Some Blundering About Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1×04: Memento Mori

“Memento Mori” or “The Wrath of La’an”*

Influences: “Balance of Terror” (TOS), “Disaster” (TNG), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, “The Year of Hell” (VOY). There’s also at least two episodes of DS9 that I think this draws from, but I can’t remember enough details to look up the titles.

* If they don’t use “The Wrath of La’an” as an actual episode title, it will be the biggest missed opportunity since they named this series “Strange New Worlds” instead of Star Trek: Pike Hard.

You know, for a show called “Strange New Worlds”, you know what this show has been a little light on? Worlds that are strange and new. We had a world back in the first episode that was new, but, tbh, not all that strange. There’s a world in the second one but the gang doesn’t actually go to it. Last week’s world was strange, sure, but the overwhelming majority of the action takes place on the Enterprise. Ditto this week. And next week, spoilers, will take place while the Enterprise is docked back at Earth for repairs. Seriously, “Pike Hard” would have been a delightful name for this show and technically more accurate than “Strange New Worlds”.

Let us start with the realization that I am going to end up spending an unwise amount of money to buy a full set of Remembrance Day lapel pins, particularly after I already spent a stupid amount of money on Discovery and Lower Decks lapel pins, and they didn’t even have a Confederation of Earth or La Sirena pin set out yet. Hey, if an episode begins with Pike’s voiceover explaining that today is a holiday where everyone wears pins commemorating ships where they lost friends, and La’an can’t bring herself to wear a pin, what’s the one thing you can absolutely guarantee will happen at the end of the episode? Yeah, wow that is heavy-handed.

Also, it turns out Chief Kyle was on the Shenzhou? And Chapel was on the Farragut? The former, fine. Sure. Okay. But you’d think that Chapel having been on the Farragut (as a civilian?) when it lost half it’s crew to the cloud monster might have come up at some point?

This week is a tense cat-and-mouse game between a crippled Enterprise and a couple of Gorn ships. I’m not entirely on-board with the decision to lean in so hard on the Gorn as evil boogeymen; in their original appearance in the TOS episode “Arena”, they came off as assholes, sure, but it felt like they had a legitimate dispute with the Federation, and maybe it’s just me, but the impression I got by the end of the episode was that the Gorn could be reasoned with and might eventually join the Federation. Here, La’an is pretty clear that the Gorn view mammals as prey and just kinda get off on being violently evil for the lolz. They edge a little close to Enterprise-levels of coyness with the Gorn. I do like that they are more explicit here than Enterprise would be, making it clear that the Gorn are known-of to the Federation, but there’s been no formal first contact, and survivors of encounters with them are so rare that there’s never been confirmed and documented face-to-face contact, but it’s not the thing which fanboys usually assume, where because Kirk treated them as a new species, literally zero humans had ever met one or even heard of them. I bring up Enterprise because it was so fond of these very cutesy, “The NX-01 gang meets a species that was introduced as ‘new’ in TNG but it’s okay because no one says their name,” plots.

Also, though, I wonder if there’s a larger trend that this touches on. We know by now that Jim Kirk is destined to make an appearance in Strange New Worlds at some point. And I wonder how they will play him. Because you can take a lot of what has happened in SNW and in season 2 of Disco as throwing a bit of very lowkey shade at Kirk. Pike knows who Spock’s parents are. He knows about his sister. Kirk is repeatedly surprised by the existence of Spock’s family. Pike knows, winkingly, about the mirror universe; Kirk is ignorant. Chapel apparently has some connection to the Farragut disaster and it’s not clear if Kirk knew this. Half of Kirk’s crew served under Pike. Pike calls Kirk’s brother “Sam”, when in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Jim’s robot duplicate claims that no one else calls him that. I think they might be trying to deliberately send out vibes that maybe Kirk is just… Kind of dumb? There’s been multiple occasions now where you get the impression that things which will one day be surprising to Kirk are approached by Pike as, “Yes, of course all captains know about this; we just don’t talk about it.”

But back to the Gorn, I like that Pike’s reaction to learning it’s the Gorn he’s up against carries a hint of a reflexive dismissal: even though he knows the Gorn are real, La’an has basically told him that his ship just got attacked by bigfoot: the Gorn of the mid-23rd century are like the Borg of the mid-24th: they’re cryptids. La’an disputes this, of course, but she does acknowledge where Pike’s coming from. She instinctively knows that to Pike and the rest of the crew, she may as well have told them they were being attacked by Slenderman, but for her, the Gorn are very real. We don’t actually see any Gorn in this episode, which weighs the narrative in favor of Pike’s perspective rather than La’an’s. The Gorn are an unseen, violent force that the Enterprise has little defense against. (The fact that we do not see any Gorn in person is a shade disappointing, especially after Pike even warns the crew to get ready for hand-to-hand combat).

