SNW 401: Valles Marineris

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returned last week for its fourth season premiere, and, wouldn't you know, I have thoughts.

After the painfully flawed mess of the third season, I was prepared to be disappointed. However, I was also hopeful that, without the rush-job environment that produced the season three scripts, we'd get back to at least the level of quality we saw in SNW's first two seasons. The premiere landed smack in the middle of those poles—there's stuff that doesn't make sense, there's some lazy shortcut writing, there's avoidable science mistakes; but there are also really funny moments, a clever premise, and good character stuff that almost makes me give them a pass on the bad character stuff.

Let's get into it (spoilers ahead):

Episode 401: "Valles Marineris" | Written by Akiva Goldsman & Henry Alonso Myers, from a story by Henry Alonso Myers & Alan B. McElroy | Directed by Chris Fisher

★★★

If there's anything the writers' room at SNW loves, it's a gimmick show—something they can market as and distill down to a sentence, like "Pike and company turn into Vulcans," or "the Enterprise gets stuck in a musical," or "'Balance of Terror,' but this time with Pike in command." They call these "big swings," but they smack of gimmickry to me. Sometimes these end up being good, sometimes they're done because of marketing and end up being offensive and terrible. This week's gimmick sentence is "The Enterprise crew meet dinosaurs."

Before we get to that, though, we open on Captain Pike riding a horse on some alien world, soon to be joined by La'an and Dr. M'Benga, all outfitted in wardrobe from True Grit or The Searchers. Why are they there? We're never told, not really, but we can infer from context that they were there to aid a society in medical crisis and they had to do it undercover. This makes me wonder, is this a primitive society/Prime Directive situation? If so, why are you helping? If not, why the subterfuge? But no matter, this very expensive scene is completely meaningless and has nothing to do with the rest of the episode. It's simply a huge waste of money and resources in order to...I don't know, let Anson Mount ride a horse because he likes to do that?

We're told (sort of) in a subsequent scene on the ship that Pike has been running the crew from mission to mission at a busier-than-usual pace for the past six months, following the season three finale wherein Marie, Pike's girlfriend and fellow starship captain, became a prison guard statue for all eternity. (I told you, season three was a mess.) He's keeping himself and everyone else super busy so he doesn't have time to think about losing Marie or how inane the whole plotline was that forced her into the worst night-watchman job ever.

Now, this is just me talking, but I think that could have been accomplished without the horseback scene and saved the production a ton of money. Also avoided the inevitable questions, like, Did they just violate the prime directive? or Where did the horses come from and where are they now? or If this was to show Captain Pike constantly moving from one thing to the next so his mind can't wander, why does that scene end with him reveling in taking a break and just riding for fun? The scene did provide one worthwhile moment to remind the audience that La'an and Spock are still enjoying their friends-with-benefits status when the landing party beams up and Spock is there in the transporter room to greet them; M'Benga needles him and La'an outright accuses him of being there just to see La'an in her cowgirl cosplay duds. Scotty is manning the transporter and La'an notices him being a little weirded out by this interaction and steps it up, inviting Spock to come to her quarters and help her remove her boots. Scott is flummoxed and it's possible even Spock enjoys the flummoxing. It's a fun bit.

Number One tells Pike that Admiral April is "on his way to see you," and then we cut to April already being on the ship, in Pike's cabin, again taking me out of the flow. Wait, he was on his way? From where? Isn't cowboy planet, like, a long way from Starbase One? They meet and April offers Pike a promotion to Commodore, telling him he has until the completion of their next mission to accept or refuse it.

I think I get what they're trying to do with this, give Pike another way to run from his feelings, but it's hollow because we know he's going to refuse. Also, it has no bearing on the rest of the story; if it's there to provide Pike a sort of Yoda moment (live in the now, don't dwell on past or future), we don't need it and neither does the character. It's superfluous. But OK, not a big deal, except it should have been done onscreen instead of taking the audience out of things because the logistics don't make any sense.

Anyway, that next mission the admiral mentioned? It's to observe a weird and awesome stellar storm around the star Ithaxus. Everyone except Spock is pretty stoked about this until, while observing said awesome storm, they pick up a mayday from inside it. Being the heroic people they are, the crew moves to investigate the mayday and, of course, gets sucked into the storm and the ship is battered and thrown to who-knows-where. Number One says this happened because the storm generated "a warp field," but that makes no sense and it should have been "a wormhole," which not only makes more sense but would clear up a dumb thing later on. I swear, it's like nobody in that writers' room understands physics or Treknology.

With the Enterprise basically blind and deaf and without ability to move very much, Pike orders a mayday buoy sent out, at which point someone—you'd think Spock, but anyone would do—might clock the fact that they're sending the very mayday they were investigating in the storm, but no one except everybody in the audience does. Meantime, in order to affect repairs, Pelia and Scott need iridium. Spock's sensors have enough capacity to determine that they're in a system with three Class-M planets, the nearest one of which shows a trace of iridium, but otherwise the sensors tell them nothing about where they are. Bit convenient, but I'll allow it. Number One, La'an, and Ortegas take a shuttle to said planet in search of iridium while Spock works on fixing the sensors. On the planet, our shuttle party encounters large, very large creatures impeding their route to the iridium; after vaporizing some trees, they see that these creatures are dinosaurs. It's the dinosaur episode! 

