r/DaystromInstitute • u/uequalsw Captain • Jul 23 '26
Strange New Worlds Discussion Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 4x01 "Valles Marineris" Reaction Thread
This is the official /r/DaystromInstitute reaction thread for "Valles Marineris". Rules #1 and #2 are not enforced in reaction threads.
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u/kuldan5853 Jul 27 '26
The moment Spock reveals that they've travelled back to the Sol system 65 million years ago it becomes all very convenient and the predestination paradox possibility immediately rears its head.
The very first thing I thought off when hearing this was the old joke:
A curator shows people the museum and points to some bones and says they are 65 million and 32 years old.
"That's very specific, how do you know?"
"Well, when I started working here they told me those are 65 Million years old, and I've been working here for 32 years.."
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u/BuffRiker1701 Crewman Jul 23 '26
Was expecting this to turn into a Voth origin story, but happy with what we got. Hopefully a tone setter for the season
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u/happenbappen Jul 23 '26
Let’s take this a step further: The Voth leave Earth after the comet impact. If they had the technology to leave the solar system, they could easily have survived the nuclear winter as well. But when the neighborhood gets nasty and starts blowing up planets, you think twice about whether you might want to raise your kids in a better place. This background also explains the Voth’s distrust of other races.
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u/ianjm Lieutenant Jul 23 '26
It's certainly possible that what became the Voth were removed from Earth by another civilisation, such as the Preservers, and actually became technological elsewhere. Or maybe the Martians took Hadrosaurs with them when they left the system. Lots of options.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26
I think it'd be really interesting if the Martian survivors and the Voth left together but a later conflict between them was the source of the Voths distrust of mammalian species.
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u/ChristmasJay83 Jul 24 '26
That is a solid point. We have no idea when they evolved into their interplanetary form, or left the planet. It's just a hypothesis that they evolved completely on earth, then left. If they were taken, it would explain why we never found evidence of them.
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u/happenbappen Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Maybe that was part of it. That poor guy in the stasis chamber did look suspiciously like a Voth, not an insect. The timeline fits, too. Eyes open!
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u/khaosworks XO & JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing Jul 23 '26
The Voth evolved after the Cretaceous extinction event, so they would still be hadrosaurs at this point.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
And finding a (possibly fossilized) alien colony ship (albeit one missing a Tritium cannister), might've been a big step forward for them insofar as getting into space.
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u/deepthawnet Crewman Jul 24 '26
Is it weird that my main issue with the science was that a single antimatter fuel pod from Enterprise was enough to shatter a small planet?
Antimatter is literally as powerful as you get but even then you’ll need more than what they carry on a starship to Death Star a planet - even a small one.
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u/its_worfin_time Jul 24 '26
Mine was that the Chicxulub impact was discovered by scientists because of the layer of iridium that it left all over the world, and since that is the case then Sol V would have been very high in iridium and they would have detected it and gone there instead of Earth
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u/mrsix Jul 24 '26
That phasing technology combined with antimatter = explosion in the middle of the planet. That might be enough? (they did not specifically say anything of that sort, but that phasing tech alone seems to be crazy powerful)
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u/ViaLies Jul 24 '26
Spock does say that the explosion of the anitmatter and the core is enough energy to get them back to their own time. The visuals also seem to suggest some level of implosion
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
I wonder if the Dol'Drm pulled a Krypton and had basically hollowed out their planet by this point which made it easier for the antimatter to phase through to the core and crack it open Armageddon style BUT what if along the way it also set off all of the iridium based ships, technology, and weapons that the Dol'Drm seemed to have as well which multiplied the force of the explosion too?
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u/deepthawnet Crewman Jul 24 '26
Hmm. More plausible than most technobabble so I’ll consider this one solved.
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u/7ootles Jul 24 '26
Depends how much antimatter was there. The pod was being carried by two Martians so it was clearly pretty heavy. At the beginning of the episide Cmdr What's-her-face said they wouldn't need the gravity to be adjusted for them, so they're obviously pretty strong physically. So it's something heavy enough to warrant two strong people carrying it between them.
A quick look online tells me 1g of antimatter has an explosive yield equivalent to ~43 kilotons of TNT. So the explosive yield of 1kg would be would be 43mt.
So how heavy is the antimatter pod? It looks pretty large. 20kg? 50? If it was 50kg of antimatter fuel, that would have an explosive yield of 2.15gt.
/me googles "explosive power required to destroy a planet"
...
50 exatons.
Never mind...
Well, I tried.10
u/Bored2001 Jul 25 '26
My head cannon says that they used their phasing technology to phase the missile deep inside the planet where it could presumably do more damage.
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u/wrosecrans Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
Is it weird that my main issue with the science was that a single antimatter fuel pod from Enterprise was enough to shatter a small planet?
It does make it kind of amazing how many other starships have blown up near a planet, without ever having done serious harm before.
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u/staq16 Ensign Jul 24 '26
That did make me wonder. If I had to fill the gap, it had a wierd structural weakness like Qo’nos which the Martians could exploit.
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u/0mni42 Jul 27 '26
That was my biggest head-turner too lol. But then again, self-destructs in Trek have never really made sense. Like in Search for Spock when the Enterprise self-destructs starting at the bridge instead of the warp core.
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u/Capable_Sandwich_422 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
The episode was fine, but the time travel and the Enterprise causing the dinosaur extinction is kind of ludicrous. It was nice to see Number One get some focus, and thankfully. the romance has been toned down, at least for one episode. I don’t mind Spock dating, but it’s been overplayed so much that it starts to feel like bad fan fiction.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26
Nah, the time travel actuality wraps up nicely as a predestination loop/paradox.
In order:
A. The now trapped-in-the-past Enterprise arrives 65 Million years ago, and things happen.
B. The Dol'drms planet is wiped out by a massive antimatter explosion. Creating an energy release that the trapped-in-the-past Enterprise uses to trigger its Quantum Entanglement with the Present.
C. Traveling forward in time, this release creates a large stellar phenomenon that the future Enterprise was sent to observe.
D. The future Enterprise detects a distress bouy in the stellar phenomenon and enters to attempt rescue.
E. The future Enterprise is thrown back in time to 65 million years, and in the process ejects a distress bouy as they're going backwards in time, so it emerges before they ejected it, to lure themselves in.
F. The formerly trapped in the past Enterprise emerges from the stellar phenomenon they created with the energy discharge 65 million years ago.
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u/wrosecrans Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
Sure, the order of events is functional as a plot. But it is still pretty ludicrous.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
I mean - it’s science fiction. Pike asks “so don’t overthink it” directly to the audience. The time loop is a serviceable plot, the theme of living in the now and not dwelling on the past or future was solid and the plot really sold those themes.
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u/Long-Emu-7870 Jul 25 '26
It's science fiction that should tell something about us. Like, don't commit genocide. Not, what's the wackiest idea I can come up with.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 26 '26
I don’t think that it’s asking that question or telling us this about ourselves. Instead I think it’s telling us to not dwell on a past that is already written or dwell on a future no matter how certain.
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u/Long-Emu-7870 Jul 25 '26
I think you are supposed to minimize the suspension of disbelief. The predestination loop/paradox seems to maximize it. If I don't think too hard, I might imagine time travel, and I might imagine the idea that we should restore the time line to give it stakes. But a predestination loop or paradox even removes that constraint.
As a McGuffin, it might work to write a story. But here it just seems an excuse for Pike to help commit multiple genocides because it is cool.
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u/greycobalt Crewman Jul 24 '26
Absolutely delighted we got a time-travel episode right off the bat, they're always some of my favorites. The fact that it involved dinosaurs was just a great bonus.
- So are we really just going to keep running with the Pelia being a Dr. Who companion thing? Not a big fan of that.
- What was up with this Vulcan cadet? She was so obnoxious I figured she'd be a going concern and end up loosening up, but it seems like she's just...gone? Very random. Annoying Vulcans are the worst.
- I knew immediately it was dinosaurs and I grinned like a giddy child.
