‘The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail’ provides the crucible that ‘Strange New Worlds’ has been building towards since before it even existed: the forging of the team that made ‘Star Trek’.
A few weeks ago in Strange New Worlds‘ up-and-down third season, “A Space Adventure Hour” delivered a deeply unsubtle paean to the creation of Star Trek. This week, Strange New Worlds does much the same: but this time the birth of Star Trek is within the text itself, making for a much more interesting lens on the birth of an icon.
From the moment that it opens, it becomes clear that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” (named for a Vulcan idiom that Spock uses later on) is not going to be a typical episode of Strange New Worlds. Not in that “oh, something’s going to be kooky and fun!” way that you might expect after last week’s dire-stakes episode and the season’s general back-and-forth in tone swaps so far, but because we do not open on the Enterprise, or with her crew at all: instead, on the personal log of Commander Kirk, aboard the U.S.S. Farragut.
At which point the planet the Farragut was monitoring—and Kirk was butting heads with his captain, V’Rel (Zoe Doyle), over beaming down and surveying—explodes. Just like last week, everyone immediately locks in, especially Jim, when V’Rel is incapacitated by the extreme damage caused by the Farragut‘s proximity to an exploding planet. But things go somehow even more badly when, of course, the Enterprise beams to respond to the Farragut‘s distress signal—beaming over an assist team of Nurse Chapel, Scotty, Spock, and Uhura. As everyone races into action and Kirk begins slowly realizing that he’s getting the command experience he’s been waiting for at the worst possible time, the vessel responsible for destroying a planet in a single blast, a massive, tendriled junk ship comes flying along and gobbles the Enterprise up before promptly warping away.
The Farragut is alone, and barely holding together, let alone capable of pursuit. It’s operating on a skeleton crew, most beamed away to Enterprise before its abduction. And James T. Kirk is staring at a captain’s chair, with Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, Uhura, and Chapel at his side.
If “A Space Adventure Hour” was an episode talking about the metanarrative about the birth of Star Trek as a television show, then suddenly, you realize: this is an episode about the birth of Star Trek, the team that we know will go on to appear in the original series. At long last, the crucible that will one day forge one of the franchise’s defining heroes has begun.
So it’s great then that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is really an episode about rocking Kirk’s shit for 45 minutes. The episode splits between the Farragut and the captured Enterprise, disabled in the interior of the junk ship as its systems are drained of power, effectively doing one of Strange New Worlds‘ “disaster on a spaceship” episodes twice over. Kirk has to rally a group of officers who don’t really know, and don’t really trust, him as he tries to figure out what kind of a leader he is in time to rescue Enterprise and stop this junker ship on a collision course with destroying another world called Sullivan’s Planet. Pike, meanwhile, has to deal with shadowy infiltrators sucking his ship dry, a ticking time bomb that will kill both the Enterprise crew and the Farragut‘s wounded.
The stuff aboard Enterprise is fun and definitely tense, even if it is also definitely the b-plot of the episode.
