Strange New Worlds Season 4 Finale Does Time Travel Like No Star Trek Story Before
by Devin Meenan · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
Google Discover
This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4, Episode 10: "Tomorrow's Enterprise."
Trying to count all the "Star Trek" episodes and movies that feature time travel is more trouble than it's worth. /Film has ranked the very best time travel episodes of "Star Trek," though, if you're looking for a smaller curation.
In one of the first-ever "Star Trek" episodes, "The Naked Time," a rejiggering of the Enterprise warp engines sends the vessel back in time by 71 hours. Later stories saw Starfleet crews traveling much further temporal distances. "Star Trek" has also abided by many different rules for time travel and its consequences.
Some episodes feature "Bootstrap paradoxes," or causal loops that suggest time can't be changed; rather, what happens is what always happened due to the time travel. Take "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where Scotty (James Doohan) introduces a formula to create transparent aluminum to Earth in the '80s, meaning the formula always came from him, etc.
Sometimes, errors in the timeline have to be corrected. In the "Deep Space Nine" episode "Past Tense," when the crew travels back to 2024 San Francisco, civil rights activist Gabriel Bell (John Lendale Bennett) is killed. Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) has to take Bell's place to ensure history proceeds as it once did. And sometimes, time travel and messing up the past creates a whole new reality with a splintered timeline, as seen in "Star Trek" (2009).
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 finale "Tomorrow's Enterprise" somehow finds a new spin on "Trek" time travel. The Enterprise and the Enterprise one year in the future sit at opposite ends of a white and black hole, and the two Uhuras (Celia Rose Gooding) communicate and even swap places.
Tomorrow's Enterprise is some of Star Trek's most abstract time travel
The title "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is an obvious riff on "Yesterday's Enterprise," a famous time travel episode from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" Season 3. The Enterprise-C, which history says was destroyed by the Romulans in defense of a Klingon colony, appears out of a temporal anomaly. When it does, the present day changes around it; Starfleet is fighting a (losing) war with the Klingon Empire. The Enterprise-C's sacrifice is what turned the two superpowers' relationship from barely neutral into a genuine alliance. The crew of the Enterprise-C thus travel back in time so their sacrifice goes down in history. The implication is that the Enterprise-C's brief visit to the future, and subsequent return, is what always had happened in a closed loop.
"Tomorrow's Enterprise" is not so brazen. The episode cuts back and forth between the two Enterprises, with only Uhura acting as a true bridge. While in proximity to the white/black hole, the timeline is apparently mutable in real time. For instance, future-Uhura's timeline shifts when everyone claims that Scotty (Martin Quinn) died a year ago. Preventing Scotty's death becomes the two Uhuras' goal, and they make the most of their unique situation. For instance, Uhura in the past asks Spock (Ethan Peck) to complete a project for her. Uhura in the future is then able to go to Spock and ask for the completed result.
The episode's structure most reminded me of the romance body-swap anime "Your Name," where a teenage boy and girl switch bodies back and forth. The boy discovers the girl is living three years in the past and, through their connection, alters the timeline to prevent a catastrophe. The dual Uhuras do much the same thing.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+.