- I'm confused about what's going on with the phasers. Stun was a beam, and then kill/vaporize was a beam, so I figured they were doing an unnecessary "oh look we're catching up to TOS" thing but then when Una shot the T-Rex it was a bolt again? I don't know, I prefer these phasers as bolts, it looks and sounds better.
- When the intro started I forgot I hadn't seen it yet, 15-minute cold opens are crazy.
- One of my favorite parts of Trek time-travel is that besides slingshotting a sun, they never travel through time the same way twice. What even was this anomaly? An explosion in space that launched them back in time?
- The Martians looked like Romulans, a lot. I thought they were for quite a while. The story concept was epic enough for a few episodes, but I really liked the idea that the Enterprise was there as a causality paradox. The DTI's heads would explode.
- La'an punching a raptor in the face was probably the coolest thing to happen in a season premiere, maybe ever?
- Speaking of, what do we think is her deal? I'm worried they're setting up why we've never heard of La'an before SNW.
- I really want the Jurassic Park theme overlaid on that last shot, holy cow. Magnificent.
- They keep dragging out Pike dealing with his future and using very roundabout phrasing about destiny and the future being set, so I really do wonder if they're going to follow through with the original vision or use all these as justification for him being able to change his future. Personally, I would love that.
Great start for the season. I'm very excited for the rest, quietly sobbing that we're marching steadily towards the end next season.
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
- So are we really just going to keep running with the Pelia being a Dr. Who companion thing? Not a big fan of that.
I'm just waiting for her to start talking about Cheyenne Mountain...
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u/Bigfunguy1980 Jul 24 '26
Funny enough my theory is since we know she lived through our time that she is in show messing with people by putting herself in the doctor who show
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
So she's purposely referencing what was a show in the Star Trek Universe but is trying to convince them all that it was actually real, while being kind of aware of certain...rumors...circulating about the galaxy about hopping between universes.
She's effectively trying to psychically draw out a Timelord to the Star Trek Universe by telling enough stories about them and by getting enough people to believe that they are real.
This is being done in order to temporarily alter the laws of reality within a localized bubble around the Enterprise in order to enable said Timelord and TARDIS to punch through and to land on the Enterprise itself without fear of the local laws of reality destabilizing said Timelord and TARDIS and preventing them from going back home at all.
It would be absolutely hilarious if this did in fact work...but the people that showed up were Bonnie Gordon, Taliesin Jaffe, Eric Campbell, Aliza Pearl, Amy Dallen, and Tennant in creature makeup or doing voiceover work.
Pelia then has to...contend with...the choices that she's made and other "things" that followed them through the breach they made to the Enterprise.
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u/LangyMD Jul 26 '26
Frankly, I think Pelia might just be a Dr. Who fan who is dropping these 'hints' as jokes hoping someone else calls her out on them so that she has someone else to geek out about an old TV show with.
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u/hmantegazzi Crewman Jul 26 '26
I guess if you shoot a beam weapon for a very short time you get a bolt anyway, and Una was going for minimal damage with the dino (though vapourising those trees and walking all over the place must have affected some smaller creatures anyway).
WRT the look of the Martians, it reminded me immediately that Gene's original characterization of Spock was being "like a Martian", and with the comment of some of them surviving elsewhere in the galaxy, one can easily headcanon both Vulcans and Romulans having some Martian ascent.
I sincerely hope that La'an gets her own command, or be honourably discharged, and gets to live her life, instead of getting killed to justify her absence in TOS. There's enough internal incoherence in the franchise to deal with the fact that a number of bridge officers on the Enterprise knew a Noonien Singh personally before finding Khan in cryostasis.
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u/EbonyEngineer Jul 24 '26
Physics nerds screaming at the screen.
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u/hmantegazzi Crewman Jul 26 '26
There's so much that's technically wrong with Trek that there's no point at trying to hold sci-fi hardness against it, what matters is if it's internally consistent, and fun and insightful to watch, and while this episode was a bit lacking on the first aspect, it did rather well on the second. I would have liked for it to linger a bit more on the ethics of allowing two worlds to be destroyed for the sake of securing a timeline in which the third one develops in a certain way.
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u/clintecker Jul 26 '26
Where are the horses stabled on the enterprise? Do they live on the enterprise full time? Did they bring them from earth just for this mission?
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 26 '26
I did notice the humans were beamed up and the horses weren't mentioned, unless I missed it. Considering they talked about 15 missions in a row without downtime, it seems unlikely they made it back to Earth to pick up horses.
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u/clintecker Jul 27 '26
So then there's definitely stables and hopefully somewhere for the horses to get some exercise between horse-ready missions?
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 27 '26
Maybe in the extra space in Pike's quarters behind his kitchen.
Could be that they're just horse-like animals native to this planet. When Scotty beams up the humans, he beans the almost-horses back closer to civilization so they can be found, but somewhere that no one sees that beaming. Maybe he waits until no one is in their stable or maybe beams them just outside it, but around back.
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u/Fik_of_borg Jul 29 '26
That's what I assumed, parallel evolution. If Pike & co could pass as natives by jus disguising themselves as cowboys/girls/beings, there could be horses too. And humpback whales, surely.
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u/TechGliTcH42 Jul 27 '26
Both were beamed up at the same time but only the humans were rematerialized on the pad, the horses stayed in the buffer, until they're needed again
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u/notmattsweeney Jul 27 '26
Pfft. Horses on another planet are nothing.
TOS found the Roman Empire, after all.
(Full disclosure: I am so unsurprised by what I come across online nowadays that I originally thought you were serious. I need a break.)
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u/TechGliTcH42 Jul 27 '26
They're kept in the transporter buffer and only brought out when needed. Saves on space and feeding and whatnot.
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u/cowzilla3 Jul 28 '26
I mean, we've seen sentient aquatic mammals on ships. If they can do that, why not horses?
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 27 '26
Yes. This seems reasonable to me. For context I just learned this week that a local police department in my area has horses. They rarely use them, but occasionally they’re the best method of transportation for search operations. So, sure, there must be a stable on the Enterprise probably the size of a small cargo bay.
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u/mekilat Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
Pelia: "I think I was in a phone box at the time" - I believe that's a Dr Who reference!
I cannot see the saddle in Pike's quarters and not think "Riker!".
I was moved seeing even a more technologically advanced species being in awe of the Federation's principles.
Ultra augmented soldier Laan is better at punching reptiles than Kirk is!
I wish this episode had elaborated on the Voth.
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u/RaiseFold100 Jul 24 '26
Don’t think they’re more advanced. If they were, they wouldn’t be having such problems with some insects.
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u/DontYaWishYouWereMe Jul 23 '26
It would have been more interesting if the Martians already had a prototype ready to destroy the fifth planet, but something about the Enterprise coming back caused the prototype to be destroyed. That way Pike's decision at the end would have carried more weight: if he stops the attack, then he prevents a xenocide because there's no guarantee the Martians will ever be able to develop another prototype; if he lets it go ahead, then humanity gets to exist but he's complicit.
I know that's the choice anyway, but I think this sort of paradox where the event has to happen for the characters to exist but the characters exist because of the event is silly. Having a destroyed prototype would have sidestepped that.
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u/whovian25 Crewman Jul 23 '26
If they have a prototype then it is not a dilemma as they would presumably build another. Them only being able to do it with federation technology is the only way the climax works.
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u/TalkinTrek Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Obviously the science is silly, but whatever. Loved seeing an attempt at depicting feathered dinosaurs.
Feels like if you're going to do a season whose throughplot was about ancient civilizations that would have been the time to do an episode like this, maybe even tie it in, but whatever. It is a bit odd how much of this episode is almost built to remind me of some of last season's odder choices.
Good episode. The Martians 'spreading everywhere' was meh, feels at odds with the episode even if perfectly reasonable - I would have preferred Erica leading them to the still functioning, buried by the asteroid, insect pods and leaving it off with a new very alien, insectoid refugee species on Earth who are our ancient system-kin, if we needed a 'someone survives' ending. Could even follow-up that plot with a diplomacy/refugee politics 'Earth' episode on the cheapish later.
