Strange New Worlds returns with Sound and Fury in Hegemony, Part II

Strange New Worlds  returns with Sound and Fury, signifying…Something?

Strange New Worlds is back! After two years, two strikes and two-thirds of a corporate buyouts, Paramount’s lead Star Trek show has returned to our screens with the conclusion to the action-packed season finale, ‘Hegemony’. Star Trek is full of plenty of great two-parters – who can forget the unbelievable tension of ‘The Best of Both Worlds’? Yet ‘Hegemony II’, despite stellar action sequences, interesting character work and…a conclusion to the cliffhanger, left me with some tepid but tangible hope for the latest season of Star Trek’s flagship show. 

For those who don’t remember (it has been two years): we left our gallant crew in the middle of a pitched battle with the Gorn. The Colony on Parnassus Beta has been destroyed; Ortegas, Sam Kirk, La’an and Dr. M’Benga have been captured by the Gorn; Captain Batel has alien reptile babies in her; and Admiral April has ordered Pike to retreat and leave his crew behind.

Oh, and Scotty’s here. There’s one positive, I suppose.

So, we are thrust back into the action, with everything in peril and everyone looking to Captain Pike for a solution. Our opening scene is, I think, meant to be action packed. The intensity of the sequence is, however, lost beneath a heavy dose of technobabble, especially for the first ten minutes of a Star Trek episode. The problem is difficult – keeping track of the missing crew and colonists while obeying orders and not being blown to smithereens – but the solution is…contrived. Sure, it’s clever – ram the Gorn ship to override it’s shields so a dud torpedo can leave a tracking device. But the dialogue is overwrought and the need for Pike to focus group a tactical solution rubs me the wrong way. Some people like that, and I understand liking it, but even this team talk didn’t feel right.

This technobabble is made worse by the fact that the B and C plots – Batel’s Gorn Babies and Scotty’s Gorn transponder – are equally technobabble heavy. They’re good plots! Just…dense plots. Very, very dense plots. And when both sequences are really backdrops for (very good and interesting) character work…I was left caught between following the character interactions and trying to keep up with why Batel couldn’t be made into a Gorn-safe stasis space popsicle. The character beats are good, though.

Enterprise eventually rendezvouses with the fleet, which has assembled on the border under Admiral April. Pike is appalled by Starfleet limiting themselves to a ‘show of force’ and defensive patrols: protecting their citizens over colonists beyond the Federation. Despite strict orders, April decides to let Pike “punch back and show them we’re not prey”. Because, sure, Admiral’s can do that. Someone on earth, a Federation civil servant just felt a chill run down their spine. 

The conversation between April and Pike is interesting: it felt like the writers were correctly trying to make a point about what Starfleet should be doing – protecting the colonists on the frontier; protecting those who cannot protect themselves. Yet it’s weird to tie that humanism to the inhumanity with which the Gorn are presented. Pike and Pelia refer to them as a form of pure evil. And, sure. No problem with an allegory for evil. But one that doesn’t reflect back at us? That doesn’t offer us the same questions about our society as say, the Borg, the Dominion, or even the Klingons? Not sure what the point is.

Anyway, we’re going back for our crew, even as a stressed Scotty admits he doesn’t know how he’s going to do this: and we begin to sense that our “miracle worker” might have inherited some of his wisest tricks from Pelia!

Speaking of our crew: we cut now to La’an escaping from her Gorn…goo pod? Digestive tract? Surrounded by other…pods, she works to free the rest of the landing party one by one. They’re not happy about it, especially Ortegas, who is missing part of her hand! So, the Gorn ship is…vile. Not in a ‘I didn’t enjoy this’ way, more of a ‘oh god I really don’t like behind here at all’ way. The horrible ship’s stomach where colonists are being ‘digested’ as fuel is also one of the few sequences I forgot about the AR room, they were all in, mainly by virtue of the horrific injuries they’d all sustained by being, uh.

Digested. Which sucks.

Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M'Benga in season 3 , Episode 1 of Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Marni Grossman Paramount+

The fact that the colonists are still being digested is awful, but also a little disjointed. Are they going to get the rest of them? Hopefully? Is it going to involve blasting our way through a bunch of lizard people? Almost certainly. As someone who has never been a fan of the presentation of the Gorn, I had my feelings about it, but (as always) Christina Chong’s performance tends to put my concerns aside. She remains (in my opinion) the stand-out star of the show - if only because she’s one of the few characters with a full character arc.

Aboard Enterprise, an embattled Scotty gets his transponder device (it’s not a cloaking device, I know, but still) working quickly, under Pelia-based time pressure. I am enjoying Martin Quinn’s Scotty. He is too young for the Scotty in my head – who should really be pushing 35 in 2261, not 20 something – but frankly I can set that aside for an excellent performance from such a newcomer. He is both the engineer we know, and not – both brilliant under pressure and absolutely lost. The weird Supervisor – student relationship (one might say student-mentor but it’s much closer to my own academic experience with professors who are tired of me) he has with Pelia is wonderful, especially when we know so little about Scotty to start with.

The Spock and Chapel stuff – a classic “taking a break” conversation over the question of how to keep someone bonded genetically to a parasite alive – is also…fine. It is good character work. The better character work is happening on the Gorn ship (so long as you ignore the show’s continued desire to maintain a typical MCU humour in the face of the escape). The steady realisation that Ortegas of all people might not be holding it together is quite intriguing: though the continued story of “Sam Kirk must suffer” does begin to explain why he quit the service.

