Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ third season has been its bumpiest ride yet, with more lows than highs. But in something that feels like somewhat of a reset for the series, its finale brings together elements from a few of those highs (and a few of those lows, for good or ill) to deliver an ending that at the very least brings the Enterprise into proverbial spacedock smoothly… if not without a few scrapes along the hull.
Yes, the mostly good news is that “New Life and New Civilizations” (which gets by on a technicality for introducing one new planet, at least) is far from the wild string of disasters that Strange New Worlds‘ third season has been on for the past few weeks. Largely a sequel to one of the rare highlights of the season, “Through the Lens of Time,” the finale sees the return of Dr. Korby, investigating a potential connection to the Vezda on the planet Skygowan… only to find himself captured by the Vezda inhabiting the corpse of poor Ensign Gamble, who found his pattern replicated and used by the Vezda as it was beamed away from Enterprise to continue plotting nefarious plots to bring its imprisoned siblings to freedom.
It gives “New Life and New Civilizations” some suitably big, threatening stakes—the Vezda are painted as an ontological evil, a very inspirational embodiment of the concept, and if they’re not stopped from returning to Vadia IX and freeing their fellow Vezda, they will slaughter and possess trillions of beings. But more importantly, it lets the episode begin to weave together a lot of little threads and character beats from across the season to at least lend this denouement a sense of cohesiveness that the season itself has painfully lacked.
Dr. M’Benga becomes an important figure here, not just for the guilt he felt in the wake of Gamble’s death, but to draw on his relationship to violence and the trauma he’d begun to move on from after the Klingon War that we returned to in “Shuttle to Kenfori.” We even, with the arrival of the Farragut to assist the Enterprise in opening a dimension-folding doorway from Skygowan to Vadia IX, get to build a little further on the burgeoning bond between Spock and James Kirk, which becomes more literal when Spock has to mindmeld specifically with Jim in order to coordinate a precise firing sequence to avoid the ships phasering Skygowan’s capital to bits. It’s a little weird that this episode off-handedly implies that their friendship really kicks off in the wake of a mind-meld-by-necessity, but then again, that would not be the most weirdly off-putting thing this show has done with Vulcans this season, either. Progress!
But arguably the biggest and most important thread this episode weaves itself around is that of Captain Batel. Ever since the opening of the season and her unorthodox “curing” of a Gorn infestation, she’s largely loomed over the background of narratives, ticking off Weird Things to Pick Up On Later. There’s the Vulcan mindmeld Spock did with her to reveal the Gorn identity in her psyche, the Illyrian blood Una provided to save her during surgery, and the chimera flower M’Benga and Pike used to help her recovery—and then, crucially, her aggressive reaction to the Vezda once it tried to use Gamble to take over Enterprise.
It all comes together here when Batel finds herself possessed momentarily when Vezda-Gamble returns to Vadia IX and attempts to destroy the guardian statuette Korby and the away team found in the prison. The Enterprise team realizes while investigating her condition that all the mucking about with Batel’s biology over the season has made her into a genetic match for the guardian statuette… because in a timey-wimey grandfather paradox fashion, Batel was always meant to become that mystical guardian herself. She is the only person who can stop Vezda-Gamble and keep the prison in check, at the cost of giving up her life with Pike and in Starfleet.
In some ways, this does work as the emotional crux the finale hangs itself upon. Tragic as it is to lose her, it gives her an interesting mirror to Pike’s own wrangling with his inevitable destiny and future injury, letting him re-engage with the struggles he’d faced in season one’s finale in a new light. And the third act of “New Worlds and New Civilizations” gives way to a tender what-if when Batel uses her new guardian powers while confronting the Vezda to give Pike a long goodbye, imagining a long alternate life for them where neither of them faces their supposed destinies and they get to grow old together, watching a young daughter grow and flourish alongside them.
But for as good as that sequence is, it also highlights a weirdness at the heart of the episode. Even when you put aside the, ahem, questionable optics that this major battle of the very ideas of Good and Evil is boiled down to a showdown between avatars of a white woman and a Black man, respectively, Batel herself hasn’t really been much of her own character over the course of her time on Strange New Worlds. Arguably the one time she really was allowed to be was in season two’s killer court episode, “Ad Astra Per Aspera,” when we got to see her in action as a Starfleet judicial officer, but beyond that, she’s largely been defined as Captain Pike’s love interest and little else.
We don’t really know her all that well outside of the importance of her connection to Pike. Even in this episode, when it becomes clear that she is going to have to essentially sacrifice her life to stop the Vezda, the arc is less about her accepting that destiny—she accepts it almost immediately and unequivocally—and more about how she can prepare Pike to accept it too, centering his pain and grief over her own. The alt-reality life shared by herself and Pike continues to center him and his feelings over and over, while Batel herself settles into a matronly role (again, this season has had very weirdly heteronormative ideas about gender and gender roles, largely unable to envision its female characters outside of their relationships with men). Her role in season three, after being saved from instant death at the start of the season, has largely been to be sidelined into recovery, only for her to suddenly get the spotlight here and now, when she’s being written out of the show entirely.
So when the dust settles, the Vezda are all reimprisoned, and Batel is now a big spiky crystal statue on Vadia IX, “New Life and New Civilizations” finds itself in a weird place where it’s managed to mostly execute a solid, emotional farewell to a character it barely really knew what to do with over the past few seasons. It’s got a weird vibe to it, but it’s at the very least nowhere near the narrative minefields that this season has repeatedly leaped from explosion to explosion through, so it’s both simultaneously an episode that leaves you feeling relieved and at the same time unsatisfied. A character we’ve only been told to care about through their romantic relationship with one of Strange New Worlds‘ central figures is now “dead,” and… it’s fine?
Perhaps that peculiar feeling is truly befitting of a season that has been all over the place as this one has been. But at the very least, “New Life and New Civilizations” concludes moving on from this moment, and all of that tonal whiplash, not with a major cliffhanger to resolve or the tease of another big threat, but with a reminder and resetting of Strange New Worlds‘ mission statement as it heads into its final full-length season: there are indeed strange new worlds out there to discover, and new life and new civilizations to meet and aid.
After a season that has traded depth for varietal breadth (and largely stumbled exploring it), maybe that simple mission is what the show needs to return to to get back on track.
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