A few weeks ago in Strange New Worlds‘ up-and-down third season, “A Space Adventure Hour” delivered a deeply unsubtle paean to the creation of Star Trek. This week, Strange New Worlds does much the same: but this time the birth of Star Trek is within the text itself, making for a much more interesting lens on the birth of an icon.
From the moment that it opens, it becomes clear that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” (named for a Vulcan idiom that Spock uses later on) is not going to be a typical episode of Strange New Worlds. Not in that “oh, something’s going to be kooky and fun!” way that you might expect after last week’s dire-stakes episode and the season’s general back-and-forth in tone swaps so far, but because we do not open on the Enterprise, or with her crew at all: instead, on the personal log of Commander Kirk, aboard the U.S.S. Farragut.
At which point the planet the Farragut was monitoring—and Kirk was butting heads with his captain, V’Rel (Zoe Doyle), over beaming down and surveying—explodes. Just like last week, everyone immediately locks in, especially Jim, when V’Rel is incapacitated by the extreme damage caused by the Farragut‘s proximity to an exploding planet. But things go somehow even more badly when, of course, the Enterprise beams to respond to the Farragut‘s distress signal—beaming over an assist team of Nurse Chapel, Scotty, Spock, and Uhura. As everyone races into action and Kirk begins slowly realizing that he’s getting the command experience he’s been waiting for at the worst possible time, the vessel responsible for destroying a planet in a single blast, a massive, tendriled junk ship comes flying along and gobbles the Enterprise up before promptly warping away.
The Farragut is alone, and barely holding together, let alone capable of pursuit. It’s operating on a skeleton crew, most beamed away to Enterprise before its abduction. And James T. Kirk is staring at a captain’s chair, with Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, Uhura, and Chapel at his side.
If “A Space Adventure Hour” was an episode talking about the metanarrative about the birth of Star Trek as a television show, then suddenly, you realize: this is an episode about the birth of Star Trek, the team that we know will go on to appear in the original series. At long last, the crucible that will one day forge one of the franchise’s defining heroes has begun.
So it’s great then that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is really an episode about rocking Kirk’s shit for 45 minutes. The episode splits between the Farragut and the captured Enterprise, disabled in the interior of the junk ship as its systems are drained of power, effectively doing one of Strange New Worlds‘ “disaster on a spaceship” episodes twice over. Kirk has to rally a group of officers who don’t really know, and don’t really trust, him as he tries to figure out what kind of a leader he is in time to rescue Enterprise and stop this junker ship on a collision course with destroying another world called Sullivan’s Planet. Pike, meanwhile, has to deal with shadowy infiltrators sucking his ship dry, a ticking time bomb that will kill both the Enterprise crew and the Farragut‘s wounded.
The stuff aboard Enterprise is fun and definitely tense, even if it is also definitely the b-plot of the episode. Pike and La’an have the mystery of the junkers to solve, Carol Kane gets to ham it up and get everyone to wire up rotary telephones to overcome the ship’s power loss and communications blockage. There’s intrigue and whimsy, but still, the focus of “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is clear: this is the making of Kirk’s moment.
It gives Wesley material that, for the most part up to now, he’s lacked the chance to chew on. Most of Kirk’s appearances on Strange New Worlds have been technicalities: alternate realities, through the lens of goofier episodes like “Subspace Rhapsody” or “Space Adventure Hour” and its holodeck metanarrative (thankfully, Wesley does not go hard on the Shatnerisms as he was encouraged to then). This is Kirk, the man who is going to become Captain Kirk, and he has been thrust into an incredible challenge, with a team that he doesn’t know yet and arguably before he may even have really wanted to be in it.
Thankfully, Strange New Worlds realizes that it’s important to not suddenly supercharge this character into the man that we already know. We see elements of the man we will come to love in the original Star Trek, his braggadocio and his desire to always challenge and take risks, but crucially, we also see the deeply human elements of Kirk that people often forget in their memories, especially amplified here in his younger self. This is a Kirk that doubts, and loses his cool, and is allowed to react to the stress of the situation he’s found himself in, and react poorly, and fairly so given the circumstances.
