Minor spoilers follow for “Hegemony, Part II,” which is currently available on Paramount+.
As Star Trek: Strange New World’s third season finally arrives, it comes with a sense of both relief (“Can you believe it’s been almost two years since season 2 ended?”) and, well, frustration (“Man, I guess it’s been almost two years since season 2 ended!”). “Hegemony, Part II” is, after all, the follow-up to last season’s big cliffhanger finale, but geez, who can even remember what happened all the way back in August of 2023?
Of course, that’s not fair to the show, which had to wait for the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes to end before it could reveal how the USS Enterprise got out of its latest jam. And yet here we are, so a quick catch-up for those in need: The season 2 finale, “Hegemony,” ended with the crew facing those nasty lizard people the Gorn once again. Anson Mount’s Captain Pike just can’t catch a break: His girlfriend, Captain Batel (Melanie Scrofano), winds up infected by the lethal creatures, meaning that she’s facing an Alien-esque eruption of Baby Gorn if Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) can’t figure out a solution. Meanwhile, most of Pike’s command crew – and a bunch of colonists – were beamed up to the Gorn ships where, well, they’re gonna wind up on the dinner menu. Admiral April (Adrian Holmes) commands Pike to retreat, but what’s a captain to do when half the stars of his show will be doomed if he follows orders?
A spinning camera move thrusts us right back into the action in “Hegemony, Part II,” beginning in space as Gorn ships attack the Enterprise, and continuing inside on the bridge as Pike, exhausted and seemingly out of options, rotates in the frame as well.
The fancy technique from episode director Chris Fisher isn’t out of place for modern Star Trek, which can do in one space battle the type of things that Gene Roddenberry only dreamed of in an entire career of Trekkin’. But it’s also illustrative of Pike’s state of mind in this story. Mount and the episodes’ writers, Henry Alonso Myers and Davy Perez, give us a Pike who is seemingly at the breaking point – it’s very un-Captain Kirk of him (which is totally fine, by the way). Even driven to prayer at one point – which Roddenberry would certainly have raised a Spock-style eyebrow at, to say the least – Mount continues to bring a vulnerability to Pike that has proven to be one of the character’s strong suits as far back as his time on Star Trek: Discovery and his trippy realization there that he’s facing an inevitable and horrific future.
What is very Captain Kirk of Pike here is the loophole he exploits to get out of Admiral April’s order to retreat. “Oh, he didn’t say retreat immediately…?” And so, in the opening scene of “Hegemony, Part II,” Pike does two things that only the greatest of Starfleet’s captains do: He breaks the rules and he relies on his crew to make him look better. Calling for ideas on how to track the Gorn ships, it’s ops officer Mitchell (Rong Fu) of all people – she’s not even a series regular! – who comes up with the “tag them with a dud torpedo” idea. Officer thinking, Lieutenant.
Speaking of creative visuals, there’s always plenty of that stuff in this show, but another shot that caught my eye this week involved our shifting perspective of the bridge viewscreen. With the Gorn firing on the ship – at the viewscreen, basically, from our POV – the camera slowly moves from left to right, so from behind the con station to behind Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding). As it does so, the perspective of what’s happening onscreen changes and the viewscreen goes out of focus as the camera trains itself on the back of our communications officer instead. It’s just a cool moment, the kind of thing that’s easily missed but which surely took a ton of planning and design work.
Perhaps slightly less effective are the practical effects of the Gorn cocooning chamber, where our pals La’an (Christina Chong), Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Ortegas (Melissa Navia), and Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte) are stuck. It’s not that the set or the gunky pods that the crew are trapped in necessarily look bad, but they do ultimately feel like the modern-era equivalent of the old Planet Hell set from 1990s Trek. It just never feels real.
The team’s efforts to escape their situation and save the (mostly offscreen, conveniently cocooned) colonists is fine, if perhaps the dullest aspect of the episode. The actors are all game, and Chong’s character is positioned as if she’s dealing with the traumatic memories of her dealings with the Gorn from her youth, but there’s unfortunately no emotional payoff there beyond “let’s throw in some quick flashes of the past” here or there. It is fun to see La’an in charge of the landing party, however, and certainly her imperative to save every last colonist is rooted in what the Gorn have taken from her in the past.
The strongest material for any of the characters here belongs to Spock (Ethan Peck) and Chapel, whose developing romance has become a cornerstone of Strange New Worlds. As the pair work to save Captain Batel, teching the tech as it were, it’s the emotional throughline of their scenes that we’re most interested in. To see Chapel have to lay out for the scientific genius Mr. Spock that they are, in fact, broken up is both a) proof that Chapel is a superior human being of the 23rd century who understands that gentle and frank honesty is the best approach in such a situation, and b) one of the saddest moments of a half-human/half-Vulcan heart being broken ever committed to film. Peck and Bush win this episode, guys.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- Quote of the week: “We’ll just turn it off before we blow up.”
- Martin Quinn, who debuted in the Season 2 finale, is now a series regular as Montgomery Scott. But you know him as Scotty!
- So with Scotty in, how long until Carol Kane’s Pelia is out? I hope it takes a while, because Pelia schooling Scotty on how to give the captain what he wants is a hoot.
- I like Lt. Mitchell but I can’t help but wonder why she’s sitting in Gary Mitchell’s soon-to-be seat. I guess two different ops officers for the Enterprise can just be named Mitchell, eh?
- Ah, so new opening credits this season? Just like TNG did in season 3!
- It’s nice to get the occasional acknowledgment of Discovery’s Klingon war, as we do in this episode.
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