Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 9 “Terrarium”
Strange New Worlds delivers what’s essentially a direct prequel to a classic The Original Series episode as one of our protagonists works through her PTSD and makes friends with an unlikely ally.
Erica’s Story
“Terrarium” is definitely an Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) episode, a chance for the actress to showcase how her character can grow and react to intense conditions in a way we haven’t seen before. Here, the helmsman is trapped on a world where her only ally and hope for survival is a Gorn, the same species that wounded her in the season premiere and set her on a destructive course.
Things start alright for Ortegas, as she is tasked with surveying a whacky area of space with strange gravimetric fields and other unusual phenomena. It’s a chance for the young pilot to get back on the horse, so to say, and regain a sense of independence and confidence she lost following her injury earlier in the season. But, a surprise wormhole gets the better of her shuttlecraft, and soon she finds herself on a desolate moon orbiting a star, and her chances of survival are slim… until she finds she isn’t alone on this barren world.
With no food, little water, and an unknown chance of the Enterprise discovering her emergency beacon before the elements claim her, Erica needs to swallow her lingering fear and hatred for the Gorn and try to work with this one. This Gorn is injured (basically a death sentence if she were to return to her kind), and helpful to Erica (by saving her life from a native predator and providing her food and shelter), but still in dire straits of her own. The two females need to work together, something they accomplish rather quickly and with little fuss.
“I need to cook this to eat this. You like pit monster sushi. I don’t.”
– Erica to the Gorn when the Gorn is startled by the fire Erica needs to cook her food.
Here’s our first critique of this episode. Erica, who we know harbors ill will for the Gorn, is able to way too quickly get onboard with communicating and working with this alien. First, the two don’t speak the same language, and there’s no universal translator around, but yet Erica is able to jerry rig a device that allows her to understand the Gorn on an “agree” or “disagree” basis. (Luckily, the Gorn can understand Erica just fine.) What is the device she created and why was she able to do it so easily?
More to the point, Erica does indeed have an initial gut reaction to seeing the Gorn – a reaction based in anger and fear – but she quickly moves past it and actually becomes friendly with the reptile. Erica bonds with the Gorn after she correctly guesses the Gorn is a pilot, like herself, and she goes so far as to start a friendly game of chess. We think Erica’s journey in this episode would have been more powerful by having her struggle more with allying with the Gorn; having this journey be emotionally and mentally harder on Erica would make the episode’s end more impactful. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Here’s our second major critique of this episode: Erica talks to herself too much. The script needs her to inform the audience what she is thinking and doing, and we wish this show had more faith in its viewers to discern those things from just Melissa Navia’s performance. For example, Erica says, “to hell with it, I’m starving,” when the Gorn tosses her a gross bit of alien meat. Why couldn’t we have discerned Erica’s desperation for food from Navia’s performance? Or when she remarks “the storm is over” when we can clearly see the lack of atmospheric activity. Strange New Worlds, show, don’t tell us, and have more faith in your lead actress’s performance.
Throughout her time with the Gorn, Erica is disturbed by some lights she sees off in the distance; considering we knew the name of the episode was “terrarium,” we kind of guessed where this was going. But before that, by the end of the episode, Erica and the Gorn’s chance of survival is incredibly slim, but their newfound friendship is solidified – an important bit of symbolism that fits right into Star Trek’s ethos. After surviving lighting the planet’s atmosphere on fire in the hopes of signaling the Enterprise, Erica and the Gorn are found by the Enterprise’s away team, but the team, led by La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) immediately shoot the Gorn on site.
This action on La’an’s part was incredibly frustrating. Why would the security chief – who we, to be fair, know has a brutal history with the Gorn herself – immediately gun down the Gorn that was clearly bunkered down with Erica as they rode out the storm? The Gorn wasn’t threatening Erica (although she was putting her hand on Erica’s shoulder when La’an opened fire), wasn’t dressed for battle, and didn’t have a weapon. To fatally shoot on sight was incredulous. Erica, understandably distraught at the death of her Gorn friend, challenges whoever is behind this encounter to show themselves, which they soon do.
Remember the Metrons? They were the powerful, mysterious race that set up the Kirk-Gorn fight in The Original Series episode “Arena.” Of course, the events of that episode haven’t happened yet as far as Strange New Worlds canon is concerned, so what we are seeing here in “Terrarium” is the first canon encounter with the Metrons. The Metron who speaks to Erica says he and his race set up Erica’s encounter with the Gorn because they were “curious” as to what would happen when two “barbaric” species met, had animosity for each other, and shared a need to survive.
The Metrons admit there’s “hope” for humanity because of Erica being able to move past her pain to ally herself with the Gorn. But considering the act of violence La’an committed as soon as she saw the Gorn, the Metrons want more time, and more chances, to study humans’ reactions and determine if humans and Gorn will ever find peace. Finally the Metron basically winks at the audience when he tells Erica that, “one day, we may need to reset your perception of the Gorn.” Thus, we know six years in the future, the Metrons will set up another confrontation between humans and the Gorn.
