Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x10 "A Quality of Mercy" Review

It's kind of surprising that we've already reached the season finale. It feels like the season just started a couple of week's ago, but here we go.

Batel, Pike's sort-of (maybe?) girlfriend, appears in this episode for the first time since the beginning of the season. I wasn't expecting to see her again, but she actually plays a somewhat pivotal role at the end when she comes to arrest Una. I wonder if that means she'll be around more in season two, since I'm guessing that Una's arrest is going to be dealt with more then.

Towards the beginning of the episode, Pike meets a kid who will one day be one of the two cadets who doesn't survive in the "incident." The understandably distresses him, and he tries to write a letter to the kid before he gets a visit from his future self warning him against doing it.

As soon as I realized that this episode was going to deal with time travel, I was wary. While I don't automatically hate time travel stories, I often don't like them because they can be so difficult to wrap your mind around, especially when it comes to changing the past or future like this one was. Overall, though, I didn't mind this episode. The story wasn't hard to follow despite the changes that had been made.

Interestingly, the crew of the Enterprise is mostly the same despite seven years having past. The only noticeable differences are that Una is gone (for obvious reasons) and La'an is on a different ship. It was nice to get a glimpse of La'an so soon after she left the Enterprise, but I'm sad that this is a possible sign that she doesn't come back.

It turns out that in this version of the universe La'an is assigned to a ship captained by Kirk. I knew he was going to show up eventually because there was casting news, but I kind of forgot about it before this episode to be honest. It's also interesting that in this version of the future Samuel Kirk is still on the Enterprise too.

The crew of the Enterprise learn that Romulans look like Vulcans for the first time in this episode. This isn't new information to the audience, even me who has limited knowledge about the Star Trek Universe. I wasn't fully aware of when the Federation learns about the common heritage between them, so I was actually surprised about that plot twist for different reasons.

The events of the episode lead to a war between the Romulans and the Federation, which is said to have lead to countless deaths. Spock, it turns out, is one of those deaths, and it's enough to convince Pike not to change his fate. I wonder if this episode is an attempt to make Pike's eventual fate less of a focus in upcoming seasons. I don't think it's realistic for him to stop worrying about it at all, but I wonder if it won't be brought up in the story like it has been throughout this season because it will now be considered "dealt with."

One thing that probably will be a focus of next season is Una's arrest for lying about being Illyrian. I thought it was curious when future Spock said that she'd been in prisoner for nearly seven years, since that would mean she was arrested around the "present" of the show. Still, I really wasn't expecting it in this episode. I thought it might be next season or maybe even two seasons from now.

I'm interested in where this is going to go, but I'm worried that it means Una will eventually go to prison. I know nothing that happened in the timeline that Pike saw is set in stone for the show, but this seems like something that would play out in a similar way considering that it's before the incident.

Either way, I'm curious to see what happens next when we finally get season two.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x09 "All Those Who Wander" Review

This week's episode was a heavy one, especially after last week's fun one. There was a bit of whiplash.

Uhura's supposed to go back to Earth after finishing her time on the Enterprise. She's still convinced that she's going to leave, but she ends up going on one final away mission before she leaves. It's pretty obvious that this mission is going to convince her to stay before they've even left the Enterprise. I never expected her to leave the show, especially since she's a character who appears in the Original Series as well.

The away mission they go on is to check on a crashed ship and save it, but around the ship, they find frozen bodies and blood, which is a pretty quick indicator that this episode is going to have a drastically different tone than the last one did.

It turns out that the ship's crew had rescued some people and one of them was infected with Gorn eggs, which ended up killing almost everyone. When the Enterprise crew gets there, there's only a person of an unknown species and a human girl called Oriana who have survived.

While on the crashed ship, Uhura talks to Hemmer about her future, and they discuss the advice he gave her previously. I love their relationship, which makes the fact that Hemmer dies at the end of the episode all the sadder. I wasn't expecting any of the crew members to die, so Hemmer's death came as a pretty big surprise.

Actually, that's slightly untrue. We're introduced to two Enterprise crew members at the start of this episode who both also die, and that wasn't shocking at all. As soon as they were introduced, I expected it was because it's easier to kill off characters who the audience doesn't know at all. Though it mostly makes it funny to me that there are these two crew members who we've never seen before and then suddenly they die. I don't love that from a storytelling perspective.

Not only do Gorn apparently mature ridiculously quickly, but they also fight and kill each other for dominance. That makes me wonder how they supposedly work together to hunt prey. It seems like they should have killed each other a long time ago.

While fighting the Gorn, they have to get angry, which results in Spock letting out his anger in order to draw one of them out. Later, at Hemmer's funeral, he says he can't control it. Chapel tells him that it makes him human and hugs him. I'm really intrigued by this because somehow I didn't think of the love triangle between Chapel, Spock, and T'Pring as being between Spock's human and Vulcan sides. But it definitely looks like they're going to lean into that.

Of course Hemmer's death will mean that he won't be on the show anymore, but losing Hemmer made it even more surprising when La'an requested a leave of absence at the end of the episode. I'm curious if that means she'll be gone for a long time or not. She does emphasize that she only has a small lead that might lead to nothing and it's outside of Federation space. I really like La'an's character, so losing her would really upset me.

Thankfully, it does seem like Uhura is sticking around. (I know she's a character in the Original Series, so I was expecting her too, but it's still nice to see.) I'm glad we didn't get three apparent exits from the show in the same episode. But I do hope that La'an shows back up in the future.