Spoilers follow for the Strange New Worlds Season 3 finale, “New Life and New Civilizations.”
Spock: “Enterprise has had a challenging few months.”
Pike: “That is an understatement.”
And so Strange New Worlds ends its third – and weakest so far – season with a mixed bag of a finale. Albeit, it’s a pretty melancholy and emotional segment, and a notable one in the ongoing march towards Captain Pike’s (Anson Mount) impending and unavoidable accident. But still, considering the heights this show has hit in the past, there’s no getting around the fact that SNW Season 3 just hasn’t had the same amount of warp core juice, an unfortunate fact which the uneven “New Life and New Civilizations” only drives home.
After a two-year delay between seasons, this new block of episodes started off decently enough with the wrap-up of the “Hegemony” cliffhanger involving a Gorn invasion. From there, however, the show hit some true low points, including an unfunny riff on Trelane from The Original Series, a shrug-inducing Klingon zombie jaunt, a misfire of a malfunctioning holodeck episode, and then by mid-season, “Through the Lens of Time,” an alien possession two-fister that felt way more like TNG’s misbegotten “Masks” than any fan could ever have dreamed possible.
The season righted itself mostly after that and churned out a couple of gems (Kirk gets his first command in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” the crew must assist a tragic spacefaring alien in the documentary-esque “What Is Starfleet?”), so it’s fairly astounding that the Strange New Worlds writers would choose to go back to “Through the Lens of Time” to wrap up Year 3. And yet here we are.
Certainly Captain Batel’s (Melanie Scrofano) storyline has been a running thread throughout the season, as she’s been recuperating onboard the Enterprise after her run-in with the Gorn. And she did exhibit some otherworldly connection to the ancient beings at the center of “Through the Lens of Time” in that episode, as she fought off the, let’s be frank here, incredibly annoying Dana Gamble (Chris Myers), or rather, the Enterprise nurse whose body had been stolen by a member of the mysterious and evil race known as the Vezda. We’ve seen this kind of thing before – age-old and weird alien spirits inhabiting our beloved characters – from the aforementioned “Masks” to Deep Space Nine’s “The Reckoning,” which featured a showdown between a Pah-wraith-possessed Jake Sisko and an equally (if Prophet-inhabited) possessed Kira Nerys. It was lame then and it’s lame now.
But a continuation of this story is what “New Life and New Civilizations” closes Season 3 out on, so, as Spock once said, we gotta do what we gotta do. (Or was that John Wayne?) The long and short of the story follows: The Gamble Vezda has managed to reconstitute its body after being phaser’d in the earlier episode, and now it’s plotting to unleash all its brothers and sisters so they can possess the planet Skygowan’s entire population. (Some of whom will be willing participants as, in a chilling moment, we see a group of the Vezda’s worshippers blinding themselves at the Gamble Vezda’s command.) After some investigatin’ by the Enterprise crew, who really look grand in their Skygowan cosplay (Jess Bush’s Christine Chapel even gets to go redhead here), Doctor M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) is trapped with the Gamble Vezda in the other-dimensional whatchamacallit from the prior episode. But we soon learn that the key to defeating the Vezda plan is… Captain Batel!
(Meanwhile, Olusanmokun’s M’Benga, who – let’s face it – is one of the coolest characters on the show, gets some tantalizing bits and pieces here, like his willingness to kill himself in order to trap the Vezda, and the story about the first time he killed as a child. Unfortunately, he kinda just drops out of the story at a certain point because the show has too much else going on with Pike and Batel.)
It turns out that, with all the genetic changes Batel has undergone as part of her Gorn treatment, she’s somehow become the “Beholder” statue which is a centerpiece of the chamber where the waiting Vezda are trapped. It’s a pretty cool concept actually, with time/space not necessarily having to line up in a linear sense; even though the statue has been there for eons, keeping the Vezda trapped, it was the Enterprise crew that created it when they saved Batel… which led to her becoming the Beholder, who is about to defeat the Vezda… and trap them for eons. It’s a loop of sorts, some real Jack Torrance on New Year’s Eve 1921 shit.
Batel takes this revelation much better than Pike does, and she even uses her newfound abilities to give us what is the best part of the episode. The Volume, with its unlimited scope of computer-generated backgrounds, has become something of a crutch for Strange New Worlds (and other genre shows), and this episode features a lot of that – vast spaces both indoors and out that look amazing but are somehow also increasingly unconvincing. So having the dramatic crux of this story take place in Pike’s cabin in Montana is a relief. It’s also heartbreaking as Pike and Batel act out, in a series of short scenes, the life they will never actually have together. They marry, have a daughter, grow old together… they even get a dog!
It’s a great way to loop back in on Pike’s never-far-from-our-minds accident, and in this version of his story, Batel sees to it that the accident doesn’t even happen. Of course, this is all tearjerker stuff because it can’t last, but after the theatrics of the Gamble Vezda in the earlier part of the episode, it stands as a reminder of what can really work for this show: Digging in nice and deep with the characters. Pike and Batel both get a happy ending, and an unhappy ending, and that’s pretty cool.
It’s just a shame that “New Life and New Civilizations” has so much else going on throughout, because recycling the Vezda stuff seems like a waste of what precious little time this show has left at this point. After this, there are just 16 episodes left. Sixteen! But at least it seems like the Enterprise may finally be heading off to explore some strange new worlds, if the closing moments of this hour are any indication…
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- With all due respect to Marie Batel, we know that eventually Pike will choose to live out the rest of his days with Vina on Talos IV. Sorry Marie!
- Lost amid all this drama is the fact that Dr. Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) may not have found the immortality that he’s looking for (yet), but Captain Batel did… in a way.
- Fun that they played the same formal dress joke on Scotty that got Uhura in Season 1.
- Pelia/Dracula crossover – make it happen!
- How can La’an master the Vulcan nerve pinch? Well, she is a superior being…
- Commander Kirk is just fully speaking for his captain these days it seems, though at least she gets to sit in the background in one shot (out of focus).
- And on the topic of Kirk: I like that Pike and La’an call him “James,” but Spock and Scotty call him “Jim.”
Source link
