Memento Mori's take on a disaster movie in just 50 minutes, mostly onboard a single ship, sells the hell out of it. The bulk of the episode sees the Enterprise on the way to deliver supplies to a distant colony, only to find it battered. In the middle of transporting survivors from a small cargo hauler with its shields down, the Enterprise quickly discovers the horrifying nature of the threat the colonists face: a squadron of Gorn vessels, which immediately lance the Enterprise with fire and gut the ship.
It is a proper disaster movie vibe and both thematically and visually sell it well. It is like much of the series so far, but this time leaning into more standard disaster fiction fare rather than anything specific to Trek, but also like much of the series so far, it is delivered with charm. The Year of Hell vibe is when a wounded Enterprise finds systems crippled and things slowly going from bad to worse as the situation gets more dire. That environment makes Strange New World similar to the battle of Khan. Outside of their ships, the Gorn are not seen. At this point, they are largely unknown to the crew of the ship, and Lieutenant La'an is horrified at the thought of enduring what is likely to be her second encounter with the species. The disaster of the episode was caused by a shadow that lingered throughout the episode, a constant threat that pushed the crew to their limits as they were outnumbered and outgunned.
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You have all the hallmarks of a disaster, like Chief Engineer Hemmer and Cadet Uhura, trapped in Engineering, with limited options and big personal stakes. You quickly forget what really shouldn't make a movie like Strange New Worlds because it does so with such earnestness. The Enterprise will be fine next week, despite the hammering it takes here, but the episode never makes light of the danger every section of the ship and crew finds itself in. You fear when characters like Number One get badly wounded, or when Spock and Uhura are put in danger, even though you know they won't meet their end facing the Gorn. You believe it because of the earnest conviction of the man who told the audience and his crew that the Enterprise can pull out all the stops in its game of space cat-and-mouse.
Getting to play with how big it can push these stakes and how much of a battering those pristine, gorgeously faux-retro sets can take shines as one of the best action films. The episode isn't just a really killer action movie shrunk down to an episode of TV. Last week shone a light on Number One, and the week before it Cadet Uhura put its heart into another of the series. This episode is a fight for the crew's lives, and it's a smart idea to center the disaster movie on the tough-as-nails security chief. The cracks in La's professional and personal armor should be the perfect professional crisis for her to face.
The colony shin was a rare Federation vessel to encounter the Gorn, as we eventually learn from a mind-meld Spock. When she lost her family in an attempt to escape, she became a closed-off woman and those barriers began to break down as she faced them again. She is allowed to feel all the rage, pain, and fear she has buried in her past over the death of her. By having this mostly unknown-to-us character run the whole gamut of fear into hope, La'an becomes the focal point of the episode and it sells as much as the other episodes.
It's high stakes, but you can't expect a series to completely bang up the ship week in and week out without someone. We won't get something like it for a while, so it had to go all out for the first season of Strange New Worlds.
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