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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S4 Ep1 sends Enterprise 65 million years back

tvJul 28, 202630402

In Season 4 premiere "Valles Marineris" Captain Christopher Pike pilots the Enterprise into a stellar storm that rips a rift in space/time and strands the ship 65 million years in the past. The crew is initially engaged in giving medical supplies to a pre-warp civilization, a return to an original series style of intervention rather than strict noninterference. Spock, played by Ethan Peck, determines how far back they are, though the episode offers little hard science explaining his method. A one-off antagonist, Commander Cassel played by Saffron Burrows, steals an antimatter pod and intends to use it to annihilate an alien planet, creating the episode's central moral conundrum that the Enterprise must confront. Landing-party scenes led by Una (Rebecca Romijn) with La’an (Christina Chong) and Ortegas (Melissa Navia) deliver lighter, sometimes goofy moments, including La’an punching a dinosaur. Critics noted Cassel felt two dimensional and the episode devotes more time to character banter and season-arc setup than to resolving the ethical dilemma or explaining the temporal mechanics. The story also frames the Dol’drm, an insect species blamed for devastating Martians and linked in dialogue to old hypotheses about a destroyed planet in the asteroid belt sometimes called Phaeton.

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