A distress call from a lost starship brings the crew of the Enterprise to a frozen planet where tense, horror movie things happen, reminding us that not “All Those Who Wander” are lost. Written by Davy Perez, directed by Christopher J. Byrne.
Mark Turetsky: Hey Will! Just letting you know I’m retiring after today. Not from my job or from reviewing Star Trek. Just retiring in general. Nothing but enjoying my retirement to look forward to!
Will Nevin: And I’m a heretofore unknown ensign who just got promoted! This review is going to work out great for both of us.
The Big Send-Off
Mark: As you mention, we get some very obvious redshirts in the opening of this episode, which features yet another instance of Pike throwing a dinner party in the captain’s mess. Not since Benjamin Sisko have I seen a captain so concerned about feeding his crew. And in true Dad form, he even clicks his tongs!
Will: And it was to emphasize a point in a dad joke during his (breakfast for) dinner party! What a treasure that man/character is. And it’s a good thing we got that levity up front, isn’t it? Because this thing got dark and quick.
Mark: The scene is pretty reminiscent of the opening of “Balance of Terror,” a TOS episode we’ve mentioned before in these reviews, which opens with Kirk officiating a wedding. He calls it a “happy privilege” of being a captain. That’s how you know that by the end of the episode, one of those newlyweds is gonna die. Here, we get two obvious redshirts: ensign Chia, who, along with Uhura, has just finished her rotation on the Enterprise. The other is the newly promoted lieutenant Duke. Now, I’ve got to figure that including them in the away team along with our main characters is lampshading that they’re the obvious ones to die, misdirecting us away from the actual meaningful death that happens at the end of the episode (more on that later).
Will: Ugh, don’t get me started on that. This show made me cry two weeks in a row, and that’s not fair. Also, doesn’t this have all the feeling of a season finale? Yet we’ve still got one more to go. I don’t know if there’s a complaint in there, but I certainly would have been happy if this was it for season 1.
Mark: It’d be fitting, right? Uhura was our first (non-Pike) point of view, and we’ve followed her rotating into different departments throughout the season. It’s now done, the circle is complete, and as you predicted, her tour has come to an end, and it’s time for her to go back to Earth. But there’s just one last thing: The Enterprise has two priority one missions to complete at once. The first is to deliver lifesaving equipment to space station Deep Space K-7 (that’s where “The Trouble With Tribbles” takes place!) and the second is to provide aid to the USS Peregrine, a starship mapping non-Federation space. So, what do you do? You split the party. It’s always the right choice in D&D, and no misfortune will come from doing that here, right?
Will: It worked out for Una and the rest of the crew at least! But seriously, she got sidelined *again* making the trip to the station where “Trials and Tribble-ations” also takes place, but when literally everyone *but* her is on the planet, I guess that doesn’t leave you with many storytelling options. Alas.
And for the record, it was a disaster if your name wasn’t Number One.
Mark: And let the record also show that, once again, Una continues to be underused.
So begins what I can only imagine is an overt, loving homage to the Alien franchise. The away team, made up of main castmembers, perfunctory redshirts and Sam Kirk (who’s got plot armor, more on that later) arrive on an ice planet and find the lost starship, surrounded by huge bloodstains. You know, normal starship things.
Will: You know, if this is really an homage to the franchise, there’d be something self-serving about Starfleet’s request to save the ship — and I’m actually still curious about that one. The Peregrine is a Sombra class, but it’s “built with Constitution parts” which 1) is a nice way to explain the set redressings and save on the FX and design budget but 2) makes me super suspicious in canon.
Mark: It’s not like we haven’t seen other classes of starships on SNW. I don’t know why they couldn’t re-use the ship design of Una’s ship in the pilot episode, and the set re-dressings are so easily handwavable. And if it’s made of Constitution parts, doesn’t that make it a Constitution class ship?
Gorn Again in Crisis
Mark: Anyway, the gang listens to some audio logs and discovers that the Peregrine rescued three people: an Orion, a little girl, and an unknown alien. Turns out the Orion was infected with Gorn eggs, which then hatched, turning it into an Alien (1979) situation. They find the unknown alien and the little girl (let’s call her Newt) and it isn’t long before La’an has gone all Ripley and is warning everyone to take the threat seriously, and Sam Kirk has gone all Private Hudson and starts freaking out, and accusing Spock of being a robot who only cares about the mission, and not people, man (Ash or Bishop, take your pick)! As I said, it’s incredibly Aliens (1986).
Will: With just a little pinch of Predator with the views from the eyes of the various Gorn hatchlings.
Mark: Speaking of, before we get too much farther, the puppeteering work in this episode is incredible. The alien (who the little girl calls “Buckley”) has an immaculate animatronic head, and the various iterations of the Gorn are all puppets!
Will: I didn’t realize the Buckley head was a puppet, but I absolutely see it now — that is some great work, which also includes all the effect work with the pulsing skin and what not. Again, this show has not cut too many budgetary corners and it shows in the results.
And whatever you want to say about how this may or may not have directly lifted from other sci-fi franchises, they did a good job here of what they were doing. The bulk of this episode plays out as tense and frazzling as anything I’ve seen.
Mark: We also get a few instances of Spock’s Vulcan stoicism slipping. Even before he consciously lets his rage loose in order to lure the Gorn out, he’s clearly close to losing it for most of the episode. It’s kind of easy to take him for granted as just plain good ol’ Spock, but I’m enjoying seeing these reminders that this is the Spock that smiled and had emotions in “The Cage,” and we’re seeing a Spock in transition.