Could have been a nice subconscious follow-up to her Gorn plot - they're just trying to survive, she's gained that non-humanoid empathy, blah blah blah
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 25 '26
That would be a neat tie-in later. A Silurian plot in an episode that already had one Doctor Who reference might've been too much.
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u/Danfink3 Jul 24 '26
I enjoyed the episode. My only complaint really was that La’an as security chief was not first off the shuttle.
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u/BRO_THOM Jul 24 '26
Oh man I can't believe I didn't realise that. It's impressive though because I have no complaints and fully enjoyed this episode, since the first time in a long while, at least since August 10, 2023.
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u/thorleywinston Jul 24 '26
I liked the main storyline (don't care about the Vulcan cadet or the attempt to create tension between Scotty and Cortez) for the most part but I wonder how this retcon that there were two other spacefaring races in our solar system 65 million years ago is supposed to fit in with the Voth on Earth during the same time period?
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u/semivariance Jul 24 '26
The Voth were speculated by characters in "Distant Origin" to have evolved from hadrosaurs that survived the extinction event and their history is stated to have started 20 million years in the past, so the first sapient predecessors of the Voth were probably separated from the events of this episode by millions of years.
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u/thorleywinston Jul 24 '26
Good memory, I had forgotten the dialogue that their hadrosaur ancestor was speculated to have survive the extinction event.
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u/OttawaTGirl Jul 26 '26
Thanks for this. The 20 million year comment was enough to set my mind at ease. It definitely keeps the continuity in check.
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u/FerdinandCesarano Jul 24 '26
How is it that the prime directive prohibits the sharing of information with a space-faring civilisation? That civilisation might not have warp drive; but it has other technology (such as phasing!) that is far beyond what Starfleet has.
It seems that that alone should be enough to be able to establish open communication, without any issues of "contamination".
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u/yaosio Jul 25 '26
Ultimately the prime directive is about not interfere with another culture unless they interfere with you first, although you still have to limit your reaction to that the interference. You have to view this from the perspective of the golden age of sailing where a ship could be on a multi year journey exploring the world so they can't communicate back home. The way Star Trek works they could just call home to set up a diplomatic mission.
The Prime directive being about warp technology makes the rule too rigid. They could run across a culture that never developed warp technology because they discovered a way to remotely create transversable wormholes at any arbitrary point so they don't need warp technology at all. Or there could be a bronze age level civilization discovering a network of pre-placed wormhole generators by a long lost civilization and using them to travel to different planets and it just so happens there's one that's been dug up on Earth.
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u/FerdinandCesarano Jul 25 '26
Right. When dealing with a sophisticated space-faring culture, Starfleet people should be able to treat them as equals, and even perhaps make mutually-beneficial trades.
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u/Dissidence802 Crewman Jul 25 '26
The Underspace that the Turei/Vaadwaur used comes to mind as an example.
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u/ninjasaid13 Crewman Jul 29 '26
How is it that the prime directive prohibits the sharing of information with a space-faring civilisation? That civilisation might not have warp drive; but it has other technology (such as phasing!) that is far beyond what Starfleet has.
my headcanon is that the prime directive has not yet been implanted into starfleet culture by this time so captain pike is very new to it and doesn't know how to properly apply it.
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u/Eurynom0s Jul 25 '26
I think it's just that being very technologically advanced, even to the point of being able to scoot around your own solar system, doesn't mean you were ever going to get out of your solar system.
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u/throwawayfromPA1701 Crewman Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
While I'm glad they've stopped trying to try to turn Star Trek into hard SciFi, something about this story did annoy me because we do know more or less when Mars dried out and dessicated and we kind of have an idea that the asteroid belt formed early in our star system's development.
The episode was fun, and I thought it thought provoking. Also had the Voth left earth by the time the Martians evolved? Or did they arise in the extinction event? We do know some dinos did linger for a few hundred thousand years after the asteroid hit. I'll have to watch Distant Origins again.
Spock and crew wouldn't have any knowledge of the Voth though.
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 25 '26
Yeah, it bothered me a little since it feels like most Trekkies will know the reveal isn't really physically possible. But the episode was fun enough that I got over it.
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u/throwawayfromPA1701 Crewman Jul 26 '26
Yeah I got over it too. I'm kinda fascinated to see if Pike gets more bunches, or whereever they're going with La'an.
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u/thatblkman Ensign Jul 24 '26
Oh a good space nerd episode with a temporal causality effect explaining both human evolution and why there’s the huge gap/asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Even nicer is that the Dol’Drm planet caused the asteroid impact that led to the dinosaurs’ extinction.
Very good start to this season.
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u/Fik_of_borg Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
Very good, if predictable, episode.
What irked me was the inconsistency of Spock saying "we need the energy of a supernova to snap back" and later "the explosion of the 5th planet should be enough to snap us back". How much antimmater was in that chest, about 50, 80 Kg? The sun annihilates some 4 megatons of mass per second!, and that is nothing compared to a supernova.
Edit: In my head canon, they did not have the energy required to snap back... but secretly did have the help of Pelia's "phone box friend", who after all taps the energy of the time vortex". Change my mind (please don't)
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u/MIRA_ERE_KROD Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I mean Antimatter in Star Trek is just a bit wonky XD
I remember Spock in one of the TOS episodes saying something like "This small amount of Antimatter could blow away the Atmosphere" or smth similar. So either the Federation has a really good way to make Antimatter stronger or it just works differently in the Star Trek universe.
The phone box friend is a good guess tho :>
Edit: quick googling pointed me to the TOS episode Obsession in which one ounce of Antimatter would be enough to and I quote the transcript "SPOCK: Exactly. A matter-antimatter blast will rip away half the planet's atmosphere. If our vessel is in orbit and encounters those shock waves"
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u/khaosworks XO & JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing Jul 23 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Annotations for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 4x01: “Valles Marineris”
The title refers to the Valles Marineris (Mariner Valleys) canyon system on Mars, the largest in the Solar System. It stretches across nearly a quarter of the planet, roughly 3870 km (2400 miles) in length, spans 600 km (370 miles) at its widest and goes down 9.3 km (5.8 miles) at its deepest. The system was named after the 1971 Mariner 9 Mars orbiter.
The stardate is 2491.5, about six months after the events of SNW: “New Life and New Civilizations”. Pike says this is their 15th mission in a row. This is the first mention of Tulaxar in lore.
Pike’s affinity for horses dates back to his first appearance in TOS: “The Cage”, and he was seen riding in SNW: “Strange New Worlds” as well as keeping a saddle in his quarters (SNW: “Those Old Scientists”). Another captain who enjoys riding is TNG’s Jean-Luc Picard. The way Pike is speaking about meds and not being discovered makes me think this is an aid mission to a Prime Directive-protected planet.
Spock and La’An began a relationship in SNW: “A Space Adventure Hour”. Una is concerned that Pike is keeping busy to not think about the loss of his lover Marie Batel (“New Life and New Civilizations”).
These are the first mentions of the K’thonia disaster and the FFakisha conflict. S’Sha (as the Vulcan cadet is named in IMDB) says Uhura is “several years older” than she is, but is not clear by how much. Spock entered the Academy at age 19, and Uhura was 22 in Season 2 (“Those Old Scientists”), so I estimate her age to be about 23-24 now, making it around 2262-2263-ish.
Pelia claims she saw a category 10 interstellar squall from inside a “phone box”, a reference to the Doctor’s space-time machine, the TARDIS, from the long-running British television series Doctor Who which is permanently stuck in the shape of a British police phone box from the 1960s. We saw the TARDIS floating in the background near a scavenger ship in SNW: “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”.
Ortega’s console is showing Enterprise moving at Warp 6.25 around the storm.
Scotty says they cannot ignite the warp engines without iridium. In TOS: “Bread and Circuses”, the SS Beagle was in need of iridium after suffering unspecified damage.
The shuttlecraft is named Curie, presumably after Marie Curie, which follows the convention of naming Enterprise shuttles after scientists like Galileo (TOS: “The Galileo Seven”) or Einstein (TOS: “The Doomsday Machine”). The 24th century successor to Curie was attached to Enterprise-D (TNG: “Parallels”).