Minor point against the episode: they use a boarding tunnel to evacuate the cargo ship but we don’t get a VFX shot of it origamiing into position like we did the last time Enterprise used a boarding tunnel back in Discovery. This does bring me to another note, which is that I spent years complaining that NuTrek doesn’t do enough Starship Porn, and apparently I was still holding that cursed money’s paw from last week one of those times, because this episode, like “Children of the Comet”, has a lot of Starship Effect Shots, and… It’s not great. Firstly, the compositing isn’t fantastic; the Enterprise doesn’t always look like it’s part of the environment. Also, the lighting on the Enterprise is often terrible – trying to make it look like it’s part of the environment by having it constantly shadowed or reflecting things or just looking kind of flat. But more than that. One of the recurrent issues people had with the visual effects back when Star Trek used physical models is that space ships were depicted like battleships. They didn’t move a lot, and mostly just traded shots broadsides, like it’s the Napoleonic Wars. And now… They do not. And one thing that’s increasingly clear when they do this in Strange New Worlds is why the Discovery looks the way it does, and why La Sirena looks the way it does. Because the concepts that went into the design of the USS Enterprise back in the 1960s presumed that it was a Big Naval Vessel – a battleship. It is designed to look like it moves like a battleship. The Enterprise looks like it’s supposed to be tanking, not dodging. The USS Enterprise doing fancy maneuvering in space sounds really cool, but when you actually look at it… It looks kinda goofy, because he Enterprise has this big flat top part, and this narrow bit at the bottom and these spindly bits in the back, and it is shaped roughly like an aircraft carrier. You know what did this okay? Battlestar Galactica. The fighters did the fancy stuff; Galactica sat there and tanked nukes because it was big and heavy and shaped like a brick. We have a little of that when Enterprise defeats one of the Gorn ships by diving too low into the brown dwarf, relying on Enterprise to simply outlast the smaller ship – which in fact, hilariously crumples under the pressure.

After the whole thing last week revealing Una as Ilyrian, it’s sort of odd that they have her spend the entire episode laid up from the gut wound she receives before the title sequence. The bits with Una, M’Benga and Chapel in sickbay are oddly detached from the rest of the plot. I assume the big goal here is for M’Benga to pay it backward for Una’s help last week in keeping his daughter safe, but it just doesn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the episode, and it’s always a little disappointing when Chapel doesn’t have much to do. I kinda liked the reference to Chapel having studied “archaeological medicine” and thus being qualified to stitch Una up by hand. Having her describe septic shock as being like, “Giving birth through your mouth,” not so much.

An oddity of this episode compared to other Starship Disaster episodes from the franchise is that despite how badly Enterprise is banged up, they never lose contact with large parts of the ship. Different groups of people are isolated in different places, but they can still talk to each other. That’s very different from the archetype for this sort of plot, the TNG episode “Disaster”, where a major plot element was that the folks on the bridge couldn’t even be sure anyone was alive in the stardrive section.

Speaking of “Disaster”, it’s a bit jaw-dropping the extent to which Uhura and Hemmer’s plot is a straight-up carbon copy of the Geordi/Crusher plot from that episode. Trapped in a cargo bay: check. Cargo about to explode: check. Blind engineer: check. Problem ultimately solved by opening the back door: check. The main point of divergence is that Hemmer is injured early on, forcing Uhura to do most of the manual labor, which also parallels plot elements of “Disaster”: Picard’s subplot where his ankle is broken so he needs a bunch of children to do all the actual work. Once again, Hemmer is good and all (His little aside about how he reconciles Aenar pacifism with Starfleet’s military role is welcome, even if it connects only loosely to the rest of the plot. Also, he mentions that he’d wanted to be a botanist, but doesn’t say why he went into engineering instead. Is there a deleted take where he explains that he just wasn’t any good at it, and Uhura makes a “green thumb” reference that comes off as crass given that she’s using a metaphor about color and thumbs to a blind man with a broken hand?), but I’m still not feeling the tremendous love I see a lot of other people giving him. He’s… Fine? I’m a little discouraged about the thing where Aenar have precognitive abilities. Not unlike Geordi’s VISOR, they make a subtle shift that I think partially undermines what’s interesting about making the character blind: there’s a sense in which he kinda isn’t blind; he just has a different kind of sensory apparatus. That said, Hemmer’s blindness is much more legitimate in its presentation than Geordi’s, both in the way it’s written and the way it affects his approach to the world, and also in the fact that Bruce Horak is, in fact, blind, while Levar Burton is not.