Spock repairs the sensors enough to learn their location—they are in the Sol system, and based on the stellar positioning, they're also in the past. The storm/warp field/wormhole has sent them back in time 65 million years. This presents a problem for the shuttle party in that in addition to getting the iridium they have to not do anything to change history ala the butterfly effect. They, of course, find the iridium after daringly stunning a T-Rex by phasering it in its open mouth, but they find it in a crashed alien spaceship that had apparently been shot down by another alien spaceship. This whole sequence showcases some impressive CGI visuals of prehistoric Earth and what is evidently a practical model of a T-Rex, but otherwise it's real positive element is a bantery conversation over a communicator between Ortegas and Scotty with Ortegas mocking Scotty's accent. It's funny and sets up a nice mutual annoyance relationship between the two.

All this is really secondary, though—the real meat of the story starts when the Enterprise is captured in an alien tractor-beam analogue by a spaceship local to the prehistoric system. Which, weird. The alien captain, Commander Cassell, has seized the Enterprise as salvage, seeing as it's pretty beat up, and she needs any resources she can find for their war effort against a species called the Dol'drm. We infer that the crashed ship on prehistoric Earth was a casualty of that war. We also learn that Cassell's ship hails from the neighboring planet in the system—Sol IV, or Mars.

The Mars of this time is a thriving, though declining, world full of life. The war has inflicted a great deal of damage, including a sort of kamikaze attack by the Dol'drm that created a huge trench in the Martian surface (the titular Valles Marineris), and there's no end in sight for the war. Thus, she needs any weaponry she can find from the Enterprise. Pike, of course, wants nothing to do with their war, and tries to convince Cassell that there may well be ways to talk to the Dol'drm despite their being weird bug-people that don't speak. His efforts appear to be making some headway until Cassell and her guards steal an anti-matter pod and flee back to their own ship. Why the about-face? Cassell saw information in the Enterprise computer about where and when its from, concluded Pike was a liar because he withheld that information, and saw that in the future Mars is a barren wasteland and assumes it's because the Dol'drm wiped everything out.

Cassell's ship moves away, speeding toward, one assumes, an attack on the Dol'drm, but no one seems to know where she's going—they don't have warp, so where's this Dol'drm world? Hey, dummies, remember when Spock said you were in a system with three Class-M planets? You've since learned the system is the Solar System, and if Earth and Mars are two, what's the third Class-M? Spock, indispensable as always, informs everyone the Martians are heading for Sol V. "Jupiter?" Pike asks, confused. Avoiding speaking to him as if he were a toddler, Spock explains to the captain that, no, right now Jupiter is Sol VI, Sol V is a heretofore unknown small Class-M world midway between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This is the Dol'drm homeworld.

Repairs to the ship have progressed to the point that they have some impulse power and one working photon torpedo tube, so they pursue the Martians with the intent to stop them from deploying the anti-matter pod, which the Martians have fashioned onto a missile. At the last second, as the Martians have launched their missile and time is running out to intercept it, Pike changes his mind and aborts the plan. That planet does not exist in his time, after all. The others on the bridge are aghast, but Pike trusts his intuition and the planet is struck by the anti-matter missile and is destroyed, as is the Martian ship, caught in the explosion. Spock realizes that the anti-matter explosion plus the energy released by the explosion of Sol V's core has created a circumstance alike enough to the one that brought them there that he directs the ship into the conflagration, which snaps them back to the point in time and space where they started this wild ride.

In the wrap-up scenes—in the briefing room and in another in-person meeting between April and Pike (man, the admiral is putting in a lot of light-years on his yacht or whatever, going back and forth to the Enterprise)—we learn that the two points in spacetime were a form of quantum entanglement, created by the destruction of Sol V 65 million years ago which, through said entanglement, created the stellar storm at Ithaxis in the present. Also, Spock has extrapolated that the destruction of Sol V caused enough gravitational disruption in the system that both Mars and Earth shifted to orbits slightly further from the sun. Both planets cooled, Earth to the point of supporting human evolution, Mars to the point of freezing and eventually losing its atmosphere. Also, a piece of Sol V turns out to be the Chicxulub asteroid that hits Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs; what remains of Sol V became the asteroid belt.

April tells Pike that the whole thing will have to be kept secret so as not to freak everybody out, but at least they know that it was the Enterprise that paved the way for humanity to evolve in the first place.

