After last season’s cliffhanger, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds opens with an action-packed season three premiere that brings members of our crew face-to-face with adult Gorn soldiers for the first time.
“Hegemony, Part II” begins exactly where season two left off, in the middle of a crisis for which Captain Pike has no good options. Hopelessly outmatched by a Gorn fleet that has captured Federation colonists and their own landing party, the Enterprise is ordered to retreat. If they leave, the prisoners may be lost forever. Then of course, there’s the even more personal crisis; Pike’s girlfriend, Captain Batel has been infested with Gorn eggs and placed in stasis to keep her condition from worsening.
Almost everyone has a role to play this week planning and executing the tactics Enterprise uses to turn a seemingly no-win scenario into a victory, and that includes Scotty himself. Introduced in last season’s finale, Martin Quinn officially joins the cast this season as the iconic OG Enterprise engineer originally portrayed by James Doohan.
And as I said in my review of the previous finale, Quinn’s approach leans even more into a Doohan impression than Simon Pegg’s interpretation in Trek’s “Kelvin Universe” film trilogy that began with 2009’s Star Trek, directed by JJ Abrams. So far, after already watching the first half of this new season, Quinn’s take on Scotty is growing on me. Though my hope is Quinn will develop his own unique flourishes that distinguish his version of the legendary character and brings more of himself into the part.
The episode packs a lot of action into its hour and the script by Davie Perez moves with efficiency and at a breakneck pace, hardly giving the viewer much time to take a breath. I particularly appreciated the opening scene where Pike solicits tactical options from the Bridge crew and immediately identifies the idea he finds most workable, declaring “That’s it! That’s the one!” The lingering image that closed last season was Pike’s face, lost and in over his head. It’s refreshing to see a Star Trek captain so visibly shaken and turning to their crew to throw them a lifeline.
Photo: Marni GrossmanParamount+
This is an episode with both large scale encounters between starships and small, intimate character moments. And for his part, Director Chris Fisher captures both competently. Disappointingly though, there’s little else to discuss about “Hegemony, Part II.” It has the unfortunate duty of concluding a cliffhanger, leaving little time for anything outside of moving the plot forward. There’s certainly always been plenty of action-packed Star Trek stories — and some of them even quite good — but by the end of the episode we’ve more or less resolved the immediate conflicts and I’m left asking, so what?
Season premieres designed to wrap up a finale cliffhanger have become even more frustrating in the era of 10-episode seasons because it feels like a wasted opportunity, stealing one of the precious few spots in season three that could have been filled with a story that exists to do more than just resolve dangling plot threads.
“Hegemony, Part II” was saddled with the obligation of concluding the season two finale but rather than find an interesting path towards that resolution it squanders its hour. Ultimately, there’s little to remark upon because it’s lazy writing that lacks any nerve. In both my review of last year’s superb “Ad Astra Per Aspera” and my recent scathing review of Star Trek: Section 31, I invoked Captain Kirk’s famous monologue that begins: “Risk is our business!”
That north star guides my analysis of this franchise that defined itself by its willingness to challenge and interrogate its audience’s perspectives. Trek is always at its best when it chooses to be audacious. season three of Strange New Worlds is the first new Trek since Star Trek: Section 31 gave us Trek at its most vacuous. My message to the writers of Strange New Worlds echo the words of a different Captain Christopher Pike, Bruce Greenwood’s version in the 2009 Abrams film: “I dare you to do better.”
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds release Thursdays on Paramount+.
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