In “Memento Mori,” the crew of the Enterprise confronts a deadly new threat to the Federation in the form of The Gorn, a race of predators that stalk the spaceways as La’an tries to cope with her traumatic past. Written by Davy Perez & Beau DeMayo, directed by Dan Liu.
Mark Turetsky: Let’s not mince words here, Will: this is a real crackerjack episode.
Will Nevin: They did a submarine combat episode. In space. SUBMARINES IN SPACE, MARK. Sci-fi World War II action drama. 15/10. No notes. We’re done here.
The Enemy Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings
Mark: When they announced the main cast of Strange New Worlds, my first reaction was, “wow, that’s a lot of people,” followed by a bit of trepidation about the presence of a descendent of Khan in the crew (well, to be honest, I originally read her name as Noonien-Soong, and therefore thought she’d be an ancestor of Data’s creator, but this season’s Picard implies those might be same thing?). But I’ve got to say, she’s been a standout character in this first half of the season. Here, we get her first full POV episode, and the payoff was fantastic.
Will: La’an has this incredible veneer of stoicism that — much like Spock — you know if you scratch deep enough, you’ll hit some personal pain. We’ve seen the character already deal with her ties to the Augments and what damage that’s done in her relationship with Number One; in this episode, it’s all about confronting her past with the Gorn, which SNW is putting a whole new can of paint on, and I’m here for it. In a half-season(ish) stretch in which our biggest complaint has been (and continues to be) the goofy theme, this episode — between La’an and the Gorn and OH MY GOD SUBS IN SPACE — is just so good because it does so many small things right.
Mark: I loved her little sidebar with Pike after their senior staff meeting, where she basically said “feelings are dumb, I never bother having feelings!” while having SO MANY feelings. And Pike, amazing captain that he is, knows that now’s not the time to call her on her bullshit, but deflects by basically saying “oh, sure, I know that, but the crew are scared of these Gorn guys, so maybe you need to put on a brave face. You know, for the crew.” It’s a tactic I’ve seen suggested in parenting support groups.
Will: And we see that play out later on the bridge when Pike says, “The Enterprise will hold” and La’an immediately says the same thing. That was, by the way, the moment I bought into your plot armor argument — just that little smile Pike has when he says it. It’s knowing.
Mark: These four episodes, taken as a whole, demonstrate a stark difference in how shows are made in the 2020s vs the 1980s. For all that we (rightly) say that Strange New Worlds gets back to the Trek basics of The Next Generation, I think the choice to focus very specifically on a new character every week, and to have that formally reflected in having their personal logs be the voice over for the episode is something that didn’t really show up much in Trek prior to this. It happened once in a while that we’d get someone else’s logs aside from the captain’s, but usually it was for big plot reasons (like, the captain isn’t on the ship, or the crewmember is on a secret mission, or Data is writing a letter). And I think this week-to-week shift of focus owes a lot to the TV landscape post-Lost, which made so much out of spotlighting individual characters and their backstories, especially in the early episodes.
Will: Watching the first season of TNG and SNW at the same time is such a trip. Next Gen is *clearly* dated for the first time in my memory with the 80s aesthetics and, as you just pointed out, the storytelling devices. Compared to what SNW is doing, TNG feels more like the original series…but that could just be the oversized part in its creation Gene Roddenberry had in the first season. And even going back to Picard again, so much of that seems like filler or fetch quest nonsense, but everything here feels integral, albeit occasionally underdone.
Mark: I’d also like to point out how differently the logs get used. Last week, we had Una’s heartfelt log about feeling isolated, about having to be a model minority, tied up in all of her worries about getting found out (which, of course, she then deletes from the record).
Go and watch the last few minutes of this episode. Much of the final montage has no voice over. It’s prime real estate for some stirring words about Starfleet, and Starfleet Remembrance Day and Sacrifice, but instead, it’s mostly un-narrated. It’s only at the very end that we get La’an’s terse log: “Personal log, stardate 3177.9. Today, the Enterprise encountered the Gorn. Seven of the crew gave their lives. But we survived.” It’s brief, it says nothing about her feelings. AND YET! Christina Chong delivers it so beautifully that that “but we survived” gave me genuine chills. She’s not talking about her feelings, but she is feeling them so hard.
Will: One more thing this episode did well was focusing on the sacrifice that comes with serving in Starfleet. It would have been one thing to introduce Remembrance Day but then to also conclude in the cargo bay with those flag-draped coffins after watching Pike struggle with his decision to seal the bulkheads (again with the sub drama!) was simply great. Having a limited number of ships (looking at you Picard season 1 copy/paste) or materiel makes every expenditure more important. Where we see characters mourn the deaths of nameless shipmates, it makes the stakes more important.
Mark: I was worried about transporter chief Kyle for a moment there! He’s not a major character, we know next to nothing about him, but he’s a familiar face.
Will: OK, one more thing before we get to submarines in space, I thought the mindmeld sequence was good — it was suggestive rather than explicit (I think we’ll get into that more here in a second) and did a nice job in illustrating that the mindmeld is a two-way proposition: Not only was Spock able to help La’an access those memories, she was able to see what Burnham’s loss means to Spock.
Mark: The film technique is also much more in line with the use of mindmelds on Discovery as well; instead of the diegetic view, seeing people standing still with hands on each other’s faces, we get a much more expressionistic, experiential view of what a mindmeld feels like. It’s much more satisfying, and put to good use here.
