Continuing the trend of the series’ first three installments, “Memento Mori” is essentially a La’an episode. Her voiceovers frame the hour and her unique experience as one of the few survivors of a Gorn attack provides a necessary perspective on how dangerous they truly are. (Let’s face it, Pike is the sort of person who would 100% try to negotiate with anything, no matter how bad their species is supposed to be, so she’s a needed balance here.) The fact that La’an is still so traumatized by her experience with them—given everything else we know about her and her ability to compartmentalize emotions—says something truly horrifying about what kind of monsters they must be.
It’s rare that we get a villain in this franchise that’s truly full-on evil. (Even the Borg—my go-to favorite Star Trek Big Bad—have been somewhat defanged by the most recent season of Star Trek: Picard.) So there’s something marvelously poetic about the possibility of making Pike’s recurring nemesis the most purely evil creature in the Trek world. He’s such a relentless hero figure, a guy who believes in the power of everything the Federation stands for and wants to see the best in every species he meets, no matter how alien they might be. The Gorn….don’t care about any of that. How will Pike deal with an enemy that essentially goes against everything (kindness, compassion, empathy) he values, that doesn’t operate from a moral perspective that he understands? And how far is he willing to go to defeat them?
Despite the constantly looming threat of the Gorn—and La’an’s palpable if somewhat repressed fear—Strange New Worlds smartly never shows us their take on these creatures (which, let’s be real, were not exactly bone-chilling monsters in The Original Series what with the spangly jumpsuits and 1950s Godzilla movie vibes ). By leaving the Gorn to our imaginations—at least for now—the show allows us to fill in the gaps with our own ideas about what scares us most, all while managing to remain canon-compliant (for now) that the Enterprise had never “met” them. But, mostly, isn’t it always that little bit more frightening when you can’t clearly see the thing that’s chasing you?
“Memento Mori” is also Strange New Worlds’ most action-oriented episode yet, featuring ship-to-ship combat, dramatic surgery without the benefit of high-tech 23rd-century medicine, and crew members willing to pay the ultimate price to save each other. (And spoiler alert, all the sets look properly fantastic.) While Pike and the bridge crew are trying to come up with a way to escape the Gorn ships, Hemmer and Uhura (who picked the worst week for her engineering roration) are trying to prevent a deadly explosion in the cargo hold, and M’Benga and Chapel are basically triaging patients in sickbay using what they refer to as “ancient” science. (Love to be ancient!!)
It all feels very much like a submarine thriller, a sort of Strange New Worlds version of the Original Series “Balance of Terror” episode that originally introduced the Romulans. (Except without the final reveal of the enemy at the end.) From the flickering lighting to the groaning, creaking sounds of the ship’s hull slowly buckling under the increasing pressure from the brown dwarf, it’s claustrophobic and oppressive in a way that would be frightening enough without the whole being hunted by a vicious murdering alien race thing.
Pike is in his most charmingly hot hero mode this week: Determined, firm, and dedicated to keeping his crew calm and fully invested in the fight to save their own lives, he’s essentially the Platonic ideal of a Starfleet captain come to life. True, there are several moments where we, as the audience, have to wonder if he’d take insane risks like purposefully skirting the edge of a black hole if he didn’t feel some level of preternatural confidence that his death wasn’t waiting for him there. (And he exchanges some quick glances with Spock that make me wonder if the Vulcan might be wondering the same thing.)
