When it becomes clear that Captain Batel has not recovered from her ordeal with the Gorn, Dr. M'Benga is forced to explored more radical treatments for her condition. Enterprise must retrieve a unique flower from a planet in disputed space, even as Klingons prowl the area, and an unexpected obstacle meets M'Benga and Pike on the planet surface. Meanwhile, the effects of encountering the Gorn also linger with Ortegas, who becomes increasingly insubordinate in clashes with Number One.
I cannot say enough about how much I like the way Strange New Worlds approaches serialized storytelling. Instead of devoting an entire season to an intergalactic threat, the writers honor continuity for the characters as they nimbly hop from one classic weekly episode to the next. A quick "previously on" catches us up (and you'd be forgiven for needing that after two years), and then we're onto an interesting tale about the consequences of M'Benga's actions against a Klingon war criminal, coming home to roost.
I'm pretty sure you have to reach all the way back to the Next Generation's Lursa and B'Etor to find Klingon women -- adversaries, at least -- as charismatic and fun as this episode's Bytha. She's a character with a legitimate grievance, a distinctly Klingon way of pursuing it, and the right concept of "honor" to serve up a great twist at the end of the story.
More compelling still, though, were the interactions between Pike and M'Benga throughout the episode. I enjoyed the silly moments (like when they lost their shuttle), appreciated the way the show depicted zombies (and then was unafraid to actually say the Z word we were all thinking), and applauded that M'Benga had to come clean and confess to Pike: he'd done exactly the morally-compromised thing Pike believed he'd never have done. What's more, Pike basically has to "be okay" with it -- whether that's his instinct or not -- because M'Benga is the only one who can save Batel's life.
Speaking of Starfleet heroes behaving in unheroic ways, the B-plot with Ortegas was an interesting look at PTSD and how it can alter someone's behavior, perhaps without them even realizing it. I like the way this subplot gave us a long stretch of Number One in command... and even included La'An in a nice scene where she weighed in. But then, this is another thing Strange New Worlds does so well -- finding at least one meaty scene for almost every character, even when they aren't the episode's focus. (They also did that here with Spock and Chapel in the mindmeld scene with Batel.)
The show continues to be ridiculously ambitious. It would have been so easy to save money in the script stage by cutting the two or three pages of zero-gravity aboard Enterprise during the final act... but the production decided to take that on just to add punch to a key action sequence. Add in dozens of background zombie actors in elaborate makeup, multiple indoor and outdoor environments on an alien planet, and extensive shots of spaceships navigating debris, and you get an episode that feels like it had a massive budget and put every dollar of it on screen.
Alright -- not every element of this episode felt pitch perfect. The idea that all this was motivated by a quest for a flower? I imagine that with choices like this, the series is trying to embrace its nature as a narrative prequel to a show made in the 1960s. Still, to me this felt like one step too hokey to gel with modern television sensibilities. And that climactic knife fight between Bytha and M'Benga gave such overt Michael Jackson's "Beat It" vibes that it was hard not to laugh.
Still, I think that even a Strange New Worlds that isn't hitting a homer on every pitch (like it seemed to be in season two) is still a Star Trek show I eagerly await each week. I give "Shuttle to Kenfori" a B+.
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