Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass Review

I was all set to really dislike this week’s Strange New World installment. Not because it was based on a soap opera*, but because out of seven episodes this season, six have been “very special episodes” based on a different genre of storytelling. As Alan Sepinwall mentioned in a recent review of the series, if all of your episode are special, none of them are. And with the spotty track record of the series when it comes to staging a story in a unique format, I wasn’t excited to once again venture into a new genre in the hopes of seeing our characters grow just a bit while confronting this week’s crisis.

*I have nothing against the soap opera genre – it’s a really interesting type of storytelling and while it has more or less fallen out of fashion these days, it still serves as a proving ground for a host of actors (check out a list of just how many exceptional actors started their career on a soap) while also being a truly remarkable means of churning out episodes quickly. There was even a stretch of a couple of years in my adolescence where I was an avid watcher of Days of our Lives – the soap on which this week’s guest star, Diedre Hall, has long played psychiatrist Marlena Evans – so I’m pretty well-versed in the world of soaps and enjoyed some of the silly and smart call-outs to that world this week. Also fun? Having Pike call Dr. Chivers “Doc,” which is a term of endearment used for Marlena on Days.

However, it turned out that the use of soap opera theming and genre quirks wasn’t really a problem in the episode. In fact, I can appreciate what the writers were attempting to do by having Pike try to navigate his way through the emotionally heightened stakes of a soap. For everything that Star Trek has done well over the last 60 years, one key hallmark of almost all of its characters is that they tend to be emotionally stunted. After all, these are soldiers of a sort or scientists, tasked with going out into the wider universe to confront new life and new civilizations – or travel home from great distances or fight in an inter-galactic war. There’s not a ton of time to spend with a counselor – if there even is one on the ship* – or even to address the emotional impact of actions they have to take or events they witness. The rarity of having an episode that asks the crew to look at themselves or their actions and weigh the cost to their emotional state should tell you just how much these characters probably need prodding like the kind Pike gets from Trelane** in the episode.

*My memory is a touch spotty, but I don’t remember a counselor ever being mentioned prior to this episode – and goodness knows several characters (Una, La’an, M’Benga, and Ortegas chief among them) could have used one at various points throughout the series.

**I appreciated that Pike refused to let Trelane say his name, which helps make it so that when he appears on The Original Series, the revelation of just who he is will still be novel. Sure, the Enterprise has run into inter-dimensional beings before who like to mess with the crew, but they don’t know their name so there’s no way for Kirk and company to link that encounter to this precise entity.

So, the concept of having a character be forced to confront the deep emotional truth he’s been studiously avoiding up until this point is a great foundation for an episode like this one. I just wish they had picked a deep emotional truth that we had realized Pike was refusing to deal with. The loss of Captain Batel was not easy for Pike – we know that. However, at no point this season has there been a single sign that he’s still working through his feelings surrounding losing not only her but also the loss from the false reality they lived through together. In fact, had it not been a part of the “Previously” sequence at the top of the episode, I wouldn’t have even remembered that part of last season’s finale, despite really enjoying that episode. So, we are presented with a deep emotional trauma for Pike we hadn’t been aware was a lingering issue until this point. And, to top it off, it looked like Pike wasn’t even aware he wasn’t dealing with that memory? So, why make it so central to his character’s growth if it wasn’t even something on his mind?

Or, to put it another way, if we have no idea this memory is lingering and influencing Pike’s emotional state and he has no idea, why does the show suddenly want to remind us of this? I would have been more excited to explore this side of Pike had this episode aired a bit earlier in the season, when this loss was still fresh for Pike. Or had we been shown breadcrumbs that he’s still struggling with the loss of Marie and the potential of their life together. But at this stage of things, bringing this story back to the forefront just doesn’t work the way the writers wanted it to. That’s not to say Anson Mount isn’t great as Pike realizes just what he’s been avoiding. Or that Hall isn’t wonderful as Chivers, a really smart shrink even when she’s in the confines of the soap setting. But I just never bought into the emotional trauma of that false future being so impressionable on Pike that he’s been avoiding thinking about it for months.

The same thing goes for the rest of the characters and their soap arcs. While it was nice to see Ortegas speak about the emotions she tried to hide while worried that she would never be the same pilot she was before the Gorn attack left her with PTSD (thrilled at that callback), having M’Benga diagnosed with a fake disease doesn’t really mirror anything about his real-life emotional state. We know he is looking into leaving the ship, so maybe if you squint you can see the debilitating sickness as a way for him to leave and learning to live with it a way for him to stay? And then there’s La’an, who really didn’t seem broken up at all last week when she broke up with Spock (ending one of the dullest relationships on the series), but who, deep down, apparently has some major emotional worries surrounding that break up? Again, that doesn’t match the character we know and the interaction we witnessed. I guess you could argue that La’an was avoiding her emotions last week (not a hard argument – she avoids her emotions all the damn time and it was even a plot point earlier in the series) and she really is terribly bereft at breaking up with Spock? Or, perhaps, she worries that she ripped Spock’s heart out with the break up, and this is her processing that (having him need a heart transplant is pretty on the nose there – and needing her to be the one to fix him also isn’t subtle). But still, you have to lay the groundwork for that kind of revelation (I genuinely never got the vibe that she was all that invested in their friends with benefits arrangement), just like with Pike and the missing daughter.

So, while I don’t think the emotional beats of the story worked based on where the characters are, I also didn’t find the episode to be a failure. The idea was a great one – ask the normally emotionally stoic and blocked off characters on the show to confront their emotions in a soap opera setting where characters lead with emotions in all their actions – but the execution was where things fell apart. That being said, I genuinely hope that the final three episodes of the season are just episodes of Star Trek and not jumps into new genres. Keeping things simple and leading with character makes a great episode of television more often than not. We don’t need all these bells and whistles.