Strange New Worlds: Among the Lotus Eaters

A new episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was released today -- and I'll mark the occasion with my thoughts on last week's episode, "Among the Lotus Eaters."

The Enterprise is sent to pre-warp planet Rigel VII, to investigate evidence of cultural contamination from a brief mission Pike led there five years earlier. But this mission will be more difficult than expected, as a strange property of the planet causes people to forget all memories but their most deeply ingrained skills -- a phenomenon that affects both the landing party and the Enterprise crew in orbit.

Much has been written (by me and others) about how Strange New Worlds is the Star Trek series that most captures the vibe of classic Star Trek. Usually, that just means that this series is largely episodic and not built on epic season-long story arcs. But here, the story and script itself feel a lot like an episode of the original series.

Part of that here is that this episode is a sort of sequel to back story established in the original Star Trek pilot episode, "The Cage." From this standpoint, the episode is surprisingly successful to me. It could have felt like a transparent writing exercise: the writers were given a few random details to have to work into their story: there's a planet with primitive aliens who wear weird helmets and live in a big castle; there was a mission here where people died and many others were injured, which had a profound emotional impact on Pike. Given these details, build out a full story. Aaaaand go.

But the ways in which the larger story was fleshed out features several plot choices that also seem very much like what the original series might have done. The idea of an alien planet with a rigid caste system that Our Heroes have to come in and puncture sounds like the most classic Star Trek. And it was peppered with lots of just-this-side-of-hokey elements like classic Star Trek would have done: referring to amnesia with a ritualistic term like "The Forgetting," a mysterious totem with carved symbols being the only source of history, the myth of a casket of memories to be opened. Hell, there are classic Star Trek episodes that featured elements very much like these things. ("The Apple," "The Paradise Syndrome," "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.")

I'm not pointing all this out as a weakness of the episode. Indeed, one of the things that makes Strange New Worlds so good is that it's consistently able to package these sort of classic Trek vibes in a more modern wrapper -- and it does so again here. But where the conception of this episode worked pretty well for me, some of the execution wasn't as strong.

You can't blame the writers for trusting their talented cast of actors here; they've been able to pull off basically everything thrown at them so far. But this episode asks a LOT. Anson Mount (finally given a meaty role in an episode this season) has to stomp around screaming about his memories in one scene. Melissa Navia has to repeat "I'm Erica Ortegas. I fly the ship!" and keep it inspirational and not funny. (She's being asked to pull a Mandy Patinkin.) And pretty much, these big asks stay just on the right side of dramatic... yet you can't overlook that they're a tiny bit silly at the same time.

Actually, for Navia in particular, this episode made me wish for a true Ortegas-centric episode soon. Ortegas is the one character who hasn't yet been the featured A-plot character at all (through last season or this one). And while this episode certainly gave the character a "hero moment" (and she's had plenty of delightful character moments all along the way), we still haven't really seen the episode that tells us more about Ortegas' background. (And obviously, an episode about memory loss isn't going to be the vehicle for that.)

A couple of my other criticisms are more persnickety and specific. That tinnitus sound effect was intolerably over the top, mixed at too high a volume relative to the rest of the episode. (You didn't need to make the audience live tinnitus that much to get the point across!) After the episode made a point of detailing certain knowledge not susceptible to memory loss, it's then a little clear why Spock loses his ability to read. (Is it because English isn't his native language? Is it a reference to the dyslexia we were told he has?)

But even in an episode that isn't as sharp as other Strange New Worlds have been, we're a long, long way from an episode being "bad." It's simply not as good. There's still an intriguing sci-fi gimmick here, well woven with compelling character arcs, and performed by a top-notch cast. So I'd still give "Among the Lotus Eaters" (that title is oh-so classic Trek too!) a B.