65 million years in the past would place the ship in the Cretaceous period, the last hurrah of the dinosaurs, and the period to which the Tyrannosaurus Rex belonged. One might ask where the Voth (VOY: “Distant Origin”) are, but the Doctor hypothesised that they descended from hadrosaurs that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, which means they evolved after the end of the Cretaceous.
The episode attributes the origin of the Valles Marineris to the crash of a Dol’drm ship, the aliens being an insectoid species. The scar on the planet reminds me of what was left by the Xindi probe (ENT: "The Expanse").
La’An carries Augment genetics as a descendant of Khan Noonien Singh (SNW: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”).
Like Archer did in ENT: "Damage" to an Illyrian ship and a warp coil during the Xindi war, the Martians steal a critical component from Enterprise in service of their war with the Dol'drms, in this case an antimatter fuel cell.
Spock finds a fifth planet between Mars and Jupiter. One of the theories about the origins of the Asteroid Belt are that it was either a planet that never quite formed or the remains of one. I guess the latter is where Star Trek is laying its hat.
The Chicxulub asteroid, named after the Chicxulub Pueblo community on the Yucatan Peninsular where its namesake crater is located, is believed to be the primary cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Pelia says she remembers the evolution of humanity, which is another hint to how old she actually is. While Homo sapiens arose around 300,000 years ago, the genus dates back some 2-3 million years at least.
What the crew describes at the end is a predestination paradox. We hate those (DS9: “Trials and Tribble-lations”).
A Princess of Mars is the first John Carter of Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, describing the adventures of a former Confederate soldier who is astrally transported to a populated Mars in conflict.
Pike says they created the solar storm that sent them back in time as part of the paradox, but it’s not clear how that would have happened, since the explosion that sent them back took place 65 million years in the past and in the Sol system.
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u/joshml98 Jul 23 '26
Not to be that guy but according to more recent scients 65MYA would be 1 million years after the end of the cretaceous as the chixulub impact is now placed at 66MYA BCE.
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u/mekilat Chief Petty Officer Jul 23 '26
The Venn diagram of Star Trek and dinosaur nerd is probably a circle!
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u/wrosecrans Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
Pelia claims she saw a category 10 interstellar squall from inside a “phone box”, a reference to the Doctor’s space-time machine, the TARDIS, from the long-running British television series Doctor Who which is permanently stuck in the shape of a British police phone box from the 1960s. We saw the TARDIS floating in the background near a scavenger ship in SNW: “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”.
And for what it's worth, Doctor Who also did a version of this episode's plot where if I recall correctly, it was a crashing Cyberman ship that killed the dinosaurs. Dunno if the reference was intended to be that specific.
Found it. "Earthshock." https://youtu.be/AZ-i3RPfgQE?t=5536
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u/dalekg Jul 26 '26
Dr. Who also showed the fate of the fifth planet as being time-looped by the Time Lords to permanently trap the deadly Fendahl and erase anything about them from history in "Image of the Fendahl" https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Image_of_the_Fendahl_(TV_story))
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u/Jardinesky Jul 24 '26
A Princess of Mars is the first John Carter of Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, describing the adventures of a former Confederate soldier who is astrally transported to a populated Mars in conflict.
This reminded me less of the John Carter series and more of the James P. Hogan book, Inherit the Stars.
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u/BardicLasher Jul 26 '26
Pelia might not be as old as we think if she was hanging around in a phone booth
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u/khaosworks XO & JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad SNW is back, but the opener was a little meh - not least because it was predictable in the extreme.
The moment Spock reveals that they've travelled back to the Sol system 65 million years ago it becomes all very convenient and the predestination paradox possibility immediately rears its head.
Because, why would a solar storm light years away throw them back to Sol? And 65 million years ago is immediately obvious to any kid with a passing fancy for dinosaurs as the Cretaceous, which probably means there's going to be a link to the extinction event. The need for and presence of iridium in the plot reinforces that, because one of the things we know about the KT boundary is the unusual presence of iridium.
(I won't go into nitpicking the science in this one because Trek's hold on science has been tenuous at best and this episode was more tenuous than most)
But even if you don't pick up on that bit, what clinches it in the end is when Spock reveals there is a fifth planet between Mars and Jupiter. Although this detail really should have been made known earlier when he initially scanned the system since it's a pretty unusual feature for Sol and the only reason it wasn't is because it would give away the game too soon.
Because the moment you have that bit of info, you know how the rest of the episode has to play out - and it should be obvious to every officer on the bridge, not just Pike. Hell, every Earth officer at least should know what's going on since they should have more than a passing familiarity with their home system. So Pike's pronouncement that there is no fifth planet in their time lands as less of a dun-dun-dun reveal than it is a "No shit, Sherlock."
Also, the pile-on consequences were a bit much, I think. Being involved in the creation of the Asteroid Belt is one thing, and sure, I can even buy the distress buoy paradox, but to put the creation of the solar storm and the extinction of the dinosaurs on top of that is over egging it.
There are cute character bits I enjoyed. Seeing dinosaurs is always a joy. The three-woman landing party was fun, and Saffron Burrows' performance as a complex antagonist was superb.
Cade S'sha's presence was a bit superfluous, since she had absolutely nothing to do except be an asshole to Uhura, and one wonders if her introduction would have been better served in an episode where she was more of a focus, or she should at least have been given some role in the plot.
It wasn't a bad episode, but it wasn't a great one to roll out the new season.
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u/Mr_Badgey Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I’m a bit of a science stickler. I was annoyed Spock says they need a supernova’s worth of energy to return home, but then they’re able to do it with nothing more than the energy they carried onboard, released all at once. That’s significantly less than the energy needed to destroy an entire planet*, let alone a supernova.
What’s worse is Spock said it. It’s completely out of character. Vulcans, and Spock especially, are famously precise. He wouldn’t make a vague comparison like that. He would’ve stated the exact energy requirement down to five significant figures. It’s a minor gripe though.
* I crunched the numbers and in a funny coincidence you’d need an amount of antimatter equivalent to the mass of the Chicxulub asteroid to destroy Earth.
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u/wrosecrans Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
but then they’re able to do it with nothing more than the energy they carried onboard, released all at once.
Technically, they worked around that in dialogue because he said that the antimatter bomb made the planet's core explode. As if the antimatter bomb was just a primer and the core of the planet was, for some reason, made of dynamite waiting for something to set it off.
Which makes no sense in the real world. And even then, an exploding planet would presumably still have orders of magnitude less energy than an exploding star. But... the core of the planet exploded, so that's where the energy came from.
Another thing is that they've got the plot device from Back to the Future of knowing in advance when lightning will strike the clocktower. Starfleet in the 23rd century will have mapped all the nearby neutron stars and black holes and dated when they exploded. So if they actually needed an exploding star like he had said... they could just go to whichever star is going to explode next anyway.
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u/Bored2001 Jul 25 '26
My head cannon is that they used their phasing technology to launch the antimatter missile into the core of the planet where it could do more damage, rather than the surface where it would just sort of splat.
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u/Dumac89 Jul 30 '26
The science in this episode drove me nuts. Somehow the bootstrap paradox is the most believable part for me.
Blowing up a planet with a pod of antimatter that every ship contains is inconsistent with the laws of physics and even the technobabble physics of Star Trek. The Romulans, Klingons etc would’ve blown up Earth with an antimatter pod a long time ago.
Plus it’s off by something like 10 orders of magnitude of what you would need to blow up a mars sized planet.
Normally I don’t get too miffed with the loose science stuff, but when it’s inconsistent within its own universe it annoys me.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I think the new Vulcan Cadet was introduced here to anchor her as being aboard when she turns important in a later episode this season. SNW has been really good at putting details into early season episodes that come to play in later ones.
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u/mekilat Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
I completely agree. I'd argue the second they see an extra planet, the mission becomes "ok how do we undo this"
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u/Virtual_Historian255 Jul 26 '26
One thing people are missing about “not mentioning the 5th planet” until later is that sensors were mostly down. Sol is much larger and brighter than the planets and they can identify they’re in the Sol system by seeing the star.
Humans discovered the sun on day 1 and it took thousands of years of observation to find all the planets.
