Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Finale “Tomorrow’s Enterprise”
Fans get a valuable glimpse at the Enterprise crew we know and love as Uhura works with her future self in an episode that is frustratingly convoluted.
Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) arrives back on Enterprise from a Starfleet refresher course just in time for a visit to a white hole, a spatial anomaly that theoretically serves as the endpoint for a black hole. Everything is just rosy until Uhura hears some music coming out of the white hole, followed by strange energies emerging from the anomaly and trapping the Enterprise. Uhura is knocked to the deck as she also hears what appears to be a scream from Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn), who just a few minutes before had asked Uhura on a date, which she awkwardly rebuffed.
Following a discussion with La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) regarding the possibility that this phenomenon is temporal in nature, Uhura transmits a signal into the white hole to investigate. The outcome is entirely surprising: she accidentally establishes communication with a version of herself from one year in the future on the far side of the anomaly.
A Tale of Two Uhuras
The other Uhura, who we’ll call Future Uhura, is strikingly more similar to the Uhura we know from The Original Series. Her hair is more akin to what Nichelle Nichols wore in TOS, as are some of her mannerisms, but the similarities to that first Star Trek show don’t stop there. On Future Uhura’s Enterprise, Captain James Kirk (Paul Wesley) is in charge, Doctor Boyce (Brian Markinson) has replaced Doctor M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) wears her hair more like what we see from Majel Barrett Roddenberry in TOS.
Moreover, Future Uhura is in a bit of a romantic fling with Scotty — that is, until she, Scotty, and Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia) investigate a black hole and Uhura hears the same kind of music the other Uhura heard. After their shuttle explodes, Future Uhura wakes up in the Enterprise sickbay with the news that Scotty has been dead for about a year and Erica is off on another planet teaching students.
This is the start of this episode getting too convoluted.
Working Together Across Time
The two Uhuras realize they can work together to pursue their own goals: Past Uhura wants to protect Scotty from some unknown unfortunate fate, while Future Uhura wants to bring her Scotty back from the dead. They realize they both encountered the strange pulse from their respective anomalies, so they need to create a reverse pulse, which is theoretically possible but would require a year’s worth of math and only possible with Spock’s super-smart brain.
This storytelling gives us pause. Why does it take a year to do these calculations? Why can they only be done by Spock and not a computer? Would Spock really have a year uninterrupted to complete this task for Uhura? This is certainly an awkward, messy section of this episode’s narrative.
Future Spock completes his calculations but tells Future Uhura she needs a dilithium diamond, something that would take a year to synthesize. How convenient, then, that Past Uhura can grow this diamond in time for Future Uhura to beam it into the black hole at the same time Past Uhura sends the reverse pulse into the white hole, thus theoretically restoring the timeline.
Their plan is aborted when another pulse hits the Enterprise, causing the two Uhuras to switch places.
Turnabout Intruder
On the Future Enterprise, Past Uhura can’t bluff her way past James Kirk’s sharp mind, who tells her they plan on destroying the entities holding the ship in place. Meanwhile, Future Uhura stumbles into telling Captain Pike, no stranger to temporal events himself, about her dilemma. In a nice follow-up to one of the storylines from “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass,” Future Uhura tells Pike how impactful he was to her early career. It’s a tender moment for the two officers and a nice little payoff to a character dynamic that was initially soap opera fodder.
Thanks to Past Uhura realizing an important and, for our money, puzzling and unwieldy connection between the musical notes she heard and a mural in her future self’s quarters, she realizes there is an entity within the anomaly. This entity claims to be a midwife who is trying to deliver a baby. So, Past Uhura needs to use three drones that are haptically linked to the gloves on her EVA suit to help deliver the baby, and her future self needs to do the same thing.
Yeah, this is where the episode kind of went off the rails for us. Sure, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is pretty, what with the gorgeous black and white hole simulations and Uhura’s spacewalk, but the plot is so distractingly messy and nonsensical. Here are just a few reasons:
- Why does Nurse Chapel think the baby at the center of the anomaly is remotely capable of being delivered by human hands? Isn’t it likely this transdimensional alien shares zero similarities with humanoid births.
