Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Finale Gives The Silliest Redshirt Death New Meaning
by Devin Meenan · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4, Episode 10, "Tomorrow's Enterprise."
The "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 finale, "Tomorrow's Enterprise," closes out a rocky season with a "Trek" staple: a time travel story. However, "Tomorrow's Enterprise" mixes up the typical "Star Trek" time travel storytelling. Its premise is that the Enterprise is observing a "white hole," a real cosmic phenomenon sometimes hypothesized to be the opposite of a black hole.
In the "Star Trek" universe, this science is correct. The Enterprise, one year in the future, is observing the black hole on the other side, intermingling the two versions of the ship. Incidentally, the future timeline is early into Captain Kirk's (Paul Wesley) tenure as the Enterprise's captain, giving us a taste of that "Star Trek: Year One" spin-off that's never happening. When the future Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Scotty (Martin Quinn) go to investigate the black hole, they're caught in a blinding light.
Uhura wakes up back on the Enterprise, where she's told that Scotty has been dead for a year. To set the timeline right, the two Uhuras communicate through the white/black holes. We only see Scotty's death at the very end of the episode: While sitting at a station on the Enterprise bridge, a console explodes in his face, killing him instantly.
For experienced Trekkies, this might read a little comical, because exploding consoles are one of the go-to Redshirt deaths in the "Star Trek" franchise. Scotty's shirt may be red, but he's important enough to resurrect, which is what advanced aliens living inside the white/black hole do as a favor to the Uhuras. (If you think getting help from higher beings living inside a wormhole is a deus ex machina, take it up with Ben Sisko.)
Star Trek loves exploding bridge consoles
In "Star Trek: The Original Series," security officers aboard the Enterprise wore red shirts. These officers were the ones most likely to be treated as cannon fodder by the show. Hence, "Redshirt" has become pop culture slang for expendable background characters, and the term "Red Shirt" is officially catalogued on the cliche lexicon TV Tropes. You know what else is? "Explosive Instrumentation," referring to electronics exploding for dramatic effect. The bridge consoles that repeatedly explode on Starfleet vessels absolutely qualify.
It's understandable why "sparking/exploding computer consoles" became a go-to norm of "Star Trek" space battles. It's an easy way to show a ship is being damaged and characters are in danger, even if the exploding consoles never lethally injure any of the main characters. But if you watch enough "Star Trek" media, it starts to nag at you: Why doesn't Starfleet start using less combustible building materials for its ships?
In fact, Scotty getting an exploding console to the face may be a nesting doll homage. The title "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is a riff on the classic "Next Generation" episode "Yesterday's Enterprise." In that episode, when the Enterprise-D of an alternate future faces a hopeless battle with some Klingon ships, Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) is killed when a console explodes in his face. Riker's gruesome, unceremonious death is meant to underline the bleakness of this alternate future and show the urgency at which it must be erased. As happens with Scotty in this episode, Riker's death is indeed rewritten out of history. The numerous redshirts who've been charred by exploding consoles, though, have never been so lucky.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+.