Strange New Worlds Review: Tomorrow's Enterprise

Spoilers below

"Tomorrow's Enterprise", like the three episodes in this season which precede it, was released in September 2026, 60 years to the month after the world first met Kirk, Spock, and Uhura. This anniversary means I was talking about "The Man Trap" just yesterday on Bluesky, noting how it's a perfectly serviceable slice of Scary Mode Trek, which is unfortunately forever lumbered with giving the impression that the galaxy is, first and foremost, a place of horror.

Show openers have this problem, of course. You're not just starting a story; you're telling us where it made most sense for the story to start. Season openers, and season finales, bear similar weight. "Tomorrow's Enterprise" isn't just where this season ends. It's where the writers wanted the characters to be when that end arrived.

It's in this context that we should consider the decision eventually settled on - to use the season finale to resolve the four-year ongoing (if often not foregrounded) subplot of a young black woman trying to find her place in the world. This is obviously delightful; for all the time travel hijinks and special effect splurges, this very deliberately eschews the action model of recent Trek season finales in favour of a character piece. This isn't about the next crisis in the Alpha Quadrant, it's about someone who has spent their life running toward the next thing to avoid thinking about the current learning that in the end, all that approach gets you is being far away from everything you were briefly near to. Never stopping is much the same as never starting: either way, you never feel like you've actually been anywhere.

As I say, this is all good stuff, particularly in the context of the show doing something similar last week with "Once La'An A Time". This is a potential route for complaint, admittedly. It's not just that the lessons La'An and Uhura learn ultimately aren't all that different - worrying about what's going to happen stops you from enjoying what's currently happening; the tragic death of your family when you were young can't be outrun forever. Both episodes feature the character facing their double, and choosing to become more like them, and both episodes make heavy use of darkness and light to heighten the already unmissable considerations of duality.

But if we're going to get bent out of shape about this double feature of featuring doubles (and ultimately, ending the season with two episodes focussed on women of colour is something to revel in, however it happens), "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is straightforwardly the better episode. The "year to prepare" idea is cute, and doesn't outstay its welcome. The black hole/white hole (presumably a reference to Red Dwarf, given the latter is literally, as Lister puts it, "spewing time back out into the universe") is a fun shorthand for timey-wimey hijinks. Uhura's grasp of music once again gets to become an important piece of her character (though the "A miner/A minor" revelation makes no sense, puns and homophones not translating even into English text, let alone an alien one). There's also the fact that, unlike with Sir Ruath and Pollux, the crew aren't written as absolute idiots unable to recognise when a bridge officer has extremely clearly been replaced.

The episode almost suggests they are, admittedly. When Pike let Uhura off the bridge despite her calling him admiral and her hair having changed shape [1] my teeth were clenched so tight you could have grown dilithium crystals between my molars. This though rapidly proves to be a feint. Pike hasn't not noticed, he's choosing to sit and figure out the implications before he acts, as opposed to Kirk a year in the future, who immediately rushes in to demand answers from Uhura. Two different approaches to command, neither suggested to be better or worse.

This moment is part of the story's broader structure. The episode keeps threatening to collapse into something less interesting than what's eventually revealed. Even the title "Tomorrow's Enterprise" works in this way, suggesting not just another episode in which our crew are sidelined, but another "darkest timeline" story in which everything has gone to hell and the "true" reality must be restored.

And yes, that's sort of what we get. We're now up to fully half the episodes of this season featuring Jim Kirk, though this is almost unquestionably the best use of him all year. But the long-teased appearance of the show's version of Bones McCoy doesn't happen, with Boyce being re-used instead. He himself gets markedly (Markinsonedly?) little to do, with the jump to the future giving the spotlight to Jess Bush, whose been rather unused this season, and who clearly relishes the chance to play a slightly different version of Nurse Chapel. Moreover, the episode makes a big thing about how much Uhura has learned from Kirk in the year they've served together, but it's very deliberately Pike who she singles out for everything he's taught her. On the darkness front, the the more coldly lit Enterprise of a year from now, the reference to preparing phasers to fire, and - most cleverly - the beginning notes of "Klingon Battle" from the Motion Picture soundtrack slowly playing out before not quite resolving suggests we really ae in a new variant of "Yesterday's Enterprise", only for us to learn the weapons are needed to break free of the white hole - this isn't a war, it's an escape attempt. And then a little later, that too is revised, as we learn the ship isn't being held by an unfriendly force, but by cosmic midwives in the business of helping stellar anomalies give birth. The episode is a progression of misdirects. Or, to use the theme of the episode, a series of bluffs.