Will: There’s also a vulnerability there that makes him more interesting. Once he does unleash that rage, he can’t simply bottle it all back up, and I think that’s true to both Spock and Vulcans more generally. It’s not that they can’t access or process emotion; it’s that they actively work to control those emotions. And when they do tap into them, they can be quite powerful — I’m thinking here specifically of Spock channeling the Horta in “The Devil in the Dark.”
Mark: The entire sequence on the ice planet is very effective, very well done action-horror, probably better done than I’ve seen on TV, and certainly better than any other Trek has done it. But I think that, much like last week, we really need to talk about how this one ends.
Will: Yeah, and about how the show broke my damn heart. Again.
The Trouble With Hemmer
Mark: While I was watching, I did some mental calculus, and everyone in the away team are characters we know for certain have a future, except for the obvious redshirts and two regulars: Hemmer and La’an. I also knew that La’an was seen in leaked set pics during filming for season 2. That left Hemmer, and the heavy foreshadowing we saw in this episode (not to mention the recap at the beginning reminding us that Hemmer was ready to die back in “Memento Mori”). But still, you and I were both bemoaning his lack of spotlighting throughout the season last week. It seems like the character was missing for much of the season, and didn’t have much to do for the rest, with a couple of notable exceptions.
Will: Hemmer was a character with an inherent endpoint in that we know he won’t be the chief engineer of the Enterprise in 10 years. Now, whether that was a departure next season or five seasons from now, I don’t suppose it matters all that much, although his death only means more with the more time you spend with the character. Still, I’m satisfied with this arc and his emotional sendoff — even as actor Bruce Horak has said in multiple interviews that it’s not the end of *his* (meaning the actor) Star Trek career.
Mark: I’m glad to hear that. I also read that he knew going in that the part was for just one season. It still stings, though. If he comes back as a different character, it’d be a lot like what happened with the character of Airiam over on Discovery: she was an intriguing-looking cyborg character played by Sara Mitich in the first season. Mitich hated the heavy prosthetics that they put her in, so in the second season, Airiam was recast, and Mitich was given a different role. Before I went looking for interviews with Horak, I was wondering if we were seeing a similar situation, as he’s the character with the most prosthetics in the main cast.
Will: Given his language, we’ve got a couple of options, right? Your theory of a new character could work, but we could also see him play another Andorian. It could also be as simple as some flashbacks. But I readily believe that the character of Chief Engineer Hemmer is dead and not coming back. This ain’t comics.
Mark: Or Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, for that matter. It would be a real shame if they wrote off their first visually impaired regular castmember. It’s not a good look, if you’ll excuse the pun. Still, speculation aside, this is the show we’ve been given.
Will: It’s odd to say this having written quite the spoilery review, but I’m happy I went into this not knowing anything about the episode, from the first face-to-face meeting with the Gorn to Hemmer’s death — two things that played really well as surprises. It’s even odder to say that after that nice experience of not being spoiled, I went off and watched the trailer for our final episode of the season. After having done and thought all those things, here’s my conclusion: Christopher Pike and Anson Mount make this show special. But I think it’s strongest when other characters have just as much (if not more) focus.
Mark: I agree: I’ve noticed that I don’t notice when the episode focuses on him. It just reads as Star Trek. When an episode focuses on someone else, it reminds me that this show isn’t just another Trek, and it’s easy to forget that it’s trying something ever-so-slightly different, despite hewing closely to the classic formula. The Uhura bookends that we get here really make this show shine. She doesn’t get a huge amount to do in the bulk of the episode, but she’s the closest to Hemmer. We saw their bond established early in the season, and I was hoping we’d see him mentoring her for a good long time. I mean, who would have though that Uhura’s mentor would be an engineer? But it was an interesting relationship, and his death promises to be a turning point in her life (not the least because we see her gazing longingly at the communications station at the end of the episode).
Will: And what a nice shot that was — it might have lingered for a *hair* too long, but it told the audience so much: Uhura wants to stay in Starfleet, she has the self-esteem necessary to believe she’s fit to serve on the Enterprise and she wants to work comms. A lot accomplished there. But, yeah, Hemmer said it best — he fixes what’s broken, and Uhura is better now. Maybe not fixed, because you’re never whole after loss. But Hemmer made it so that she could get to the next starbase in life.
Mark: I haven’t watched the trailer for the finale yet, but with Hemmer gone, La’an on leave trying to find a home for Oriana (Newt) and Uhura maybe possibly going back to Earth, we’re getting some big changes going into our finale. Have you got any predictions?
Will: Again, having watched the trailer, I think Pike is going to figure out whether his future is set or if it can be changed. Or, perhaps, answer the question of whether he wants to try to change it. Whatever it is, it’s going to be heavy. And also whatever it is, it’s going to have to do a lot to do better than this as an endpoint on the season.
Mark: I’ve got just two words for my prediction: cliff. hanger.
Will: Mark, fire.
Stray New Words
- Dr. M’Benga mistakenly refers to Oriana as “my daughter.” Quite the Freudian slip.
- Dr. M’Benga also says, “It’s dead, Chris.” Truly, this is be the man who will teach Bones everything he knows.
- But, seriously, there has to be something Starfleet wants with the Peregrine, right? Imagine Pike’s righteous fury if/when he learns brass knew how dangerous that mission was.
- Acting Chief Engineer Ortegas? We’ve seen a helmsman become an engineer before…
- La’an mentioning that the Gorn are just as dangerous in person as they are piloting starships is a nice inversion of how viewers know the Gorn, but is an absolutely apt thing to say to her crewmates who’ve only ever fought them ship-to-ship.
- SNW making Gorn the big bad of the series (or at least the first season) continues to be an incredibly creative and true-to-canon decision.
- Still, you’d think Spock would mention to Kirk that he fought a Gorn in person. He’s turning out to be a remarkably private person.
Mark Turetsky
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
