STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS
Season 4, Episode 1

Valles Marineris

Series: Strange New Worlds - (2022 - present)
Season: 4
Episode #: 1
Production #: SNW-401
Original Airdate: 07/23/2026

Writer(s): Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers, & Alan B. McElroy
Director(s): Chris Fisher

Guest Stars
Saffron Burrows as Battle Commander Cassell
Adrian Holmes as Commodore Robert April
Dan Jeannotte as Lt. George Samuel Kirk
Carol Kane as Commander Pelia

Co-Stars
Bianca Nugara as Cadet A'Sha
Dane Gulston as Martian Guard 1
Colby Dean Turner as Martian Guard 2
Alex Kapp as the Voice of the U.S.S. Enterprise Computer

Stardate: 2491.5

Synopsis

Six months after the defeat of the Vezda, Captain Pike, Lieutenant Noonien-Singh, and Doctor M'Benga ride horseback through a desert on the planet Tolluxar, having completed a mission to deliver medical supplies to the locals. This is the Enterprise's fifteenth back-to-back mission since Captain Batel's sacrifice. Number One can tell that the crew is straining under the workload, and that her captain is using the work to avoid grieving. She implies to Pike that she would like to go on the next away mission instead of him, which Pike reluctantly promises.

In a meeting with Admiral April, Pike discovers that Starfleet is considering him for a promotion to commodore. This is a matter that Pike initially dismisses, but April recommends that he "think about it", before sending the Enterprise on a mission to observe a category 10 interstellar squall, a rare kind of space storm. Only Commander Pelia confesses to having seen this kind of phenomenon "a long time ago", musing with a smile that she may have been "in a phone box at the time".

While Ensign Uhura struggles to make a personal connection with her new cadet understudy on the bridge, the crew approachs the phenomenon, anticipating a routine scientific survey. Unexpectedly, they receive a distress signal from a buoy deep inside the phenomenon. When the Enterprise attempts to intervene and perform a rescue, the ship becomes trapped in the squall and is damaged, thrown to an unknown location.

In order to effect repairs and restart their warp drive, Pike sends Number One, Lieutenant Singh, and Lieutenant Ortegas to investigate nearby class M planets. While on the surface of one of the planets, the away team discovers that the iridium source they need is blocked by a very large life sign. Before they can get assistance from the Enterprise, an unidentified alien vessel arrives and ambushes them. The ship is ensnared in an energy field, without the power needed to fight them off. Pike manages to make contact with the alien commander, pleading for his ship and crew. The alien commander agrees to come aboard, but does not agree to release the ship.

Lieutenant Singh unsuccessfully uses her phaser on its maximum setting, burning down several trees while only agitating the lifesigns. At the same time, aboard Enterprise, Spock discovers that their location is Sol, and that the alien ship is towing them toward the planet Mars. The phenomenon had displaced the Enterprise sixty-five million years into the past. This leaves the away team alone on what is actually a prehistoric Earth, with an agitated tyrannosaur emerging from the fallen trees and smoke.

Updated with the reality of their situation, the away team agrees to a plan to stun the tyrannosaur by shooting it in the mouth in order to minimize changes to the timeline. After distracting it from a meal of pterodactyls, Number One successfully stuns the dinosaur, allowing the team to move forward and locate their objective.

[ Complete Screencap Index ]

Aboard Enterprise, the alien commander and her entourage board by phasing directing through the hull and the bulkhead into the corridor. Despite awkward introductions, the commander, Cassell, is curious about diplomacy. In her experience, her enemy, the Dol'drm, are as implacable as they are impossible to communicate with. Captain Pike convinces her to let his crew attempt contact, demonstrating his xenolinguistics and xenoanthropology experts.

On the bridge, Spock informs Pike that they need the energy of a supernova to return to their own time. Before they can begin working on a solution to this problem, a blaring alarm warns that Cassell and her entourage have phased through the science lab floor and broken into engineering. Scott signals that they stole an antimatter storage pod.

Pike attempts to intervene and talk Cassell out of leaving, but she reveals that she knows he is from the future. Gaining access to the Enterprise computer, she learned the fate of her world, and is determined to use the antimatter pod to change that fate. Helpless to stop her otherwise, Pike is forced to watch her board her ship and leave, the Enterprise left to drift.

On the planet, the away team arrives at the source, discovering it to be a crashed alien space vessel. Inside are cryopods, with recently dead insectoid occupants. Lieutenant Singh remarks that, given this to be prehistoric Earth, the fact that the cryopods didn't save any of their lives was a passive benefit to the future of the planet, Lieutenant Ortegas muses that they may be different, but they wanted to survive too. Number One salvages the iridium from the ship, and they are about to leave when they are ambushed by a velociraptor. Before it can actually attack anyone, Lieutenant Singh reacts with a haymaker to its snout, startling the predator into running off. This will be the last contact dinosaurs and Humans will have until the year 2373.

Returning safely to Enterprise and restoring power, the away team takes their stations as Pike orders a pursuit of the alien vessel to retrieve their stolen antimatter. Despite pushing the ship to its limit, and Pike appealing to Cassell to reconsider her actions, the antimatter pod is ejected via missile launcher. Lieutenant Singh is prepared to target the missile, but Pike orders her to stand down, realizing that the planet about to be destroyed didn't exist in his time. He allows the Dol'drm homeworld to be destroyed.

Spock reveals that the detonation has created the energy needed to make it home, and Pike orders Ortegas to take the ship into the blast wave. Enterprise is swept away by the energy and returned to the present day in the same position it left.

In the wake of the event, Spock informs the senior staff that the destruction of the Dol'drm homeworld contributed to the formation of the Solar asteroid belt. It also shifted the orbit of Mars, rendering the planet incapable of supporting life. A fragment of the Dol'drm planet collided with the Cretaceous Earth, in present-day Chicxulub, Mexico, contributing to the extinction of the dinosaurs and allowing mammals to rise as the dominant order of life on the planet. The crew mulls over the ramifications of possibly being their own progenitors before Pike recommends they all take the night off.

Later, after Singh voices her concerns of her genetic structure potentially changing to M'benga and Chapel, Pike ruminates on the mission with Admiral April, he decides that he isn't ready to take on a promotion. Instead, he proposes a promotion for someone else; Una Chin-Riley, his Number One.

-Memory Alpha

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