In a move that feels far more reminiscent of a season finale than a penultimate episode, Strange New Worlds bids goodbye to two cast members in “All Those Who Wander.” While I wasn’t necessarily prepared to bid adieu to some of these fascinating characters, the show demonstrates that it could do so well and with compassion. The show also does this with an intentional homage to the Alien franchise, proving that Trek can and will do horror. Not everything in space is fairy tales and tasty omelettes.
Plot Ahoy!
The Enterprise has been tasked with delivering much needed power cells to Station K7 when they receive a second priority one mission—to rescue the U.S.S. Peregrine and her crew from the surface of Valeo Beta V where the ship presumably crashed. Because the power cells degrade in transit, which could render them useless to K7 thus threatening the station’s life support, Captain Pike decides to head up an away team on his own, taking Cadets Uhura and Chia with him as a sort of last hurrah as the cadets had finished their rotations aboard the Enterprise. He sends the Enterprise on to K7 under Una Chin-Riley’s capable leadership.
On Valeo Beta V, however, they discover that this mission will hardly be the cakewalk Pike believed it to be. None of the Peregrine’s crew has survived, and listening to the final logs, they find that the ship had stopped briefly to rescue some refugees. Unfortunately, the Orion refugee had been infected with Gorn eggs. La’an immediately comes to full alert, especially once they find Oriana and the unknown alien Oriana dubs Buckley. She demands to know if they’re infected, but neither refugee answers. M’Benga sends La’an out of Sickbay, leaving Nurse Chapel and Ensign Chia to tend to the two refugees. Buckley begins wheezing, and just as Chia notices, four Gorn hatchlings burst out of Buckley’s chest. One hatchling eats a sibling while another leaps onto Chia, killing her. Chapel activates the Sickbay forcefields and escapes predation.
Elsewhere on the ship, newly promoted Lieutenant Duke is not so lucky. Two of the hatchlings rip him away from Spock and the rest of his team, prompting Pike to order everyone to pull back to the comparative safety of Sick Bay, where they begin to plan. La’an explains that the Gorn hatchlings will slaughter each other until only one, the strongest, remains. In her opinion, it’s a better idea to kill them at this stage.
Down in Engineering, Hemmer and Uhura complete their repairs, and Hemmer offers Uhura some valid life advice. As they finish, one of the hatchlings hops down only to be devoured by a second, much larger hatchling. Hemmer and Uhura escape but not before the hatchling sprays Hemmer with some sort of acidic agent. Pike calls for a tactical analysis, and they come up with a plan to use the temperature controls on the Peregrine to drive the hatchlings to a choke point, where the crew will eliminate them. Pike controls the operation from the bridge. Uhura serves as bait, luring the hatchlings toward the single, warm point in one of the cargo bays where Spock and Hemmer wait. They successfully trap the two remaining hatchlings in the cargo bay, where the Gorn proceed to attack each other in a bid for dominance.
The solitary Gorn emerges, and La’an begins screaming at it, convincing it to follow her. She runs into a cargo bay where she jumps into a secured cargo pod. The Gorn follows her and pounds on the pod to get at her. Hemmer activates the environmental protocol, blasting the hatchling with cold air and freezing it. La’an emerges and destroys the frozen Gorn. Hemmer also emerges and explains that he can feel the Gorn maturing inside him. He walks to the ship’s edge and throws himself into the chasm in order to protect his fellow crewmates.
Back aboard the Enterprise, the crew celebrates the lives of the fallen, grieving Hemmer’s loss in particular. La’an goes to Pike to request a leave of absence in order to track down a lead on Oriana’s family, which he grants. Uhura walks onto the bridge secure in the knowledge that allowing herself to open up to people is the right course of action and that Starfleet is where she belongs.
Analysis
Y’all, I was not expecting to say goodbye to not one but two comparatively major characters in the penultimate episode. Hemmer’s sacrifice makes a certain amount of sense, and to an extent, I can see how his arc has been building toward this. In the episode “Memento Mori,” he explains to Uhura that his purpose is to fix broken things, and at his funeral, she observes that he fixed what was broken in her. Hemmer certainly stepped into a mentor role for her, and while I don’t normally care for the practice of fridging a character to further another character’s story, I do think it works here. Hemmer had an arc that completed with his advice to Uhura because he lived his credo. He explained to Spock that he wouldn’t kill the Gorn but that he would do what was necessary to protect the crew, and that’s exactly what he did by opting to sacrifice himself. In a literal sense, he fixed the broken U.S.S. Peregrine, enabling the Enterprise to complete its mission, and more figuratively, his death gave Uhura a certain sense of closure and reminded her that the joy was worth the pain. It’s a nice, tight bit of writing.
For La’an, she gets to wreak a little bit of vengeance against the species that tortured and killed her family. Trek doesn’t generally condone violence, and I’m not saying that’s what’s going on here. Rather, Trek frequently does force its characters to face their fears in order to move past them, and La’an does precisely that in “All Those Who Wander.” She began that journey in “Momento Mori,” but “All Those Who Wander” represents an end to this arc. Where she couldn’t save her family when she was a child, she is instrumental in saving her fellow crewmembers. Moreover, she gets a chance to teach Oriana how to come back from the trauma she experienced by providing an example of what it is to live rather than survive. Helping Oriana find her family is also a bit about La’an giving Oriana the best start she can, just as Una did for her. It’s a nice circle.
“All Those Who Wander” continues to build on Spock’s inner turmoil as he has to release his rage in order to engage the Gorn. I do worry that Strange New Worlds will overuse that particular character theme because inevitably, we aren’t going to get any resolution of that in SNW. We get some resolution of it in the TOS movies, so developing it too much in this installment almost feels a bit like they’re leading us toward a pay-off that won’t come. That said, I like that Chapel continues to try and be a good friend to Spock, despite her feelings.
Beyond the character beats, “All Those Who Wander” is a pretty fantastic demonstration of Trek’s flexibility in its storytelling. Strange New Worlds, due to its episodic framework, can bounce between Once Upon a Time and Alien the same way most 90s Trek shows did. This is not to say that the episodic format is better or worse than Discovery’s season-long plot arcs but rather highlights how free Trek is as a franchise to do very different things narratively. Diversity, after all, forms a significant pillar of the franchise ethos, and that diversity extends to storytelling.
This time, that flexibility gives us a solid bottle show showcasing the franchise’s ability to do scary. The Peregrine segments featured re-dressed Enterprise sets which, rather than feeling corny, just made it easier to see the potential for the events to play out on everyone’s favorite ship. For me, that made the scares that much more impactful as did the clever use of off-screen gore. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Rating:
Four Time Crystals
Stray Thoughts From the Couch
- You all may recognize K7 as the station made famous by “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
- Hemmer does get the chance to pull a real Ellen Ripley—only into ice and not fire. His death sequence also reminded me very strongly of Spock’s in The Wrath of Khan, and I am hard-pressed to believe that’s coincidental. Additionally, he’s a redshirt.
- This episode really trotted out all of the tropes—including introducing characters just to kill them off.
- I really loved Buckley’s character design. I hope we see his species turn up later.
- I would like to see La’an come back.