The Uhura-Hemmer subplot is an interesting parallel, because the rest of the plot isn’t really that close to “Disaster”; most of “Memento Mori”‘s focus is on the cat-and-mouse game between Enterprise and the Gorn, which makes this more similar to… Honestly a whole bunch of other episodes where the hero-ship is outgunned and needs to hide out and wait for a strategic moment to make full advantage of their limited resources. Among the modernizations of the plot this time around is that Pike’s first plan is structured like the kind of saving throw we’re used to seeing, but it backfires: he drops their one remaining torpedo onto the Gorn, and that much works (They’re in the gravity well of a brown dwarf, so things still fall when dropped), but the Gorn expected as much and sacrificed one of their ships so that the explosion would alert the rest of their fleet to Enterprise’s position. We get some very nice Star Trek-style technobabble when Spock explains how to repurpose the atmospheric data used for navigation to locate the Gorn, and Pike very helpfully provides the analogy of turning a compass into radar. The technobabble around the “Pike Maneuver” is less good, and I had a hard time quite figuring out the plan here, possibly less because the plan was complicated and more because it wasn’t but the narrative wanted us to feel like it had a lot of gravitas. Also gravity. The maneuver just seems to be a gravitational assist – this is a perfectly normal thing that real spacecraft do. It’s hard in context because their ship is badly damaged, they have to tuck in close to a black hole, they’re already under the strain of the brown dwarf’s atmosphere, and they’re being chased by murderous lizard-men, but it’s not a conceptually complicated maneuver. But they throw in some other stuff that kind of sounds reminiscent of the Picard Maneuver to do with the sensor distortions close to a black hole, and they’re gonna whang the exploding atmospheric processor out the back while they fly by, and it’s just hard to quite follow all the details, and it sounds like more is happening than actually is.

I think the plan just boils down to using gravity assist to pull a quick skedaddle, using the exploding equipment to fake their own deaths. Possibly the proximity to the black hole is creating an optical illusion that will make the explosion appear big enough to act as cover? Because in the end, the Gorn apparently think the Enterprise has been destroyed and have already left by the time the ship makes it around the far side of the black hole, rather than sticking around to make sure.

Of course, throwing around phrases like “Gravitational slingshot” in a Star Trek story gets the imagination fired up, so it’s unexpected that nothing else comes of it. Like nothing. I’d have to review the dialogue in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” to be sure, but I don’t think anything there proclaims in a firm way that time travel by gravity slingshot had never been done before – it’s more like one of those things where everyone was broadly familiar with the concept, but the details hadn’t been worked out yet. So to not get anything at all about it is odd. Even just, say, one line from Spock about how the gravitational slingshot had caused a minor distortion in the chronometer. It’d be a great place to touch base back to Discovery, even: Spock mentions the possibility that the maneuver they just did could possibly create a time warp, and Pike very pointedly “reminds him” that the Vulcan Science Institute Has Declared Time Travel to be Impossible. It’s an idea you could stick in your pocket here for why Spock is able to do the math for time travel so easily later in life: he’s actually been thinking about this for years on account of his sister.

And then there’s La’an. This is really very clearly her episode, which makes it strange that she feels sort of bracketed from a lot of what’s going on. Big point in her favor, and the show’s, is how easily she owns her PTSD about the Gorn. She doesn’t fall into the cliche we saw with Tilly or Detmer in past seasons of Discovery and spin the wheels for a while refusing to acknowledge how much her trauma has affected her. When Pike asks her about her experience with the Gorn, she immediately confesses that she’s suppressed most of her memories about it because of the trauma. And they take the step explicitly that Discovery only took implicitly, having Spock directly say that mind-melds aren’t a substitute for therapy, and that powering through one’s mental defenses is bad actually. Also, they mention Spock’s sister who apparently had been scrubbed from the official record? I know Spock mentioned that he was never going to talk about her again, but I’m not clear on why erasing her entire existence was necessary. The existence of Discovery isn’t classified; Pike was openly wearing a Discovery pin. It’s just that the circumstances of its loss were covered up. This is similar to the weirdness in the premiere, where Spock admits to the whole time travel thing, rather than just going with the cover story-compatible, “Discovery was lost during a battle”.

I do really dig the gambit of Galileo blinking its lights at the Gorn ships to get them to shoot at each other. Honestly kinda feels like an Adventure Game Puzzle. The one thing that I find weak about it is that when we see the notebook in La’an’s memories, it’s clear that the Gorn light-based communications aren’t a language. They’re a substitution cipher for English. Like, there’s a one-to-one correspondence written out in that notebook for the Latin alphabet to Gorse code. Also, as much as I like the puzzle-solving aspect of it, there’s a slightly gross note to making the Gorn so cartoonishly unpleasant that their one weakness is that it’s trivial to get them to turn on each other by making them look weak.

But in all, it’s another solid episode at least on the surface level. It’s fun. It’s actiony. It’s human. It doesn’t quite transcend that, but it also isn’t really trying. If this were the only Star Trek currently on the sorta-air, I might not be as excited as I am, but Strange New Worlds is the first Nu-Trek to really feel like it was made from the ground up to be part of a Star Trek ecosystem. This is not “the time they finally got it right” or “the one that didn’t go too Woke(tm)” or “the good one”. It’s the one that was made to fill this niche. What I’m most excited for now? We’ve already seen that this past season of Picard, while far from perfect, was a lot more focused than the first. If the people making these shows are starting to get the message that if they’re gonna make a dozen shows, they can tailor each one to a particular piece of the puzzle, that frees them up from having to shoehorn Everything for Everyone into Every show. And if that means that Discovery‘s fifth season might actually commit its entire episode count to something without meandering off for a few episodes? Yes, please.