Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW) Season 4 Reviews
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Valles Marineris
Synopsis
Stardate 2492.5: After completing a routine mission on Tulaxar, Admiral April offers Pike a promotion to the rank of commodore, which the captain says he will consider. The Enterprise investigates a rare interstellar squall, a phenomenon involving extreme distortions of space-time. The crew receives a distress call from a Starfleet buoy inside the anomaly. Pike orders the Enterprise to enter, but the ship quickly loses power and becomes trapped. With main power offline, the crew determines that they need iridium to restart the ship's engines. Sensors identify a nearby M-class planet containing the required element, and Una, La'an and Erica take a shuttle to retrieve it. The planet turns out to be a primordial world populated by strange creatures. While the landing party searches for the iridium, the Enterprise is ensnared by an alien vessel using energy tendrils. Its commander, a humanoid woman named Cassell, comes aboard and demands that the powerless ship be surrendered as a prize. Pike tries to convince her that cooperation is a better idea. Spock eventually determines that they have been displaced in space and time: they are in the Sol System 65 million years in the past. The planet where the iridium is located is Earth. Cassell reveals that her people are Martians, who have been fighting a desperate war against the Dol'drm. When one of the enemy ships crashed on Mars, they carved away a vast section of the planet's surface to contain it, creating what will one day be known as Valles Marineris. She steals one of the Enterprise's antimatter power cells after discovering that Pike has concealed the truth about the ship's origin. On prehistoric Earth, Una, La'an and Erica make their way through dinosaurs before recovering the iridium they need inside the wreckage of a crashed Dol'drm spacecraft. They take it to the Enterprise, allowing the ship's systems to be restored. The Enterprise pursues the Martian vessel as it prepares to destroy the fifth planet of the Sol system in a suicide attack, using the stolen antimatter. Pike initially orders an interception, but then realizes that this planet no longer exists in his own time. He calls off the attack, allowing history to unfold as it always has. The planet explodes, forming the asteroid belt, while one massive fragment strikes Earth near the Yucatán Peninsula, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs and paving the way for the evolution of humanity. Mars shifts its orbit and becomes a barren world. As the resulting shockwave reaches the Enterprise, Spock concludes that its energy can propel the ship back to its own time. The ship returns to the present, where the crew reflects on having ensured humanity's own existence. Pike mourns the fate of the Martians, but M'Benga notes that he took samples of their DNA, confirming that it appears in many later species. La'an notices unusual changes in herself and suspects that some of her dormant Augment genes may have been reactivated. Pike declines the promotion, realizing that his place is aboard the Enterprise. Instead, Una Chin-Riley is promoted to commander.
Review
Four years ago, Strange New Worlds began as the series many Star Trek fans had been asking for. After the serialized storytelling of Discovery and Picard, it brought back standalone weekly adventures and returned to a lighter tone, even though it also played fast and loose with canon and redefined established characters. The series was willing to experiment from the start. Season 1 only dipped its toes into different genres, but season 2 embraced them more enthusiastically with a sitcom, a partially animated crossover and a musical. Season 3 pushed that formula even further, with every second episode relying on gimmicks or self-awareness. For me, that trend reached its low point with "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans", which I found unbearable.
The producers were clearly aware that not everyone appreciated this direction. Although season 4 had already been filmed, they promised the show would become "more serious". Later, they softened that wording to "fewer big swings", a phrase that entertainment outlets kept repeating almost like a reassurance to disappointed fans. At the same time, the season 4 trailers carefully avoided revealing the crew's transformation into Muppets, even though it had already been confirmed for episode 5. But that's not even my main concern. I don't mind genre-bending when it grows organically out of the story, which I don't think was the case with most of season 3's "big swings". My question is a different one: will there still be substance beneath the stylistic experiments? And although I have given up hope that canon will ever be more than something to play with, the least the writers can do is let our characters simply have adventures instead of constantly constructing stories whose primary purpose is to tie into TOS, often only to contradict it in the process.
So what does the season premiere "Valles Marineris" have in store? More of the same kind of "big swings", or a departure to something more subdued? Actually, neither. My first reaction: what a rollercoaster ride of an episode!
It starts off in a rather routine fashion. The whole sequence with Pike and his team riding horses lasts only about two minutes, and we never learn what the mission is about beyond delivering some medicine to a planet. But that doesn't matter anyway in the following. It is simply a pleasant opening for the new season, with no further relevance except to show that our captain enjoys riding, as if we didn't already know that. In fact, he lingers a little longer than originally planned because he enjoys it so much. At this point we have no idea where the episode is heading, except that it will have no further horses. The title itself turns out to be something of a red herring. The landscape where Pike, La'an and M'Benga are riding looks Martian, yet the floating rocks make it obvious that this is an alien world. So this is clearly not Valles Marineris after all, even though the title encourages us to think about Mars. We will actually see Mars later in the episode, but not as we know the planet.
