“ Strange New Worlds ” has a terminal prequel brain

Strange new worlds had a blow this season. From tone to episodes that have swung gadgets to engage with the material questions they raise, the spectacle has exchanged the depth of the extent in terms of variety of spaces it explores. But one thing has become clear during the season which becomes crystal in its penultimate episode: the only time the series is ready to stop and to concentrate really, it is when it wants to climb on the beams of the beam beam Hiking That before.

Now, this is something that the show has already made for great success, mainly by going beyond this initial stage of the facade context compared to the original season. His first season final, “A Quality of Mercy”, nailed a perfect mirror to one of the big ones of all time Hiking stories, “balance of terror”, while skillfully pulling her own tower Discovery. Even this season, “the Sehlat who ate his tail” was clearly set up as a prequel to put the young Jim Kirk alongside his future teammates of the Business But always focused on telling a new story about Kirk’s difficulties with the rigors of the command.

Sadly, “terrarium” fails to do something in a similar vein, telling a flat, predicable tale with one of its mostly underserved characters in erica ortegas—leading to an episode that wow be middle-of-road forgettable without its last-minute Attach Itself as a direct prequel to one of the best stories of the original series, Making it ultimataly Look Much Werse in comparison to the 60-yy-oar-cold matt it’s strggling to correspond.

“Terrarium” focuses on an exploratory mission that has gone wrong, when Ortegas is sent in a solo expedition to draw gravimetric fluctuations in a area of ​​space, only to find its shuttle swallowed by a sudden appearance of a worm hole, catapping it in a distant system where hundreds of Moor are slowly taken in the storms of the giant clouds caused by Funky Orbit neighboring gazing giant. With little hope of rescue and with her emergency supplies damaged in the accident, Erica must find a way to survive long enough to communicate to Business That it is still standing, while the besieged bridge crew struggles to hunt it before being called to deliver vital vaccination supplies to a colony in difficulty.

The premise is great, and it is should have been a showcase that was long awaited for the pilot several times on Melissa Navia – a character who has regularly refused repeatedly Strange new worldsOnly to be stuck with a singular identification trait (which it “flies the ship”, which became overused at the slogan point at the start of this season). Season three tried to do something with her in the culminating moments of the first, suggesting that her meeting with the Gorn in the final of last season would humiliate the noisy desire to reset a status quo for its episodic format) largely came this potential story … And, well, well, well given more to make more brothers.

So far. Naturally, Erica and we learn fairly quickly so that she is not alone on the moon with which she is discouraged, being saved from the local fauna which stimulated by an intruder wounded in the form of a Gorn. But apart from a first moment of shock, none of “terrarium” really concerns Erica dealing with his trauma or his persistent feelings both on the Gorn and his role in the war of the Federation-Klingon. In fact, despite being the star focal point, the episode does not really have much to say about Erica.

We don’t really learn much more about her or see a large part of her process during her experience. She can just start bonding with the Gron who saved her when she realizes that the Gorn is both a woman and a pilot – very well that the only decisive features of Erica as a character. The character’s joke is mainly unilateral, because even with a certain reshuffle of his knitting, Erica can only communicate with the Gorn directly by affirmative / negative questions. It is also a relatively simple episode, with little challenge for Erica and the Gorn beyond the Tic-Tac clock of a nebulous entrant gas storm on the fringes of their slow exploration of common points.

Star Trek Has a lot of episodes to win two improbable characters in a stressful situation, just to see them overcome the obstacle of communication and survive it. There are episodes like “Rise”, which task Tuvok and Neelix to work together to repair an orbital elevator Traveleror “ascent” in New deep spacewhere Quark and Odo must help climb a mountain while being failed on a planet. There are even more cerebral episodes on the promotion of communication, such as the Tng “Darmok.

But “terrarium” has nothing to say about his premise or his central character while he is predictable from rhythm to rhythm, or anything on his central conflict on the past of Erica with the Gorn. No doubt it’s almost forget This conflict even existed in the first place, Eria being almost immediately agree to have to work with a Grenn to survive, leading to an episode which ends up having the counting of an inevitable conclusion as an Erica and the work of Great and work on means of sending signals, and the crew on board Business (mainly Uhura) work and work to find ways to continue to seek their missing crew companion until they cannot.

Thus, when the “terrarium” arrives at this inevitable conclusion – Erica and the Gorn find a risky means of triggering the gas storm to act as a “flare” to alert Business While he desperately scans the moon after Moon – the episode has a last chance to say something when at least one surprising thing happens. While La’An and a security team decrease to Erica’s site, and it comes out of the protective pod that she and the Gorn has formed to repel the storm of fire, there is no time for Erica to explain the context, then La’an and her officers simply shoot the dead of Grenn, to the great horror of Erica.

Again, the potential is there, even if the episode has not really put it in place. Having the perception that Erica du Gorn is so transformed by this experience that she feels sorrow for an reaction which, there is an episode, she would have agreed with an interesting place to leave things, but “terrarium” has just spent 50 minutes in large part having ignored this change itself, having immediately Erica to be adequate of this moon with a Great. We do not really see this transformation occurring in the story, so its upheaval sounds largely hollow.

But it is not where the episode ends. While the team (and a distraught Erica) brings back to BusinessEverything except Erica freezes for a moment. A flickering light that she noticed in the distance here and there throughout the episode shines more and more bright until it reveals a humanoid form, a bald and pale being in shimmering clothes … which immediately reveals that they were testing Erica and the pilot of Gorn and are a metron, the species which, like the figure, will do it in Erica here, to find the relationship between humanity and each other in the emblematic events Hiking Episode, “Arena”.

“Terrarium” is not only a boring episode of Star TrekSO. By making a direct prequel to it of “Arena”, it is actively reduced simply by not being able to correspond to the depth of an episode of almost six decades. What makes “Arena” so brilliant is the recognition that our hero, Captain Kirk, is imperfect. The test that the metron does in “Arena”, forcing Kirk and the Gorn to fight until death to save the lives of their crews, asks Kirk to fight with the basic impulse of violence which humanity is capable – is always Capable, despite having overcome so much to go up to the stars. The final conversation of the episode sees Kirk directly recognized by Spock that he is, and the rest of humanity always counts constantly with their shared past and their aggression story when they try to be better and adapt to their enlightened utopia.

“Terrarium” simply has Erica Ortegas to be lit by almost Go. There is no conflict, whether with his own past trauma or with the past monstrous lens Strange new worlds Only saw the Gron. They bind immediately and continue, and the tragedy is that it could not communicate this enlightened nature that it developed in a heart rate in time to her teammates (mainly because the show could not square in the circle to have a “good” in Gorn Strange new worlds and original Star Trek).

It is an episode that has so little weight or dramatic depth in contrast striking with “Arena”, even without the direct shoe connection with it. But by readily imposing this connection on itself, it invites the comparison itself and can only appear clearly unfavorable alongside a television element of six decades. There is no improvement by having this episode being a prequel to “Arena”, beyond the fact that Strange new worlds is increasingly obsessed, because he looks at the cannon of his own end, with the fact that he must open the way to the original Star Trek.

In doing so, he can only render his own characters and stories a bad service. But given that the way in which a large part of this season has already gone, it was already doing it even without prequel-Itis.

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