[COLUMN] The Grim Inevitability of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for “Valles Marineris”, the fourth season premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is now streaming on Paramount+.

The fourth and penultimate season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds launched this week with “Valles Marineris”, what is essentially a classic Star Trek time travel episode.

After six weeks of dangerous missions, non-stop adventures across the quadrant, Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) leads his crew to chart an interstellar storm, a phenomenon that his Chief Engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) describes as “space-time gone wild.” When the Enterprise picks up a distress signal from inside the storm, Pike mounts a daring rescue mission that ends up throwing the ship through not just space – but time itself.

Unable to get their bearings from the stars, the Enterprise beams an away team down to a local planet in the hopes of harvesting supplies, precious urinium that is necessary to power the ship’s warp drive. However, while the ground team are working on solving this problem, the Enterprise encounters a pre-warp space ship belonging to an alien species. Battle Commander Cassel (Saffron Burrows) lays claim to the Federation ship as “salvage” as part of her species’ generational war.

Cassel explains that her people have been locked in an extended conflict with a monstrous insectoid species known as the Dol’drm, “a terrible and destructive enemy” who reside on the fifth planet of the system and seek to expand and consume everything in their path. “They are insects,” Cassel warns Pike. “They do not speak or reason as we do. They simply feed and move forward.” It seems that the only possible way to ensure peace is through genocide of these monsters.

Naturally, “Valles Marineris” is building a very heavily-telegraphed twist. The Enterprise has been thrown backwards in time, and has found itself in the Solar System. The planet that the away team is visiting is Earth, populated by the dinosaurs. Cassel and her people are Martians, from millions of years before the red planet became uninhabitable. Pike has wandered into the secret pre-history of the known universe, engaging with a set of forces that he does not understand.

Obviously, as a franchise, Star Trek has a long history of engaging with time travel. The concept was heavily employed in the franchise’s first season, serving as a deus ex machina ending to “The Naked Time”, before becoming the central plot driver of “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and motivating the penultimate episode of the first season, “The City on the Edge of Forever”, which is one of the best episodes of television ever produced.

Time travel has been key to countless classic episodes of Star Trek in the decades since. It was the cornerstone of three of the franchise's best-received movies: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek. It has been employed in classic and beloved episodes like “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “All Good Things…”, “Past Tense”, “Future’s End”, “Trials and Tribble-ations”, “Twilight” and so many others. It is just a thing that Star Trek does.

That said, Strange New Worlds is very fixated on the idea of time travel and time dislocation. This is a prequel series, largely adapted from “The Cage”, the unaired pilot of the original Star Trek series that featured – allowing for Leonard Nimoy as Spock – a largely different ensemble than the crew that eventually led the series. The show is very firmly set in the pre-history of the original Star Trek, to the point that the series is haunted by what will come.

The primary cast of Strange New Worlds includes lead Star Trek characters Spock (Ethan Peck) Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (Martin Quinn), along with recurring Star Trek characters Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) and Joseph M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun). The recurring cast of Strange New Worlds includes James Tiberius Kirk (Paul Wesley), who has headlined multiple episodes. The show has announced Thomas Jane will play Leonard “Bones” McCoy.

Throughout the show, Pike has been plagued by visions of the future. During his recurring guest role on the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, Pike was granted a glimpse his fate in regular Star Trek continuity, as a man bound to a wheelchair and unable to even articulate beyond a single flashing light, as depicted in the first season Star Trek episode “The Menagerie”, which existed as a plot device to justify a two-part episode built around incorporating footage from “The Cage.”

The central thematic thrust of Strange New Worlds has been the idea that Pike must not only accept his fate to end up tortured for all eternity as a result of an accident during a training mission, but that he must also fully embrace it. It evokes Frederick Nitszche’s concept of amor fati, with the philosopher arguing that the key greatness is “that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity.” What is is the only thing that could be.

This is a point that Strange New Worlds hammers repeatedly. The first season episode “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” is a very overt homage to Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, imagining a society that is built on the suffering of an innocent child. In order for the paradise of Majalis to thrive, a child must be placed in a torture chair. If the child is not placed in a torture chair, the entire world collapses.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a masterpiece because it captures so much of the human condition. How many societies build prosperity on the suffering of people they pretend don’t exist? How many people build their own happiness on looking away from the pain their comforts cause to others? The biggest problem with “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” is that it is less interested in any of this subtext then it is in the series’ thesis statement: Pike’s gotta go in the torture chair.

This becomes clear in  “A Quality of Mercy”, the first season finale, in which Pike concocts a fairly gentle plan to rewrite history so that nobody has to go in the torture chair from that episode of sixties Star Trek. However, no sooner has Pike set that plan in motion – a plan in which nobody is even mildly inconvenienced – than he is visited by a time-dislocated version of his future self, who warns him that this plan will have disastrous consequences.

