“Valles Marineris”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds begins its fourth season with a trip to the past, dinosaurs and unexpected revelations.

Time travel in Star Trek has never been consistent. Sometimes history can be altered, sometimes it can’t, and sometimes it branches into an entirely new universe with lens flares everywhere you look. Strange New Worlds has used most of these approaches. The series began with Pike wrestling with the inevitability of his own future, a thread that shaped the season 1 finale. A later story tied time travel to the Federation’s very existence, and last season ended with Batel accepting her own fixed place in the timeline. Across these examples, the show has treated time travel as a way to explore inevitability and the discomfort of events that either can’t or shouldn’t be changed.

This idea of inevitability becomes the foundation of the episode. The Enterprise is thrown 65 million years into the past and arrives in a solar system that is familiar but not recognisable. Mars is home to a spacefaring civilisation, and an additional planet orbits the sun, although the crew only discovers that much later. At first the situation resembles a standard time travel story. The crew worry that even the smallest action could damage the timeline, while Pike assumes they are far enough back that their presence can’t meaningfully alter the future. As long as their technology remains contained, he believes events will unfold as they should.

The main obstacle to Pike’s assumption is Commander Cassell (Saffron Burrows), a Martian warrior shaped by a lifetime of conflict and eager to seize whatever weapons the Enterprise can offer. With her tactical advantage, Pike has little choice but to pursue a diplomatic solution. He brings her aboard in an attempt to defuse the situation and uses the opportunity to demonstrate what cooperation has achieved for the Federation. The episode is at its strongest when it leans into these cultural contrasts. Cassell is startled by the size and emptiness of sickbay, a space designed for major casualties but rarely used. For someone raised in constant war, the idea that a medical facility could sit mostly idle is almost unthinkable. It becomes a tangible example of a society built on collaboration rather than conquest, and it’s one of the key moments that makes her willing to listen to Pike.

They also discuss the diversity in sickbay. Cassell’s blunt statement, “Alien to me means evil”, is shocking but entirely consistent with her upbringing. She has been raised to see anything unfamiliar as a threat, and although she is willing to consider alternatives, unpicking that level of institutional hatred is difficult. Pike tries to offer a different perspective through the simple carrot‑and‑stick analogy. Cassell has never encountered the idea of a reward for cooperation, so Pike explains that the Federation encourages unity through mutual benefit rather than coercion. The concept is basic, but it lands, and Cassell shows a genuine willingness to think about what she hears even as she remains focused on acquiring weapons.

These cultural differences continue on the bridge. Her perception of the science station is something that can be used to assess the weaknesses of opponents instead of it’s actual purpose of learning for the sake of gaining knowledge and understanding. She sees everything as either a weapon or an accessory to a weapon which makes sense given her stated background. The contrast between Cassell and Pike is compelling because they are both so steadfast in their beliefs. Saffron Burrows imbues Cassell with authority and has a presence that matches Anson Mount so they’re dynamic when they share screentime is that of equals on different sides of an issue. The material as written is already strong but Saffron Burrows elevates it with her performance and Anson Mount excellently portrays Pike in a weaker position but still holding onto what he stands for and hoping that he can get through to the person threatening to take all of the weapons on his ship.

Another interesting development is that Cassell is not devoid of empathy. A lifetime of war has not stripped her of the ability to recognise pain in others. She picks up on Pike’s grief through a nuance in her language that the universal translator renders in a way that reveals more than Pike intends. It’s a small detail, but an effective one, and she offers him sincere condolences. In that moment she meets him as an equal rather than an opponent.

This exchange also highlights how poorly Pike is hiding his grief. He has thrown himself into work to avoid confronting Batel’s loss, a familiar coping mechanism that can’t hold forever. Una recognises this, but she doesn’t push him. Instead, she frames her concern around the crew needing a break, knowing that Pike is more likely to reflect if he believes it benefits others rather than himself. It’s a subtle but telling example of how well she understands him.

Cassell also challenges Pike to reconsider how he approaches his responsibilities. In her culture, commanders are forbidden from forming personal relationships because emotional ties are seen as a distraction from the sacrifices required in war. Pike rejects this outright, asking, “Isn’t love part of what we fight for?” He accepts that conflict is sometimes necessary, but his motivation has always been to protect the people he cares about, even at the cost of his own life. Cassell views connection as a liability because that’s what her society has taught her, while Pike sees it as a source of strength and a reminder of what is worth preserving. Both positions make sense within their respective cultures, which is what makes their disagreement compelling.

