‘Strange New Worlds’ Has Terminal Prequel Brain

Strange New Worlds has been having a rough go of it this season. From tonal misfires to episodes that have swung for gimmicks over engaging with the material questions they raise, the show has traded depth for breadth in terms of the sheer variety of spaces it explores. But one thing has become clear over the course of the season that becomes crystal in its penultimate episode: the only time the show is willing to knuckle down and really focus is when it wants to ride on the coattails of the Trek that came before it.

Now this is something that the show has done to great success before—mostly by going beyond that initial step of fawning context in relation to the original season. Its first season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” nailed a pitch-perfect mirror to one of the all-time great Trek stories, “Balance of Terror,” while still deftly weaving its own spin on things through Pike’s arc wrangling with his future destiny as first teased in Discovery. Even this season, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” was clearly set up as a prequel run-up to putting the young Jim Kirk alongside his future crewmates from the Enterprise but still focused on telling a fresh new story about Kirk’s struggles with the rigors of command.

Sadly, “Terrarium” fails to do something in a similar vein, telling a flat, predictable tale with one of its most perpetually underserved characters in Erica Ortegas—leading to an episode that would be middle-of-the-road forgettable without its last-minute attempt to try and attach itself as a direct prequel to one of the best stories of the original series, making it ultimately look much worse in comparison to the 60-year-old material it’s struggling to match.

“Terrarium” focuses on an exploratory mission gone wrong, when Ortegas is sent on a solo expedition to chart gravimetric fluctuations in a region of space, only to find her shuttle swallowed up by a sudden wormhole’s appearance, catapulting her away to a distant system where hundreds of moons are slowly caught up in giant cloud storms caused by the funky orbit of a nearby gas giant. With little hope of rescue and with her emergency supplies damaged in the crash, Erica has to find a way to survive long enough to communicate to Enterprise that she’s still standing, while the beleaguered bridge crew struggle to hunt for her before being called away to deliver vital vaccination supplies to a struggling colony.

The premise is great, and it should have been a long-awaited showcase for Melissa Navia’s repeatedly sidelined pilot—a character that has regularly been denied focus time and time again on Strange New Worlds, only to be stuck with a singular identifying trait (that she “flies the ship,” which became overused to the point of catchphrase by the start of this season). Season three tried to do something with her in the climactic moments of the premiere, suggesting that her encounter with the Gorn during last season’s finale would humble the boisterous lieutenant as she navigated PTSD, but the season (and the show’s broader desire to reset to a status quo for its episodic format) has largely ignored that potential narrative… and, well, largely given more to do to Erica’s brother Beto.

Until now. Naturally, Erica and we learn quickly enough that she’s not alone on the moon she’s crash-landed on, finding herself rescued from skittering local wildlife by an injured interloper in the form of a Gorn. But aside from an initial moment of shock, none of “Terrarium” is really about Erica dealing with her trauma or her lingering feelings about both the Gorn and her part in the Federation-Klingon War. In fact, despite being the starring focal point, the episode doesn’t really have much to say about Erica at all.

We don’t really learn much more about her or see much of her process during her experience. She can only begin to bond with the Gorn that saved her when she realizes that the Gorn is both female and a pilot—pretty much Erica’s only defining traits as a character herself. The character banter is mostly one-sided, as even with some reworking of her tricorder, Erica can only communicate with the Gorn directly through affirmative/negative questions. It’s also a relatively simple episode, with little in the way of challenge to Erica and the Gorn beyond the ticking clock of an incoming gas storm nebulously sitting on the fringe of their slow exploration of commonality.

Star Trek has done plenty of episodes about foisting together two unlikely characters into a stressful situation, just to see them overcome the hurdle of communication and survive. There are episodes like “Rise,” which tasks Tuvok and Neelix with working together to repair an orbital elevator in Voyager, or “The Ascent” in Deep Space Nine, where Quark and Odo have to help each other climb a mountain while stranded on a planet. There are even more cerebral episodes about fostering communication, like the TNG classic “Darmok.”