Pike is still mourning the loss of Batel, and we learn that he has spent the past six months on routine assignments. It serves as a brief wrap-up of the previous season, although it feels more like skipping over those six months because it wouldn't have been interesting. A lot may have happened during that time, even if the missions themselves are labeled as routine. Admiral April then offers Pike a promotion to commodore, and the captain seems to consider it. In the end he decides to remain on the Enterprise because he realizes that this is where he belongs. But I don't think the mission itself really changes his mind. The small promotion subplot feels tacked on. It could easily have been omitted without affecting the story in any meaningful way, so it doesn't really convince me.
There are a few other bits of setup as well. Scotty keeps teasing Ortegas, and she happily gives as good as she gets. The banter continues throughout the episode, but for now I have no idea where it is leading, or whether it is leading anywhere at all. I could do without it. We are also introduced to a new Vulcan cadet. She represents the familiar ENT-type of her species, not only reserved but also arrogant by human standards. Uhura struggles to establish any kind of connection with her because the cadet has no interest in doing so. This feels a bit more like groundwork for a future storyline, but remains more like a nuisance for now.
The Enterprise then runs into what looks like the usual space anomaly of the week, without me anticipating it would become something far bigger. Everything that happens at first is pretty standard. The ship encounters a mysterious phenomenon, there is of course a reason to fly into it because of a distress call, and naturally the ship gets trapped. Pelia has already mentioned that space-time fluctuates wildly inside the anomaly, so "time" is the decisive clue. The moment the crew picks up a Starfleet signal, it is easy to anticipate that it originates from the Enterprise itself at another point in time, much like the setup in VOY: "Parallax". Up to this point, everything feels a little too familiar. The ship loses power, gets tossed around inside the anomaly, and the VFX team clearly had fun creating the spectacle. It all looks impressive, but so far it is not particularly exciting.
Things become more intriguing when the ship suddenly finds itself near three M-class planets. A shuttle is dispatched to one of them, a primordial world inhabited by giant creatures. From the season trailers we already know these are dinosaurs. Also, Paramount had announced that the episode involved traveling 65 million years into the past. We all know what happened to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, so from the very beginning it is obvious that the landing party has arrived on a beautifully animated prehistoric Earth, leading up to a story that, at this point, I was tempted to label "Jurassic Trek" (if it weren't actually the Cretaceous Period). The question that remains unanswered (until the end, BTW) is why the Enterprise has suddenly ended up in our own solar system. Because destiny? And then there's another elephant in the room: three M-class planets? Last time I checked, the Sol system only had one. That exact number, however, will become important later.
An alien vessel appears and captures the Enterprise with what looks like a giant energy tractor beam in the form of tendrils. To me, that visual is more silly than threatening. Modern Star Trek is oddly obsessed with tendrils and tentacles in the place of tractor beams, whether as physical objects or energy effects.
Fifteen minutes into this hour-long episode, the opening credits finally roll. After the break, Pike first communicates with the alien commander by audio only. The crew assumes the aliens possess only impulse drive and concludes that handing over the Enterprise would violate the Prime Directive. Honestly, at this point I think the Prime Directive should be the least of their concerns. These aliens are trying to seize the ship by force and clearly possess technology far beyond anything primitive, regardless of whether they have warp drive or not. The whole argument feels rather forced. Then several revelations arrive in quick succession. Spock confirms that they have indeed traveled 65 million years into the past. The shuttle is on Earth, exactly where we expected it to be. And the mysterious aliens reveal that they originate from the fourth planet of the solar system: Mars.
Martians. They are actually Martians. No kidding.
Naturally, I was torn. Martians are an obsolete concept. No one still takes them seriously. So what would Star Trek's Martians look like? The answer is... rather disappointing. Because they look like the Martians of 1930s pulp science fiction, with facial markings, pointed ears and exaggerated shoulder pads. Instead of feeling alien, they come across as vintage - like in a "Captain Proton" adventure. For quite some time the episode borders on parody. This was definitely one of the rollercoaster's low points for me, because I simply found these Martians ridiculous. Sorry. We also learn that they can phase through walls, a convenient ability that exists entirely because the plot requires it. It sets up something in the sense of Chekhov's gun, but otherwise never really makes sense. Nor do we ever find out whether they possess warp drive. It briefly becomes a major issue, as already mentioned, only to be quietly forgotten because it turns out to be irrelevant to the rest of the story.
