Star Trek #1706: The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail

CAPTAIN'S LOG: Kirk's first mission in the chair pits him against an evil scavenger ship.

WHY WE LIKE IT: The making of a team.

WHY WE DON'T: Confused messaging.

REVIEW: Yep, someone on the production team definitely fell in love with Lovecraft. While the monstrous Scavenger ship doesn't have supernatural (or cosmic) origins - so far as we know, though who knows how it got this powerful, was it something like what happened to NOMAD or V'ger? - it sure looks like a giant tentacle monster. And until the odd twist at the end and its corresponding "message", I couldn't help but ask "Is this Trek?". Trek is about understanding the Other, so something so oppressively evil as the Scavenger, that can't be reasoned with, isn't in the Trek tradition (though La'an at least has the decency to give Pike a look when he has her set phasers to kill). And while you might also say the Borg were like that, I'll bring up two things. 1) They weren't a one-off and indeed, we did get to understand and befriend them in various forms over time. And 2) they weren't introduced in a season like this one, where horrible, unreasonable monsters (Gorn, zombies, Vezda) have shown up in more than half the stories. I mention Lovecraft because of the scope, but my accusation in the previous review also mentioned Doctor Who, a show where monsters must be fought more often than they can be reasoned with. Well, look at that...

I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought they were giving us a Planet Killer like the one in The Doomsday Weapon, sending critics to the pencil sharpener in expectation of a massive continuity contradiction. But WE - humans from our time-ish - are the real villains, people who left Earth when things were bleak after World War III and before Zefram Cochrane discovered warp drive. There was something weird about near-Earth space in those days going by the number of things that fell into a vat of weirdness (NOMAD, V'ger, the astronaut from The Royale, and now this), and "we" became ruthless, dangerous Scavengers, destroying even inhabited planets for resources. The "we" in question is actually the corporate elite represented by astro-nuts like Musk and Bezos, which is made clear by dialog about the Scavengers' "bottomless greed" (their whole shtick is consuming energy) and the stylized Tesla logo on the original crew's uniforms. And were it not that Pelia was there and still believes the people who poisoned the Earth and left behind were "the best of us" (she should know better), we could easily theorize that between targeted misinformation and lost records, 23rd-Century thinks those "pioneers" were heroes (tying into that cringy Musk line in Discovery). But annoyingly, the episode conflates the Tech Bros with the rest of humanity and wants to make us feel bad that the Scavengers were destroyed. I'm not and the crew shouldn't be that bummed about it either (or at least make mention of children being on board or something). The truth is that these bozos WERE monsters, no matter their genetics, and evolved into even bigger monsters. That should be the lesson.

Dubious inspirations and revelations aside, the episode is made great by it being Kirk's first time in the captain's chair. Captain Garrovick's successor, Captain V'Lar (who must have transferred from the Vulcan space service, as I continue to cling to the notion that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet) is taken out early and with most of the Farragut's crew beamed to the Enterprise, he inherits that ship's away team. And how lovely is it that it's all the characters who will follow him to the 5-year mission? There's no question in my mind that their performance here, more than any other adventure's, is why Kirk will have kept them close when he succeeds Pike. Even Scotty, who is rather insubordinate. Kirk has a lot to learn - he's the dog who caught the car and doesn't know what to do with it at this point. He wants to take risks (shades of Return to Tomorrow's "rousing speech", but he takes it all upon himself and too quickly dismisses objections to his plans. He's paralyzed by failure (the man has ALWAYS been unable to handle that), and is cocky when he at first seems to succeed (at which point, he finally sits in the chair - Wesley has the Kirk pose down). With Spock's help, he comes to realize he has to listen to his experts and bounce off THEIR ideas to come up with the BEST risky plan. Scotty the Miracle Worker, Uhura the Empath, Chapel the Brilliant Brainstormer, Spock the One Who'll Keep Him Honest... They'll all have a role to play on his first real command.

And in terms of action, it's quite the plan. I don't quite buy everything (Uhura's fancy flying despite having flown a starship only once before, Chapel shooting out an anti-proton line that should have been Spock's), but the effects are gorgeous, and the scheme indeed "crazy", like all the best Kirk ideas. And while these guys are working together, so is the crew of the Enterprise, meeting challenges with just as much ingenuity. Pike and La'an have to cut the Scavenger's energy-sapping umbilical while braving toxic gas and evil Muskites, while Pelia rewires the ship with vintage telephones to restore internal coms so Ortegas can network with manually-activated thrusters so the ship can escape the Scavenger's stomach. Everybody's clicking and bouncing off each other's ideas, fixing problems intelligently, like the best of Action Trek.

LESSON: People don't change, they only become themselves more.

REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: The TOS crew stuff is primo. The reveal at the end is... something else.