But “Terrarium” has nothing to say about either its premise or its central character as it predictably moves from beat to beat, or anything about its central conflict over Erica’s past with the Gorn. Arguably it almost forgets that conflict even existed in the first place, with Eria almost immediately being fine with having to work with a Gorn to survive, leading to an episode that ends up feeling like it’s counting down to an inevitable conclusion as Erica and the Gorn work and work on ways to send signals, and the crew aboard Enterprise (mainly Uhura) work and work to find ways to keep looking for their missing crewmate until they can’t.

So when “Terrarium” reaches that inevitable conclusion—Erica and the Gorn figure out a risky way to ignite the gas storm to act as a “flare” to alert Enterprise as it desperately scans moon after moon—the episode has one last chance to say something when at least one surprising thing happens. As La’an and a security team beam down to Erica’s location, and she comes bursting out of the protective pod she and the Gorn formed to fend off the firestorm, there’s no time for Erica to explain context, so La’an and her officers simply shoot the Gorn dead, much to Erica’s horror.

Again, the potential is there, even if the episode didn’t really quite set it up. Having Erica’s perception of the Gorn be so transformed by this experience that she feels grief for a reaction that, an episode ago, she would’ve agreed with would have been an interesting place to leave things on, but “Terrarium” has just spent 50-odd minutes largely having ignored that change itself, immediately having Erica be fine to cohabit this moon with a Gorn. We don’t see that transformation really happen in the narrative, so her upset largely rings hollow.

But that’s not where the episode ends. As the team (and a distraught Erica) is beaming back to Enterprise, everything but Erica freezes for a moment. A flickering light that she’s noticed in the distance here and there throughout the episode shines brighter and brighter until it reveals a humanoid form, a bald, pale being in shimmering clothing… who immediately reveals that they were testing Erica and the Gorn pilot and are a Metron, the species that will, as the figure tells Erica here, go on to find more ways to test the relationship between humanity and Gorn when it finds Captain Kirk and a Gorn warrior to aim at each other in the events of the iconic Trek episode, “Arena.”

“Terrarium” isn’t just a boring episode of Star Trek, then. By making it a direct prequel to “Arena,” it actively lessens itself simply by not being able to match the depth of an episode that is almost six decades old. What makes “Arena” so great is the acknowledgement that our hero, Captain Kirk, is imperfect. The test the Metron makes in “Arena,” forcing Kirk and the Gorn to fight to the death to save the lives of their crews, asks Kirk to wrestle with the base impulse of violence that humanity is capable of—is still capable of, despite having overcome so much to ascend to the stars. The concluding conversation of the episode sees Kirk directly acknowledge to Spock that he is, and the rest of humanity are still constantly reckoning with their shared past and history of aggression as they try to be better and adapt to their enlightened utopia.

“Terrarium” simply just has Erica Ortegas be enlightened from almost the get-go. There is no conflict, either with her own past trauma or with the past monstrous lens Strange New Worlds has solely seen the Gorn through. They immediately bond and get on, and the tragedy is that she could not communicate this enlightened nature she developed in a heartbeat in time to her crewmates (mostly because the show couldn’t square the circle on having a “good” Gorn go on its merry way between the events of Strange New Worlds and original Star Trek).

It’s an episode that has so little dramatic weight or depth in stark contrast to “Arena,” even without the shoehorned direct connection to it. But by willingly foisting that connection on itself, it invites the comparison itself, and can only come across as distinctly unfavorable next to a six-decade-old piece of television. There is no enhancement by having this episode be a prequel to “Arena,” beyond the fact that Strange New Worlds is increasingly obsessed, as it stares down the barrel of its own end, with the fact that it has to pave the way to the original Star Trek.

In doing so, it can only do its own characters and narratives a disservice. But considering the way much of this season has gone already, it was already doing that even without the prequel-itis.

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