Some Blundering About Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1×09: All Those Who Wander

“All Those Who Wander” or “The Wrath of La’an” – no, wait, I used that one. How about, “In Space, No One Can Hear You Rip Off James Cameron”. Eh, too close to the Omelas thing. Okay, then. We’ll go with “Children of the Gorn”

Influences: “Arena” (TOS), “All Our Yesterdays” (TOS), “Impulse” (ENT), “Empok Nor” (DS9), “Context is for Kings” (DSC), Alien, Aliens, Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda

I watched this episode with my Mother-in-Law. She was convinced the little kid was evil. She reckoned she was putting some kind of mind-whammy on M’Benga when he conflated her with his daughter, because why would M’Benga still be distraught and not thinking clearly when encountering an endangered little girl, it’s been a whole week since his daughter died ascended to a higher plane of existence.

Man, wow, that is kind of obvious, though, isn’t it? Wow. Let’s start the episode off by saying a fond goodbye to beloved cast member with a guaranteed future Nyota Uhura, and also to Other Cadet We Have Never Met Until Now. Also congrats on your promotion, Lieutenant Skippy. I’m sure you will have a long and successful career ahead of you. (Noticed: La’an misses Pike’s big breakfast because she’s with her therapist. Nice small touch there. Also, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelets”)

So the plot of this episode is that the Enterprise is on its way to deliver power thingers to Space Station K-7 (Which is, fun fact, the one from “The Trouble With Tribbles”), but they pass a crashed ship on the way. Since Enterprise has to make that delivery on-time, the away team is going to be all on their own to fix and re-launch the ship. Pike goes down with a team consisting of five regulars, two obvious expendables, and Sam Kirk, who is doomed but not today.

And then the plot of the Alien movies happens. Very straightforwardly. Like, even more overtly than the Omelas thing a few weeks back. They even have a Newt. She serves no purpose in the story proper, but she’s there. Is it just me, or is Strange New Worlds a little derivative?

This episode is good, don’t get me wrong. But man, they are laying it on thick with the Gorn, aren’t they? I’m having a hard time really buying the Gorn as an advanced spacefaring race. It’s kind of important to the believably of the Alien movies that the Xenomorphs aren’t actually an intelligent species in their own right; they’ve got something to do with the Space Jockeys – and maybe the Predators. But they’re basically animals. You would not expect them to be building their own starships. There’s an obvious nod to the Magog from Andromeda as well – not the first time NuTrek has raided it for ideas. But again, the Magog had this whole thing going where they gained the memories of their hosts, and also I think there was some big scary evil intelligence that was helping them out? I don’t know, that show sucked except for the bits that were delightfully insane.

It isn’t necessarily a big thing, and I know it’s kill-or-be-killed in this situation. But it does stick with me that the one significant divergence between this episode and Alien is that it accidentally contains the element of “The main plot of this episode is that Captain Pike and friends hunt down and murder a bunch of babies.” Perhaps this is why they had to paint the Gorn so over-the-top as space-monsters, because it helps you forget that this is a sentient species who build starships and wear spangly space togas and live in cities, and Captain Pike and friends just murdered a bunch of their babies. Again, under the circumstances, necessary. But I notice that Doctor M’Benga does not raise any objections to murdering the non-cute children in this episode. No one voices a reminder that this is a sentient race and could we try trapping them first? Obviously you could have that fail and get one of the Skippys killed (great tension there if Spock advises not-baby-murder, and thus holds himself culpable for the deaths that follow, leading to his willingness to relax his emotional control), but someone should at least have brought it up.

In this episode, we learn that Gorn are born in litters, but within a few hours, the strongest baby Gorn will kill and eat the rest of its litter. Because needlessly nasty and violent. They also reproduce via spitting acid in the faces of their prey, are fertile within hours of birth, and apparently reproduce asexually. I mean, that or the teen Gorn took a few minutes off of killing each other for a sibling orgy. And they’re invisible to both sensors and telepathy (Surprising they would forsake the chance to give everyone motion sensors like in Aliens). In their adolescent form, Gorn kinda look like Gremlins. I am having a hard time handling just how needlessly nasty and derivative this all is. Also I guess Gorn have a race memory or something because La’an expects this hour-old Gorn to be able to understand language and respond to her challenging it.

