This week, what begins as a throwback to a familiar Original Series trope takes an unexpected turn into a different classic Star Trek trope in an episode that centers Enterprise’s young helmsman.
Enterprise is ordered to return to Rigel VII, where it was forced to flee in a hurry 5 years earlier after a landing party was ambushed by warriors among the planet’s Bronze Age inhabitants. In that incident, multiple crew were injured or killed before the away team escaped. If this backstory sounds familiar, you’ve seen Star Trek‘s original pilot “The Cage” and/or the two-part episode “The Menagerie” from the Original Series that repurposed its footage.
In “The Cage,” Pike describes the ambush to the ship’s doctor and then later on the telepathic Telosians make Pike relive some of that fateful event. Now, in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Pike’s team become aware they may have left behind advanced technology during their hasty retreat, technology that might have culturally contaminated that civilization. So Enterprise’s mission is to clean up its own mess.
This story device was most commonly used in the Original Series to give the production an opportunity to borrow already existing costumes and sets from Paramount’s back lot. There was “Patterns of Force,” where a missing Federation cultural observer introduced Mein Kampf to an alien culture and recreated Nazi Germany with himself as the ruling Fuhrer. And, in “A Piece of the Action,” another planet modeled itself around a book about 1920s Chicago gangsters.
But “Among the Lotus Eaters” soon proves early on it isn’t interested in playing dress up after we meet a survivor of Enterprise’s original landing party who is now ruling these alien people as a power-mad dictator and our crew starts to suffer extreme memory loss. This isn’t a cultural contamination/Prime Directive episode; it’s a strange alien virus that infects the crew with unusual symptoms episode more in the vein of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s “Babel.”
Now this is not the first time a Star Trek series has done a ship-wide amnesia plot. Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Conundrum” explored similar ground. But what makes “Among the Lotus Eaters” stand out is how well it uses the full cast and its familiar plot elements as a platform for developing its characters. And this particularly gives us the opportunity to learn more about Helmsman Erica Ortegas, who hadn’t yet been given the spotlight until now.
Photo: Michael Gibson/Paramount+
Lt. Ortegas has been here since Day One but has largely been relegated to the go-to character to deliver quips and generally add a sense of fun camaraderie to Bridge scenes. She’s the one who insisted in the season premiere that Spock needs to have his own personalized catchphrase when giving the order to go into warp.
Here, we discover Ortegas feels underappreciated in her position and is hungry for more opportunities for career development. So when she thinks she’s going to be part of the new landing party, she excitedly shows up to meet the away team in full costume to blend in with the planet’s locals only to have her hopes dashed by news she’s staying on Enterprise. By showing Ortegas outside of her normal role as the class clown of the bridge, the episode reveals that not only does its helmsman feel devalued as a crewmember but she herself devalues her own role on the ship.
Lt. Ortegas doesn’t think flying the ship is an important job until a situation arises where, even without remembering details about who she is or what their mission is, just hearing the ship’s computer matter-of-factly declare her the one in the position to save everyone — only when she’s given permission by some abstract authority to excel — allows her to embrace her role: “I am Erica Ortegas. I fly the ship.”
The other significant character this week is Pike, who had been fairly sidelined in the previous 3 episodes. Afraid of commitment, he uses Captain Batel’s being denied a promotion possibly as a punishment for her minimal role in Una’s recent acquittal as an excuse to suggest a break from their relationship. But even fellow amnesiac Luq from Rigel VII sees that the alien pendant Pike wears around his neck, a gift from Batel, is Pike’s North Star.
Without remembering where it came from, Pike says he knows it was given by someone he needs to get back to, which plays into the episode’s title. The Lotus Eaters of The Odyssey caused Odysseus to lose his original sense of purpose, his desire to return home to his wife, Penelope. While the entire crew also falls victim to the memory-wiping radiation, only Pike’s struggle is framed as trying to get back to a loved one. Is Captain Batel Pike’s Penelope?
“Among the Lotus Eaters” isn’t likely to be anyone’s favorite episode, but it functions effectively as a character-builder, particularly for Ortegas. And Director Eduardo Sanchez (The Blair Witch Project) effectively conveys the chaos of a ship full of people losing their minds with just a few quick, yet unnerving, hallway shots. The old amnesia trope has been certainly done a million times, but writers Kirsten Beyer and Davy Perez recognize the device is best used as a means to getting at who the characters are at their core. As Pike tells his former crewman-turned-dictator, Rigel VII doesn’t change you; “It shows us who we really are.”
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