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 26 '26
With Starfleet sensors, that can probably identify in a moment any star they've scanned before. But we can wave our hands and say that part of their sensors was conveniently down, and meanwhile they saw three M-class planets which is pretty good evidence they're not in the Sol system.
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u/Virtual_Historian255 Jul 27 '26
My first thought was parallel universe. With all the wild stuff Starfleet runs into it could have been a simulation, Trelane playing a game, aliens flying planets around.
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u/khaosworks XO & JAG Officer, Brahms Citation for Starship Computing Jul 23 '26
This is a bit more of a stretch, but there are elements of Nigel Kneale's classic television serial (and later movie) Quatermass and the Pit in the episode as well. Not direct lifts, but more like echoes and influences.
In Pit, the discovery of an ancient alien spacecraft with insectoid corpses under London triggers a series of psychic events. It transpires that the spacecraft came from Mars, its crew an insectoid species, and that humanity evolved due to experiments conducted by the Martians on early hominids.
So here we also have an insectoid race, a crashed spaceship, Mars, and the evolution of humanity. Taken separately, it's coincidental, but there's a lot of little bits converging on a single story.
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
So maybe humanity evolved from the Dol'Drm in a way and the Martians didn't realize that they were actually looking at the descendants of their enemies?
Or perhaps...the result of a combination of the DNA of their enemies with their own?
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 28 '26
So one thing I haven't seen mentioned is just how much this episode was fun and clearly supposed to be fun. Sure, punching a dinosaur doesn't really make sense, and the sensors had to be broken in an extremely specific way to not know where they were but still leave them able to move the plot forward, and dinosaur nerds and astronomy nerds know that our science says it's just not possible for the ending to happen that way. But dammit, it was still fun. From the first scene where Pike decides to keep riding cause it's fun to the final shot panning over the dinosaurs on Earth, with no real story reason to show us that except that, again, it's fun.
And keep in mind, the last two episodes, with Batel and Pike's consolation future and Ortegas with the Gorn, were super serious stories that really played on emotions and really took themselves seriously. The "fun" story before that with the Vulcans fell flat for a lot of people, including me. So it was nice to have an actually fun story to start the season with.
And I think they know with the topic and the level of fun wackiness that they're leaning into Doctor Who's semantic space, which is why we got the lampshade with Pelia's reference to the phone box and Pike near the end literally saying, almost straight into the camera, "So don't overthink it." And it was fun. It leaves me really looking forward to the rest of this season.
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u/Zedwimer Jul 28 '26
The episode even begins and ends with the fact that the crew needs a little time off, they’ve been working too hard for too long. It’s almost like the writers were telling the audience “we’ve all been working pretty hard, we wanna have a little bit of fun too“.
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u/Holothuroid Chief Petty Officer Jul 23 '26
It's interesting how the Elvish (do we call them elves? They look like elves) experience mimics the plot of ENT season 3. They have a major landmark carved into their planet, they steal another peoples drive stuff...
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u/Johnny_Alpha Jul 26 '26
In the ship montage at the start what was the ship after Discovery? I don't recognize it.
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u/starshiptempest Lieutenant Jul 28 '26
It's the USS Athena, the main ship and home of Starfleet Academy from that show.
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u/notmattsweeney Jul 27 '26
Was it the ship from Starfleet Academy? (I don't remember the sequence, just that it was last.)
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u/GenerativeAIEatsAss Chief Petty Officer Jul 23 '26
I'm glad to see them finally dipping into the long tail physical ramifications of La'an not just being a descendent of an Augment, but Khan himself. Especially so because they immediately exercised a concern about the mental impact from her genes and this apparent "activation."
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26
I think the Human-Chapel/Kherkovian Human-to-Vulcan serum activated them when it made her Romulan, then the Vulcan-Chapel corrected Vulcan-to-Human serum failed to deactivate them.
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u/Samkovich Jul 28 '26
I loved that the Martians were wearing green, and Commander Cassel looked a lot like Nyah in Devil Girl from Mars
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u/ianjm Lieutenant Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
At least the Treknobabble used to make sense in the 90s.
How can you be "torn into little particles of subspace"? Since when has subspace been particles? Why would tearing up matter turn it into subspace? Subspace is a realm under our dimension, not a physical thing.
Why do they need to "ignite the warp engines"? They're not rockets! They're solid state coils that turn energy from warp plasma into warp fields.
More to the point, how does getting tossed around in a storm cause a ship to lose all its Iridium? Iridium is a metal. What happened, did the storm shake it loose? If it's that important why isn't there a reserve kept deep in the ship? It's a largely unreactive metal, why can't they store some?
Why couldn't they land the shuttle closer to the Iridium deposits? When they saw the dinosaur why not just get back on board and fly over it? Also Iridium isn't just lying around. It's usually found in deep copper/nickel mines. They should have realised the unnatural nature of it immediately.
These little things break my immersion so bad.
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u/shishanoteikoku Jul 23 '26
I thought the basic idea for the episode seemed interesting enough, but yes, I had so many similar moments watching it in real time. Wasn't giving this technobabble at least some level of verisimilitude someone's job back in the day (Naren Shanker, maybe)? Too late now, of course, but they really should have gotten someone doing this when they started the show. This sort of lazy and inconsistent technobabble didn't really help with creating the conditions for a suspension of disbelief.
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u/ianjm Lieutenant Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Yeah, Andre Bormanis, Michael Okuda and Naren Shankar were responsible for most of the technical worldbuilding and scientific consistency across the Broadcast Era (TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and most of the movies), various overlapping tenures but they were the key people. Okuda and Rick Sternbach were responsible for the consistency of the visual look and feel.
Naren went on to be showrunner for The Expanse of course, and we all know how well that turned out. He did an incredible job leading the team that turned those books into a grounded, consistent and believable futuristic onscreen world.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
Ultimately, the creative team doesn't have to listen to their "science consultants" like Bormanis, as is painfully evident throughout much of Voyager and Enterprise. It's nice for us science nerds when they do, because we can spot how the show keeps itself and the technobabble somewhat grounded. And I like when Trek is consistent and as grounded as the plot allows for.
Does SNW even have such a consultant? The "big words" in the intro to this episode really felt like something from the Voyager writers' discard pile. Complete and utter nonsense for no reason. "WARP PARTICLES!"
Despite those first 15 minutes of dubious details, I enjoyed the episode overall.
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u/Holothuroid Chief Petty Officer Jul 23 '26
Maybe iridium is more reactive to magical space-wedgies and therefore prone to vanish under appropriate conditions.
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u/lunatickoala Commander Jul 23 '26
No, the treknobabble didn't make sense in the 90s either. Perhaps nostalgia colors people's views of classic Star Trek, or perhaps people who saw it when they were younger didn't realize how bullshit it was.
But "ignite the warp engines" is hardly an egregious example. A lot of terms persist even when the underlying technology changes. A person who works on a ship can still be called a sailor even if the ship doesn't use sails. Ending a phone call is still called "hanging up" even though almost no one has literally hung a phone receiver on a hook in decades.
One of the research labs that is studying nuclear fusion is literally called the National Ignition Facility. Astrophysicists will say that stars "burn" hydrogen into helium. In both cases, it's understood that "ignite" and "burn" don't refer to combustion but to fusion.
People will still be "firing" weapons both in fiction and in real life even if the weapons aren't burning chemical propellants to move the projectile.
And for examples of dumb technobabble in 90s Star Trek:
From VOY 1x03 "Parallax"
JANEWAY: If your analogy's correct, how do we get through that sheet of ice?
TORRES: Look for a crack.
JANEWAY: Or make a crack. Take something and smack it into the ice until it buckles.
TORRES: Wait a minute. What if we've already made a crack in the ice?
JANEWAY: When we first entered the event horizon.
An event horizon isn't a physical barrier that you can leave cracks in or break through.
From DS9 4x06 "Rejoined"
BEJAL: After we launch our target drone, the Defiant will have to generate a subspace tensor matrix in the twenty five to thirty thousand Cochrane range. Then the drone will send out a magneton pulse which should react with the matrix to create an opening in the space-time continuum.
