Pah-wraiths! Pah-wraiths! Pah-wraiths! Ahh, spoil sports. In his directorial debut, Andrew Coutts takes the helm, commanding the Strange New Worlds penultimate episode for season three. It isn’t Coutts first foray with Strange New Worlds or even Star Trek, though. He was previously the editor for such cinematic masterpieces as Saw VI, several episodes of Sleepy Hollow, 4 of Picard, 10 of Discovery, and the partridge (wa-hey) in the pear tree of 9 episodes of Strange New Worlds thus far. While Discovery writer Alan B McElroy returns from “What Is Starfleet?” for his second of three confirmed episodes.

She is Ortegas, and she flies the shuttle into the eye of a wormhole that pops up out of nowhere. With the crew horrified as they watch their friend get sucked off into another bit of space, they have a ticking clock as they are set to deliver a vaccine, but also need to find a way to save the pilot. Crash landing on a far-off moon, that’s apparently good enough to support a breathable atmosphere without a tree in sight, Erica needs to remember SERE: Survive, Evade, Resist, Extraction. Though she quickly forgets the rule of threes in survival.

After saying McElroy was the main reason for “What Is Starfleet?” being crap, I don’t want to be too mean with “Terrarium.” However, to say the paint is meeting the numbers in almost every single aspect doesn’t seem unfair despite being quite harsh. It is a paint-by-numbers episode, one late in the season following several story beats, and we’re talking about one character for most of it. I don’t think it is unfair to tread a little closer to the spoilers that we typically avoid.

That said, I’m left wondering what this season is about, what we’re building towards if this was the Ortegas episode, in a season where she’s been combating the trauma of the Gorn attack from “Hegemony, Part II.” It is a genuine question, but what else have we had building this season in particular? We had the Gorn attack with Erica needing the most help after it, Scotty finding confidence, Battel hanging around, Spock being a man-whore now with La’an, the sun rising, fish swimming, and nothing else really going on. Kirk is existing and pushing himself more into the focus?

I know because I sat and watched ahead for once, but part of me looked at the writing of the season and put the pieces together that we were supposed to get something big with Erica. I’m not saying it isn’t big in terms of emotional and wider implications, but I was expecting a bigger beat for her and something a bit more fulfilling towards the end of the season. At the very least, more than the lone character monologuing to themselves for the benefit of us viewers.

Sent into the heart of anomalous space, Erica is flying blindly into the gravitational pull of a wormhole that appears almost out of nowhere. I wonder where I’ve heard of something like that before. Spat out into the pull of a moon that is making an elliptical orbit surrounding a gas giant, those of us who killed enough Kerbals can tell you the perigee of that orbit is going to become a bit of a problem. By problem, I mean a lack of helmet, protective gear, and generally, “yeah, that’s going to kill me if I stick around for too long.” So that’s a ticking clock of shelter, food, and drinkable water, right?

Let’s be generous and say the ticking clock on the threes of survival starts ticking when she crash-lands on the moon. From there, Erica has three hours to find somewhere that’s breathable within three minutes, three hours to find shelter, three days to find water, and three weeks to find food, each assuming the prior condition was met. She crash lands in a shuttle on a moon where she doesn’t need a flight suit helmet when outside, so it is breathable, and it is a form of shelter. Very quickly, she finds a way to produce water, so she only needs food in the next three weeks.

Without a plan or an establishment of where she is and any further ideas for extraction, she goes out searching for food. I get it, it is drama, trying to highlight the danger she’s in and what happens next, but if we’re completely honest, a highly trained pilot, in what I’ve already established is a military with a significant science background, should know better. This is where, aside from his trite dialogue for all the monologuing that Erica does, I’m going to bemoan Alan B McElroy’s writing.

It is shown here and in “What Is Starfleet?” that Erica is practical, working on some bikes in her quarters during her off time. She’s also trained by Starfleet, let’s assume to be ok, reasonable, or decent at very basic survival. So why are we doing this? “Because we the viewers—” I’ll stop you there, there are better ways to do this sort of lone survivalist thing while also keeping viewers in the loop. However, it isn’t about Erica’s survival; it is about being that episode of sci-fi we’ve all seen before.

See The Orville’s “Mortality Paradox,” I think it is “Persistence of Vision” from Voyager, you could say elements of TNG’s “The Enemy,” and similar, either forced confinement or an ethereal being does magic to test the character episodes. Listen, if you think that’s a spoiler, might I introduce you to something a bit more along your media literacy level, Bear in the Big Blue House, Blue’s Clues, Barney and Friends, and Sesame Street? That was aggressive, but I’m right. You couldn’t find a more basic page 1 of How To Write Sci-fi episodes if you tried.