The decision is made at every turn to not re-run "Yesterday's Enterprise". Compare this to what was until today this show's best finale, "A Quality Of Mercy", which does reframe that episode, with a change to the franchise's established timeline resulting in a bloody war that had previously been averted (it's even due to the Romulans in each case) [2].. There's a conscious choice here to use similar building blocks - "A Quality Of Mercy" also featuring a future version of one of our characters meeting their present-day equivalent to consider what can and cannot be changed - to build a very different structure. It's not that the newest finale strips out any sense of peril or loss; Scotty's dead, after all. But that's part of the point. "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "A Quality Of Mercy" are both about the question of how the timeline can be fixed to avoid interstellar war. "Tomorrow's Enterprise" is about how the timeline can be fixed to save a bloke everyone likes and doesn't want to see die.

The dimensions of the solution matter, too. "Yesterday's Enterprise" ends with Tasha Yar and the crew of the Enterprise-C having to sacrifice their lives to avoid war with the Klingons. "A Quality Of Mercy" ends with Pike recognising he has to accept a future in which he will be unable to move or speak in order to avoid war with the Romulans. This week's episode ends with Uhura delivering a space-baby [3] so that Scotty lives to see tomorrow. Just being able to type that sentence is a treat. The frenetic pace and expensive VFX makes this episode feel weighty, but at heart this is basically a midseason TNG story (highly complementary). [4]

There's one other obvious parallel to consider here - the season opener, "Valles Marineris". I noted at the time it had a similar British sci-fi origin, that being Doctor Who rather than Red Dwarf, and the time-related shenanigans are obviously similar. Where that episode went so badly wrong, though, was in the idea that we have a duty to preserve the future, rather than to preserve life [5]. While it's true that what precisely is meant by "preserve the future" is very different in the two episodes, of course, it's still notable that "Tomorrow's Enterprise" takes precisely the opposite position. Screw what might happen to the future; save everyone you can (this in its way is also the moral of "A Quality Of Mercy", of course).

"Tomorrow's Enterprise" isn't just a good episode. It isn't just a fitting season finale, choosing to focus on why we care about these characters rather than worry about us losing them. It's the show in dialogue with itself and Trek more generally, committing itself to do better. To recognise we can't always keep charging forwards. In that sense, this is a companion piece to the season's best episode, "Like Chronitons Through The Hour-Glass", and it's saying almost as explicitly that those who tune into Trek hoping every episode can be like "Yesterday's Enterprise" - as good as it is - are wholly missing the point. You need the quiet moments for the loud bangs to register. You need the episodes where the stakes are the life of just one person, so you can be reminded of how much the life of just one person matters.

The season that begun by finding a way to justify genocide ends with a woman violating standing orders in a year-long project to save a single person. Surely this is Trek. Surely, after all the dreams and drugs and delusions and dragons, we have once again come home. Or maybe, like Lieutenant Junior Grade Uhura, what's happened is that we've realised we've been home the whole time.

[1] Not sure how to take the joke about men never really noticing when a woman changes her hair. Bit 20th century, surely? Either way, the bigger problem is that the change is very obvious to the viewer. It reminded me of watching cartoons as a kid, where someone would be replaced or possessed in a way that had an extremely obvious visual tell (Visionaries had the dude who turned into a blue lion turn into a red one instead, for instance) that no-one picked up on in-universe. One of the fundamental rules of writing, which this season hasn't followed nearly as much as it needed to, is that part of not assuming your audience is stupid is not making your characters stupider than the audience is (unless the stupidity is the point, of course).

[2] That episode also compared Pike's command style to Kirk's, by more or less explicitly saying that if Pike had been in the captain's chair during "Balance Of Terror", the Federation would have been plunged into a new war. I much prefer "Tomorrow's Enterprise" suggesting the two men have different but equally effective styles. I much prefer "Tomorrow's Enterprise", full stop.

[3] What else would you call it, younger Uhura? Huh? What else?

[4] It also features no fewer than three aliens from The Animated Series in the background; a Storr, a Sord, and a Catian (possibly even M'Ress herself).

[5] This is a sin of the source material as well, as many will know Who has done more than one episode centered around "fixed points in time", where large numbers of people simply have to die, ultimately to justify the Doctor never averting historical genocides. Red Dwarf, in comparison, has no problem with the boys from the Dwarf changing whatever they please whenever they get the chance.

Ordering

1. Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass 2. Tomorrow's Enterprise

3. Orders Of Magnitude

4. The Griffin Incident

5. Once La'An A Time

6. Level-Five Transporter Accident

7. Off-Hour

8. Human Best Friend

9. Valles Marineris

10. A Case Of Chiaoscuro