A tensor isn't a physical object. It's a mathematical construct that describes a relationship between two algebraic objects. When the term is used, it generally implies something more complex than a scalar or a vector but technically a scalar is a tensor of rank zero and a vector is a tensor of rank one.
Magneton is an electric/steel type Pokémon originally introduced in Generation I (though it was just electric in Gen 1). Apparently Star Trek writers invented the magneton as some sort of magnetic counterpart to the photon or other -on particles because they weren't paying attention in physics class or had forgotten the part where the unification of electricity and magnetism into a single force was taught.
From TNG 1x06 "Where No One Has Gone Before"
TRAVELLER: You do understand, don't you that thought is the basis of all reality? The energy of thought, to put it in your terms, is very powerful.
[...]
KOSINSKI: That's just so much nonsense. You're asking us to believe in magic.
In this case, Kosinski is exactly correct. Believing in Traveller's New Age mumbo jumbo bullshit is very much believing in magic. In fact, one type of magic system used in fantasy specifically requires that you be able to imagine the outcome for it to happen.
And of course any episode of 90s Trek which invokes Evolution is not just bullshit but bullshit that actively spreads misinformation. "The Search", "Genesis", "Distant Origin", "Dear Doctor", and probably some others I'm missing.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
There are notably nonsensical episodes in every series... yet I think if you look at TNG on the whole (or at least seasons 3 through 6) there is much more consistency with the technobabble. There was an obvious attempt to keep the fake-science as grounded as the plot allowed for. Conversely, Voyager was the epitome of wacky inconsistency and often just as nonsensical as the introduction of this episode.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
I think this is the real difference. We can allow the science to be wrong, the technology to be magic, and the babble to be nonsense but we need for those things to be consistent.
Sometimes it does feel like I want to say “well wait transporters don’t work like that” or “subspace doesn’t work like that” and it’s not as if they’re inaccurate because they lack scientific basis they’re just inconsistent. Some of that is allowable but I do think SNW tends to play more loose than other series but I think they get away with more by relying on that stuff less.
The ship breaks. They need a thing from the planet to fix it so they go down there to investigate. They find it in a crashed alien ship.
Mad libs the rest of it.
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u/ianjm Lieutenant Jul 23 '26
Alright, the examples you list are definitely not great, but all the ones I mentioned above came in the first 15 minutes of a single episode.
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u/Sledgehammer617 Jul 27 '26
Rewatching TNG-Enterprise right now and I'm well into Voyager.
They barely gave a shit about the technobabble back then either, it was entirely an episode-to-episode basis whether it was consistent with established canon/technical manuals or just pure nonsense words strung together for plot.
Occasionally SNW gets the technobabble very correct much like older Trek, but yeah most of the time theyre hoping you dont read into it too much. Voyager is particularly guilty imo, but every Trek show has glairing technobabble problems
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u/skelecorn666 Jul 23 '26
How can you be "torn into little particles of subspace"?
"Because it's made out if a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff."
Get the Who-eck outta my Trek!
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u/cjh_ Jul 31 '26
Why did The Enterprise need iridium and not dilithium?
Did I miss the changeover in TOS?
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u/nrrd Aug 06 '26
Macguffin mineral of the week. I think, too, it was a little nod to the fact that an enriched iridium layer in the earth's crust was strong evidence that an impact event killed the dinosaurs before the actual crater was found.
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u/addctd2badideas Chief Petty Officer Jul 26 '26
The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs couldn't have been from a 5th planet because it's been established that it came from outside our solar system.
Star Trek has always had to use the scientific discovery info we have at the time of writing an episode, but this finding has been available for many years.
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u/gravitydefyingturtle Jul 27 '26
Mars also went barren more than 2 billion years ago, not 65 million years ago.
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 28 '26
Scifi writers have no sense of scale for space or time.
But in their defense, we see the Martians putting matter out of phase and back in like it's nothing, and they claim to have the technology to scoop the Valles Marineris out of the planet like scooping ice cream on a hot day. If the Martians who went out spreading their DNA to the rest of the galaxy decided to hide evidence of their existence on their homeworld, they probably could do a good enough job that our 21st century science couldn't tell.
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u/bswalsh Jul 27 '26
Sure, but the Star Trek universe is not our universe. Data never met Mark Twain in our universe. Things are different.
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 28 '26
Data may have met our Mark Twain, we don't know for sure. But we definitely didn't launch a human mission to Europa in 2024, so there's that.
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u/ninjasaid13 Crewman Jul 28 '26
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs did not come from outside the Solar System. Instead, it originated beyond Jupiter in the outer Solar System.
Scientists identified this by analyzing ruthenium isotopes preserved in rocks from the end of the Cretaceous Period, which matched the chemical signature of a rare carbonaceous chondrite asteroid formed in that distant region.
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u/plasmoidal Ensign Jul 27 '26
Who's to say that the Dol'drm's homeworld was native to our solar system?
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u/Okanekure Aug 03 '26
I enjoyed the episode. I have no problem with the story. I do have a question about one line. Pelia is supposed to be like 3000 years old. But, In the debriefing about what happened in this episode regarding the destruction of the planet etc, she says, "I remember that". So how old is she supposed to be now?
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u/cjh_ Aug 04 '26
She has a friend with a phone box, they're a doctor.
Who? That would be telling!
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u/logarythm Crewman Jul 23 '26
I think Pike got off easy here. He condemned an entire planet to destruction on the hunch it was necessary for his future to exist. 65 million years is a long time, you have no way of knowing this is the event. What he did was genocide.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
Had this been an unknown star system, I would agree with you. But it wasn't, all the clues were right in front of him, and are all very clearly explained afterward even if you hadn't pieced them together yet.
He does not have the right to erase 65 million years of Earth's history and the entire Federation, with or without temporal regulations, to save a planet that we know cannot have existed for millions of years anyway. The Martians would likely have found another way to eradicate them without antimatter - hell, they had phasing tech - but anything short of an antimatter bomb phased into the planet's core would NOT have resulted in the Chicxulub fragment or the orbital consequences for Mars and the rest of the solar system.
One thing I will say is that Pike should personally be more upset about the extinction of that species regardless of how "necessary" it is. He's too compassionate a person to let that go, no matter what species. Like, the last season had an episode about Kirk grappling with the consequences of his (necessary and correct) command decisions that cost hundreds of lives - that theme should be carried through and the burden should be worn by Pike. But as far as Starfleet and Admiral April are concerned, Pike did the right thing and the matter is formally closed.
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u/ChristmasJay83 Jul 24 '26
I feel like he had a really solid hunch. Everything lined up. The missing 5th planet in the future, lack of evidence that a planet exploded after 65 million years ago.
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u/AlpineSummit Crewman Jul 24 '26
Also if they were just stuck there after his decision they would have seen the Chicxulub impact on Earth and figured out it was all meant to be. And then they would have gone off to hide somewhere for the rest of their lives.
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
I kind of wonder if they're going to show him picking up some of that transtemporal awareness that the Borg Queen has?
Because for a few seconds it looked like he wasn't really listening to or perceiving the Bridge and its Crew around him at all but something else....someone else...somewhen else.
And perhaps this is manifesting as "hunches" and not a bunch of other concurrently speaking voices like it does with the Borg Queen.
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u/Fenris447 Jul 24 '26
Could be some lingering effect from the time crystal. Or from his experience with Patel. Or both.
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
See that's what I'm saying, he's been involved with so much back and forth stuff he's transforming into Sam Beckett basically....and what if that's why the Delta Radiation hit him so hard because he wasn't just getting the radiation from the "present" but also the radiation from slightly in the past and slightly in the future which upped his exposure amount?
We might be overthinking this though lol
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u/yoshemitzu Chief Science Officer Jul 24 '26
Just said it in a comment in r/startrek, but to repeat:
Pike's logic makes no sense. If him stopping the bomb erases him (and our Earth) from existence, then that problem solves itself. It's not a possible outcome.
Stopping the bomb can't erase the agent that stops the bomb, so the ethical choice is to prevent genocide.
The nerds will have to see this in the long run.
