Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 1

Star Trek Strange New Worlds
Season 4 Reaction: Episode 1

Valles Marineris

Fun intro sequence, Pike on horseback is a fun callback to not only the opening scenes of the series pilot "Strange New Worlds" but the Original Series pilot "The Cage" which established Pike's fondness for and ownership of horses.  Uhura gets to mentor a trainee cadet, a Vulcan.  This is cool since three seasons ago the shoe was on the other foot, with Uhura being mentored by the late Commander Hemmer.  Pike's reticence to take a promotion echoes Riker's resistance to take the captain's chair and Picard's resistance to leave it in TNG and the TNG movies.  According to Una, six months has passed since the end of season 3.  The story proper starts when a space storm phenomenon throws the Enterprise back in time to prehistoric Earth.  Earth 6 million years in the past.  The Sol System apparently had an additional M-class planet at that time.  La'An, Una and Ortegas deal with dinosaurs on Earth while the Enterprise finds itself in the middle of an interplanetary war.  Walking the fine lines of the prime directive and not contaminating the timeline are not new ground for trek, but this episode definitely puts a fresh spin on both tropes.  The idea of Mars once having life and an advanced civilization in the distant past is also not original, nor is it something I thought trek would ever tackle.  The idea that the Enterprise's travel to the past and the Martians use of the Enterprises antimatter to destroy the Dol'drn planet caused the creation of the asteroid belt and the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs is interesting.  Predestination Paradoxes are nothing new for trek, but this take of one is a new one.  It was also fun to see Admiral April again.  The episode ends with Una's promotion from Lieutenant Commander to Commander.  Overall, a pretty good episode to start the season.