Gorn Before Their Time
Mark: Let’s talk about the Gorn and their use here: we all know that in “Arena” in TOS that nobody had ever seen a Gorn, and their appearance on Enterprise happened in the Mirror Universe. It means that there are certain limitations placed on any episodes about the Gorn. And as La’an points out in the episode, plenty of people have seen the Gorn, they’re just all dead.
Will: Quick point of order here, Mark: Did we see a Gorn in this episode?
Mark: We did not.
Will: You’re damn right we didn’t! I loved that touch — talk them up as monsters, the boogeymen haunting the dreams of Starfleet’s finest. It’s such a compelling way to feature them. And if the Gorn are going to be SNW’s Big Bad, this is a much better way to build them up than TNG’s feeble attempts to use the Ferengi as an enemy in the first season. I know I keep bringing up TNG S1 a bunch, but watching it in real time (I mean, we’re only doing an episode a week so I can’t burn through all the bad stuff to get to season 3/4) is ROUGH.
Anyway, back to this stuff that is actually good. The Gorn should not be an enemy that you can physically beat, either with fists or with weapons. I *loved* how the Enterprise is clearly outmatched in a fight, and Pike has to resort to cunning — which has got to be the way you defeat super aggressive space lizards. All of the component parts of the space submarine fight were perfect — Spock basically redeveloping radar, Pike dropping a torpedo like a depth charge, the Enterprise getting crushed like in Down Periscope. God, it was all so good.
Mark: While I’m mentioning previous appearances of the Gorn, I should also mention the Gorn wedding from Lower Decks.
This episode borrows a lot from Star Trek II, especially the Mutara Nebula sequence, but it also plenty from TOS’ “Balance of Terror,” which featured the then-never-before-seen Romulans and was also a tense submarine battle in space. There’s also a ton of Aliens, with the parallels between the colony and LV-426 and between La’an and Ripley. Of course, unlike in the toxic capitalism of the Alien franchise, La’an is immediately believed and it ends up saving the day.
I think my favorite part of this episode is that the Enterprise does not win, by any stretch. They survive and they escape. That’s the best they can hope for.
Will: I loved one of the final VFX shots where you can clearly see parts of the interior on fire. And you’re right in that the Enterprise simply survived, but we didn’t see any of the usual Trek tropes — Pike didn’t call the crew to lifeboats or prep the self-destruct or anything like that. Although blowing up the ship does seem preferable to getting boarded by the Gorn.
Mark: There’s a brief moment about halfway through the episode where it seems like it’s going to play out in the predictable Star Trek way, when they destroy the Gorn ship with the depth charge torpedo, but it’s a fake out, and part of the Gorn plan to get the Enterprise to show themselves. Really great stuff.
Will: Pike’s moment of defeat when he realizes that? Incredible. I think this show would still be good without Anson Mount, but his ability to inhabit Pike and his charm and doubts and everything else is what makes this must-watch stuff.
Cargo And Sick: The Ballad of the Two Bays
Mark: Finally, it draws a lot from TNG’s “Disaster,” where the Enterprise is disabled and members of the crew are isolated in different parts of the ship, doing things outside of their comfort zones (like Picard having to save a bunch of schoolchildren or Worf delivering a baby).
Will: Hey, that’s both a good pull and the episode that Troi has to make command decisions. This episode is not structured in quite the same way since we have such a heavy A-story, but we certainly do see things cooking in the cargo bay and in sickbay. I think the moments between Uhura and Hemmer could have bled into the saccharine, but they walked right to that line without crossing it.
Mark: It seems like such a slow pitch, storywise: we’ve seen this pair not get along, we know Uhura is a prodigy when it comes to communication, so, of course she’s going to get through to prickly old Hemmer and learn what she needs and save the day, right? But of course, that’s not what happens. They fail! They don’t fix the ice machine (okay, okay, it’s a coolant thingy, but it’s got a big snowflake decal on the side!) and barely survive. If they learn to get along, it’s not going to be because she got through to him, it’ll be because they nearly died together.
Will: But also they don’t write Hemmer to be such a dick that he’s unlikable. He complements Uhura, and he certainly tries to be patient. I tell ya, the MCU superheroes could learn a lot from the crew of this Enterprise.
Mark: We also had the drama in sickbay. This was the part that landed the least for me. All of the elements were there: Dr. M’Benga needs to make some hard decisions about triage with all of their fancy 23rd century medical tech out of commission, including Una walking in with shrapnel in her abdomen, but it just kinda seemed like a nothingburger of a plotline. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as strong as everything else for me.
Will: I referenced something up there *makes pointy motion for previous discussion* as being “underdone” and this was the moment that made me think that. There was potential, certainly, but when they’re trying to keep the runtime in check — unlike certain streaming series *stares in Stranger Things* — sacrifices have to be made. I could have used a little more there, maybe Chapel arguing how the practice of physically stitching people up was barbaric, but I think it accomplished what it could. I thought about what the episode would have been without it, and then that gives you the problem of what to do with Number One. That would have been a crowded bridge and taken away from La’an’s turn in the spotlight.
Mark: We could see her get injured early on and then come back to her in sickbay at the end without losing too much.
Stray New Words
- We haven’t called it out enough, but the music in this episode was incredible. Give composer Nami Melumad all of the money.
- As pointed out by Twitter user Jörg Hillebrand, Crewman Zuniga wore a skant in this episode!
- Next week is a bedroom farce called “Spock Amok.” What more could you want?
- The series continues to find credible reasons for characters to use shuttlecrafts.
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.