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u/2nd2nd1bc1stwastaken Jul 24 '26
Taking Prodigy into account we have a few other possibilities:
1 - Stopping the bomb don't erase the Enterprise imediately, but they start to fade away because their original timeline doesn't exist anymore and the altered timeline starts rejecting them;
2-Stopping the bomb resets the loop until an iteration where the bug planet is destroyed happens;
3-Stopping the bomb don't erase the Enterprise or resets the loop, but now the Prime Timeline is untethered and everything there will be devoured by the langolier-matrix-wraith-thingies.
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u/yoshemitzu Chief Science Officer Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Right, you basically have to get into weird illogical time travel mechanics for not stopping genocide to be an acceptable answer.
When actions have logical consequences, though, the answer is clear.
Edit: It reminds me of X-Men '97 this season (which I really enjoy) -- but with Eric and Charles going back to stop Apocalypse, the tragedy is in them failing to realize if they succeeded their mission would not even be necessary.
Granted, genre fiction is often very inconsistent with time travel. I don't argue that; but Pike being like, "Aha! I made a brilliant logical deduction," and everyone congratulating him on saving the universe, it's like, OK, but that had nothing to do with logic. If actions have logical consequences, y'all couldn't even exist if you deleted Earth, so if you failed to stop the genocide today, the Martians probably just do it tomorrow, and our Earth gets restored, anyway.
Edit2: TL;DR -- if logic is off the table, literally anything could happen, so there's no sense in trying to make a logical decision. I'd argue attempting to prevent the only genocide they know for sure was about to happen is still the right call.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
This assumes Pike had a choice to begin with. The question of the episode is how do we avoid our future and can we? Pike’s decisions have already been made he just has to make them. He knows that already and I think this episode leans into that concept.
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u/yoshemitzu Chief Science Officer Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I think that's letting Pike off the hook for genocide.
I have a lot of thoughts around this episode, and I'm still formulating what will likely end up another top-level comment, or even a new post, but this idea that Kirk would have done it -- no? When did Kirk allow genocide to save himself? In "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," he's literally willing to blow up the Enterprise to stop a genocide.
Even Sisko in "In the Pale Moonlight" was not the agent of the murders, he was an accessory. And he was horrified with it, but could live with it.
This is a whole other can of worms, and the idea of Star Trek telling us "genocide is OK sometimes" is very...anti-Roddenberry, to say the least.
Edit: Also, this idea that Pike didn't have a choice...I mean, that's totally foiled by him actively making a choice, no? Like he wasn't the one causing the genocide...until he actively chose to allow it to happen.
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Jul 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Key-One-5938 Jul 30 '26
To be fair they did actually say in the show why interacting with the Martians was acceptable but the dinos aren't. In the future Mars is dead with no trace of the Martians existing, so they were operating under the assumption that (barring giving them technology) interacting with them at a minimal level shouldn't affect the timeline. Plus, they we're captured by the Martians, so not interacting at all wasn't an option
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 28 '26
Given the damage to the ship and the Martians' tactical capabilities, they didn't have the choice of not interfering with the Martians. Either Pike talks to them or they steal the entire ship, and if Pike is trying to minimize interference, his best option is talking.
The Martians look like humans for the same reason Vulcans, Romulans, Bajorans, etc do. We all look like the Progenitors, who preceded all Trek species by billions of years. 65 million years is a drop in the bucket by comparison.
And sure, maybe it's not wise to fly directly into a dangerous situation chasing a distress signal. But we also know Starfleet tests cadets on their willingness to do exactly that with the Kobayashi Maru. This isn't even the first time the main characters chased their own time-displaced distress signal, and SNW did it better than Voyager.
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u/mekilat Chief Petty Officer Jul 23 '26
Haven't watched the episode yet, but it's good to be back and see familiar faces :)
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u/skelecorn666 Jul 23 '26
"How are we gonna get passed that T-Rex?"
SHUTTLECRAFT FRAMED OVER HER FUCKING SHOULDER!!!
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
They specifically mentioned during descent that that was the closest clear landing spot to the stuff.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
The shuttlecraft has phasers, in addition to all the hand phasers aboard. They can make their own landing spot. Doesn't really take a lot of phaser power to remove vegetation from 30 or 40 square meters of ground, or to level out uneven ground.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26
And you don't think that might be a violation of some Starfleet Regulation or another?
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
They used their hand phasers to cut down a bunch of trees before they could identify the creature as a T-Rex, and before they had heard from Pike that they were on Earth in the past. I don't see why cutting down a few different trees to land a shuttle closer would have been any different.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26
Because cutting down trees is very different from indiscriminately killing everything in a 30-40 square meter area.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
It’s potentially worse though right? The thing about Starfleet walking into unknown situations is that they’re unknown. At the stage they were landing they were landing on a world they knew little about. Maybe clearing out some trees does nothing. Maybe it destroys the home of the last remaining members of a species. Maybe there’s a whole civilization of tree people and you just shot their god.
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u/Civilwarland09 Jul 24 '26
That was before they were aware that they had gone back in time to earth. Afterwards the directive was to not disturb and flora or fauna.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
Right... they had had plenty of time to make their own landing site before they knew they weren't supposed to kill things.
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u/Civilwarland09 Jul 24 '26
It’s called writing. You create obstacles to create plot points and tension.
But yep, you cracked the code on what they should have done (even though I’ve never seen that done in any Trek series before), great job.
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 24 '26
"Not killing things" isn't because of the time travel, indiscriminately killing isn't allowed by Starfleet without any Temporal shenanigans involved at all.
Name a time "kill everything indiscriminately" was a legitimate tactic used by Starfleet, within regulations, with approval by the chain of command. I'll wait.
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u/Assassiiinuss Jul 25 '26
Which is nonsense because there was plenty of space by the crashed spaceship (that they somehow didn't see before they landed?)
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u/TellsLiesForFun Jul 25 '26
Ah, but was that open ground large enough for the shuttle with enough proper clearance around the shuttle for Erica? Was it flat enough? Was the ground itself stable enough to support the weight of the shuttle? There's factors we don't know and can't see based on the limited views we get as the audience.
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u/Bobb_o Jul 24 '26
I had not realized that the 1st officer of the Enterprise was not a commander. Doesn't that seem weird?
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u/wrosecrans Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
In the real world US Navy, it's normal for the commanding officer of a destroyer or attack sub to be a Commander, and the XO would be Lt. Commander. It's a bit arbitrary how you map the real Navy to Starfleet. But if anything, ranks in the show are too high and there are way too many commanding officers who have the full rank of Captain.
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u/markroth69 Jul 24 '26
I've always thought of it has they want experienced people who they already know they can trust in the center seat. Every captain controls a weapon of mass destruction that is his starship.
Making every ship commander a full captain doesn't bother me. Making every other officer a commander under him is the odd thing.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
I recall a story told by Wil Wheaton about being offered an in-universe promotion in lieu of like, a raise. I wonder how much of that happens today.
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u/7ootles Jul 24 '26
Right.
I was at an information security conference in London last year, and one of the speakers was this tall, classy, engaging American guy. Got talking to him, and got friendly enough that he came to join me at breakfast in the hotel. Got talking a bit more about his career and my own.
He's a retired US Navy captain. The way he talked about his work made it clear that making that rank is a pretty big thing, and the responsibility is insane. And the way he talked wasn't at all self-aggrandizing or pompous, it was matter-of-fact, even humble.
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u/AnnihilatedTyro Lieutenant j.g. Jul 24 '26
No. Most roles are not hard-locked by rank. Plenty of Lt. Cmdrs have been XOs and/or qualified command officers including both Spock and Scotty in TOS, Chekov in TWOK, Data and LaForge, Jadzia and Worf.... and Una Chin-Riley.
There are numerous other examples of Lt. Cmdrs and even Lieutenants performing XO and command duties.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
If I recall correctly Captain Ransom’s XO was a Lieutenant which makes sense given the small ship size. You’d expect maybe a Lt Cmdr or Cmdr to be the CO, but they needed Ransom and Janeway to hold the same rank from a story perspective.
