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This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4, episode 1.
Even the biggest fan of new Star Trek has to admit that Strange New Worlds has something to prove. After its first two excellent seasons, the prequel series took a wrong turn with its third season. Between a mean-spirited overarching story that involved eye trauma and a nonsensical Doctor Who-style resolution, and far too much emphasis on Spock’s love life, the season left many disappointed.
The season 4 premiere, “Valles Marineris,” seeks to right the ship, in part because it follows the model of one of the greatest episodes of the franchise. The story of a captain who must make a difficult decision for the future of humanity recalls The Original Series standout “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which the new Captain Kirk Paul Wesley calls, “My favorite episode.”
Written by Harlan Ellison (who then took exception to changes to his script and famously disavowed the episode) and directed by Joseph Pevney, “The City on the Edge of Forever” begins with a wacky premise in which a medical mishap results with McCoy getting injected with a serum that makes him paranoid. A crazed McCoy runs through a time portal that lands him in 1930s New York. Kirk and Spock (his ears disguised by a wool cap) follow, and there they meet Edith Keeler, a kind-hearted social worker played by Joan Collins. As Spock searches for McCoy, Kirk finds himself increasingly moved by Keeler, to the point that he actually considers leaving his true love, the Enterprise, to settle down with her.
Kirk’s longing only grows when he learns that she is to die in a car accident just days after he and Spock arrived. Worse, if Kirk were to save her, a series of events would occur that lead to the Nazis inventing the atom bomb before the U.S. and winning World War II. Thus for the sake of all humanity, Spock memorably declares, Edith Keeler must die.
Few episodes of Trek have so skillfully weaved romantic longing, human drama, and high sci-fi concepts. For Wesley, Strange New Worlds came closest in season two. “We got to do our version of that with Christina [Chong, who plays La’an] and I with ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,’” Wesley says. “I always wanted to do something like that, and we did.”
Kirk is absent for “Valles Marineris,” which means that Pike gets his shot at a version of the TOS classic. Here, the Enterprise finds itself investigating an unfamiliar planet inhabited by dinosaurs. As Una takes La’an and Ortegas go down to investigate, Pike and Spock must deal with an enemy ship that takes a hold of the Enterprise. Knowing he’s outgunned and in unfamiliar space, Pike tries the diplomatic approach, inviting that ship’s captain, Battle Commander Cassel (Saffron Burrows), to visit the Enterprise for a conversation.
Although he only initially wants to get Cassel to free his ship and lower their weapons, Pike finds himself drawn to the tragic dignity of his guest. Cassel and her people have been locked in a war for ages and neither can see a way out. All Pike’s talk of the Federation and the coexistence of different peoples sounds to Cassel like a distant dream, a feeling only increased with the reveal that the Enterprise has traveled back to the prehistoric past; that Una and her team are in fact on Earth; and that Cassel hails from a Mars which is not yet the red wasteland we know today. Strangest of all, Pike learns that Cassel is at war with a people from a planet that does not exist in our present, a planet that must have been destroyed in the past.
That recognition leads to Pike’s version of the decision that Kirk makes in “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Despite his entire crew telling him to stop Cassel from killing herself and destroying the enemy planet, despite the feelings for her that have developed through their conversation, despite the impulse to save lives instead of letting them die, Pike decides to preserve the timeline. He watches as the planet explode, engulfing Cassel’s ship in the process.
However, he also realizes that the stakes of his decision were even greater than he could’ve known. A chunk of the destroyed planet floats across space and head towards Earth. As gravity pulls the chunk in, it becomes an asteroid, the very astroid that killed the dinosaurs and sparked human evolution. Thus Pike’s dilemma was even greater than the one faced by Kirk, even if he didn’t know it.
“That was one of those moments where we were filming that scene and we were trying to understand the timeline,” admits Pike actor Anson Mount. “We were going through it as a cast with our writers, but we decided to just shoot it and stop asking questions, shoot the confusion. Story-wise, I could sense where the writers were going, and I was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute! If this happened, the that means…’” he trails off with a laugh. But in the end, Mount feels he made the right decision by holding his questions and letting the audacious episode unfold. “It was a fun idea, and I’m glad we did it,” he surmises.
In that way, Mount can walk away from “Valles Marineris” feeling better than Pike, and much better than Kirk in “The City on the Edge of Forever.” And if “Valles Marineris” can stand the test of time like its TOS predecessor, then we’ll all be happy for his decision as well.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.
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