American ideals in an English RP accent from the mouth of an alien from Mars. It is like trying to talk to a Reform voter about actual policy. Or, I guess in this case, it is like trying to tell Henry Alonso Myers that you can write TV without making a horrible, pointless relationship the focus of it with a hard-on for Vulcans and sidelining the beautiful Rebecca Romijn. The episode is also written by Akiva Goldsman, with Alonso Myers and Alan B McElroy doing the story. Director of Eureka‘s later seasons and the regular Director and Producer of Strange New Worlds, Chris Fisher, also used his tumble dryer to film a couple of scenes.

It has been a long time since we spoke about Star Trek and even of Strange New Worlds; if we waited another 10 weeks, it would have been a year. A year since the death of the most nothing love interest this side of the Alpha Quadrant to Captain sexy hair. Pike is taking it well as he Westworld-style adventures across the galaxy, trying to avoid the radiation-based disability/death hurtling towards us. With the help of Admiral April offering a “promotion” away from the Enterprise, Pike and crew are sent on one more mission.

Observe a strange temporal stellar event that sucks you in (or off, depending on perspective) and spits you out (mostly the white stuff) into the not-so-unknown, strange, nor new world. In fact, it might just be closer to home than anyone might have suspected: The stellar display has a distress signal; once saving the buoy is a no-go, they retreat, only to be pulled back in and thrown into a star system known simply as Sol… 66 million years in the past. With Una and the girls (Erica and La’An) off on prehistoric Earth, while Pike has to talk to the space banjo-loving, cousin-“befriending” people, they find another big sexy woman.

Indeed, them things from Jura-sis-c-peh-rock. I’ve got a feeling this review is going to be a fun one to try and not swear in, as we’re thrown into the emotions of Pike’s loss of the woman whose name I’ve genuinely forgotten because she was that boring. I almost want to call her Marie, but that might be from a Breaking Bad rewatch, not that it matters because the point of her death is to this episode what a fart is to the wind. Yet some lines are still meaningless.

Moaning aside, let’s talk about it. Pike is distracting himself from both Betsy’s space-death and his impending one by going on all the away missions, this time with horses – he’s like these people who enjoy Rule34 of My Little Pony. Only to be brought back to Earth (literally) by Una and Admiral April, the former noting she should go on some away missions and the latter telling Pike that he needs to grow up and move on. Obviously both are getting addressed with the adventure this week, but that’s part of its problem; it is an adventure of the week.

Aside from the odd line or interesting idea that snuck by and was rushed to production (writer’s strike), a large portion of the vocal fans bemoaned season 3’s whimsy. Something that isn’t “corrected” here in “Valles Marineris;” a title that for language and space nerds (me) is somewhat spoiler-y. In fact, some of that whimsy would sadly fit in well with season 2 of Picard or worse, Beyond with surfing a space-wave to the tune of Beastie Boys. I’m getting angry again; deep breaths, then we can talk about punching dinosaurs in the face.

So with the help of giant anomaly-based ship-porn, the crew are flung those millions of years back into a time when Earth wasn’t called Earth and Mars wasn’t called Mars. Why? There were no people, and despite Texas believing that God made the shotgun to kill the dinosaurs, there weren’t uncle-brothers or White people. Just a whole lot of plant life and some lizards that were overgrown for the effects of film and TV.

Thinly veiled moaning aside, the premise of being flung so far back in time and there being some sort of danger isn’t terrible. Sadly, the story is by Henry Alonso Myers and the guy who co-wrote the documentary episode “What is Starfleet?” Split into two groups for the A and B stories, we have Pike and the crew (Spock, Uhura, and Scotty) on the ship trying to repair and solve problems on the Enterprise, while Una takes Erica and La’An to a strange planet where there is an angry sound coming from the trees. Thus far, not a completely terrible idea.

