Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Finale Title Pays Homage To An All-Time Classic Episode
by Witney Seibold · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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The final episode of the fourth season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is called "Tomorrow's Enterprise." The story surrounds the eerie temporal mechanics of a colossal negative space wedgie that allows Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) to communicate with herself one year in the future. Uhura learns that, in the future, her beloved boyfriend Scotty (Martin Quinn) has died in an accident, so the two Uhuras have to collaborate, across time, to save his life.
This plot is classic "Star Trek" stuff: temporal mechanics, time-drift doppelgangers, and a crisis solved by hard work and ingenuity. The episode is also an orgy of fan service, as it begins to butt up against the events of the original "Star Trek" series from 1966. "Strange New Worlds" is set just a few years before "Star Trek," and it has spent its entire runtime slowly getting key players into place. The flash-forward sequences of this episode see Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) finally in command of the USS Enterprise, while Uhura and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) finally begin wearing the hairdos and costumes that their counterparts wore back in the 1960s. "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is a reminder that we're almost there.
The title of the episode is also a fun callback to one of the most famous episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," "Yesterday's Enterprise." Trekkies will clock this right away. Of course, "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is about saving one life and enjoying the halcyon warmth of a crew that loves each other. The season ends with teary speeches, hugs, and enjoyable group dinners. "Yesterday's Enterprise," meanwhile, is a dark tale of war and sacrifice full of blood, injury, and death. It's still a time-travel story, but tonally, the episodes couldn't be more different.
Tomorrow's Enterprise is clearly a reference to Yesterday's Enterprise
Many Trekkies appreciate "Yesterday's Enterprise" because of the cleverness of its script. (It's one of the best "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episodes ever.) The episode begins when the Enterprise-D encounters a colossal negative space wedgie of its own, which proves to be a time portal to the past. Through the portal unexpectedly flies the Enterprise-C, traveling from 22 years in the past. When the Enterprise-C appears, however, the timeline shifts, and the Enterprise-D is very suddenly a military vessel embroiled in a war.
It turns out that the Enterprise-C, in flying through the portal, exited a key battle in Starfleet history. By suddenly vanishing, it allowed a war to continue, and the war kept on raging for decades. By the time we got to the events of "Next Generation," the Enterprise was always prepped for battle in a war with the Klingons — a war, it so happens, that they're losing. Worf (Michael Dorn) is missing from the new timeline, but the previously dead Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) is now still alive. It's one of the cleverest ways a TV show has resurrected a deceased character.
The plot of the episode involves the ethics of sending the Enterprise-C back through the portal and restoring the timeline to the way it was. The captain of the Enterprise-C, Rachel Garrett (Tricia O'Neill), certainly has a hard choice to make, as returning to the battle would most assuredly mean the deaths or kidnappings of her crew. Is she willing to sacrifice herself and her ship in order to end a war that never should have happened in the first place? Naturally, we in the audience want her to, as it would restore the "Star Trek" status quo. But, wow, that sure made some of us feel guilty. /Film has written a full history of Rachel Garrett, the first female captain on "Star Trek."
The stakes are lower on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Generally speaking, "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is a much lighter, frothier series than "Next Generation." Indeed, one might see the show as a whimsical comedy series that just happens to make use of "Star Trek" iconography. As such, even when there are life-or-death stakes on "Strange New Worlds," they rarely pivot on ethical conundra or war prevention and the sacrifices therein. In "Tomorrow's Enterprise," the main plot crux seems to be rescuing Scotty from oblivion. Not that Scotty's life is nothing, but his death means more to the characters personally than to the history of the galaxy at large.
Through it all, Uhura goes on a personal journey of discovery, finding that she needs to be more assertive in her life decisions, and more confident in general. Sometimes the powers of the galaxy conspire to make us better people. Never mind that the black and white hold physics might not be 100% accurate to real life. "Strange New Worlds" is one of the less scientifically rigorous "Star Trek" shows. This was the series, after all, where a transporter accident turned everyone into puppets.
The fifth and final season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" will air in 2027, and that season will bring us right up to the events of this episode, leading handily into the original "Star Trek," which will begin a year thereafter. There were rumors for a while that "SNW" would continue as "Star Trek: Year One," a series that would fill in that missing year, but that project seems to have stalled; we recently wrote about why "Star Trek: Year One isn't happening. Indeed, the future of "Star Trek" is something of a question mark at the moment. We'll report on more post-WarnerMount-merger "Trek" should news arise.