To illustrate the danger that Pike’s plan poses, his future self pulls him forward into what is a clear retelling of “Balance of Terror”, the beloved first season episode of Star Trek that introduced the Romulans. The only difference is that Pike is still in command of the Enterprise rather than James Tiberius Kirk. However, “A Quality of Mercy” is built around the idea that Kirk has to be in command of the Enterprise in “Balance of Terror”, or else the very fabric of reality unravels.

Strange New Worlds has always couched this as a moral argument. Pike’s suffering saves millions of hypothetical lives that would be lost in a more protracted war between Earth and Romulus. But that seems very abstract. Does this hypothetical war between Earth and Romulus kill more people than the wars that the audience knows will happen afterwards like the various Klingon Wars or the Dominion Wars? What about the people in that timeline, and their children? Do they get a say?

In reality, the logic underpinning all of this is just brand management. Pike needs to go in the torture chair because the production team running the classic Star Trek show needed to buy themselves a little breathing room and so decided to restructure their aborted pilot into a clip show and actor Jeffrey Hunter did not want to come back to play Pike. Kirk has to be captain in “Balance of Terror” because that episode existed and everybody loves it.

So much of Strange New Worlds is built around the possibility of teasing characters and the audience with a better future, only to yank that away using the justification of continuity. In "Terrarium", Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) learns the seemingly monstrous Gorn are not truly evil, but her memory has to be reset to preserve the continuity of “Arena.” In "New Life and New Civilizations", Pike gets to imagine a “happily ever after” life with his lover Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano), but that has to be erased to preserve the continuity of “The Menagerie.”

This is obviously the inevitable outcome of the modern franchise landscape that is built around “fidelity” as an objective measure of quality. Strange New Worlds has to constantly remind viewers that it respects the established canon of Star Trek. It feels appropriate that the original Pike actor, Jeffrey Hunter, played Jesus Christ in King of Kings, because the character must be sacrificed at the altar of continuity, to assure fans that the canon is being respected.

However, at a more basic level, there is a really grim conservatism underpinning all of this, the idea that the only way that things can ever be is the way that they always were. There is no point trying to imagine a better future or a better world, because the world exists as it does and as it should, and the modern imagination is trapped within the confines of a bunch of ideas that were formulated in mid- to late-1966 by a creative team frantically struggling to deliver the agreed number of episodes.

And so, true to this underlying spirit of Strange New Worlds, “Valles Marineris” builds to this embrace of amor fati. Battle Commander Cassel launches a genocidal weapon at the Dol’drm homeworld, and Pike stands by and lets her. After all, the Dol’drm are – like the Gorn in earlier seasons – just faceless hordes of inhuman monsters. The fifth planet blows up. Most of it becomes the asteroid belt. One fragment lands on Earth, killing the dinosaurs. The explosion pushes Mars out of alignment, turning it into the barren red world it is today.

Everything happens as it should. Events play out exactly as they need to. The status quo is preserved. There is no better future possible, only the maintenance of the world as it already exists. It is a future build on the extermination of an entire people, albeit a genocide that is justified because they are seemingly monsters. And all Pike has to do is to just passively stand back and let it happen. Pike’s big moment at the climax is ordering the Enterprise not to intervene.

“Valles Marineris”  comes close to parsing what it is actually doing. “Captain, that planet’s about to be destroyed with our technology,” protests Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn), Pike’s first officer. “Chris, our future notwithstanding, we can’t just sit here and let that entire planet be destroyed.” However, that is exactly what Pike does. Pike is as impotent now as he will be in “The Menegerie.” As Uhura puts it, “The Martians had to take our weapons. And we had to let them destroy the Dol’drm planet. Because they always have.”

There is something exhaustingly cynical in all of this, encapsulating so much of the problem with this era of Star Trek in general and of Strange New Worlds in particular. “Chris, everything happened as it was meant to,” Commodore Robert April (Adrian Holmes) reassures Pike at the end of the episode. “That much is clear.” So much of Strange New Worlds is built around nostalgia for older Star Trek, but the show seems fundamentally at odds with the franchise’s belief in a better future.

“Valles Marineris” cannot imagine a better future than one built on genocide and massive devastation, in which it is foolish to hope that things can be better than they already were, no matter how much suffering is necessary to justify that status quo. However, what is most jarring about this is the sense that “Valles Marineris” doesn’t understand this as a tragedy, but instead as something to be enthusiastically embraced It’s very true to the central spirit of Strange New Worlds.