Pike and M’Benga take a “Shuttle to Kenfori” in order to find a miracle cure for Captain Batel’s continuing Gorn problems, only to encounter a planet full of zombies. Strange New Worlds Season 3 episode 3 written by Onitra Johnson & Bill Wolkoff, directed by Dan Liu.
Mark Turetsky: While Will continues to recover from his mysterious Gorn illness, I figure we might should take a little road trip to get to know each other. Sound good?
Matt Lazorwitz: Absolutely. Nothing like a road trip movie, so it must work the same in real life. Crosby and Hope. Martin and Candy. Thelma and Louise.
Mark: Come, get on this bus in downtown Brooklyn! Come aboard… THE SHUTTLE TO CANARSIE!
Matt: I think you might have that a bit off…
They’re Not Zombies, Don’t Call Them Zombies
Mark: Hey, so remember how Una’s magic science blood cured Captain Mrs. McMurray? Yeah, it turns out it didn’t take. Or, rather, it did, but not all the way, and now the only thing that can cure her for real is a flower that can only be found in the Klingon Neutral Zone. The wounds of the Klingon War that happened mostly offscreen in the first season of Discovery are still fresh for the crew of the Enterprise, including and especially Dr. M’Benga, who was witness to and committed some real atrocities, so it’s a good thing he needs to come along on this dangerous mission into disputed space. Before we get to the mission itself, what do you make of Pike’s risking both his ship and a war with the Klingons in order to find a cure?
Matt: It’s funny, because last review I commented that I liked that Pike was willing to leave his crew behind to save the Federation when the Gorn were preparing to invade, and this episode he’s willing to do anything for Batel, up to restarting the Klingon War. He goes out of his way to lower the footprint of the Federation as much as possible, but it’s still a bold choice. It’s not the only time a Starfleet captain has put the world/universe at stake for personal reasons, but it was one of the more extreme ones. I worry that we’re getting a lot of set-up here for this to end very badly…
This is a follow up of sorts to the controversial season 2 episode “Under the Cloak of War,” an episode that some fans read as being a little too pro-war for Star Trek. But we come here not to talk about that episode, but about this one, which is a zombie story. We chatted last time about genre and tone shifts, and this isn’t the first horror story we’ve seen in this series, but it is one of the more overtly horrific. Plant zombies stalk M’Benga, Pike and some Kilingons who show up chasing them. Or rather, chasing one of them specifically.
Mark: Yes, here the zombies are specifically the victims of an infectious moss, and these ones are fast zombies, so, we’ve got a kind of mash-up of the fungus zombies from The Last Of Us and the Rage Virus zombies from the 28 Days Later franchise. Of course, in the world of Star Trek, people crossed with fungus become transwarp navigators, not zombies, so moss it is.
Matt: When we got to the planet, I was initially figuring we were going to get carnivorous, sapient plants, like the Drengir from “The High Republic” comics/novels over at a competing sci-fi franchise. But they proved me wrong.
The zombies and the survival horror is only a part of what really drives this part of the episode. As is often the case with Star Trek in general and nuTrek a whole lot, this comes down to character interactions and conflicts. The moss zombies gave us a ticking clock, but the engine of the episode is M’Benga and the secrets he’s keeping from Pike. One secret involving Batel and one involving the Klingon Dak’Rah from last season. That secret comes back to bite him, because if we know one thing about Klingons it is that they usually have families, and killing one usually means all sorts of problems for you. Just ask Worf on TNG. And Ma’ah on Lower Decks. And Quark. Long live the House of Quark.
Mark: Yes, it’s rather funny to me that in the final season of Lower Decks, less than a year ago, we had Relga, the surviving member of a dishonored house, seeking revenge for the killing of her dishonored relatives and going on a mission to find and kill one of our characters in order to restore her house’s honor, and here we have Bytha doing much the same thing for the same reason.
Matt: A great example of how Lower Decks was a comedy show that still played so much of the Star Trek of it all straight.
M’Benga has to face down what he did, and who he is. This warm, loving doctor who truly believes that at his core there is a monster constantly attempting to get out. We’ve seen that before, but he really admits it here, and gets to talk it out with Pike, who has the safety net of this being an off the books mission that “never happened” so he doesn’t have to turn M’Benga over to Starfleet for murder.
Mark: Maybe it’s the knowledge of his imminent maiming that’s motivating Pike here, because I feel like Picard, Kirk, hell, even Sisko would give a member of his crew who committed murder a stiff dressing down, even if they didn’t report them to the authorities. Even above and beyond the violation of the law, it’s a violation of personal trust.
Matt: And not the only one, as M’Benga also kept Batel’s decision to be hybridized with a Gorn from Pike. He frankly seemed far more upset about that than the murder.