Give it a second; it will still disappoint you. Turns out Pike and the crew aren’t alone to fix the problems; there is a mysterious ship with a tractor beam pulling them in. The ship eventually communicates after Pike’s attempts to make peace. It is a scavenger ship manned by the teenagers from Mars that Glenn Danzig sang about, an immovable and self-righteous group claiming there is only one way about everything. See the opening line for my comparison. They are only convinced to “board” the Enterprise when told that there are weapons of immense power – told you, American ideals.

As it turns out, the angry sound on the odd planet full of life is Earth and the dinosaurs, who could have guessed? I’m not saying something being predictable is inherently bad; what I think is bad is probably all the first draft lines that made it to filming. Mostly the lines for, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, the women: “Hey, dinosaur! You there.” I’m not an expert, believe it or not, but I don’t think a dinosaur knows that it is a dinosaur; they aren’t the type of creatures I imagine sitting around in a smoking jacket, puffing on a pipe, and questioning what life is.

Yes, and again, believe it or not, I do understand we’re going for the tone of men in rubber suits level of Star Trek. The trouble is, we’re no longer in the 60s despite some people’s best efforts to demonize Black folks; what I think most Star Trek fans want is character pieces that reflect the problems of today in a fantastical space drama with adults. I know, a mad concept, but I think it might just work.

There are even attempts towards it with the Pike storyline with Saffron Burrows’ Commander Cassel, the no-nonsense Martian woman who eats frosted fierce flakes for breakfast, apparently. Mad notion I know, but if you can’t exactly write a woman in a TV show, maybe hire a couple of women to do it for you. However, that’s putting the problems here lightly. Cassel is about as complex a character as James T. Kirk is a straight-laced family man in the original series. He was a sex pest, and we all know it!

Moreover, the premise of very humanoid “aliens” who are very advanced for a time period before humanity crawled out of the ocean isn’t a particularly refreshing idea. Especially for the end result of the episode. The Martians (who aren’t green or small), and Cassel as their only emissary, are in an interplanetary war with bug-like creatures that they have difficulty communicating with. Thus, they want to scavenge weapons. A pretty basic idea, but one that works for space philosophy diluted by a bad writer.

We’re 1250+ words into a review about Star Trek; I think spoilers are fair game at this point. It is nothing. The alien species that the Martians are fighting are there, but the relevance to our crew, the points of which could be made in a “fantastical space drama with adults,” isn’t capitalized on. It is just an alien bug species we see an image of on a screen. We see what is said to be their destructive power; we are told of their destructive power, but we don’t see it firsthand. I believe the old adage is show, don’t tell. Or here it is: Tell poorly and don’t show.

I’m not saying it needed to be the Gorn, but it would have provided us with character relevance. More so because of what we saw last season with Alan B McElroy’s other episode, “Terrarium.” Yes, I know that, much like “Mortality Paradox” from The Orville, that’s kind of a closed-loop alien fantasy implanted in the person’s head, but it would have been relevant to the characters. We would have also seen the damage that these aliens could do through action rather than throwing up an image of the dark side of Mars with a big burn mark.

Indeed, that would have been a bit of relevance too since Una, Spock, and Pike were part of that whole The Burn thing from Discovery. However, here we are. The angry woman is angry and ready to nuke Japan because internment camps weren’t enough damage on the population, so she listens to Pike babble on about talking to this strange species, ignores him, and steals the only bit of the ship Scotty and Pelia were actually working on.

Starfleet values being spoken to by someone who is warmongering is part of the series, and that is certainly there, but the relevance feels lost somewhere, be it in translation, in the writer’s ability, or whatever. I don’t want to come out and say “the writers don’t respect the fans,” because that’s a slip and slide into a corner of certain reviewers. No, I think the problem is that there isn’t that trust, and admittedly that trust has to somewhat go both ways. The creative team has to trust the fans to understand storytelling, and the fans need to somewhat understand there would be a point.