Meanwhile, on Earth, Ortegas, Una and La'an have made their way past the dinosaurs to get their hands on the iridium. By now it has been confirmed that this really is prehistoric Earth, complete with a T-Rex. They are not allowed to kill any of the animals because of the Temporal Prime Directive and the danger of the butterfly effect. Sorry, but I don't buy that. The butterfly effect does not care whether you kill a dinosaur or merely stun it. Any interaction with the past could potentially change the future, hence the name of the effect. Realistically, they could hardly touch anything without affecting history.
At the same time aboard the Enterprise, Pike explains the Federation to Cassell, the Martian commander, describing a future in which former enemies coexist peacefully. He suggests that the Martians and the Dol'drm might one day find a similar path. At this point I found myself wondering where the episode was going. Was this turning into a sermon? Of course Pike would say these things (much like he did in SNW: "Strange New Worlds"), but it goes on for several minutes without really contributing to the plot. And it becomes super awkward at latest with his attempt to explain what "carrot on a stick" means. We also learn how Valles Marineris supposedly came into existence. According to Cassell, a Dol'drm vessel crashed on Mars, forcing the Martians to tear away the surrounding landscape in order to contain it, thereby creating the enormous canyon. The Dol'drm themselves are said to be an unstoppable, insectoid enemy. It is an effective tragic backstory and explains the title quite nicely. More importantly, it foreshadows the episode's still larger ambition of entirely rewriting the history of our solar system.
Pike continues to show the Martians around his ship, discussing its technology and his ideals of peace. Naturally he does not reveal that he is from the future. But this creates another inconsistency. On Earth, everyone is obsessively careful not to alter history by harming a dinosaur. On the Enterprise, however, the Martians are allowed to inspect advanced Federation technology and learn about the future in considerable detail. By the episode's own logic, that should have vastly greater consequences than anything happening on the planet below. In this one regard, the reasoning simply doesn't work for me.
Meanwhile, Spock determines a theoretical way for the Enterprise to return to its own time. This is clearly another of the episode's many Chekhov's guns, carefully planted for later. In fact, the script generally handles its internal logic rather well. Almost every piece of information introduced along the way will become relevant before the story is over. And so Commander Cassell uses her unlikely phasing ability to pass through the Enterprise's walls and steal the antimatter fuel cell. I actually like that she still takes the time to speak with Pike instead of simply disappearing with it. Perhaps Pike's hospitality now pays off. She confronts him calmly, pointing out that despite telling her all those nice things he has not been honest with her. She has seen enough on computer displays to learn how humans measure time and to realize that they are from 65 million years in the future. She has also discovered that her own homeworld Mars will one day become a barren wasteland. Cassell has a point, and she is anything but a conventional villain. In fact, I would hesitate to call her a villain at all. She is portrayed as compassionate, reasonable and willing to negotiate. The only exception is the Dol'drm. To her they are nothing more than destructive insects, enemies with whom no compromise is possible, even though Uhura demonstrates that the Enterprise may possess ways to communicate with them. That reaction is perhaps understandable, given everything her people have suffered.
Meanwhile, the landing party finally reaches the iridium deposit. They discover it in the form of a power cell in the wreck of what appears to be a Dol'drm cryo ship. The implication is that the insects intended to colonize Earth until the Martians shot them down, although the episode never explicitly confirms that. It is another piece of rewritten prehistoric history, an interesting touch, but ultimately not important to the plot.
When a smaller dinosaur attacks (a velociraptor I think), La'an has no time to draw her phaser and instinctively punches the creature instead. To her own surprise, it works. Later she concludes that some of her dormant Augment genes may somehow have been reactivated. Like the new Vulcan cadet and the ongoing banter between Scotty and Ortegas, this is another storyline that will likely continue later in the season. It also feels somewhat contrived. Since La'an was introduced as a descendant of Khan Noonien Singh, the writers apparently feel obliged to make something of it, to justify the heritage retroactively. Personally, I always found her interesting despite the backstory rather than because of it, so I could have done without this development. But we'll see where it leads.
And then comes the episode's truly enormous reveal. We have already established that the planet is Earth, 65 million years ago. We have dinosaurs and an inhabited Mars. And we keep in mind that there are three M-class planets in the Sol system. Clearly something even bigger is about to happen. Once the landing party returns with the iridium, the Enterprise is finally able to restart its engines using a spare antimatter fuel cell. The crew intercepts Commander Cassell's vessel, which is heading in a suicide mission for the fifth planet of the Sol system, another Earth-like world. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars... and then the fifth planet, exactly where we know there is only the asteroid belt today. The episode doesn't spell it out yet, presumably trusting the audience to put the pieces together. The Martians destroy the Dol'drm homeworld with the stolen antimatter. The result will be the asteroid belt.
