Strange New Worlds – The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail Review

I had been hoping that Strange New Worlds would rebound after last week’s disappointing outing. Unfortunately, this over-stuffed and under-baked attempt at showing us Kirk’s* growth – while still spending far too much time with the crew of the Enterprise and trying to turn the final beats of the story into a pretty out-of-left field commentary on the nature of good and evil – was an even bigger miss than our archeology expedition. And all of its faults lie within the scattershot writing.

*While I know there’s some argument in the Trek fandom over Paul Wesley’s turn as Kirk, I’m not someone who thinks he’s egregiously miscast. It’s almost always a lose-lose situation to have a new actor take over a beloved character, and Wesley is doing the best with what’s he’s given. Which is not a lot. So, again, the fault with this version of Kirk stems from the writing more than the performance, in my opinion.

With the recent announcement (alongside the announcement that the series was ending with its fifth season) that Strange New Worlds will end with Kirk installed as the captain of the Enterprise, it makes perfect sense that the series would want to start taking steps to turn the cocky, short-sighted first officer of the USS Farragut into more measured man who will boldly go where no one has gone before. Sure, Kirk was a womanizer and had a temper in The Original Series, but he was also a good captain who trusted and cared deeply about his crew – and listened to them when he needed a sounding board. The Kirk we’ve seen thus far . . . isn’t that guy. And he’s still not that guy after his first real experience in command in a time of crisis. But the episode tried to show us that – despite getting a single talking to from Spock about how he can be that guy – he managed to pretty miraculously get his act together in the nick of time and become the brilliant problem solver he will become in the future. Personally, I don’t buy it.

Now, if the entire focus of the episode had been on Kirk and his future Enterprise crew members*, things might have been a bit different. If we’d gotten the chance to see the cocksure guy from the opening moments become shell shocked that he needs to be the one making the choices and then slowly acclimate and trust his new crew around him – listening to all of them, understanding their strengths, letting them lead where they could – that would have been a great character study in the man Kirk can become in the future. But instead of getting that focus episode, we got half of an episode about Kirk and half about Pelia’s knowledge of the past combined with Pike and La’an going off on some Alien-adjacent attempt at stopping the scavengers from taking over the ship? It was such a complete tonal shift between those parts of the story (just among themselves) that going back to Kirk’s journey toward becoming a leader left me trying to decipher just what the episode was trying to do.

*It was a cute move to have only the central characters from The Original Series on the Farragut to aid Kirk. Lest we forget, Una, M’Benga, Ortegas, and La’an are either minor or non-existent characters on the Enterprise with Kirk takes the captaincy.

And let’s talk about the events on Enterprise and the strangely disjointed reveal of just who the scavengers ended up being. I’ve made my love of Carol Kane and Pelia known in past reviews, but her “let’s go back to analogue and old school video games” was a bridge too far in terms of winking at the audience. Yes, phones was a solid choice to communicate, but the entire reveal of this solution felt like such a joke that it was deeply at odds with the rest of the drama happening around it. I’m all for comedy within Star Trek, but it needs to balance with the rest of the story being told. This didn’t. And then there was the choice to head back into the Alien well once more (which we really exhausted with all the Gorn storytelling). Did we need it? Not really. Again, focusing just on Kirk for the majority of the episode would have been perfectly fine.

But far and away the worst choice within the episode was the sudden turn to reveal that the scavengers were the descendants of a group of colonialists who were sent off to find a new home for humanity – and then never heard from again. From such hopeful beginnings, their descendants have turned into brutal scavengers who are more than willing to kill others to make themselves more powerful. The lesson presented here – that anyone can become a monster, so we shouldn’t look at our enemies as such – not only fell flat, it also doesn’t make sense with that particular reveal. We know nothing about the steps that led to the creation of the scavengers. We don’t know what led them down this path (which, yes, is the point of Pike’s warning). But taking five minutes to turn the story from “these are the villains” into “well, they were once, centuries ago, the best and brightest we had of humanity, so what happened to turn their descendants into these killers?” short-changed that revelation. It’s an empty story beat that’s sole purpose is to provide proof of an empty lesson that, frankly, Kirk should have already learned. It just felt so clearly manipulative in its nature with almost no grounding in the story until that revelation was sprung. No hint about where this was going. You have to seed those sort of things so they don’t feel like they came out of nowhere.

So, another disappointing and under-written episode. For a series that has had its absolute best moments when it focused on character to drive its stories, it’s really disheartening to see that for two weeks in a row, the writing has all but abandoned that process in favor of throwing big moments at key characters with almost zero groundwork being laid. Last week was M’Benga’s reaction to Ensign Gamble’s death, this week it’s Kirk suddenly finding the ability to command. And don’t think I didn’t notice the eye-roll inducing love triangle stare beat between Kirk, La’an, and Spock. I would love a week of this show without a single romantic moment. But we have four episodes remaining. Can the series pull out of its slump before the finale?