Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Premiere Review - “Valles Marineris”
“Valles Marineris” is a strong start to the penultimate season of one of the finest Star Trek series in the franchise’s 60-year history, and it earns that description by doing two things simultaneously: establishing emotional stakes with genuine economy while also delivering a wicked fun time-travel adventure that pays affectionate homage to Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, without being consumed by either.
The episode’s premise – the Enterprise sucked into a stellar storm and deposited 65 million years in the past, facing Martian warriors while a landing party navigates a dinosaur-populated prehistoric Earth – is exactly the kind of cheerful high-concept absurdity that Strange New Worlds has always embraced with full commitment. The Martian commander Cassell, played by Saffron Burrows with a rigid dignity that gradually gives way to genuine curiosity about Federation values, is a one-episode character given enough dimension to make her inevitable fate land with weight. When Pike attempts diplomacy and charm and finds both insufficient, and when the episode reveals that the Enterprise’s very presence in the past is part of the causal chain that allowed humanity to exist at all, the temporal paradox is handled with the lightness of a show that understands such things are more fun when you do not over-explain them.
But the episode’s more lasting work is done in the quieter character beats that will clearly define the season ahead. La'An's unsettling realization that she felt no pain after punching a dinosaur – and the subsequent question of whether recent events have activated recessive genetic material from her Noonien-Singh heritage – is set up with exactly the right amount of dread. Her “Are you going to try to take over the galaxy now?” exchange with M'Benga plays as comedy until the moment La’An admits she genuinely does not know the answer, at which point it stops being funny in the most productive possible way.
Uhura’s new mentorship of the Vulcan cadet A’Sha is the premiere’s most promising new dynamic. A’Sha is a character designed to deflate enthusiasm through pure logic, pointing out with cool precision that Uhura’s accent in Vulcan is “improper” and that their experiences as newcomers are not actually comparable. It is a relationship with genuine friction built into its foundation, which is exactly what good ensemble television needs. The Ortegas and Scotty tension – passive-aggressive, petty, and recognizably human – provides reliable comic texture.
Pike’s decision to decline the promotion to commodore and remain at the helm of the Enterprise is the episode’s emotional resolution, and it arrives not as triumph but as something more honest. The work still means something to him, even as he carries grief that he has not yet fully processed. Una’s promotion to Commander, toasted over champagne, is the genuine celebration the episode allows itself.
A’Sha calls the Enterprise “a chaotic place.”
She is not wrong, and that is precisely why we keep coming back.