I don’t want to say nothing new is done, because something new is done. However, it is the unspoken problem we’ve been building to in general with Strange New Worlds. The Gorn throughout Strange New Worlds is played up as a great big monster to fear, and you can bemoan the fact that they are here before “Arena,” but that’s besides the point. The purpose of the Gorn to some degree is the idea of fear itself, fear of the unknown, fear of the “other,” fear of what you perceive to be a bigger, badder enemy, and ultimately to some degree that Cold War fear of the 60s.

So when Erica is trapped on this moon that apparently sustains life and a breathable atmosphere, only to realize she’s trapped on it with a lone Gorn and flashing lights in the distance, you practically see where the episode is going straight away. To return to the point, “Arena” was James T Kirk, the “hero” of the adventure, rejecting that fear of the men in rubber masks, the control of the Metrons, and saying that instead of fighting, we should be working together. “Terrarium” tries to do every bit of that without having something new to say this time.

Using Ortega’s fear and trauma, we see the two forced to work together. The Gorn itself kills a centipede-like alien, and now they have food, so they must collaborate to survive. See the flashy lights for reasons to work together in such a perilous situation. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t even have a problem with Uhura being the one most affected by Erica’s wormhole disappearance, and she tries to force a way to get her back. I think my main problem is that I’m left disappointed and saying, “Is that it? Is that all we get from moving this story forward?”

Eventually, Erica does use her training to make a basic translator. We get the idea that this Gorn isn’t too bothered to go back to the Hegemony because they’ll be killed, and we get a lot of empathy towards this creature we’ve been told to fear for two and a half seasons. My question is, to what purpose? We’re talking about 4-5 years at least before “Arena.” We’re watching characters that are going to be surprised by Gorn in the TOS’ era – though we can talk about different timelines, you’d expect it to broadly stay the same.

So what does the series and the episode want to actually say? If I’m honest, I don’t know. It was last time out that I pulled up the joint statement quote from showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, as well as executive producer Alex Kurtzman, “[We’re] deeply grateful to Paramount+ for the chance to complete our five-season mission, just as we envisioned it, alongside our extraordinary cast and crew.” So what is the vision? What is the five-season story thus far? Without saying Pike’s eventual radiation-based state, what can Strange New Worlds be distilled down to?

I’m not going to touch how the episode ends because that’s quite important to stay as raw as possible, but the general idea is that we move on to next week’s finale after Uhura was distraught over losing Erica, while Erica survives an encounter and friendship with a Gorn. Nearly three full seasons into that five-season mission, it has been about Alien-ifying the Gorn to fit with modern aesthetics, being USS Fan-Fic for every relationship aboard the Starship STD, and the occasional fun light episode that can make some of the darkness less horrible. What “Terrarium” sets up for is a retcon to allow for TOS or other bits of the canon, and I’m fine with that.

In fact, despite all that I’ve said, I don’t hate “Terrarium” as much as my complaining might suggest. Quite the opposite. Out of McElroy’s two episodes of SNW, this outing was leaps and bounds better. I think his dialogue, particularly for monologuing, could use a bit more work and sound less like generic comic book drivel. Aside from that, he does better than I was giving him credit for in “What Is Starfleet?” and his previous work in Discovery.

There is one complaint that I am going to hammer home like a tent peg, though, and that’s simply the fact that this strange new world is not very strange, doesn’t look very new, and doesn’t look all that interesting. A very dimly lit rocky outcrop that is generally inhospitable, yet is supposed to sustain life and have a breathable atmosphere while holding an elliptical orbit around a gas giant, that bothers me more than it should. It bothers me more than the easy comparisons I’ve made, and it bothers me more than the generic nature of 90% of the episode.

What I think needs to be said is that if “Terrarium” was in season 1 or 2 of Strange New Worlds, if it was alongside the best Star Trek episodes we’ve had since the 90s, it would be a “bang average” mid-season episode. However, it isn’t in the middle of a season and isn’t surrounded by all-time great episodes. We’re wrapping up season 3, a third season of polarizations. Much like people’s complaints about “Wedding Bell Blues” and “A Space Adventure Hour,” if this were in a longer season like we’d get with TNG, it wouldn’t be too bad, and in fact, it would be a solid outing that has flaws. Season 3 wasn’t very long, and it didn’t have those “banger” episodes where you can forgive something taking it easy for one week.

Ultimately, “Terrarium” does something that I don’t think anything else this season has done, and that’s make me care about something introduced this season alone. Strip away what is Strange New Worlds and you’ve got the DNA of several better episodes of sci-fi, often with better dialogue and refreshing ideas, but what it does in those 50-some minutes does just enough to make me enjoy it in the end. Not an episode to return to often on a regular rewatch, but good enough.

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SNW “Terrarium”

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Convinced me by the third act of this friendship.
• I'm ok with a bit of rejigging the cannon where needed.
• Pike knew what Uhura did.

Cons

• Vulcans can write better monologues.
• Should a Starfleet ship allow crew to edit data?