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A review of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Four finale, "Tomorrow's Enterprise" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as we have to say "space baby"...
Alan Sepinwall
Well, how about that? Strange New Worlds caps off a season that left me despairing over the series' clumsy embrace at gimmickry above all else with one of my favorite episodes the show has ever done. Hell, maybe it's my favorite SNW episode, period?
Like the season's other two highlights, "Off-Hour" and "Orders of Magnitude," "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is simple, meat-and-potatoes Star Trek. It does the thing that made Strange New Worlds so charming: it tells a classic standalone Star Trek story that grants much greater depth to an original character who rarely got enough to do on TOS. There are a couple of bumps here and there — an occupational hazard of doing a time travel story where the same character helps herself out in another era and/or timeline — but on the whole I watched this with a huge smile on my face, and got choked up a time or three.
As both La'an and Pike obliquely note to one Uhura or the other, this crew already has plenty of experience with time travel. Pike has seen his own future, and also glimpsed an alternate timeline where he still captained the Enterprise during the events of TOS and inadvertently led the Federation into a war with the Romulans. La'an went back in time, fell in love with Kirk, and delayed the Eugenics Wars by several decades. What happens to Nyota is a bit more complicated, owing as much to the 1999 Dennis Quaid/Jim Caviezel movie Frequency(*) as to other Star Trek stories about the past, present, and/or future interacting.