Because there is canon to protect, the Metrons wipe Erica’s memory of her encounter with them, so for all Erica knows, the Enterprise away team found the unlikely pair, shot the Gorn on sight, and beamed Erica away from her prison. As the episode ends, Erica wonders how she is going to rationalize La’an’s actions, as the security officer’s quick trigger cost Erica a friend, and the Federation a chance to get to know the Gorn in a far more intimate way than ever before. To remember her trial on the desolate world, Erica has a keepsake – a chess piece from when she and the Gorn were bonding in their shared quest to survive.
Finding the Wayward Lieutenant
As Erica is surviving on the moon with the Gorn, the Enterprise crew is desperately trying to find her. No one is more desperate than Nyoto Uhura (Celina Rose Gooding), who works tirelessly to rationalize how and why the Enterprise should spend more time looking for Erica instead of making its way to Epsilon Indi III, a planet whose population is awaiting vaccines the ship is carrying (because of course there’s a time constraint in play here). In a bold move, Uhura fudges the numbers of a simulation she is running to see if the Enterprise can venture into the wormhole to keep its event horizon open and contact Erica. Yes, Uhura arbitrarily increases the odds of success of this simulation so Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) approves her idea.
Uhura effectively puts not only the lives of the Enterprise crew at risk, but the lives of thousands of people awaiting vaccines, just to try to save one person. While her motives are pure, she should absolutely be punished for this action. Worse yet, Captain Pike later tells her he knows she faked the simulation numbers, but that “it doesn’t matter” because he would have searched for Erica anyway. The fact that Uhura walks away from this episode without consequences is mind-boggling – and the fact that Pike was having his officers work to prove the proposed plan’s chances of success when he was just going to approve the mission anyway is also a poor leadership decision. Why do these people rarely face consequences for their actions?
Breaking Down the Episode
As we’ve noted, some things bothered us in this episode. There are a few other things, too, listed below for your reading pleasure.
- Why would the Metrons allow themselves to be seen by Erica via the flashing lights the helmsman glimpses throughout her ordeal?
- We find it hard to believe Spock, the attentive Vulcan who was standing right next to Uhura, didn’t notice her increase the odds of the simulation.
- Why would Erica assume the Gorn was a pilot based on her helmet? Erica is a pilot and she doesn’t wear a helmet. She didn’t need to wear a helmet when she was piloting the Gorn fighter craft in the season premiere. A helmet could just as easily belong to a soldier.
- Erica first gets eyes, presumably, on the Gorn thruster when the Gorn uncovers it from her pile of material. How is Erica able to immediately know what it is and if there is fuel in its tank?
- Erica moves the heat shield a foot or so after she sets out to use it to cover them during the impending firestorm, but then she collapses to the ground and laments how they are toast and should just accept their pending fate. Why does she give up at this moment? She was just excitedly explaining what a good plan she had. Talk about a forced “all is lost” moment.
Despite some storytelling issues, “Terrarium” is a well-meaning and visually striking episode that delves into the foundational themes of Star Trek: empathy, unexpected friendship, and moving beyond prejudice. The episode’s narrative and visual ambition, especially in its depiction of the Gorn and the alien world, are commendable, even if the execution sometimes stumbles. While we maintain our critiques of character choices and plot conveniences are valid, the core message of “Terrarium” resonates deeply within the franchise’s ethos.
Ultimately, “Terrarium” is a bridge between the old and new, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of the Gorn in future stories and cementing the idea that compassion can be found in the most unlikely of places.
Stray Thoughts:
- How did the Metrons know Erica’s shuttle would crash within walking distance of the Gorn? What would have happened if Erica landed on the other side of the moon? We know the Metrons created the wormhole that brought Erica to the Gorn, but just how far did their influence extend in setting up the events of this episode?
- Why does Erica take a nap after creating the water condenser? She just crash landed… isn’t there something more productive she could be doing while waiting to see if the condenser works?
- In a neat deep cut, the ship the Enterprise is supposed to rendezvous with is the U.S.S. Constellation, captained by Matt Decker, the ill-fated ship and man we see in The Original Series episode “The Doomsday Machine.”
- To this episode’s credit, the planet upon which Erica is stranded is one of the most visually striking locations of the season. What a great use of the famed AR wall.
- Kudos to this episode’s composer, who delivers an appropriately ethereal score that fits nicely with the episode’s location and theme of connection.
- We were happy to see a fully realized Gorn, not one that was in the heat of combat or far away. The creature in “Terrarium” seems to be largely practical, which is a welcome change from the less-detailed CGI Gorn we’ve seen elsewhere. Having a practical Gorn also helps us humanize and be more empathic to the alien.
- We couldn’t help but keep thinking of the TNG episode “Darmok” while we were watching this episode. Both productions deal with our protagonist trying to communicate and work with an alien, although in the TNG episode Captain Picard didn’t harbor any ill will toward the titular man. The core narrative of each episode revolves around the struggle and eventual triumph of communication between a Starfleet officer and an alien with an unintelligible language. A shared struggle against a common external threat or environmental danger breaks down initial barriers and forces the characters in each episode to build a foundation of trust.
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