The trouble with that is that we’re four seasons in, we’ve seen some truly awful bits of Star Trek under this creative team, and the writing itself doesn’t feel like it is trusting you as a viewer to understand what just happened. Season 3 played with the idea that the future, Pike’s future, isn’t set in stone. Ok, but why bother with a show that is about the journey leading up to that and why he’s heralded as great? Besides the point, but more or less this is what “Valles Marineris” tries to reinstall.

As you might guess, it is a bootstrap paradox in which the crew of the Enterprise is flung back 66 million years, to talk to the Martians who are having an interplanetary war, which results in the Martians blowing up the 5th planet in the Sol solar system. Not Jupiter. One of the “jump the shark” moments is easily the fact that Pike could have stopped the mad Martian woman but doesn’t because he knows there isn’t a 5th planet before Jupiter. Not only that, but part of the planet’s debris lands and creates the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula, with the rest creating the asteroid belt.

If you’re thinking “you didn’t have to explain all that,” yeah, tell Alonso Myers that. There is no trust that the audience will understand the large bit of rock heading towards what is already established as Earth 66 million years ago is that rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Those things from Jura-sis-c-peh-rock, and speaking of Jura-sis-c-peh-rock: La’an punches a Hypsilophodon in the head. What more can I say to instill that sense of dread for season 4?

Listen, I get it, the episode is supposed to be the fun one, the one where you are supposed to think “it was fun; inconsequential, but still fun.” However, it is the premiere of the new season. Episodes 4 through 6 are fine to do some fun stuff, like episode 5 with the puppets in “Level-Five Transporter Accident,” but the first episode that is supposed to set up the season arc? No. That’s the problem on top of the first draft lines.

Not everything was terrible. There are bits that I’ve complained about that weren’t completely bad. Saffron Burrows’ performance is one of the standouts, really elevating some of those more so-so lines she’s given, and I do love that we’re actually getting questions of what Starfleet is, particularly from a different culture. That’s like a sparkle in the dirt, so to speak. It gave me a little bit of hope that we’d get something worthwhile, then we got a straight bootstrap time travel problem that canonized that the Enterprise killed the dinosaurs.

I also got a slight spoiler for something I’ve mentioned my hatred for, but not spoken about directly here. Uhura now is the “work-bestie” of (in an offensive way) an extremely autistic Vulcan who hates when anyone tries to share in culture, particularly hers. I get that I also moan about actors’ accents and phrases – Erica, wrap up that mocking before I rig an ejector seat at your console – but in many cases it is not about sharing in culture but rather just a purposefully poor imitation. The spoiler that I got is that this Vulcan played by Bianca Nugara (Maria in Heated Rivalry) doesn’t return until episode 4.

That right there is a great example of the problem with “Valles Marineris;” it is somehow flabby, underproduced, poorly constructed, and of no consequence to the grand scheme of the series as far as we know. Maybe Nugara’s character is important, but she does nothing here aside from making Uhura feel like crap. The dialog doesn’t leap off the page. The action doesn’t feel important because none of it is really shown, unless you count a CGI dinosaur and a planet blowing up 3 minutes after being first shown.

Ultimately, “Valles Marineris” is a terrible premiere in what is the penultimate season of a show that is ostensibly about drama. As I’ve said, moved a little inwards to the middle of the season, there are fewer complaints. A little bit more time on the dialog so we don’t have one of our leading actors shouting “Hey, dinosaur!” at a CGI blob, maybe just a little bit more time overall, would have solved its problems in some places.

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Strange New Worlds "Valles Marineris"

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Saffron Burrows’ Commander Cassel.
• The Pike and Cassel storyline had something going, but was underserved.

Cons

• The Enterprise is directly responsible for killing the dinosaurs.
• Punching a dinosaur... why?
• Such terrible lines given to a character already treated poorly.
• You spin me right round, baby right round.
• Bianca Nugara's pointlessly introduced Vulcan.