Mark: We’ve come to another point of this episode that really rankled for me: Batel tells Pike that she didn’t include him in the decision about her treatment because it doesn’t involve him. He plays the supportive boyfriend and says he would have supported her, but he’s hurt that he wasn’t consulted. It’s very much self-consciously a conversation meant to mirror real-world conversations about bodily autonomy, more specifically about women’s control over their bodies. But it’s not explored. At all.
Matt: Could that be a seed for conversations to be had after she has the procedure and becomes part lizard? It does seem to be a big deal for something that is dealt with in one scene. Star Trek has never shied away from issues, and women’s rights to choose have never been more relevant, so you’d think they would have spent time with this. Especially because it sounds kinda borderline with the Federation’s feelings on genetic manipulation as well, something this show has repeatedly dealt with. [Ed. Note: Specifically with Batel as part of some of those stories].
Mark: I certainly hope so, because such heady questions have been the focus of entire episodes of Star Trek, like “Ethics” or “The Offspring,” or “The Outcast.” To just put this conversation at the end of a zombie/revenge episode feels like the writers just plopped this at our feet because because this is the sort of thing Trek deals with. Heck, even 28 Years Later, which is very much A Zombie Movie, managed to deal amazingly with a question like this, in a, dare I say it, moving way.
The Ortegas Factor
Matt: We talked about the fact that Ortegas had been underserved in the previous season(s), and were worried about how her trauma arc was going to play out, and they didn’t hold that card close to the vest for long, did they?
Mark: No, they really didn’t. The ramifications from the season opener might just resonate through the entire season at this rate. But that’s the kind of Trek that everyone wants, right? Self-contained episodes with light smatterings of serialization sprinkled throughout. Anyway, Ortegas is now snapping at other officers in meetings and offering up the most reckless of plans. The thing about her characterization that I really enjoyed in previous seasons (though she wasn’t given much to do) was that she was a fairly positive person, while being an ace pilot. She was daring, let’s say, but never reckless. It’s why it was so shocking to see her alternate future self in the season one finale “A Quality of Mercy.” It’s nice that she’s getting more to do this season, but as we’ve opined before, it’s coming from whacking the character with the trauma stick instead of exploring the character as she existed before, and that’s a shame.
Matt: It is. There are so many other ways to give a character depth than dragging them through the hell of a trauma arc (and I’m saying this as the site’s leading Batman fan). She puts the entire ship in danger here, not just herself. And Una calls her right on it. Ortegas is such a good a pilot (she flies the ship), that what would be an understandable error from someone else is clearly her forcing Number One’s hand to go with her reckless plan. Not to say that Pike won’t call someone to task, but he’s so affable that it’s good to have a reminder that Una is the hardass in their command relationship, and she comes down hard on Ortegas at the end here.
Mark: It’s funny: the writers are somewhat limited with Una’s character on this series because of her portrayal in “The Cage.” Her original conception was that she was the coldly logical one, not Spock, but since we have 50+ years of Spock characterization to contend with, we’re given a version of Una that has to walk a line where she needs to be consistent with her character in “The Cage” but also not be just another Spock. This is a rather longwinded way of saying that Rebecca Romijn has had a really hard job in making her an interesting character, because the writing on the show hasn’t given her much to go on aside from “trusted, stalwart adviser to the captain who’s more or less all business.” Even in her biggest showcase, “Ad Astra Per Aspera,” it didn’t focus on who she is as a character, but rather what she represents as an Illyrian.
Matt: Ortegas also snaps at Uhura, her best friend of the ship, and while they make peace by the end of the episode, it’s clear that Ortegas is ready to bite back at anyone in her current mindset. I doubt the dressing down she got from Number One is going to fix everything, and I’m wondering if Uhura’s burgeoning romance with her brother is going to be another bit of friction in this relationship.
Mark: The Enterprise really needs a counselor…
Stray New Words
- So, Una went to the same hairdresser as Princess Leia in Empire Strikes Back this episode, huh?
- With the Gorn implantation being portrayed as so incredibly persistent and contagious, is it possible that Spock’s mindmeld with Batel might have implanted him with some kind of psychic Gorn infection?
- Don’t life sign scans include movement? Really?
- The dragonfly wings on the Klingon shuttle were cool.
- They make a point of pointing out that Pike and M’Benga were about to board the Klingon shuttle before they got beamed away. Was this put in solely for us not to put too much stock in Ortegas’ plan succeeding?
- I’ve seen it speculated around the Internet that the Gorn hybridization might be what leads to the type of Gorn we saw in TOS’ “Arena.” I really hope we’re not heading in that direction. It smacks of “explaining the Klingons from TOS.”
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.
Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana. Follow him @markturetsky.com on Bluesky.
