Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Is Back. Episode 1: Valles Marineris
- aaroncynic
- Jul 24
- 6 min read
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back for its fourth season, and its first episode is an absolute diamond.
Be warned, spoilers abound ahead.
In between the season 3 finale and season 4 premiere, the crew of The Enterprise had been on a grueling series of nonstop missions for six months, and Number One (Rebecca Romijn) tells Captain Pike (Anson Mount) of how much of a toll that can take on a crew and himself personally. “We all need weekends once and awhile, even you,” she says, while reminding him she also enjoys heading up away missions.
Pike is still reeling from the loss of Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano), who last season transformed into The Beholder statue, a perpetual prison guard standing watch over the banished Vezda, one of last season’s big bads. Mount does a brilliant job throughout the episode showing the emotional weight Pike is carrying on his shoulders, just barely being able to hide the grief behind his eyes in a few scenes.
After meeting with Admiral April (Adrian Holmes) and being informed he’s up for a promotion, Pike and the crew are ordered to observe a category ten interstellar squall, a phenomenon rarely seen in the Alpha Quadrant. I certainly don’t remember any crew in any Trek franchise encountering one, but the Enterprise’s Lanthenite Chief Engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) says she has before and quips she might’ve been “in a phone box at the time.”
It’s a fun little Easter egg and the third time in Strange New Worlds has referenced Doctor Who. In the season 3 episode The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, an unmistakable TARDIS appears for just a second trapped alongside the Enterprise in a massive ship. In the season 3 finale, Pelia mentions a time traveling doctor she once knew. While a crossover between the two franchises would be epic and something that I would personally love, it’s not something likely to happen. Co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told Syfy Wire recently there were “too many corporate hurdles” for such a meld. But still, it’s a nice little nod to something that could have been.
The Enterprise sets out to view the squall, receives a mysterious mayday from inside and while trying to investigate, gets sucked in. After a rough ride, the ship emerges on the other side heavily damaged, with nothing working but life support. A nearby planet shows a source of iridium, which would give the crew what it needs to get the ship running again, and Number One gets her wish for an away mission. She heads off to the planet via shuttle with Lieutenants La’an (Christina Chong) and Ortegas (Melissa Navia).
The planet is lush and beautiful in a primordial sort of way. But the source of the iridium is a bit far off for the away team and something BIG lurks on the way in between. A phaser blast seems like a mosquito bite to the beast and we soon learn why.
After the Enterprise gets ship-napped by unknown aliens, the crew discovers they’re in a most unexpected and precarious place – Earth as it was 65 million years ago. The beast is a T-Rex. Our away team are standing among real, actual dinosaurs on prehistoric Earth.
The Enterprise’s captors are revealed to be actual native Martians, as Mars appears on the viewscreen as a very much habitable and life-filled planet. The Captain of the ship, Battle Commander Cassell (Saffron Burrows), tries to claim salvage rights on the disabled Enterprise, saying that the ship is needed in a war with an insectoid species known as the Dol'drm. The Martians and Dol’drm can’t communicate, and the Martians believe they have no desire to do so – only the desire to spread across the planet and feed on everything.
What follows is a wonderful and poignant exploration of a classic bootstrap paradox. The Dol’drm are also from the Sol System, inhabiting the fifth planet, which at the time was not Jupiter. The crew is very careful to follow longstanding advice and try not to step on (or kill) anything while on Earth and attempts to hide their temporal origins from the Martians. Commander Cassel eventually discovers their true place in the timeline, and she prematurely ends what was a potentially burgeoning relationship between the Federation and Martians of eons past.
Cassel steals antimatter from the Enterprise to make a bomb, one that will completely annihilate the Dol’drm. The Enterprise crew doesn’t want to be part of what will be a genocide and does all they can to stop it up until the near end of the episode, when Pike realizes that without the destruction of the fifth planet, the Federation, the solar system, and humanity itself would no longer exist in his present.
Much like many other classic causal loops, it turns out that the crew of the Enterprise was not only responsible for their own appearance in the past, but assisted in the extinction of the Dol’drm, the dinosaurs, and the Martians, along with the eventual evolution of humanity. Cassel’s wholesale slaughter of the Dol’drm in the hope it would thwart the destruction of Mars end up being the cause of it becoming a barren wasteland millions of years in the future.
It’s a very familiar and sometimes overused trope, but Strange New Worlds does it so very well, and Valles Marineris gives us a fictional glimpse into a very real theory that maybe once in the very, very distant past that the red planet had life. We grapple with some very dark moral quagmires. It’s a stand-alone adventure that also has repercussions and reverberations throughout the franchise. In short, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from the series and hopefully, a good portent of what’s to come for the rest of the season.
Stray observations:
I’m wondering why at least Captain Pike and Admiral April didn’t get a visit from the Department of Temporal Investigations. While it technically doesn’t YET exist in 2262, La’an got a visit from them in season two after traveling back in time to the 21st century.
I’m not exactly sold on the awkward beginnings of the mentor relationship between Uhura and new Vulcan cadet A’Sha. The arrogant Vulcan is off-putting towards a beloved crewmember trying to help thing has been done A LOT before and usually plays out the same way.
I’m also not completely sold on the tension between Ortegas and Scotty. It feels a little forced and seems like we might be headed into an awkward at first reluctant romance that’s a surprise for everyone but the audience. I hope I’m wrong.
Speaking of tropes, I did enjoy the Captain passes on promotion one as it played out in this episode, if only because it keeps true to the timeline of what we know and Number One got a much deserved promotion.
How La’An is going to deal with the emergence of her new augment superpowers can go myriad ways and I’m here for it. Also, how about that punch?
It’s been a long time since I’ve watched Voyager, but does (and if so, how) this impact or somehow retcon Distant Origin, the episode where the reptilian humanoid Voth are descendants of dinosaurs? Then again, the Voth do resemble Silurians quite a bit, so maybe there’s some other timey wimey Doctor Who related things happening here.
Valles Marineris was almost TOO packed and I wish we’d have gotten a longer runtime. While I loved the Enterprise crew trying to grapple with the fallout from realizing their dark responsibility in humanity’s creation, it felt a little rushed. Mount’s and Burrows’ captain to captain chemistry was stellar, and I’d have liked to see them given more time onscreen to teach each other about their respective civilizations.
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