The scary episode of Strange New Worlds Season 3 borrows from two classic science fiction

Define phasers on spoilers. This article deals with major events from the last episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”.

If the creative team behind “Strange New Worlds” tries to convince us that “Star Trek” can support any possible combination of genres and tones, season 3 is already a brilliant case study. In the space of only five episodes, we saw an action thriller with The Gorn, a romantic fantastic drama (the accent put on fantasy) featuring Spock (Ethan Peck) and nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), an invasion of autonomous zombies, and a fanciful return to the aesthetics of “The Original Series” wrapped in an intrigue of murder-mystère. Now, the screenwriters of the show have just triggered what could be the most ambitious in all the “new worlds” and he releases a page (or two) of a pair of underestimated horror stones.

Yes, “Star Trek” travels again in the unknown Cosmic with season 3, episode 5, rightly entitled “through the objective of time”. This time, however, it is inspired by certain unusual sources. When the story begins, it seems that we are for a riff “Indiana Jones” as a chapel and Dr. Roger Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) leads a excavation of an old archaeological site. But what starts with a feeling of wonder and exploration quickly turns into the most logicisic of horrors. The outdoor team quickly discovers that the “treasures” that await them inside the hidden structure are anything but: automated (and fairly fatal) self -defense mechanisms, time / space paradoxes and interdimensional foreigners that itch just for their chance to escape.

While our characters go more and more deeply in this house of horrors, two films in particular feel like spiritual brothers and sisters to what “Strange New Worlds” tries here: the classic cult of Paul Ws Anderson “Event Horizon” and the “Alien” prequel “Prometheus” by Ridley Scott of Ridley Scott. Add this to the usual characteristics of the franchise for the use of science to explain the unknown, and the end result is as unique as everything we have seen in “Star Trek” before. The series gave us a taste of existential, and there is no return now.

You know, maybe there are Worse things in life than death. Humanity has always been obsessed with immortality and the idea of what then comes after our death, but nothing good has ever just probed too deep in these questions. Innumerable stories and edited tales warn us of the costs of interference with things that we have no control, with “Prometheus” standing up as one of the most intriguing examples that science fiction cinema has had to offer in recent decades. When you filter such high concerns through the generally idealistic objective of “Star Trek”, one might think that horror would be the last thing in mind. Instead, “Strange New Worlds” has just jumped out in the mouths of chaos first.

It all starts to be mistaken when the USS Enterprise crew meets an archaeological wonder on an extraterrestrial world, which could contain answers to the mysteries behind the resolution of immortality. Unfortunately, the red flags begin to appear when the team meets corpses, a brilliant orb that explodes violently in front of a bad sign bet (Chris Myers), and a defense mechanism that kills their local Njal guide (Ish Morris), trapping them inside the structure. Their only outcome is to go further in, of course, but not a single of these starfleet hardened officers could never have anticipated what they would have met afterwards.

The superficial “Prometheus” superficial parallels are rather difficult to miss, but which really connects the two together comes from the thematic idea of deceiving death and looking for indices on our own origins. The native extraterrestrial njal seeks these answers to his people, which is why he recruits the help of Starfleet in the first place. But this research is also what leads directly to his own death, when he finds himself face to face with “evil” than the Vezda. Everything he undertakes in the next room scares him enough to completely flee the area, although it ends with a tragedy when it is instantly vaporized by the door defenses and the rest of the survivors are left to an uncertain destiny inside. Like the Prometheus crew, their quest for answers brings them much more than they have negotiated. Rather than meeting their manufacturers, however, our “strange new worlds” characters find rather the bad guys who have been left.

And this is where things take an infernal transmission in “event horizon” territory, because we finally learn that what the company crew thought A temple or a research installation was actually a interdimensional prison. When Ensign Gamble is uncomfortably closer to one of these Vezda and horribly loses his sight, well, it is probably not a coincidence that these visuals correspond so strongly to what happens to Dr Weir of Sam Neill and to the rest of the unfortunate victims of the entrance called Event Horizon. Let’s say that the similarities do not end in bleeding eyes, however. The protagonists surpassed from “Event Horizon”, responsible for investigating the long lost ship which has disappeared without a trace several years earlier, realize that it did not return alone. Having traveled beyond the limits of our own universe (and perhaps even hell itself), the ship brings something back that its original team has turned each other … before doing the same at Dr. Weir, who designed the ship and its “gateway” promenade faster than light, as well as the rest of the rescue team.

Gamble finds himself in a similar situation, possessed by one of the Vezda and forced to light his colleagues officers of Starfleet in order to escape imprisonment. Like the antagonist of “Event Horizon”, this inter-dimensional entity defies human understanding and alludes to a horrible region of the universe outside our own scope. According to Pelia (Carol Kane), the Vezda are an embodied evil. Look at what Anderson does with “Event Horizon”, well, it is hardly a section to attribute exactly the same malice to everything that ends up haunting this ship. Between the allusions to hell, the nightmarish imagery of what happened with the initial crew and the tone and the visuals of General Lovecraftien, the film can easily be classified as a supernatural horror. “Strange New Worlds” at least shirking in the same disturbing territory, although it does not leave it is not resolved with a last teasing. Once Pelia pulls and kills “Gamble”, the recapped Vezda is transported in the pattern stamp of the ship and actually imprisoned … Although a seed console suggests that we have not seen the last – or the fascination of the series for the classics of science fiction – again.

New episodes of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” on Thursdays on Paramount +.