collaborative idea like the Federation could ever work; the fact that a fragment of the destroyed Dol’drm homeworld becomes the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; Pike noting that the Enterprise followed its own 65-million-year-old buoy into this situation in the first place; the way Dr. Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) explains that Martian DNA is present in innumerable species throughout the galaxy, which I guess makes them a step between the Progenitors and the Trek aliens we know; the fact that our home planet can be a “strange new world” too.
It’s not the cleverest closed loop story, but in a way that helps set expectations for this season. Strange New Worlds is here to have fun and not overthink it. While we can quibble about that mission statement, for now I’m inclined to appreciate this show’s present while we still have it.
Stray observations
- • Welcome back to weekly reviews of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds! I’m excited to be breaking down this season with you all again and look forward to reading your takes on each episode in the comments.
- • While La’An is generally the MVP of Strange New World, the flirty scene with Spock and the sickbay scene where she talks about her recessive augmented DNA activating are both very clunky. Hopefully that’s just the show shaking off some cobwebs before she gets back to business as usual.
- • New cast member Bianca Nugara (aka Kip’s smoothie coworker from Heated Rivalry) mostly sticks to the expected officious beats as Vulcan Starfleet Cadet A’Sha. Personally, I always think Vulcans should be more neutral and curious rather than cold and judgy, but I did appreciate the final scene where she points out that as a full Vulcan, her experience on the Enterprise is going to be very different from Spock.
- • Pike bringing his own saddle on an away mission is a nice reminder that he started this series riding horses on a ranch in Montana.
- • At one point, Commander Cassel notes that she only knows her world and the Dol’drm, in which case I feel like she should be way more excited and/or freaked out to discover there are other sentient humanoid life forms out there??
- • The Dol’drm are woefully underexplored, but it’s nice to see a case where Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte) and his Xenoanthropology specialty could be useful!
- • The rivalry between Ortegas and Scotty (Martin Quinn) is cute. I totally buy that engineers and pilots have a kind of Army vs. Navy dynamic going on.
- • In addition to the winking Doctor Who phone booth reference, Pike excitedly pulls out a copy of the 1912 John Carter classic A Princess Of Mars.
- • The opening 60th anniversary intro featuring all the past Trek ships is really nice!
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