Another in the long line of SNW’s list of small but significant missed opportunities, La’an warns them that they stand no chance against an adult Gorn. Would have been both funnier and a better tie-in to “Arena” had she said, “The feral adolescent stage is the most dangerous. Once it becomes an adult, we’d have a chance, since they get slower and kind of awkward and unable to turn their necks. But that will take days and we’ll all be dead by then.”
And then we’ve got this whole thing going on where Spock has to unleash his TUMULTUOUS VULCAN EMOTIONS in order to provoke the Gorn out of hiding. But now that he has awakened the savage beast inside, can he truly put it back in its cage? Except… Look, all he does is scream a little. God, this feels so forced. And since it’s going to be La’an who handles the climactic part of the battle, the only purpose it serves in the plot is to set up him hugging Chapel at the end. (I will admit being touched by the hug)

I guess the other thing that matters about it is that Sam is a complete dick to Spock about his emotional reserve before he cuts loose. Ten years later:

Jim: Spock… You nevermentionedthatyou knew my….. Brother.
Spock: Yes, Jim. He worked for me for years. Funny he never mentioned it to you. He was kind of a dick and everyone on the ship hated him. I didn’t think it was appropriate to bring it up when you were in mourning.

So Cadet Skippy and Lieutenant Skippy die, and the last Gorn is killed technically by La’an. I mean, Hemmer makes a big point about how he refuses to be the one to actually do the killing because he is a pacifist. But he totally is the one who hoses it down with the space version of liquid nitrogen, and the fact that La’an hits it with a pipe afterward to shatter it is really a formality. If being flash-frozen solid has not been previously shown to be survivable by the temperature-sensitive lizard-monster-people, I am going to assume he dead. But then we get the telegraphed but still shocking twist: that faceful of lizard-spit Hemmer took a few scenes back which we’d already established was how they reproduce is how they reproduce, and Hemmer’s going to explode into more Gorn babies. So he jumps out the back of the ship and real-for-real dies. Which absolutely sucks for the people who like Hemmer. It’s a good scene. He locks everyone else out, so that they can’t stop him, but he lets La’an stay, because he knows she won’t. He explains that while he can’t sense the Gorn with his Aenar powers, he knows his own body, and thus knows he’s out of time. It’s kind of weird that here, in episode 9 of a ten episode season, we kill off a major character and write out two more, since La’an takes a leave of absence to bond with Newt and Uhura’s tour is over (Uhura at least will still be here next week, so I guess they haven’t gotten around to dropping her off yet). I hope they don’t replace him with Scotty. I like Scotty, but this show has plenty of legacy characters already, and this whole, “Everyone in TOS served with Pike and was super close and chummy with him, though no one but Spock will react to his horrific fate,” thing is clumsy.

I hope when Jim Kirk shows up next season, they make a point that he’s a total square and anyone who serves with him will have to tone it way down compared to the fun, freewheeling style everyone adopts with Pike. That would actually be consistent with the stiffer, more military attitude Kirk has in the early TOS episodes. Bonus points if they hint that it’s actually Spock who makes Kirk lighten up.

Also, given that we have already established that M’Benga is the sort of dude who will store his own kid in the transporter for a year while he tries to figure out how to cure her, there is a somewhat higher bar than usual to make me happily roll with everyone just accepting that someone else is doomed and might as well make a noble sacrifice since they definitely can’t be cured.

Another question: what’s up with the Peregrine? It’s apparently Sombra-class, but I took a bit of time trying to work out how it differed from the Constitution-class, and all I could come up with is that it has blue detailing instead of red. There’s a few shots where I thought maybe it was closer in design to the schematic we see of the Terran Empire-acquired of the Defiant, but when you get a better look at the ship at the end, I think it’s just that the nacelle pylons were bent in the crash. It might be smaller? I know it has a smaller crew, but whether it’s meant to be obviously smaller overall, I couldn’t tell. I get why you want a lot of variety in your ships now that the budget allows it, but was there any point in not just having this be another Constitution-class? You could even keep the different color scheme, since Lower Decks gave us that whole thing where ships can have detailing that is color-coded to their mission.

Next week, the exciting season finale. Will they break history? Are they doing the comic book plot where, having seen his future, Pike turns down promotion and stays on the Enterprise forever and gets to redo TOS plots with a fun Pike twist? They sure seem to want us to wonder that before inevitably having our hopes dashed!