“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 4 Episode 1 Recap/Review – “Valles Marineris”

“Time’s a funny thing.”

“Yes, it is.”

That brief moment between Captain Cristóbal Rios and Q in Star Trek: Picard season two could very easily describe the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ fourth and penultimate season, “Valles Marineris.” A classic chicken-and-egg paradox story, the Enterprise crew find themselves at a very misunderstood moment in Earth’s history.

A Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Sort of Thing

Act One

Yee-haw! The episode fades in on Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) making good use of his historical saddle. Trying to keep up are Lieutenant La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and Dr. Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun). The last time we saw these three particular crew members on a mission together, things went seriously sideways on good ol’ Rigel VII again (“Among the Lotus Eaters”). This time, however, it looks like they’ve outrun whatever was chasing them once they finally regroup (but that’s a pretty big shiner on Captain Pike). Lieutenant Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) calls from the Enterprise to tell them that the street lamps are coming on, so it’s time to come home. Remember, RHIP (“Rank Hath Its Privileges”), so Pike takes five more minutes to ride a little more with the landing party, just to make sure they’re well out of range when they’re beamed up.

Once back on the ship, Lieutenant Spock (Ethan Peck) is waiting in the transporter to take Pike’s saddle for him. We all know that a rider’s saddle is a very personal item, so there was no way in Gre’thor Pike was going to hand it over. Of course, the fact that Spock’s girlfriend, La’an, was also beaming up had nothing to do with why he was there in the transporter room waiting for the landing party to return. And she lets him know in no uncertain terms that she appreciated the gesture. Lieutenant Junior Grade Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (Martin Quinn) is visibly uncomfortable at their public display of affection, but a sharp look from La’an quickly turns his attention back to the transporter console. After all, he doesn’t want to make her angry.

Pike’s exuberance may only be superficial. Once the dust is washed off and the saddle placed back on its mount in the Ready Room, we learn that the Enterprise and her crew have been working for six months without a break. They’re not about to get one anytime soon, either, because here comes Admiral Robert April (Adrian Holmes) with another mission… and a promotion for Captain Pike to Commodore, if he wants it. Normally, we would expect the Captain of the Enterprise to respond with a resounding “no,” but Pike asks for time to think about it.

April gives him until the end of the mission (in other words, the end of the episode) to decide.

Meanwhile, Lieutentant Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) is chatting up Ensign Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) in the turbolift as they’re reporting to the Bridge for their duty shift. Scotty has introduced alarms into Ortegas’s console to let her know she’s pushing the ship too hard (as if she didn’t know that already), and she’s taking it as a personal criticism of her flying. Uhura isn’t paying attention, though; she’s reading up on the cadet she’s been assigned to sponsor this year. She remembers her year on the Enterprise as a cadet and the impact Hemer’s mentorship had on her, and she wants to share some of his wisdom with her new mentee.

Cadet A’sha (Bianca Nubara), a Vulcan, couldn’t care less. When Uhura tries to greet her in her native tongue, A’sha quickly points out that her Vulcan sucks, and she should stick to Federation Standard. Every time Uhura tries to form some sort of bond or find something in common with her new cadet, A’sha shoots her down. She’s not there to bond; she’s there to learn.

The Exposition

The crew gathers in the Ready Room for a classic mission brief to learn what the episode’s plot is this week.

They learn they’re being sent to investigate the techno-babble thingie, also known as a Category 10 Interstellar Squall. Commander Pelia’s (Carol Kane) eyes quickly light up, and she off-handedly remarks about how she saw one once many years ago. “I think I was in a phone box at the time,” she casually remarks, adding yet another implied connection with Doctor Who.

The crew around the table ask if this is really worth their while; after all, it seems pretty risky to fly a ship into a storm. Those things generally don’t turn out well. Pelia takes a page from the James T. Kirk Starfleet handbook and reminds them that risk is why they’re out there in the first place (and where would the plot go if they decided to stay home), so off they warp.