So, the plot ratches up: with the possibility of a full scale Gorn invasion on the horizon,  Enterprise arrives at a binary system where they have traced the crew to, and discover a portal (?) to the Gorn homeworld. Just happens they arrive at the same time as a massive coronal mass ejection (yay). The Gorn are preparing an all-out attack on the Federation and worse: Batel’s parasites are also making an all-out attack. It’s all about to go very badly wrong: even the escape attempt aboard the Gorn ship is falling apart under a swarm of attackers, even as the gang pile into the Gorn hunter.

 Pike has a plan – a bad plan, it has to be said: turn the enterprise into a coronal mass ex-flare to counter the impulses driving the Gorn attack. Turn the ship into a false star! Draw particles from the star! Nearly get blown up! Sure, whatever. They draw the Gorn to them as the crew escape aboard a Gorn fighter. It goes right down the wire, as always: Irradiated Enterprise, pursuing Gorn, and then at the last moment, they…go back to their dimension! The colonists are safe! Everyone’s a life! Everybody Lives! Though, as Pike points out, triggering a Gorn hibernation makes it someone else’s problem: James Kirk’s problem, to be exact,

But, importantly, Ortegas gets to fly! Maybe she’ll get a personality too! Here’s hoping! (No, seriously, the awful stuff happening to her in this episode seems indicative of a shift in the writer’s approach to her which is good, but I hope some of it doesn’t just involve grievous bodily harm? Hopefully?). And, really, the sequences with the Gorn Gang crammed into the tiny fighter, escaping while she bleeds out onto the console is good stuff. Gripping stuff! It’s definitely a sign of writing improvement over last season. But it coming in the middle and end of a very technobabble sequence about making the Enterprise look like a star doing…something I still don’t quite understand ends up undercutting it.

Everyone’s survived: and we finish with an especially intimate conversation between Pike and Batel, who has survived semi-illegal surgery using Una’s Illyrian blood. It’s a great character moment for me – Pike praying in the 23rd century is an excellent callback to Discovery Season 2, especially with his “okay dad, you win” before he kneels down. Pike’s frustration with nearly losing Batel feels right, really for the first time since the start of season 2. It’s one of a few clear elements of writing that have improved since 2023: tangible effects of the writers’ strike victory? An advantage of breathing room around the script? Who knows? I just like it.

Overall ? I am…fine with this episode. It was clunky in parts and raced along in others. It’s good character beats are kind of swamped by heavy exposition and technobabble. And I remain…unconvinced by the Gorn. The thing is I like and also don’t like the conceit that maybe the Gorn are so unlike us that they…what? Come from a completely different plane of existence? On the one hand, I really like it – I think doing something that otherworldly, and freaky, and completely beyond our comprehension is perfect for the vibe of Star Trek, and perfect for the wacky world of TOS Strange New Worlds exists on the cusps of. Metrons! Organians! The ones from The Empath no one remembers! I like doing that, especially mixing it with real world science. It is another reminder of the awesome power of the Trek universe, and one that modern shows often fail to play with.

Yet, at least in Arena, the Gorn aren’t that. The Gorn are meant to be just like the Federation: another civilisation stumbling into the final frontier, another ant scrabbling the dirt beneath the foot of the almighty Metrons. Making them both eldritch beasts from another dimension who view us as cattle is both quite grim and a horrid counter-pose to the traditions of Star Trek, which (since as early as Errand of Mercy) has always considered a sworn enemy to merely be a friend in waiting. Can that work with the Gorn I hope so. Will it work with the direction the writers seem to want to take it?

I don’t know.                      

So, Hegemony II? Fine. Finishes the plots from Season 1 and 2 off, dishes out the new threads for Season 3 handily, and leaves us ready for new adventures. In some senses, it is very workmanlike for this. It is not…artistic. This is no Best of Both Worlds: more Time’s Arrow, perhaps. What I am taking away from this opener, especially compared to some of the lower moments of Season Two, is that this Season of Strange New Worlds feels more put together. Ortegas the pilot seems to be becoming more than that – stretched out of her comfort zone, greviously wounded (and still critical at the show’s ending), there seems to be a strong suggestion that she will have a role in this plot wider than simple set dressing. The rounding-off of the Spock-Chapel romance with them taking “time” for themselves, and Chapel warning Spock not to wait for her is also good – not just because we do need to get the plot romping along towards Roger Korby and his electric dreams, but because it didn’t feel forced. They weren’t…going to work, and them realising it competently instead of falling apart dramatically was a nice change from traditional breakups. And no one had to get fridged for it to happen!

I’m still not entirely happy, though. I think one of my crucial issues with ‘Hegemony’ remains simple. It is incredibly techno-babble heavy from the word go: and, when almost every hinge-point of this episode’s plot is dependent on a large collection of terminology that I couldn’t follow…I am left feeling a little dissatisfied. While the solution to a terrifying invasion being a biological ‘off switch’, it is no where near as ‘earned’ as the iconic “Sleep, Data” moment in BOBW. More importantly (at least to me), the conceit that the Gorn – who, you know, have warships and a civilisation, presumably, are that easily controllable rankles me. These might just be problems with the cliffhanger they were left with.

End of the day, it is quite nice to see these characters again. It is nice to watch Star Trek again.

Next time, we return to normal(?) with Wedding Bell Blues. Surely a perfectly level episode of Star Trek, without any 2260s-appropriate camp nonsense.