Whether it’s reimagining classic episodes of the Original Series or hanging out on dangerously faulty holodecks, “Strange New Worlds” has never been afraid to boldly go where someone has gone before. Continuing that long-running tradition, everything about this week’s episode “Terrarium” feels like a throwback to previous “Treks”. Even so, this derivative final frontier “Robinson Crusoe” is one of the most compelling instalments of the season.
It was a long-running joke that ace pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) never got to leave the driving seat of the Enterprise. Since her dreams of away missions were belatedly realized in the season 2 finale “Hegemony, Part One“, however, it’s been a case of “be careful what you wish for”. That close encounter with the Gorn nearly killed her, and now — just as she seems to be recovering from the physical and mental scars from her ill-fated mission to Parnassus Beta — she’s piloting retrofitted shuttlecraft Archimedes into an area of extreme gravimetric volatility. What could possibly go wrong?
Being dragged into a wormhole is just the start of a very, very bad day for Ortegas. First, she crash-lands on a rather inhospitable moon, whose eccentric orbit passes through the atmosphere of a nearby gas giant. To make matters worse, she’s lost contact with the Enterprise, which has an urgent appointment with the USS Constellation to deliver essential vaccines to 4,000 colonists on Epsilon Indi 3.
And, as if this nightmare scenario wasn’t nightmarish enough, she’s not alone on this lunar hellscape: the moon’s very hungry indigenous invertebrate life would be very happy to turn her into a snack, while some mysterious lights in the sky appear to be following her around.
Then there’s the small matter of the other crash survivor on the surface being an injured Gorn. All in all, it’s fair to say that the only small blessing is that, this being “Star Trek”, the air is “breathable-ish”. All hail the gods of M-Class (or thereabouts) worlds!
It’s no exaggeration to say that nothing about this episode is original. Whether it’s James T Kirk fighting a Gorn to the death in “Arena” or Jean-Luc Picard completing a total immersion Duolingo course in “Darmok”, finding yourself marooned on a strange new world has long been an occupational hazard if you enlist in Starfleet.
In the most blatant future echo of Ortegas’s unlikely friendship with a Gorn, Geordi La Forge was forced to work with a mortal enemy (in this case, a Romulan) to survive “The Enemy”. Meanwhile, Captain Pike’s dilemma — how far do you go to rescue a lost crewmember? — was previously explored in another franchise, as Commander Adama pulled out all the stops to find Starbuck in “Battlestar Galactica” episode “You Can’t Go Home Again”.
But despite the excessive lashings of déjà vu, these are storytelling clichés that work. As an interstellar castaway, the funny, talkative, and resourceful Ortegas is engaging company, while the Gorn is a significantly more responsive (and, let’s be honest, helpful) companion than Tom Hanks’ famous volleyball chum, Wilson.
The evolution of their relationship from inevitable mistrust to mutual dependency — the Gorn needs company, Ortegas needs protection from the elements — to genuine friendship is beautifully played, both by Navia and some impressively emotive Gorn prosthetics. “Just a couple of girls at a slumber party,” Ortegas jokes when she realizes her fellow strandee is also female.
Over the course of their exile, they teach other chess (and its Gorn equivalent), establish a rudimentary communication system, and eventually unleash a moon-wide explosion to attract the Enterprise’s attention. This is an old-school two-hander in which one of the protagonists just happens to be a giant lizard with very sharp and pointy teeth.
Indeed, had this story been told 30 years ago, it would have been your quintessential bottle episode. Of course, it’s debatable whether such things still exist in an era when TV sci-fi leans wholeheartedly towards cinematic scale. But — ignoring a sequence where the Enterprise jams itself into a wormhole — “Terrarium” has several unmistakable bottle hallmarks, such as its pared-back cast and the decision to confine most of the ship-based action to the bridge.
This is an episode that prioritizes solid writing and a brilliant lead performance over pyrotechnics, a story powerful enough to leave you mourning the Gorn when a rescue party led by La’An mows her down in a barrage of phaser fire. These are feelings you’d never have anticipated when the Archimedes first crash-landed.
Indeed, everything about this episode is great until “Strange New Worlds”‘ reveals a familiar Achilles heel, and the opportunity to prequelize an episode from the Original Series proves impossible to resist.
That the Enterprise is due to rendezvous with Captain Decker and the USS Constellation (as seen in classic episode “The Doomsday Machine”) is fair enough, seeing as they’re both leading lights in the Federation fleet. But when those snooping flashing lights reveal themselves as Metrons — y’know, the condescending aliens with a superiority complex from the aforementioned “Arena” — it devalues the previous hour of storytelling.
Yes, the “Terrarium” episode title hints at some kind of “Twilight Zone”-style interstellar zoo, but it feels like an unnecessary twist that Kirk’s legendary skirmish with the Gorn was simply the second instalment of the snooty Metrons’ experiment to work out whether two “barbaric species” are ready to join their exclusive club. Even if humanity never rises to meet their exacting standards, it doesn’t feel like we’d be missing much.
The “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 3 finale debuts on Paramount+ on Thursday, September 11.