In my previous professional life, I was a practicing attorney. Which means I can be pretty darn harsh on legal stories – in fact, I can almost never manage to watch shows that are all about lawyers because they are often so horribly inaccurate under the guise of making legal practice interesting (spoiler alert: being a lawyer is not interesting or all that fun) – so I’ll admit I approached this week’s installment of Strange New Worlds with a great deal of trepidation. I mean, we all knew that somehow Una was going to be allowed to continue serving in Starfleet despite her Illyrian background, but I dreaded whatever courtroom mumbo jumbo the series would craft to get us to that outcome. Which is why I’m thrilled to say that, in the grand scheme of things, this was absolutely one of the best courtroom-based episodes of television I’ve had the pleasure of watching. Sure, that is absolutely not how one asks for asylum – and there’s absolutely no way that any court would allow that last-second defense to be thrown out in closing arguments – but I’m willing to forgive the writers this one major piece of fantasy since so much of what they did put together turned what could have been a disappointing legal quagmire into a pretty fun and engaging hour of television.
And so much of what made this episode truly work came from the performance of Yetide Badaki (whom you might remember as Bilquis on American Gods) as Neera. It’s not easy to pop onto an established series and essentially carry the episode, as Badaki was asked to do, and successfully pull it off. You must establish your character, their relationship to the central characters of the episode, and then make the audience want to continue following your story throughout the episode at the expense of characters we have grown to love. But you better believe Badaki was up to the challenge and absolutely crushed the chance to shine. Neera’s presence helped not only to flesh out Una’s character (getting to know how hurt Neera was when Una disappeared from her life and then understanding how that hurt helped shape how Neera viewed Starfleet and the Federation in turn was illuminating to both Neera’s character development and Una’s) but also La’An’s – we knew of her connection to Kahn, but we didn’t know just how that connection and the genetic modifiers that continue to linger in her family’s DNA made her feel othered as well. This was such a compelling and smart use of a guest character – helping to deepen our understanding of key regular characters while managing to provide enough characterization for the new addition to keep us invested in her journey. Just a hell of a job writing this one.
I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to mention the excellent performances from both Rebecca Romijn and Christina Chong, who were both given the chance to dig into the emotional wells of their characters – which was a treat, since both characters rarely show the level of emotion they were asked to show this time around. Una and La’An have proven themselves to be crucial characters within the tapestry of the series, but they tend to be the tools that come in to fix things – to make sure that the more emotionally resonate characters (Pike, Chapel, M’Benga, Ortegas) get done what needs to get done. Letting Romijn and Chong grapple with the emotional upheaval for both their characters was great to see, and while I don’t need La’An cracking jokes left and right in the future, it felt right to see her shell crack a bit as she realized that she wasn’t created wrong and that she deserves to be whomever she wants to be.
Star Trek can sometimes get a touch preachy when it dives into stories about accepting our differences and how what makes us different shouldn’t scare others – it should be something we hold with pride. But this episode never fell prey to the impulse of beating home the message with a blunt object. And maybe it’s because that, as a young closeted queer kid in the 90s, I desperately wanted Star Trek’s idyllic Federation future to expressly have queer representation so I could believe that I could have that kind of future, too, but I found myself smiling along once the verdict was reached and Una was allowed to serve, freely and openly, within Starfleet. The parallels to race segregation and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the American military were hard to miss, but still not explicitly called out, which I appreciated. All-in-all, this was a really strong episode of Trek, and yet another solid Strange New Worlds outing. Now that we’ve gotten the whole gang back together, it’s time to see what the Starship Enterprise encounters on its continuing mission next week.
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