This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Unauthorized rescue missions, a fully grown Gorn in a space suit, the return of everyone’s favorite Scottish Engineer, and a Bridge full of officers waiting for orders from a panicked Captain Pike frozen in indecision with no good options before him. Season two’s finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was a kitchen sink of an episode that brought us to the brink of war and set the stage for a high-stakes, intense showdown in season three.
As predicted, the episode began with Captain Batel and her away team from the USS Cayuga dealing with that priority mission mentioned at the end of last week, though that mission did not turn out to be related to the growing Gorn threat…at first. Rather, the Cayuga was tasked with a seemingly routine mission to help out an Earth colony operating outside The Federation with their agriculture.
Nurse Chapel also tagged along to assist in administering vaccines in exchange for the Cayuga giving her a lift to Dr. Korby’s fellowship program. Until the Gorn showed up to plant their flag, feed the populace to their baby Gorn, and declare an official demarcation line dividing Gorn and Federation space.
We expect galactic stakes in a season finale, but writer Henry Alonso Myers wisely adds personal stakes in “Hegemony” as well. Putting Batel and Chapel in danger and then drawing out their fates effectively builds tension. Even if we already know Chapel at least will live to serve under Captain Kirk one day, we still get to experience the dreadful uncertainty through Spock.
Of course, Batel and Chapel also lead to my biggest problems with the episode. Even while Batel was postponing her vacation with Pike last week to respond to a priority mission, I worried the character was about to be “fridged,” a term referring to the common cinematic trope of a character — usually a woman — being killed off to further the storyline of the most often male protagonist.
On the one hand, Batel is still alive by episode’s end, but on the other hand, she’s left in a perilous situation and is fridged in an almost literal sense as Chapel loads Batel into a stasis chamber to prolong her seemingly imminent death until they can come up with some miracle to save her. It will be immensely frustrating if Batel does end up fulfilling this tired trope and probably a missed opportunity to do something more interesting with the character.
Then there’s Chapel. Her being the sole survivor of the Cayuga strains credibility. I think it would have been worth adding a few more minutes to the episode’s runtime and a few extra day-players to have had a small group of Cayuga survivors find the unconscious Chapel in sick bay and pull her to safety.
Chapel, as the most senior officer among them, could then have just taken command and played out the rest of her story more or less the same except getting to also heroically save some Cayuga survivors. As is, the episode doesn’t even offer any kind of in-universe explanation for why Chapel alone survives.
Another issue I have is not so much with this episode but with a potential problem down the road. Strange New Worlds finally revealed its updated take on an adult Gorn. Canonically, Captain Kirk was said to be the first Starfleet officer to see a Gorn and live to tell about it in Star Trek: The Original Series episode, “Arena.” And while this may have been the initial reason the writers were reticent about showing the adult Gorn, keeping them off-screen had the added benefit of building their mystique and menace.
But if the Gorn are now to become a bigger foe in this series with stories built around Gorn brinkmanship, it will be harder to keep the Gorn out of sight. Hopefully, the show is prepared to deliver scenes of a Gorn captain speaking directly to Pike across the main view screen in a similar fashion as Sir Patrick Stewart often acted against the late Andreas Katsulas as Romulan Commander Tomalak in Star Trek: The Next Generation. If this means breaking canon to achieve a better story, that’s fine with me.
Photo Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+
Oh yeah. Scotty’s here too. Martin Quinn now takes the iconic role made famous by James Doohan and portrayed by Simon Pegg in the recent “Kelvin Universe” prequel films. If Pegg only added a hint of a Doohan impression to his ordinary accent, for better or worse, Quinn delivers much more of a direct impression of the original performance than the other The Original Series recasts we’ve seen on Strange New Worlds so far.
While Celia Rose Gooding is delivering their own unique take on Uhura that differs from both Nichelle Nichols’ original and Zoe Saldana’s version of the character, Ethan Peck, like Zachary Quinto, has found a sweet spot that seems to at once capture the essence of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock while also making the role his own.
In Paul Wesley’s first appearance as Jim Kirk, he seemed wildly miscast to me, but I began to see more and more of an amalgam of William Shatner and Chris Pine with successive appearances.At least in his first appearance, Martin Quinn seems to inhabit the spirit of that classic Montgomery Scott, but I need more time to digest whether Quinn can deliver something more than the mere, almost uncanny vocal impression of Doohan.
“Hegemony” provides the action and suspense you want in a season finale while also providing more personal stakes for the crew on top of the grander spectacle. Director Maja Vrvilo makes Spock’s run-in with the Gorn a particular standout sequence. Scotty’s entrance into the series also manages to not feel forced. He seems to fit right in with the ensemble nicely. And though we still haven’t gotten a great look at the adult Gorn, what we glimpsed managed to not look silly, which is a feat in and of itself when you consider the original rubber suit from “Arena.”
But most importantly, “Hegemony” does what a good finale should do, make the audience hungry for the next season. In that closing moment, Vrvilo just lets Anson Mount’s eyes tell the story. I can’t recall another instance in any Star Trek where our lead captain looked so shell-shocked. Mount gives the viewer the impression Pike is facing his no-win Kobayashi Maru and has finally cracked under the pressure of command.
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