The squall, like most interstellar phenomena, is visually stunning, and the crew takes a moment to appreciate its beauty. That is, all but Cadet A’sha, who appreciates digital data more and would rather stare at a console. Their reverie is broken, however, when Uhura picks up a Federation distress call from inside the storm.

Enterprise treads carefully to find the source of the distress call but gets caught in the storm as well, as if the storm itself reached out and grabbed the ship. Pike orders Uhura to drop a warning buoy as they’re pulled deeper into the storm.

Act Two

After a spectacular light show, the crew wakes up a little shaken but otherwise unharmed. The Enterprise, however, is a different story. Everything is down: shields, weapons, sensors, communications, engines, helm… you know, just everything that tells them where they are and what they should do.

Thankfully, life support still has just enough power to work. Pelia and Scotty assure the rest of the crew that systems will come back online, but they still need one critical item: iridium. Sensors are working well enough to find some on a nearby planet, where Una, La’an, and Ortegas take the one working shuttle to go look for it.

Something about this planet feels… familiar. The landing party is forced to land pretty far from the iridium they’re going to get, and they quickly realize they need to hike through a jungle to get where they want to go.

Not only that, but there’s what Scotty describes as a really big life form between them and the iridium, and it doesn’t sound friendly at all. La’an quickly and recklessly figures out that stunning it won’t work when she fires her phaser at the “laddie” (as Scotty has started calling it). They still can’t get a clear look at what they’re dealing with, so La’an, already feeling trigger-happy, suggests they use the new “Disintegrate” setting on the phaser to cut through the trees obscuring their view.

At the same time, back on the Enterprise, more systems are coming back online, and Spock has finally been able to figure out where they are. They’re home in the Sol System. They don’t recognize it, though, because they’re also 65 million years in the past.

Yep, those trees were obscuring a tyrannosaurus rex. The landing party suddenly found themselves surrounded by dinosaurs. They landed on Earth.

That adds a huge wrinkle. Now, not only does the Enterprise crew have to worry about getting its systems online, they have to worry about butterfly effects as well. While the Temporal Prime Directive isn’t a thing yet, Captain Pike and Una both realize they need to be really careful not to erase all of human history, including Starfleet and the Federation.

No pressure.

As if things couldn’t get any worse (they could), Enterprise is suddenly grabbed by a very large unknown vessel. Let’s do a quick recheck – weapons: down, shields: down, engines: down. They can’t fight, and they can’t run. The only option open is to talk, since communications have come back online. Since diplomacy is one of Captain Pike’s strengths (along with really great hair), he asks Uhura to open those hailing frequencies to see if they can’t talk their way out of this.

The vessel responds and informs the crew that they’re claiming the Enterprise as salvage to use in their war effort. This doesn’t sit well with Pike, who doesn’t want his ship broken down for parts, and those parts change a lot of history. In a moment of sheer desperation, he invites the person at the other end of the line to come aboard. On a scale of 1-10 of bad ideas, this one is right up there with invading Russia in the winter, and the rest of the crew lets him know. Still, Pike is committed, and he waits in the transporter room with Spock, M’Benga, and Scotty all chiming in to tell him how sideways this could go.

That proved to be unnecessary when their unknown guests walked through the exterior hull into the hallway outside the transporter room. They don’t need transporters, because they can phase through walls, and can’t you guys do that, and by the way, they’re from the fourth planet in the solar system, which just happens to be… Mars.

The Martians Have Landed

They don’t want to see our leaders, though; they want to see our weapons. The Martian commander, played by the legendary actress Saffron Burrows (Paradise, YOU), explains in no uncertain terms that she sees anyone not Martian as an enemy. She’s not interested in cooperation or collaboration; she’s fighting to save her planet from extinction. The only aliens they’ve encountered are an insect species called the Dol’Drm who live on the fifth planet in the system and crashed one of their ships into Mars, leaving a 4,000 kilometer-long planetary scar in its wake (Valles Marineris).

