James T. Kirk has boarded the USS Enterprise for the very first time, and for once, Paul Wesley is given the opportunity to play this universe’s version of the iconic character in an episode that also showed us both how Kirk met Uhura and how he first met Spock outside of the movie Kelvin timeline.
Twice now, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has built its Uhura-centric story around a problem her language expertise makes her uniquely suited to solve. But unlike last season’s “Children of the Comet,” “Lost in Translation” creates a problem that forces Nyota Uhura to face her own trauma.
Fortunately, James Kirk is there to help her to not face that trauma alone. We’ve entered an interesting era of Star Trek where we get to experience Kirk as a supporting player rather than the lead. It actually allows a whole new side of the character to come out. We’re used to Kirk as the decisive man in charge. Watching him across several episodes now acting as an equal collaborating partner to whoever he’s paired up with — Pike, La’an, now Uhura — is refreshing. And Paul Wesley is getting better at the role every time.
“Lost in Translation” also checks off two more Trek tropes. “The Devil in the Dark” from The Original Series as well as “Home Soil” and “The Quality of Life” from The Next Generation were all about Federation mining projects having to be halted after the discovery that their efforts were harming a unique lifeform they didn’t know about. And another Trek trope involves one of the main crew members experiencing a number of unexplained symptoms that are initially explained away by medical diagnosis but are ultimately revealed to be caused by some unknown alien entity. The Next Generation episode “Realm of Fear” is a classic example.
We get the surprise return of Bruce Horak this week as various apparitions of Enterprise’s late Chief Engineer Hemmer. Here, Hemmer manages to loom large in “Lost in Translation,” figuratively haunting two different members of the Bridge crew: Uhura, because his death feeds into her preexisting trauma over her family’s sudden deaths, and Una, because her grief over Hemmer is driving her underlying anger towards his replacement.
But if the producers only brought Horak back for a few short moments of screen time, this seems like a disappointing waste of the actor’s talents. This only feeds my suspicion that we may see a bigger return of Hemmer in some form in the near future. Otherwise, why put the actor through so many hours in the makeup chair for so little?
“Lost in Translation” is an overall solid episode that nevertheless remains one of this season’s weakest installments because it’s weighed down by a number of flaws. First, the conclusion feels rushed. We’ve come to know Pike as someone willing to break the rules when he thinks he’s doing the morally right thing, but he’s awfully quick to totally obliterate a strategically valuable Starfleet outpost based on just Uhura’s assessment of her own confidence in her theory.
Even the ever-reasonable Captain Picard required a lot of proof the Exocoms were truly sentient and sapient living creatures before demanding that program shut down in “The Quality of Life.” And given what the audience knows about the rising Gorn threat, Pike’s destruction of the refinery is not a small infraction; it may even be regarded as an act of terrorism. It’s almost certainly a greater violation than Una’s lying about her genetically modified nature and should mean a potential court martial, but I suspect we see Pike suffer no consequences and it will never be brought up again.
Photo: Michael Gibson/Paramount+
A smaller issue I had with the episode was the lack of one last button on the La’an and Kirk situation. La’an did briefly bump into Kirk, and he acknowledged their brief call at the end of “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” reminding her that she agreed to buy him a drink sometime. And while I’m certain this will all be revisited in a later story, it feels like there’s a missing beat that maybe was cut for time.
Even if just the final shot of Kirk, Spock, and Uhura’s table as the camera slowly pulls out to show the entire lounge had ended with La’an in the foreground watching Kirk from across the room, it would have ended the episode on a moment related to events in this series. Instead, we end on a moment that’s only meaningful because of our preexisting knowledge of these three character’s ultimate fates beyond Star Trek: Strange New Worlds as lifelong colleagues and friends.
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