That is the moment when the episode reveals what it has really been building toward all along. I fully expected the interception to fail somehow. What still surprised me was how it fails. It is not because the Enterprise is too late but because Pike consciously decides to let it happen. He chooses to sacrifice an entire world, and presumably billions of Dol'drm, because he realizes that this event is necessary to preserve the future. This is what I customarily call a predestination phenomenon rather than a temporal paradox. Everything was always supposed to happen this way. The Enterprise creates the Sol system as we know it by allowing its antimatter to be stolen. The destruction of the fifth planet creates the asteroid belt. Mars shifts its orbit, turning it into the barren world of the future. And one fragment strikes Earth at Yucatán, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs and making human evolution possible. All of it happens because the Enterprise followed its own distress beacon into the anomaly in the first place, another predestination event. Although predestination is a recurring concept in Trek (the first time was in TOS: "Assignment: Earth"), the one in "Valles Marineris" is amazingly ambitious regarding the complexity of its impact.
In terms of sheer scale, this is the arguably biggest story Star Trek has ever attempted to tell. The producers promised they would do "fewer big swings" in season 4. Yet this may well be Star Trek's biggest swing ever. The Martian civilization, the origin of Valles Marineris, the fifth planet inhabited by insectoids, the creation of the asteroid belt, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the evolution of humanity. It is difficult to imagine a more far-reaching story.
At first glance it seems like a run-of-the-mill space adventure, but it grows into something enormous. At the same time, I don't think the episode is entirely successful in getting there. Everything is meticulously constructed. The script successfully pieces the puzzle together in the finale. On a storytelling level, it is remarkably coherent, at least if we don't start to talk about the scientific plausibility. What doesn't work quite as well for me are the characters. Their actions sometimes feel governed by the needs of the plot, there are many small side threads competing for attention, and the dialogue rarely feels especially natural. I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly why. Perhaps I simply need another viewing.
In that sense, "Valles Marineris" reminds me of TNG: "The Chase". That episode also revolved around a single revelation with enormous implications for the entire Star Trek Universe. The difference is that "The Chase" presented its idea in a comparably subdued story, whereas everything in "Valles Marineris" is just big - perhaps too big for the characters to handle.
Of course, there are plenty of scientific objections. If advanced civilizations had existed in our solar system 65 million years ago, we should find traces of them. Perhaps not of the insectoid civilization on the fifth planet, but certainly on Mars, in open space and possibly even on Earth. I also wonder how all this fits with other Star Trek lore, such as the dinosaurs that supposedly evolved into the Voth in VOY: "Distant Origin". I would have to revisit that episode to see whether the two stories can be reconciled.
Yet scientific plausibility is not the key issue here. As a work of science fiction, the episode is bold and largely internally consistent. It also turns into an unexpected collection of genre crossovers. It begins almost like "Western Trek" with Pike on horseback. Then it becomes "Star Trek meets Jurassic Park". The humanoid Martians make it feel briefly like "Star Trek meets My Favorite Martian". The crashed Dol'drm vessel evokes "Alien", while the seemingly unstoppable insectoid enemy recalls "Starship Troopers". I wouldn't know any Star Trek episode to have blended so many familiar science-fiction ideas into a single story.
As for my rating, the Martian design still strikes me as rather silly and character interactions are not always convincing. The resolution, for better or worse, is totally over the top. But the central story is surprisingly well constructed and leaves me with plenty to think about. The ethical implications of the time travel are only partially explored, often overshadowed by other questions or simply glossed over. In the end, the whole affair is swept under the rug - in the usual way DIS and SNW love to rewrite history on a grand scale only to pretend they didn't. Still, this is an episode people will still be discussing years from now. For that ambition alone, despite my reservations, it deserves eight points.
Annotations
- Nitpicking:
- The question was asked, but it remains unexplained why the ship ended up in the Sol system of all places.
- Una sets her phaser to stun, expecting that it would work on a T-Rex, as if this would require the same amount of energy as stunning a humanoid. Strangely enough, the story proves her right.
- For some reason, the Temporal Prime Directive applies to the actions of the landing party on prehistoric Earth, but not to interactions with the Martians.
- The Martians need only one hour to turn a regular antimatter pod into a weapon that is capable of blowing up a whole planet. If they are so powerful, warp core breaches should realistically be destroy a lot more than "only" a single ship.
- Remarkable quote: "If they were settlers, I'm not sure if I should feel sad or... relieved." (La'an, about the dead Dol'drm in the ship wreck on Earth)
- Remarkable scene: When Pike speaks of being alone, the translator uses the Martian word for "widower". Cassell condoles, and Pike doesn't contradict when he learns why.
Rating: 8