Because the Martians can’t communicate with the Dol’Drm, they were never able to find out why the Dol’Drm crashed a ship into their planet and killed about two million people, so they assumed hostile intent and went to war.

Spoiler alert: Everything the Martian commander is worried about will happen. Mars will become uninhabitable. Pike can’t tell her that, obviously, but he heavily implies that she’s not wrong. Ever the diplomat, Captain Pike offers to be a bridge between the Martians and Dol’Drm and help them figure out how to communicate. Since the Federation has already learned how to communicate with insectoid species (e.g., the Xindi), this shouldn’t be a problem for Ensign Uhura and Lieutenant Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte).

Back on Earth (such as it is), the landing party still needs to figure out how to get past a very large creature that would find them delicious and get to the iridium they came for. Una insists they can’t kill “Laddie” and risk a butterfly effect, but they can try to stun it.

When La’an points out that she already did that to no avail, Una retorts by suggesting hitting it in its soft palate might do the trick. She just has to wait until it’s close enough to knock out but not get eaten in the process. Una is able to get “Laddie’s” attention, but anything with a brain the size of a walnut gets easily distracted.

A t-rex has the grace of a bull in a china shop, and all the debris causes Una to drop her phaser. Ortegas tosses it to her just as “Laddie” is about to enjoy Illyrian tartar, and she’s able to fire right down its throat. The dinosaur falls unconscious, and Una doesn’t get eaten, but she does happen to notice that “Laddie” is, in fact, “Lassie.”

The Dol’Drm Have Landed

The landing party decides to move on before Mama T-Rex wakes up and finds the source of the iridium. It’s coming from a Dol’Drm cryo-ship that crash-landed on Earth (apparently, the Dol’Drm are really bad at landing their ships) with all hands dead.

While La’an and Ortegas try to wrap their heads around that little discovery, Una searches the wreckage for the iridium. La’an tries to put a positive spin on it by pointing out how bad it would have been if they survived. Ortegas, on the other hand, reminds her that no matter what, they were just trying to survive.

Una returns with iridium in hand, and they start back to the shuttle. What they didn’t know was that they were being stalked by a velociraptor who took that opportunity to pounce. While Una and Ortegas clearly saw Jurassic Park and knew to duck, La’an simply squared up and punched it in the nose, causing it to run off in fear and confusion.

You mean Jurassic Park was BS???

The landing party shrugs it off to get the iridium back to the Enterprise quickly. Back on the ship, La’an reports to sickbay, where she explains how she punched a dinosaur. Chapel reacts with shock and awe, but M’Benga just cracks a joke, “I’m sure it had it coming.” La’an is taking this seriously; she’s broken her hand and doesn’t feel any pain. In fact, she feels focused, stronger, and more attuned to her surroundings. M’Benga, ever the comedian, asks, “Are you going to try to conquer the galaxy?” La’an doesn’t brush it off and simply replies, “I don’t know.”

Back on the Bridge, Spock has finally been able to figure out how they got there and how they could get home. Their own warning buoy was the original signal they detected within the squall. The storm sent them back in time and created a quantum entanglement that could be broken by flying back into it. The catch: They need the power of a supernova to make it work. Obviously, they don’t want to blow up the sun to do it, so they need to find some way to generate that kind of power.

The landing party has also had a chance to compare notes with the rest of the Bridge crew. With this new information, Pike realizes that the Dol’Drm are trying to escape from a fifth planet between Mars and Jupiter that isn’t supposed to be there. He knows the Martians are doomed either way, but now he’s faced with the added problem of what’s supposed to happen to the Dol’Drm.

Act Three

The Martians weren’t kidding about the weapons. While the rest of the ship kind of forgot they were there, the Martian commander figured out how their computer worked and looked up the history of her planet, learning everything they were trying not to tell her.