I've got no problem with the basic premise of the story—a predestination paradox that requires the crew to be sent back in time to bring humanity about—nor do I object to ancient Martians or the mystery planet five. But the timing doesn't work for both. I mean, OK, in the grand scheme of things that's a nitpick, but really you have to go back hundreds of millions of years for a habitable Mars. (Shut up, nerd, move on.) There are actual hypotheses about a planet between Mars and Jupiter either being destroyed or failing to completely form to create the asteroid belt, so that's cool. Having one of those created asteroids be the one that hit the Yucatan is fine, too. I just have to suspend disbelief more than usual to put Martians/"blue Mars" in the same timeframe as the dino-extinction asteroid. Plus, I'm just not so wowed by dinosaurs as I think the Paramount marketing folks and Akiva Goldsman expected me to be. In my mind, Enterprise crew + dinosaurs on Earth = gimmickry. The scenes on Earth were by far the least interesting part of the episode. (Well, except for the horseback scene. I mean, why?)

I do have a problem with shrugging off what should be a monumental moral dilemma for our heroes.

The focal point of this story should be the decision whether to allow the Martians to destroy Sol V or not. It's weighty. Pike allowed a genocide to happen when he could have prevented it. And it wasn't a reasoned, debated decision, it was a last-second hunch, which isn't very Pike, frankly. So, once again, the writers—in this case, the showrunners, Goldsman and Myers—have the bones of a great Star Trek story but fail to capitalize on it.

I'm not entirely sure how you'd fix this, but a few thoughts:

• Maybe Spock doesn't determine where and when they are until nearer the end, removing worries of time-tampering until they're already well into having tampered. This would drop the dilemma on them suddenly, so it would play out similarly in the end, but not feel so comparatively trivial.
• Maybe there's a mid-episode briefing room scene where they discuss the problem—they're in a Sol System with (a) an extra planet, (b) spacefaring  and warring Martians, (c) shot-down aliens on Earth, and (d) even allowing for millions of years' drift, too-close-to-the-sun orbits. What's their play?
• Maybe it's determined beforehand that, should the Martians succeed in deploying an anti-matter bomb on Sol V, Sol V would be destroyed, fulfilling a hypothesis about what created the asteroid belt, thus giving time to really consider whether allowing the Martians to bomb Sol V is necessary for their future history.
• We don't really know how long Cassell has had to look at the computer, but it can't have been long enough to learn all the stuff she learns; for one thing, "present-day" Mars has been terraformed and is well populated, so she'd have had to not only see data on 23rd century Earth and its neighbors, but historical data on Mars as well. The story requires she find out that Starfleet and Federation don't exist yet, and it gives her more motivation if she knows her planet becomes lifeless in the future, but this is a lazy-writing shortcut. Maybe instead we see Cassell stumble across some of this in the computer and in addition she learns that Sol V doesn't exist in Pike's time. She then tries to justify her intention to destroy Sol V as necessary, or maybe it leads to an argument about mutually-assured-destruction warfare. I suppose that would ruin the "surprise" at the end, but hasn't the audience figured it out by then anyway?

I don't know. But having it be kind of shrugged off as, "well that's what had to happen because that's what always happened, predestination paradox" is cheap. "Don't overthink it" is actually Admiral April's advice. Seems to me that this is something one couldn't help but overthink. I mean, sure, humans and the Federation and all that came to pass and that's good, but maybe the Martians and Dol'drm could have learned to co-exist, maybe the Martians would have explored the galaxy millions of years ahead of most others and who knows what could have been, good or ill? Maybe the dinosaurs evolved into sentient creatures on Earth. I mean, kind of big stakes to just sweep under the rug, and no matter what, Pike stood by and allowed a genocide when he had the power to stop it, and though inadvertent, that genocide also destroyed a second civilization.

I'm not panning the episode; on balance I think it's good, but it also feels like yet another missed opportunity. And what might have been done with the resources had they not spent so many on the useless horseback scene, the practical T-Rex, and the gratuitous end shot of all the dinosaurs?

Other bits:

• Near the end, Pike says to M'Benga that, had their positions been reversed, he would have done the very same thing that Cassell did and bombed Sol V and the Dol'drm out of existence. I call bullshit, for many reasons, not the least of which is that Pike just spent most of an episode trying to convince Cassell that there were better alternatives and preaching the ethics of Starfleet and the Federation. Yes, Pike, be empathetic, be understanding, but "I'd have done the same?" If that's true, you need to resign your commission right now, Captain, sir.
• There's a little bit of empathy for the Dol'drm from Ortegas and La'an when they find the shot-down alien ship that we later learn is Dol'drm, but that's the extent of any examination of the bug-people and never is Cassell's story of defending from aggression questioned or probed. Given the circumstances Pike and co. find themselves in, this makes sense, but it's also another missed opportunity.
• Chief Engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) was incredibly annoying in this episode. I loathe her continual Doctor Who references, and am very glad that the apparent attempt to do a SNW/DW crossover event failed to happen. These are two franchises that do not belong in the same continuum.
• A few breadcrumbs laid here for future plot points, all of which seem (at this point, anyway) to be worthwhile.

Wonder what we'll get this week.