> Spoiler Warning: This review covers the season premiere immediately after watching and features a running commentary style. Major plot points, twists, and spoilers for “Valles Marineris” are discussed below. Read at your own risk!
It feels like it’s been forever, but what is—in my opinion—the very best show of the “Kurtzman era” of the Star Trek franchise is back with its season premiere.
Judging from the preview, this was billed as “the cowboy episode,” taking us to Valles Marineris. For those who don’t know, Valles Marineris is a real place on Mars—the largest canyon in the solar system. At 2,500 miles wide, it is roughly the same width as the continental United States.
Early on in the creation process of TOS, Spock was actually supposed to be a Martian with red skin and his signature pointy ears, before NBC pushed back, calling the character “too Satanic.” While I knew they wouldn’t go all-in on that old concept here, it was a really cool nod to introduce red-skinned characters as Martians.
Episode Breakdown
Cowboy motifs, Mars, dinosaurs, and time travel? I knew the showrunners loved to put the “strange” in Strange New Worlds, but that sounded like an awful lot to cram into a single 60-minute episode, even for this series.
The Setup: The episode opens with Pike on an away mission riding a horse—delivering on the cowboy bit. Pike’s affinity for horses goes all the way back to the very first TOS pilot, “The Cage,” so it’s a great, consistent character beat. Number One informs Pike that the crew has been out on continuous missions for six months straight, clearly trying to avoid processing Captain Batel’s passing at the end of last season. Admiral April also checks in to let Pike know he’s being considered for a promotion to admiral, inching us closer to the TOS era.
Classic TOS Lore & Continuity: Ortega mentions that Scotty is adding more ambient beeping to the enterprise’s background noise, and we get a new Vulcan Academy cadet coming on board to work with Ortega—a full-blooded Vulcan portrayed as a delightfully pretentious piece of work. Pelia is back, though some of her dialogue (“in a phone box once”) leans a bit heavily into cartoonish territory.
The Time Jump: After dismissing a warning about “exceeding normal parameters” as one of Scotty’s excessive alerts, the ship gets caught in what looks like a space whirlpool. Pike deploys a subspace buoy, and before they know it, they’ve been thrown 65 million years into the past—smack dab into a primordial Earth with three Class M worlds in the solar system.
First Contact with Mars: The Enterprise gets pulled into a tractor beam by an alien ship fighting a species called the Dold’rm. We soon discover these aliens are actually from Mars! When they beam over, they have pointed ears—a direct, clever callback to early Spock concepts. Captain Cassell of the Martian ship is fiercely protective of her people and initially views the Enterprise with suspicion. When her translators pick up that Pike is a widower (referencing Batel), she notes that captains in her society aren’t allowed relationships. Pike responds with, “Isn’t love what we fight for?”—essentially explaining the core philosophy of Starfleet to an outsider.
Jurassic Star Trek: Down on the planet, the away team (Number One, Ortega, La’an, and M’Benga) realizes the iridium they need for their warp engines is inside a crashed alien ship. Standing in their way? A full-blown T-Rex and a flock of pterodactyls. It’s essentially Jurassic Park meets Star Trek, complete with La’an punching a dinosaur bare-handed when her genetically enhanced strength unexpectedly kicks in (prompting a great joke from M’Benga: “Are you going to try to take over the galaxy now?”).
The Catalyst: Cassell discovers on the Enterprise computers that Mars’s future is a barren red wasteland. Desperate to save her people, she steals an antimatter fuel cell and sets a course to destroy the Dold’rm homeworld, a fifth planet in the solar system. Pike faces a crushing moral dilemma: if he stops her, history changes; if he lets her fire, a planet dies. Ultimately, Pike chooses not to fire, allowing the Dold’rm homeworld to be destroyed.
The Butterfly Effect: In the 23rd century debrief, Spock concludes that a fragment from the destroyed Dold’rm planet became the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth. Furthermore, the destruction of the planet shifted Mars’s rotation, moving it further from the sun and turning it into the barren wasteland we know today. In short: the Enterprise’s intervention accidentally created the solar system’s history. Meanwhile, M’Benga notes that Martian DNA is scattered all across the galaxy, meaning some survivors escaped.
My Take
This was a great episode, albeit an incredibly ambitious one. It easily could have served as a two-hour feature film. Multiple long-explored concepts in the franchise were introduced—life on Mars, the origins of life on Earth, and the deep roots of our solar system—all wrapped up in less than 60 minutes.
When you think about the real-world scientific theories—like Mars having life millions of years ago, a mysterious fifth planet whose destruction formed our asteroid belt, and the Chicxulub asteroid killing the dinosaurs—Star Trek has always loved writing its own “history of the universe” by rooting itself in real science while filling in the gaps.
Admittedly, if I didn’t love this show so much, I’d say it was way too much to cram into one hour. Even as a massive fan, it is a lot to absorb. Word is that Kurtzman and the team were trying to “load the barrel” as much as possible to wrap up big storylines before the Skydance merger became a reality, which explains why the episode feels so overwhelmingly weighty. The moral implications of letting an entire civilization die for the sake of the timeline could have used a lot more room to breathe, but they did as good of a job as humanly possible with a tight 60-minute runtime.
Pike’s Burden: Pike is left wrestling with the weight of time yet again, having seen both past and future. It’s becoming clearer why he will eventually be ready to step away and take a desk job in Starfleet.
Rank & File: It was great to see Number One officially promoted to commander, bringing her one step closer to her own captain’s chair, alongside some nice lighthearted friction between Scotty and Ortega.
The Road Ahead: I suspect La’an’s enhanced reflexes and strength are going to be a major narrative thread this season. Will her augmented DNA push her toward her ancestor Khan’s shadow, or will she forge her own path?
P.S. — If you missed my early morning thoughts on life’s ultimate investments and how it all came full circle with Kid 1, you can catch up on today’s first post right here.
Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.
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