Warp Factor Trek

In this season premiere, time travel shenanigans force Captain Pike’s crew to make some hard choices concerning history. Will interacting with the past destroy the future?

Log Entry

Pike is horse-riding through an alien desert, along with La’an and M’Benga. They beam aboard the Enterprise, where Spock and La’an flirt, which Scotty notices.

Admiral April notifies Pike about a potential promotion to commodore. Pike has until after his next mission to consider this.

Ortegas, chatting with Uhura, reveals conflict with Scotty. Uhura must mentor a new Vulcan cadet, who turns out to be standoffish.

A briefing is held to discuss the next mission – observing an interstellar squall. Upon arriving there, the crew is generally in awe of the storm, aside from the cadet, who is typically Vulcan about it. The ship becomes caught in the interstellar cyclone.

Stranded, the Enterprise requires iridium to refuel. A landing party including Una, La’an and Ortegas heads to a nearby planet to extract some but will need to overcome a creature-infested jungle to reach the iridium. Meanwhile, the Enterprise is captured by an alien spacecraft.

The vessel is commanded by Cassell, whose people are at war with a neighboring insectoid species – the Dol’drm. Despite Spock citing the Prime Directive, Pike invites the commander aboard. Spock discovers the Enterprise has been sent sixty-five million years to the Cretaceous, where Mars is inhabited and dinosaurs roam the Earth.

Avoiding changes to the future is imperative, both for the team on prehistoric Earth and aboard the Enterprise. Cassell arrives there, while the landing party stuns a T-Rex.

Pike tries to sell a skeptical Cassell on Starfleet ideals. She identifies him as a “widower” in her language. Pike tries to convince Cassell to resolve the war peacefully. She steals the ship’s antimatter fuel cell, having discovered both the time travel and that Mars is uninhabited in Pike’s time. Planning to detonate the fuel cell and destroy the Dol’drm planet, Cassell leaves aboard her spacecraft.

On Earth, the landing party tracks the iridium to a crashed Dol’drm colony ship. The team grabs the iridium, La’an punches a small dinosaur, and the group retreats to the Enterprise. Because the punch broke La’an’s hand without causing her pain, she worries something is happening with her Augment genes.

The Enterprise crew members realize Cassell’s ship is approaching a planet which doesn’t exist in their time. Cassell’s vessel deploys the stolen fuel cell.

The Enterprise can stop the attack, but Pike resists. Realizing the future is at stake, he lets Cassell obliterate the Dol’drm planet. The Enterprise rides the energy of the explosion back to the future.

A fragment from the Dol’drm planet continues onto Earth. Spock reports, mid-briefing, that it was the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs. Due to the Dol’drm planet’s destruction, Mars changed its orbit and became uninhabitable. The crew realize this wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff was always supposed to happen.

As M’Benga informs Pike, Martian DNA is scattered throughout the galaxy, meaning at least some of Cassell’s people survived. M’Benga counsels Pike on his decision, encouraging him to accept it.

Speaking with April, Pike refuses the promotion. However, he does request one for Una – to commander.

Status Report

This morally complex episode provides a good mix of action, adventure, and comedy, besides ancient life and ancient civilizations. The time travel element adds heavy but ambiguous ethical questions about how far a Starfleet officer should go to preserve the timeline.

During the briefing scene, Pelia – whose personality is reminiscent of a character like River Song – teases a Doctor Who reference like one she mentions in the Season 3 finale, “New Life and New Civilizations”. There are also flourishes of Jurassic Park here, with a roaring and rampaging T-Rex stomping about.

The zany fun with the dinosaurs contrasts well with the more serious aspects of the episode, but it’s also a bit underdeveloped. There’s not much time to explore the prehistoric environment, appreciate the dinosaurs, or learn much about the aliens that crashed there. It also reduces time for the main storyline, although that’s not to say it isn’t fun to watch. While the rendering of prehistoric Earth could feel a bit more immersive, the CGI dinosaurs are fine. The one La’an punches looks great, showcased in a laugh-out-loud moment which makes the entire sequence worth it.

The new alien costuming and designs are another highlight, and the brief glimpse of the insectoids is a nice change from the typical humanoids. Elsewhere, the rivalry between Scotty and Ortegas is incredibly funny and gives their characters a welcome opportunity for more screentime and one-liners.

However, the meat of the episode unfolds between Pike and Commander Cassell. The Martian leader makes a significant impact in a short duration, as a complex and nuanced character shaped by war. It’s easy to empathize with her while also abhorring what she does, a reminder that extreme violence often has unpredictable results.

This episode should have been a heavy-hitter, but it all feels too easy and the ending falls a little flat. A terrible thing is when Pike defies his and the Federation’s nature to ensure its future by doing nothing. It’s a brutal lesson in temporal mechanics, because the Enterprise functionally supplies the weapon by failing to recover it and is complicit in both a planet’s destruction and the resulting consequences. The bomb also raises some questions about the strength of an antimatter explosion and how dangerous warp technology is if it has planet-destroying capability. Although Cassell obliterating the planet feels inevitable and there is some brief debate among the Enterprise crew, this is the most questionable thing Pike does in the series so far. The episode barely tackles it. Janeway makes a similarly contentious decision in Voyager’s controversial “Tuvix”, but its given much more weight and people are still discussing it decades later.

In general, this is a good episode which falls just shy of being great. It makes for a solid start to a strange new season.