Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Hegemony" | Season 2, Episode 10
The show ends its second season on a familiar note
Hey, remember the Gorn? They were a big deal last season. One of Strange New Worlds’ biggest changes to established Trek lore was taking the goofy humanoid-lizard-in-a-caveman-outfit design from the original series and turning them into, well, let’s say it’s a loving homage to pop culture’s most infamous murderous xenomorph. Last summer, we spent a few episodes dealing with that transformation, as the show danced around continuity in a fairly successful attempt to create its own Borg-level Big Bad. The tropes were familiar, but as with so much of SNW, that familiarity was elevated by strong production values, good performances, and some effectively freaky scripts. Of all the show’s various tricks, the nu-Gorn were the most obvious, but it was still possible to enjoy their appearances as the necessary balance to Pike et al’s sunny-side-up approach to exploration. We needed a bogeyman, and this is what we got: almost, but not quite, “micro-changes in air density.”
The Gorn have been absent for the bulk of the second season, but they’re back in “Hegemony,” and imposing as ever. The cold open has a Hunter ship appearing in the sky over a bucolic “small town” colony, in a scene with strong echoes of the first ten minutes of A Quiet Place Part II. (Which I saw in theaters, for some reason, despite never seeing the first one.) Captain Batel’s ship, the Cuyoga, is in orbit, and Batel and Chapel (who’s hitching a ride to her internship) are in the streets delivering much needed vaccines to the locals. Chapel beams back to the Cuyoga just before a communications blackout ends a chat between Batel and Pike; a shuttlecraft crashes in the distance, and then the Gorn arrive. It’s neatly done.
The rest of the episode focuses on Pike and his team’s efforts to rescue the survivors of the attack without antagonizing the Gorn into open war. (The Gorn send a message that basically says, “This is ours, this is yours,” and unfortunately, the colony is on the wrong side of the line no one knew about.) This splits our heroes into two groups: on the planet, Pike, La’an, M’Benga, Sam Kirk, and Ortegas (who finally gets to go on an away mission), and back on the ship, it’s Una, Spock, Uhura, and the rest. There’s no big coming together moment until the end, and even that’s compromised—but that’s okay, because SNW has decided to fall back on ‘90s Trek tradition and end its season on a cliffhanger.