Star Trek: Strange New Worlds kicked off its fourth season with a cracker-jack episode of my favorite kind of science fiction: time travel. Now, I entitled this review "Safeguarding the Future", which is always a good thing. But it becomes a pre-eminently essential thing when travel to the past is involved. And Captain Pike is the perfect person to be helming this episode, making the crucial decisions, given that he is walking around with knowledge of a future he most certainly doesn't want to safeguard, because ...
[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]
In case you didn't already know this, Pike dies in "The Menagerie," a two-part episode aired on broadcast TV -- NBC -- in the original Star Trek series back in 1966. So, he'd love to avoid that future, not protect it, if there was anything he could do, any way he could prevent it from happening.
But the same, of course, is not the case with our human species. Because if that is not safeguarded, then there wouldn't be a Captain Pike or any human being in the first place. So that is Pike's guide when the Enterprise gets caught up in a cosmic storm (a frequent source of predicament in the Star Trek universe) and finds itself some 65 million years back in the past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. And since this is science fiction, a time when sentient Martians, which look a lot like we humans, are in mortal conflict with intelligent space-faring insects that come from a fifth planet in our solar system, between Mars and Jupiter, and are bent on destroying the Martians.
Now, as any Star Trek fan well knows, the Federation would want any starship to do whatever it could to protect a human-like sentient species from marauding insects out to exterminate the humanoids -- short of wiping out these Dol'Drm intelligent insects themselves. But as Pike to his credit realizes, far more important than Star Fleet policy is making sure that Star Fleet exists in his present, and that includes his crew and him. His own understanding, his own prime directive, thus leads him to allow the humanoid Martians to destroy the 5th planet (because it doesn't exist in our reality, which is Star Trek's reality). And, though he likes the humanoid Martians, especially Commander Cassel (pictured above in a scene with Pike), he accepts that the force of her destruction of the fifth planet will encompass her ship and her, with the energy from the blast turning neighboring Mars into a barren planet, and a fragment from the blown-to-bits fifth planet hitting the Earth and wiping out the dinosaurs.
All of that, if not exactly cause for celebration, is certainly a source of satisfaction and happiness. Pike saved the Enterprise and all aboard and everyone he knows from being instantly erased from existence. He saved our human species on Earth, because had the dinosaurs continued, the little mammals that existed in their time might have been wiped out before they evolved into primates. That's not only good time-travel science fiction, but a cause for everyone watching this episode to be happy as well, that we're here and able to watch and enjoy episode 4.1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, right?
See also Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.1-3.3: Gorn, Spock & Chapel, and The Walking Dead ... 3.4: Lots of Laughs and Serious Business ... 3.5: Endearing Pseudo-Science ... 3.6: Chris and Jim ... 3.7: The Medium and The Message ... 3.8: Pike's Hair and Spock's Smile ... [Note: I didn’t review 3.9 because, though it had a few good moments, I didn’t have enough worth saying about it.] ... 3.10: Season 3 Finale: The New Story
And see also Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1.1-1.2: Great Characters, Actors, Stories ... 1.3: "Instead of terraforming planets, we modify ourselves ..." ... 1.4: The Gorn and the Wub ... 1.5 Going to the Chapel ... 1.6: Two Stories ... 1.7: The Kiss ... 1.8: Ends of the Continuum ... 1.9: Momentous! ... 1.10: Everything!
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