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.
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