Strange New Worlds Review: Valles Marineris

Spoilers below

It's going to be hard, like really hard, to not view this entire season through the lens of what's happened behind the scenes at Paramount, and the ways even the upcoming arrival of fascist-supporting owners seemed to compromise the previous season of Strange New Worlds.

And I want to resist that being all we talk about. Political criticism where it's warranted, always, but by all accounts we're a year away from the franchise entering it's third period of hibernation. I'd rather not spend that time focussing on the myriad damages Skydance have inflicted.

It was a solid plan, in theory. And then Strange New Worlds opens its final full-length season with a story about how sometimes it's better if you let a genocide happen. Not because you want it to happen, naturally, but because it's sadly necessary in the broader context of civilisational development. The bugs past Mars have to die, otherwise their spread could have meant real people never even got born, and the horror of that is too great to comprehend.

Perhaps I sound too harsh. "Valles Marineris" doesn't present us with some hypothetical potential restructuring of who lived where. It's clear from the moment the fifth planet is introduced (as part of a parcelling out of info which is both dramatically effective and dramaturgically baffling) that it's the Dol'drm, or its humanity. This is wholly irrelevant, though. Pike has to choose between allowing a genocide or dooming humanity to never existing because that's what the script says is his choice. The writers made the conscious choice to set up a situation in which the heroes of the show have, they argue, a defence for allowing the extinction of an entire race.

What is the virtue of such a plot? What do we gain? Why, in the context of at least two actually ongoing genocides in the world right now, do we need to construct a situation in which maybe not engaging in genocide might in some way be worse?

The specifics make things even more problematic. The scene with Uhura and Sam Kirk getting excited about the challenges of finding out how to talk to a new race of insectoids is sweet, but it's also the closest we get to actually hearing the Dol'drm side of things. We never talk to them, we just noodle over how we might. The species themselves are deliberately hidden from us, to lessen the impact when their many billions are slaughtered. We hear plenty from their murderers, of course, about the atrocities the Dol'drm have committed, and how it simply isn't possible to even conceive of engaging in dialogue with them. We see how learning of Mars' barrenness dozens of millions of years in the future makes them unwilling to consider the possibility of peace now. We're invited, time and again, to understand what has driven them to this position (note that when Cassell mentions the scar across her planet, Pike doesn't respond by referencing the Xindi attack a century earlier - the script doesn't want to make the obvious point that that Martian attitude is ultimately one they have chosen, not one that has been forced upon them). No counter-context is ever offered - this is wholly about how the Martians feel, and what those feelings do or do not give them the right to do to the Dol'drm. The Dol'drm themselves are deliberately kept silent.

Even the choice to make the inhabitants of the fifth planet insectoid is an issue - how many times have we seen genocidal acts justified by reference to the need to exterminate "cockroaches", or "vermin"? How much more interesting would it have been had the Martians been insectoid, and the alien race we never get to speak to be clearly humanoid? Sure, that would cost more money, but it's not like they didn't splurge on the CGI this week anyway. Just put in some beetle-people on the Enterprise, and take out La'An punching a dinosaur in the face.

(I actually enjoyed La'An punching a dinosaur in the face. The first three quarters of "Valles Marineris" is a bit too far on the silly side for my tastes, but I'll take this over the overblown melodrama of "New Life And New Civilizations" any day. I'll most certainly take it over where this episode ends up.)

There's a way we can read this whole mess as a response to fan criticism of the previous seasons playing ever more fast and loose with established Trek history. You could see this episode as a statement of intent to cleave more faithfully to the canon in future - making sure Roddenberry's version of the future is maintained is worth a genocide or two. Alternatively, you could see it as righteous ire - you want us to treat the franchise's past as sacrosanct? Let us show you how warped your priorities are! The former is contemptible, obviously, but the latter isn't exactly great either. You shouldn't toss around the idea of genocide as part of a dispute about priorities in fiction anyway, and you certainly shouldn't do it by actually putting a genocide on screen which everyone involved then agrees was for the best.

In truth, though, I don't think either of those was the primary motivation here. As Pelia's aside on seeing a previous squall from a phone box make clear (see previous comments about it all being a bit too silly), this is Strange New Worlds doing a Dr Who story, right down to a thinly reskinned "fixed point in time" dilemma (to say nothing of the similarities between the ending of this story, and Who's "Earthshock"). This rather adds to the argument that the show is struggling for ideas (not helped by the "Pike's a bloody puppet!" episode we're getting letter in the year), but that's not really where my focus is today.

I hate this kind of story in Dr Who, and I hate it here. The focus is always on how awful the heroes feel about not being able to stop mass death, rather than on the people actually dying. I'll give "Valles Marineris" props for having Pike actively choose to let Cassell murder a civilisation, rather than have him try and fail, but it's extremely unpleasant watching the episode spend its remaining runtime telling him he made the right choice, and he shouldn't feel bad. Just days after allowing genocide, he's laughing with Robert April about how his dad was wrong about no-one having lived on Mars. We spend more time on his grief over losing Batel six months earlier than we do choosing to let billions of sentient species die because of a "good hunch".

This isn't a "fixed point" story, though, not really. It's something even worse - a "predestination paradox" which fixes a genocide as something that was literally destined to happen. No point in feeling sad about it; it was always on the tarot cards. Let's chat about the terrible lizards, rather than lingering on the terrible crime against decency. But time travel isn't real. Predestination paradoxes aren't real. What is real is the phenomenon of appalling human beings telling themselves, and us, that there is some teleology to human history. That some peoples are ultimately "meant" to die out, as less civilised or less innovative or, fuck, even less hygienic (no link, but fuck you, Ben Shapiro) bequeathing the lands they once lived in to the people who can make proper use of it. You can feel sad about the passing of these less-developed people, you can hate the ways in which individual bad actors hastened that passing, but in the end, you have to accept that this was simply always what was going to happen. Not every people is destined for greatness.

"Valles Marineris" works tirelessly to set up a situation in which these arguments are proved to be right. It doesn't matter that our crew works so hard to persuade the Martians that they've let their hatred rule them, or that they repeatedly extoll the virtues of the UFPs multicultural and benevolent society. This is all just to sell us on the idea that even the enlightened liberals of Starfleet can recognise there are times when they just have to sit back and watch a bunch of racists use their trauma as a justification for wiping out an entire other culture. This action sickens us, but the true tragedy here is that it is ultimately necessary. The grown-ups in the room understand that.

From a review perspective, then, "Valles Marineris" is three parts clean albeit silly fun, and one quarter wholly horrifying. In committing to the need for the Trek universe to remain as it always did, this episode wholly betrays what that universe is supposed, and occasionally is even allowed, to be. It is, ultimately, an episode Ben Shapiro might be able get behind.

It is therefore impossible for me to do the same.