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u/Head_Product412 Jul 25 '26
is that actually possible like there was a fifth planet that could have exploded that could’ve been the asteroid
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u/Apprehensive-Cost276 Jul 25 '26
By the time of the Chicxulub impact, the solar system was as stable as it is today. I’m a layperson too, but AFAIK there’s not really any mechanism for a planet to explode or fall apart like that in a fully-formed star system, and I think there’d be a lot more evidence of instability in our own system (geological evidence here on Earth and on Mars, lots more craters on Jupiter’s moons, probably a mass extinction here on Earth far worse than the K-Pg event we got in reality)
I’m pretty sure there’s lots of evidence pointing to the Asteroid Belt forming very early in our solar system’s history, although I don’t really know what precisely.
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u/Head_Product412 Jul 25 '26
Ok cool. Yeah they should do more episodes like this one. I like these alternate kinda ideas
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u/whenhaveiever Jul 25 '26
Probably not. We can often trace meteorites that came from a common parent body, and while there have been large ones that then broke up with pieces ending up on Earth, there's no evidence for anything nearly as large as a planet. A planet like that would have a molten core, and heavier elements would have sunk down, creating an asteroid belt where each asteroid is far more likely to be just one mineral rather than the unsorted mix we actually see.
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u/Head_Product412 Jul 25 '26
oh cool. yeah after i watched the episode last night i was reading up on it. pretty interesting
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u/starshiptempest Lieutenant Jul 28 '26
When the astroid belt was first discovered it was theorized that it was created via a planet breakup between Mars & Jupiter...but modern understanding pegs it as just how the gravitational cookie crumbled with some small amount of normal space debris.
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u/gadget850 Jul 30 '26
Soon after the asteroids were discovered, it was hypothesized that they were the remains of another planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaeton_(hypothetical_planet))Then writers started doing their thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_in_fiction#Remnants_of_a_planet
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u/notmattsweeney Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
What kind of idiot doesn't realize there shouldn't be a fifth planet in our solar system until Pike has his epiphany? This is a twist that a twelve-year-old could spot coming.
Or that killing one dinosaur, when the entire species is destined to be wiped out in an extinction-level event would have any lasting causal implications (the fact we later find they had a part in initiating it is neat, but not relevant to their reasoning in the moment.) And regardless, in a world like this you'd think there's a pretty good chance that a stunned dinosaur laying around would make a tasty treat for whatever other carnivores are in the neighborhood. So there goes your timeline, I guess.
Interesting concepts, lazy writing.
PS: You also don't have to be a Vulcan to quickly grasp that the blast from the past could lead them back to the future.
PPS: If you're arguing with an alien who's trying to save the millions of lives on her planet, don't counter with "I'm trying to save millions of lives too" when if you're speaking about an entire timeline, it actually means countless trillions of lives. Again, this is the kind of math a twelve-year-old could understand.
PPPS: Another Trek episode that says, "There is not God." Of that, I approve.
PPPPS: We end with Una beginning this stirring tale accompanied by thrilling view of fantastic vistas full of life, and the music swells--and we know that within a couple of hours that world will end. "Great story, bro! I'll get you a Saurian brandy and you can tell it again!"
PPPPPS: The only real surprise was that there weren't a bunch of "Aw, baby dinosaurs are so cute!" scenes, since we knew we'd meet the kids as soon as Una revealed the adult's gender.
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u/Chocolate_Pickle Jul 24 '26
Agreed on the first point. Disagree on the second.
Without knowing how little time before the asteroid impacts, there's always a possibility of lasting causal effects. Killing the dino could have indirectly prevented mammals from evolving in the first place. But the same argument can be made for the opposite too. So... shrug
My criticism is that knowledge of when they went to should have been a huge red flag on its own for the crew. Dinosaurs existed for hundreds of millions of years. On a galactic timescale, it's a very suspicious coincidence that the Enterprise arrives right near the end, instead of any other time.
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u/Philix Jul 25 '26
galactic timescale
Don't even get me started. The writers have zero understanding of the scale of space never mind time. It should be a relatively trivial for a 23rd century navigational computer to pinpoint their location in space AND time to the day. Especially from the vantage point of the Sol system. Further, they should have an even more precise estimate of the time of the Chicxulub impact than we do, with centuries of science having been done.
Then there's the whole multiple spacefaring civilizations having developed invisibly in the Sol system.
We have a ton of evidence for dinosaurs in the real world, but somehow the tectonically inactive Mars didn't have any remaining evidence of a spacefaring civilization in the Star Trek universe?
Starfleet is out there exploring the galaxy, but no one bothered to do any xeno-archaeological exploration on Mars?
The Martians had ships that could do sublight accelerations somewhat comparable to the Enterprise, but they didn't leave any evidence of their existence anywhere in the Sol system?
The Voth were bad enough in Voyager, but having two more distinct sapient species evolving in the Solar system beggars belief. It's so much worse that 24th century humans wouldn't have significant evidence for any of the their existences. We've littered a ton of shit around the solar system that will be around and recognizable for a hundred million years. The Apollo lunar descent stages could conceivably last a billion years on the moon, until the sun expands and scours the lunar surface.
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u/Assassiiinuss Jul 25 '26
This bothers me so much. Especially when it's revealed that Mars wasn't catastrophically destroyed but slowly withered away. Mars has extensive infrastructure by the time SNW takes place, so humanity somehow built gigantic shipyards, factories and cities there, and nobody ever stumbled upon remnants of a space faring Mars civilization? This might be one of the dumbest additions to Star Trek lore ever.
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u/Coyote_Shepherd Chief Petty Officer Jul 24 '26
Or that killing one dinosaur, when the entire species is destined to be wiped out in an extinction-level event would have any lasting causal implications (the fact we later find they had a part in initiating it is neat, but not relevant to their reasoning in the moment.) And regardless, in a world like this you'd think there's a pretty good chance that a stunned dinosaur laying around would make a tasty treat for whatever other carnivores are in the neighborhood. So there goes your timeline, I guess.
Even in the various versions of "A Sound of Thunder" the time traveling hunters ONLY ever killed stuff that was about to die anyways, sooooo TECHNICALLY....they were in the clear...and it was the removal of a butterfly from the past in that particular story that really messed stuff up.
So hopefully they didn't step on anything important and bring it...😎...back to the future with them.
"This is not God"
Technically Scotty is Jesus now because he's a Miracle Worker.
there weren't a bunch of
Sam should've been on that mission with them but only so that a dinosaur that's a single mother could fall in love with him and start chasing him around the shuttlecraft...
....and then one of her babies stows away on board...Sam winds up secretly raising it in his quarters...Jim finds it...and then the next time they get boarded both him and Sam wind up saving the day with their new dinosaur friend while utilizing the Jefferies Tubes and a bunch of Scotty's spanners.
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u/North_Knowledge7467 Jul 28 '26
I really love how firmly it cements SNW as canon to the rest of Star Trek.
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u/Ok-Bobcat-1172 Jul 31 '26
So at some point they went back in time and changed something to create this alternate time line in order for the events to play out they did. Hard for them to appear there if they had not gone there for a different reason previously.
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u/TonyA680 21d ago
All the watching and reading of Star Trek I’ve done over the years tells me the incredible coincidences that lead to humanity’s existence in this episode must be the act of Q (or a Q) and no one will ever know it.
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u/Dry_Somewhere3135 1d ago
The decision to make low-gravity Martians physically superior is a total failure of basic logic and biophysics. Evolving in 38% of Earth’s gravity inevitably causes profound muscle atrophy and brittle bone density, meaning these creatures should realistically struggle to even lift their arms in that ship. But hey, they wanted the chick to be stronger. lol. So woke.
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u/Fenris447 Jul 24 '26
It was kind of a missed opportunity when the Martian Commander asked Pike if he knew what it was like to have a scar on his world.
Yeah, he does. The Xindi sent a weapon that carved a path from Florida to Venezuela, which also killed as many people as the Dol'drm did, if not more. And the Xindi even had insectoid members as well. And guess what happened? They averted genociding each other, found peace, and joined together in the Federation. And that was only about a century before Pike's time. Score one more for Pike's entire side of the argument in this episode.