Likewise, this gives the proto-TOS crew that he finds himself leaning on to get the Farragut even remotely close to shipshape a chance to react to this Kirk, and begin to feel out the seeds of what will become their relationships. It’s fun to watch Martin Quinn’s Scotty absolutely hate working with this guy, a thickheaded commander who wants to push systems an engineer knows can’t be pushed, just as it’s fun to watch Kirk’s relationship with Uhura, and the trust they already established together last season, flourish even further as that bond deepens.
It is, of course, also fun to watch the early days of Spock and Kirk’s understanding of each other begin to coalesce. That becomes crucial here when the stress does get to Kirk when his plan to juice Farragut‘s engines almost literally blows up in his and Scotty’s faces, leaving the ship dead in the water between the junker ship and its next target at Sullivan’s planet, which is home to a pre-warp civilization. Kirk blows up, needing to get off the bridge, and his more senior fellows among the Enterprise crew realize that the young commander is in a very precarious moment.
It takes Spock confronting and comforting him, removed from an emotional response to the stress everyone is feeling, to get Kirk to rearticulate and find the confidence he needs to deal with the setbacks and pressure the situation has demanded of him. It’s a wonderful moment between the two as they start feeling each other out, how comfortable they can be even in this nascent phase of their relation, what boundaries there still are, and what can be bonded over to create a friendship that we know will span lifetimes. Again, crucially, Strange New Worlds understands here that it cannot just speedrun these characters into their original Trek selves just yet. We can see glimmers of those bonds, but just as it’s vital for this episode to give us a Kirk that is flawed and still learning, and willing to both make and accept his mistakes, it’s just as vital that we come out of this episode feeling that the crew that will one day serve aboard the Enterprise together are still not yet that crew. They’re just closer than they were an episode before.
This is the most important thing “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” arguably needed to nail, and so when the day is saved by some Kirkian ingenuity (and some assists from Scotty, Uhura, Spock, and Chapel) to free the Enterprise and destroy the junker ship before it can consume Sullivan’s Planet, we can perhaps forgive that the last twist the episode makes doesn’t quite land as effectively as the rest of it does. Amid the destruction of the junker ship, Spock manages to confirm, right as Pike and La’an do, ridding the Enterprise of its last infiltrator, that the mysterious foe they faced was a colony ship of 7,000 human beings, life signs blinking out as the junker ship tears apart.
It turns out, as the Enterprise discovers during debrief, the vessel was, in its core form, a ship sent from Earth just after the end of World War III, staffed with scientists who believed that Earth may not be able to recover, and humanity’s hope lay in the stars. Whatever happened to them in the generations since to transform their descendants into monstrous, planet-and-ship-devouring scavengers is left unsaid as Kirk’s first victory in the chair is tinged with the discomfort that he is responsible for having to have slaughtered thousands of people to save millions, and both the Farragut‘s interim commander and the Enterprise crew find themselves humbled by the revelation.
While it does again build on this episode as not being about the establishment of the legend of Jim Kirk but the flawed and deeply human man that he will come to be (and always was beneath our memory of that legend), what sits as odd in this final twist is the sudden swerve Strange New Worlds has to take to serve it. Would the climax of the episode have labored this consternation if this crew of disenfranchised descendants were early Vulcans, or Romulans, or another Federation species? What if they were some other alien species that we either knew or didn’t know? Or is the point meant to be that our deeply human heroes are now touched and aggrieved at the revelation that they have had to kill other humans, specifically, before they could kill them?
After all, up to the moment of this revelation “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”, both through its characters and the narrative itself, framed these mysterious junkers as explicitly monstrous, just as this season did with the Gorn in its premiere. They had destroyed worlds, killed countless crews of ships whose vessels were consumed in its growth, and were on the precipice of indiscriminately extinguishing a population in the millions. The fact that it suddenly wants Kirk and the rest of the characters to wrestle with remorse because the perpetrators of these atrocities were human raises some uncomfortable questions about who and what gets to be treated with sympathy on the show that the episode simply does not have time to answer, saving this moment for its very end.
But again, for the worse this time, that was never meant to be the focus of this episode. From beginning to end, “The Sehlat Who At Its Tail” is about the genesis of the unit that would go on to become the original Star Trek, forging them together amid a grand trial. There, at least, it delivers one of the season’s best episodes yet, albeit in a slightly compromised form.
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