Strange New Worlds’ Newest Season  Proves What Kind Of Star Trek Fan You Are

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 8 seconds ago

Star Trek is currently experiencing something of an identity crisis. Starfleet Academy tried to appeal to young fans, but that effort failed, and the new show got canceled after one season. It joins a graveyard of canceled shows, including series like Picard and Lower Decks that were aimed squarely at older fans. Now, Paramount’s new leadership has decided to pivot the franchise to the big screen. That means Strange New Worlds will be the final show to bear the torch before Trek ceases developing new shows for the foreseeable future. Because of these factors, this show is likely the very last to directly channel the pioneering spirit of The Original Series.

That’s a lot of baggage for the show to carry as it warps into Season 4. Fortunately, Strange New Worlds carries that weight very well with a new episode that feels like the lovechild of Doctor Who and Jurassic Park. The result is a tale with plenty of breathless action, fun character moments, and top-notch special effects. There’s only one downside: all of the episode’s most dramatic beats require the characters to act completely stupid. In the end, this leads to a fun-but-dumb episode that helps you determine what kind of Star Trek fan you actually are.

See You, Space Cowboy

The premise of this Strange New Worlds Season 4 premiere (“Valles Marineris”) is that the Enterprise investigates a distress buoy inside a solar storm. They get sucked inside and emerge 65 million years into the past, and the only way to get back home is for an Away Team to dodge dinosaurs and get some fuel for the warp core. Meanwhile, on the ship, Captain Pike and crew encounter a hyper-advanced alien race from Mars who wants to make the Enterprise part of a bitter war with some nearby aliens. The crew must now find a way to get home without doing anything that destroys their entire future.

For the most part, “Valles Marineris” works as a modern take on a Star Trek: Original Series episode. That first show was pitched as a Western in space (“Wagon Train to the stars,” in Gene Roddenberry’s words), and the Strange New Worlds Season 4 premiere leans into this with an opening shot of Pike and his Away Team dressed as cowboys and riding on horses on a planet straight out of Rick and Morty. It’s a really fun, really beautiful scene that’s never really contextualized; it’s just there to look cool. In a way, that is the thesis for this episode and, now, Star Trek as a whole.

Hit The Ground Stunning

Let’s start with what works about “Valles Marineris.” First, it’s got a great amount of action and adventure, including cowboy shenanigans, wacky space hijinks, and dinosaur dilemmas. While nobody has ever accused Strange New Worlds of being a boring show, this season debut never goes very long without providing a new scene to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. It is, quite frankly, the kind of episode you show to your friends who are convinced that nothing ever happens in Star Trek. Here, a shocking number of things happen, including events that radically redefine our characters’ understanding of human history. 

That leads into the next great thing about “Valles Marineris:” it’s yet another example of Strange New Worlds taking a big, creative swing. Those swings don’t always connect, but I’m glad the show keeps making them, even if we end up with failed experiments like the musical episode. Like, without getting into too many spoilers, this episode gives us a time travel episode unlike anything we have seen, one that delightfully channels Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” Between this and the extensive exploration of a predestination paradox, “Valles Marineris” delivers a creative and surprising story that pays homage to some of the crunchiest concepts in sci-fi history.

TFW Your Crew Keeps Getting Stupider

Aside from the beautiful visuals, the final major strength of “Valles Marineris” is its fun character moments. Sure, some of them fell flat; I thought the Ortegas/Scotty rivalry was pretty silly, and the prissy new Vulcan cadet is uniformly annoying in both of her scenes. Otherwise, though, this is great. We get to see Pike be a literal cowboy (talk about Hell On Wheels flashbacks!) and see Number One lead the craziest Away Team in Star Trek history. La’An gets to punch a dinosaur and (it is highly implied) ride Spock while dressed like a cowgirl. Throw in characters doing things like phasering a T-rex, and you have a truly unforgettable adventure.

Hovering over all of these cool elements, though, is a deeply depressing truth: Star Trek is now a franchise that focuses more on looking cool than making sense, so most of its biggest moments are tied to these highly-trained, brilliant Starfleet officers acting like complete idiots. For example (and beware some gentle spoilers!), Number One takes a shuttle to a nearby planet to get iridium so the Enterprise can get home. On the planet, they suddenly discover the dinosaurs thanks to a personal tricorder. This caused my nerdy ass to sit up in my chair and ask the obvious question: “wait, you didn’t scan the planet from orbit with your shuttle?”

Apparently, they never thought to do so. The character stupidity gets more annoying when we get to the big reveal that the Enterprise has traveled 65 million years in the past and that the Away Team is actually on Earth. This reveal takes time because the trip to the past damaged the ship’s sensors, and it takes a while to restore them. Why, I wondered, did Number One not bother to run scans as soon as the shuttle was in space? For that matter, why didn’t Spock suggest anyone try this? It is, after all, the most logical thing they could do.

There IS Life On Mars

Later, we get to the weird revelation that not only was there an advanced alien civilization on Mars, but they were at war with aliens from a seemingly new planet in our solar system. Multiple characters comment on how this planet isn’t there in their timeline; when the Martian ship gets ready to destroy that planet, Pike orders his crew to let it happen. They object, leading him to declare, “In our future…there is no fifth planet.” This is framed like a dramatic reveal, but this factoid was previously explained to the other characters and, effectively, the viewer. Why are they surprised, and why do we have to hear it twice?

That last bit reminded me of Matt Damon’s own dramatic reveal. Namely, that Netflix encourages writers to restate the plot three or four times because they know most of the audience is playing around on their phones. Apparently, Paramount+ subscribes to this idea, too, which is why we have an elementary school-ass factoid about our own solar system. Writing for bored, distracted audiences would also explain why the characters seem selectively stupid. After all, why have characters remember how sensors work if half the viewers aren’t even looking up? Why have characters remember what they heard one minute ago when half the viewers don’t know what they heard one minute ago?

Basically, all of the smart nuances of Trek have been sanded off so we can get to the cool parts (horses, dinos, and explosions, oh my!) that much quicker. That’s why this episode is a perfect way to answer the big question: what kind of Star Trek fan are you? 

What Kind Of Star Trek Fan Are You?

If you like more of the fast-paced action, snappy one-liners, and vibes-based storytelling of Star Trek (2009), you’ll likely love “Valles Marineris.” And you’re in luck, too: based on NuTrek and what little we know about the next Trek movie, it sounds like Paramount has gone all-in on transforming the franchise into something more like Guardians of the Galaxy than The Original Series. Incidentally, if you’re a big fan of TOS or the Golden Age of Trek, you’ll likely hate “Valles Marineris” because the show routinely dumbs characters down for the sake of drama, something that would never happen in, say, The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine.  

Before anyone calls me a snob, there’s no wrong way to like Star Trek. While I prefer the more cerebral Trek of the ‘90s, I’m a big fan of Star Trek (2009) and generally liked the Strange New Worlds Season 4 debut, “Valles Marineris.” If this is to be nothing but a shlocky action/adventure franchise, then, as Captain Sisko might say, I can live with it. What we have now is a daring thrill ride, one that consistently delivers pure, unadulterated fun. Unfortunately, this season premiere is a permanent reminder that the Golden Age of Star Trek is a bit like the dinosaurs featured in this episode: complex. Majestic. Powerful. Iconic.

And, most of all, completely and utterly extinct.