What becomes increasingly clear through Cassell and Pike’s interactions is that both are locked into the roles their cultures have shaped for them. Cassell has known nothing but war, and Pike is guided by the Federation principles he has lived by his entire career. They are each following tracks laid long before this encounter, which makes the outcome feel inevitable. When Cassell learns that the Enterprise is from the future, she realises her people don’t survive. With no frame of reference beyond conflict, she concludes that the only way to secure her species’ future is to eliminate their enemy. She identifies the Enterprise’s antimatter pod as the means to do it and steals it with the intention of turning it on the Dol’Drm.

This is where the idea of Cassell and Pike being locked into predetermined roles comes fully into focus. The episode reveals that the Enterprise has been part of a predestination paradox, meaning their involvement was always part of history and nothing they do can alter the outcome. Pike realises this, at least intuitively, and chooses not to stop Cassell from destroying the Dol’Drm planet. He calls it a hunch, but it’s clear he has connected the missing planet in their own time to this moment.

The destruction of the Dol’Drm world becomes the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs and shifts Mars into an uninhabitable orbit. Cassell’s attempt to save her people instead guarantees their extinction, which is a devastating irony. Pike shares responsibility through his deliberate inaction, a burden he accepts because preserving the timeline means preserving the future he knows. It’s a powerful sequence, and the episode gives it enough space for the scale of the tragedy to register.

There are several philosophical implications that the episode raises but does’nt explore in enough depth. One is the question of whether the future the Enterprise is trying to preserve is inherently better than the one that would emerge if the Dol’Drm planet survived. The Next Generation episode “A Matter of Time” touches on this directly when Picard rhetorically asks who gets to decide which timeline is better, acknowledging the moral weight of choosing one future over another. Season 2’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” approached the issue more directly by showing that Kirk’s alternate timeline had merit of its own, even if La’an assumed hers was superior. This episode hints at a similar debate without fully committing to it. Cassell wants to create a future where her people aren’t extinct, while Pike wants to ensure he has a future to return to. Both positions are understandable, yet the crew largely accepts the idea that events must unfold as they already have. Star Trek thrives on wrestling with questions like this, and the episode’s reluctance to go deeper is a noticeable limitation.

Another implication the episode raises but doesn’t explore in detail is the lack of agency the Enterprise crew has in this scenario. They accept that events unfolded as they were meant to, which means Pike’s “choice” is one he was always destined to make. From his perspective he followed a hunch, but on a cosmic scale he had no real freedom to act differently. This ties directly into Pike’s ongoing struggle with his own future. Since the series began, he has wrestled with the idea that his fate is fixed, and Batel’s recent entrapment in her own predestined loop has only made the question more immediate for him. The episode hints at this almost from the outset.

The reflection he receives amounts to M’Benga urging him to live in the present rather than in the past or the future, and April advising him not to overthink it. There’s also the scene where the crew sit around the table processing the fact that they played a part in the destruction of two species 65 million years ago. The mixture of confusion and melancholy is effective, but the episode stops short of fully engaging with the deeper debate. This was a real opportunity for Strange New Worlds to explore complex and fascinating territory, and it simply doesn’t go far enough.

Travelling back in time to prehistoric Earth feels as though it exists mainly to justify putting dinosaurs in an episode, and on that level it delivers, but these scenes are easily the least engaging part of the story. The away team’s mission amounts to a simple fetch quest with dinosaurs functioning as obstacles rather than meaningful threats. There is a brief encounter with a T‑Rex that ends with a phaser set to stun, and another with a smaller dinosaur that La’an punches. This moment is used to set up her worry that not feeling pain might indicate she is drifting toward the same despotic tendencies as her ancestor, Khan. It’s a clumsy introduction to an idea that will presumably recur throughout the season, and it sits awkwardly within this episode.

The dinosaurs themselves feel almost incidental, especially when compared to the far more compelling moral and cultural dilemmas unfolding on the Enterprise. The sense of jeopardy is minimal, undercut by the quippy tone Una, La’an and Ortegas adopt throughout, and any danger posed by the T‑Rex is resolved with surprising ease. This is likely a budget limitation in terms of what can be shown on screen, but it doesn’t change the fact that the solution feels too simple. The entire sequence feels disconnected from the main plot, even though the goal is to retrieve the iridium needed to get the ship operational.

Despite its uneven elements, the episode remains compelling thanks to the strength of the cultural conflict between Pike and Cassell and the emotional nuance running through their interactions. The ideas it raises about inevitability, agency and the cost of preserving the future are rich ones, even if the script doesn’t explore them as fully as it could. The result is an opener that carries a quiet melancholy, shaped by Pike’s unresolved grief and the tragic inevitability at the heart of the story, while leaving some of its most interesting questions only partially examined. It stands as an ambitious but imperfect beginning that succeeds more in mood and character than in the philosophical depth it gestures toward.

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Verdict

A resonant episode that finds its clearest strengths in a compelling cultural conflict and well‑judged character work.

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