- How do the drones maintain a haptic link to Uhura’s gloves even after descending into the black hole?
- How are the drones programmed to attach themselves to the alien baby, the composition of which the crew knows nothing about?
- Why did the drones need to be energized by the dilithium crystal the two Uhuras cultivated?
It all overwhelms our suspension of disbelief and makes us wonder how this plot was broken for this episode.
Confusion aside, Uhura’s mission continues. After the drones fail, both Uhuras figure the only thing to do is hurl herself into the black hole to meet her other self and deliver the baby together. We don’t know how a person can survive falling into a black hole — and we guess the episode doesn’t care, either. For their trouble, the Uhuras are transported to a reality created by the anomaly aliens. Standing together on the deserted bridge of the Enterprise, they talk with the aliens, who assert they live in the past, present, and future. At the end of their brief conversation, the aliens hit the good ole’ reset button, where the events of the episode are erased; only Uhura will remember what transpired.
“Despite how we see time, you are and always will be… surprising.”
– The anomaly alien to Uhura.
Returning to their respective ships, Past Uhura has learned a valuable lesson about living in the moment, while Future Uhura continues her romance with Scotty.
Living for Now
The message baked into the story of “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is a good one: live in the moment, don’t take the present for granted, and be comfortable not knowing the future. But this episode is so clunky in its delivery of this message that the impact is dampened. The alien baby delivery aspect of this plot is a bit absurd, no small feat for a franchise that has done some truly wacky things, and the overall narrative grows overly complex with two distinct Uhuras separated by a year.
We also have to question why did this show’s production team choose to spotlight an Uhura story as a season finale? While Celia Rose Gooding delivers a consistently compelling performance and Uhura remains an iconic cornerstone of Star Trek lore, placing her personal growth and romantic dilemmas at the center of a season climax feels structurally unexpected for a series that typically relies on high-stakes ensemble cliffhangers to close out a season.
In the end, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” falls short of our expectations due to several underlying narrative flaws. Beyond the plot inconsistencies previously noted, the heavy reliance on bluffing as a core thematic element throughout the episode feels remarkably out of place. Across her appearances in both The Original Series and Strange New Worlds, Uhura has never been defined by her ability or inability to pull off a bluff. Yet, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” goes out of its way to emphasize this trait, attempting to insert an artificial flaw into her character where one was never needed.
Here’s to hoping this show’s one remaining finale is stronger than “Tomorrow’s Enterprise.”
Stray Thoughts:
- On the Future Enterprise, Leonard McCoy has apparently just arrived on the ship, and is set to take over soon from Doctor Boyce.
- Why the fake out with having Erica Ortegas and not Hikaru Sulu be the ace pilot the Future Enterprise crew needed for the black hole mission?
- When Lt. Uhura is forced to bluff her way back on the bridge of Pike’s Enterprise, she is made to be a bumbling fool. The same thing happens when she tries to play it cool to Kirk after arriving on the Future Enterprise. From everything we’ve seen of Uhura in this show, we’re certain she could be cooler than that.
- Why isn’t Pike more alarmed that, as far as he is concerned, Uhura seemed to magically change hairstyles after the pulse hit the Enterprise?
- Starbase 6, the place where Jim Kirk taught Uhura how to play poker, is mentioned in both The Original Series and The Next Generation.
- Upon Past Uhura not recognizing the name Gary Mitchell, Kirk tells her he is Jenna Mitchell’s stepbrother. Jenna is seen throughout Strange New Worlds as a bridge officer — except for this season, where her absence is unexplained.
- Kirk hints that something happened to La’an in the past year. What could it be?
- Future Chapel shares that she once dated a girl who claimed to be from the Department of Temporal Investigations, a key part of Starfleet we’ve seen in most Star Trek since Deep Space Nine.
- On Future Enterprise, we see a Skorr, the golden bird-like alien from The Animated Series.
- Finally, the awkward romance bit between Scotty and Uhura in The Final Frontier is validated!
- We did appreciate how this episode used music to convey transcendental concepts, a theme previously seen in “Subspace Rhapsody” and the Uhura-centric episode “Children of the Comet.”
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