When confronted, she points out that they weren’t completely honest with her, while she was nothing but honest with them. She believed Captain Pike was sincere when he described the Federation and its ideals, but it didn’t change the fact that he kept things from her, and she just couldn’t trust him. She grabbed their primary anti-matter fuel cell, powerful enough to destroy the Dol’Drm planet and then some, and returned to her ship to destroy the Dol’Drm and save Mars.

The Enterprise crew’s first instinct is to stop her from wiping out an entire planet, so they give chase. Systems are still coming up slowly, so Ortegas has to push the engines well beyond their limits (and setting off Scotty’s alarms).

The Martians worked quickly and converted the anti-matter fuel cell into a torpedo and launched it at the Dol’Drm home world. Captain Pike quickly reviews 65 million years’ worth of history and calls off their efforts at the last second. The Martians destroy the Dol’Drm planet and their own ship in the process.

Debris from the explosion scatters, and a sizable chunk crashes into Earth, creating an extinction-level event. Consequently, the shockwave happens to be the exact amount of energy they need to break the quantum entanglement if they fly into it. You don’t have to twist Ortegas’s arm to fly into danger, but even she’s not sure about this as the shockwave envelops the ship and returns them to their present time, where they find Starfleet and the Federation right where they left it.

After Spock further analyzes the effects that the destruction of the Dol’Drm planet had on our solar system, he explains that everything that happened was supposed to happen. The destruction of the Dol’Drm planet changed Mars’ orbit around the sun, causing its atmosphere to thin and its surface to dry up. The debris from the planet formed the Dust Belt that now exists between Mars and Jupiter. Finally, the chunk that hit Earth and killed off the dinosaurs… well, we all know how that turned out.

In other words, the Enterprise answered its own distress call from 65 million years ago to go back in time to make sure Martians took their fuel cell to destroy a planet but create life in our solar system as we know it. Whoever designed that buoy deserves a very big raise.

Dénouement

There’s just one more thing to resolve: Pike’s promotion. If he takes the promotion to Commodore, he knows he’s one step closer to his fate, but if he doesn’t, he’s just prolonging the inevitable. After he’s debriefed Admiral April about the mission and how the Enterprise is responsible for, well, everything, Pike lets the admiral know he’s not ready to give up the chair just yet. There is someone, however, who very much deserves a promotion.

Congratulations, Commander Una Chin-Riley. Living as an Illyrian in Starfleet, Una always had one eye over her shoulder, waiting for her secret to be exposed. Everything she’s done to this point has been with one big secret over her head. Her promotion comes to her as an out-and-proud Illyrian and brings her one step closer to being the first Illyrian captain in Starfleet.

Final Thoughts

“Valles Marineris” is a solid Star Trek episode. It has tons of action, suspense, and a few laughs as well.

During Captain Pike’s Federation pitch to the Martian commander, he explains that the member planets benefit more working together than they would alone. Her response, however, was to offer condolences. She explains to Pike that their culture has 12 different words for alone that differ with tone and inflection. The way Pike said the word “alone” translated to her as “widower.” He’s clearly not over losing Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano) and still has a lot to deal with.
The tension between Ortegas and Scotty is palpable. They’re trying to play it off, but they’re clearly on each other’s last nerve. Since there’s no interpersonal conflict in Star Trek, this is going to have to get resolved.
Carol Kane is on fire as Pelia. She’s fully committed to taking Scotty under her wing and bringing out the best in him. She’s also a little more specific with her Doctor Who reference, negating the fan theory that the “time-traveling doctor” she once knew was actually Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Feel free to ask me sometime about how I love that theory and think of it as a missed opportunity for a small Taxi reunion.
Pike turned down the promotion this time, but we know he’s going to accept it eventually. The fact that he thought about it in the first place is an indication that he may be getting a little tired of the chair. This could be a subtle setup for a transition into a Captain Kirk-commanded Enterprise. Paramount hasn’t announced any official plans beyond when Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy end next year, but I never count Star Trek out.
They totally could have disintegrated that dinosaur.