“Memento Mori” may just be the best episode of Star Trek since the franchise returned to television in 2017.

I have certain biases that inform this view — as some readers many know, I’m a sucker for starship combat action — but beyond that, this week’s new Strange New Worlds is simply spectacular. The stakes are high, the emotional core is strong, and despite a lot happening, it doesn’t feel crammed at all, allowing viewers all the time we need to process everything and enjoy an exceptional hour of television.

This week’s tale begins as the Enterprise is en route to deliver supplies, including a new air filter, to the Finibus III colony. It’s also Starfleet’s ‘Remembrance Day,’ an occasion leading much of the crew to wear little badges memorializing lost Federation starships — a tradition in which La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) has no interest participating.

She’s clearly uncomfortable with the practice, as made clear with her terse interactions with Number One when asked about her former ship SS Puget Sound; La’an no intention to relive the past, either in a commemorative or therapeutic sense.

The action begins when (as happens so often in Star Trek), the colony doesn’t reply to the Enterprise’s hails, and a landing party’s trip to the surface reveals the grisly site of a massacre. When 100 of the colony’s survivors are found on an old ore freighter, Enterprise docks with the ship to bring the survivors aboard — but as a child describes the colony’s destroyers, La’an immediately recognizes that they’ve just fallen into a Gorn trap.

The ensuing Gorn attack is brutal and swift, destroying the transport freighter and causing severe damage to the Enterprise as well, wounding both La’an and Number One (Rebecca Romjin). The new Gorn ship design is unique and alien, seeming more natural and predatory than the sleek lines of the Constitution-class.

Captain Pike (Anson Mount) initially wants to turn and fight the alien vessel, but La’an convinces him to withdraw as the Enterprise retreats to a nearby brown dwarf. With shields, optics and other systems knocked out by the brown dwarf, we end up in a perfect homage to a “Balance of Terror” or Star Trek II-style ‘sub hunt.’

Below decks, though, things are getting worse following the initial Gorn attack. Hemmer (Bruce Horak) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), paired together as the young cadet rotates through various duties around the Enterprise, are trapped in the cargo bay with a damaged air filter that threatens to explode. Down in sickbay, already overwhelmed with casualties, Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) are forced to rely on a dwindling inventory of medical supplies, resorting to “ancient” surgical techniques after the power goes out.

During a tactical briefing, the news for Pike grows worse: the only weapon the ship has is a single photon torpedo, with no working guidance systems. Our encounter with La’an’s own fatalism here is a bit forced (as are the repeated visons of her brother) but Chong and Mount manage to sell it with conviction. Despite her own fear, it’s her job to inspire hope and confidence in this situation.

While Hemmer and Uhura struggle with the air filter — with the cadet acting as the engineer’s hands, to the best of her ability, after the Aenar is injured —  Spock (Ethan Peck) devises a method to turn the navigational deflector into a type of radar so that they can track the Gorn attack ship. After a tense moment where the enemy ship passes right over the top of them, Pike uses the intense gravity of the gas giant to drop the photon torpedo out on to the target. It’s a hit — but one that only signals three more Gorn vessels to join the Enterprise hunt… including an immense mothership.

The portrayal of the Gorn as relentless warriors is very well done — thinking back to the only-hinted-at Cestus III attack in “Arena” — especially since we never go see the lizard-like aliens at all. the brutality of their attack on Enterprise their highly-effective tactics force the ship to dive deeper into the brown dwarf’s gravitational pull.

The whines of the ship creaking, and shudders as the ship comes under fire make a more subtle, sensible tension builder than the usual explosions of rocks (or the still-baffling flamethrowers on the Discovery bridge) — it’s all part of how “Memento Mori” is so much closer to episodes like “Balance of Terror” or “The Doomsday Machine” than the show’s contemporary counterparts.

Even the B and C plots focused on the air filter and Una’s medical status seem a little closer to the ratcheting tension of an Original Series episode, with the added advantage of a larger budget giving us a lot more spectacle to look at — whether it’s the expanse of the ship’s main cargo bay thanks to the AR wall technology, or the grim reality of Chief Kyle (André Dae Kim) narrowly escaping a collapsing deck.

The side plot with Hemmer and Uhura, if a little constricted, is still a great development of both characters. Containing the two inside the isolated cargo bay gives Bruce Horak and Celia Rose Gooding room to work well with each other, and — even in the little snippets we see of the pair — Hemmer gets a lot more depth than previously portrayed, especially towards the end of the episode.

The hide and seek game with the Gorn is further complicated by the collapse of the gas giant, which is being drawn into the nearby black hole at pace. Slightly contrived, yes, but we do need something to get a resolution within 50 minutes before the episode starts to get tedious. La’an and Spock take a shuttle out to scout ahead, finding the two remaining Gorn ships flashing lights at each other in a strange sequence. With some faint recognition of their meaning, La’an insists that Spock perform a mind meld to search her childhood memories.

It’s a good mind meld sequence – is a little protracted – and we find out that La’an’s older brother Manu (Cameron Roberts) sacrificed himself to the Gorn so she could escape, while also giving her a guide their communications: the flashing lights are the Gorn’s take on Morse Code. I think they get away with the contrivance of the mind meld here because it’s not solving La’an’s trauma; in fact, even within the meld her subconscious is still maintaining barriers, this isn’t a quick-fix solution.

But still, it serves a purpose: the meld lets them figure out the lighting pattern, allowing the pair to fake a message to the Gorn mothership which tricks it into destroying its smaller companion vessel. Even though the odds now are even, time is running out for the Enterprise in more ways than one as the black hole is consuming the brown dwarf rapidly, while the damaged air filter is on a countdown to overload — which will destroy the ship.

With the Gorn still loitering outside, Pike decides to take a risk and make a break for it, using a combination of the black hole’s light distortion and the exploding air filter (dropped out into space from the cargo bay) as a diversion. It’s dramatic — perhaps a little over-dramatic, as we know Uhura isn’t going to get shot out into space in Episode 4 — but that’s nothing nothing that I can’t forgive thanks to the brilliant visuals of the Enterprise’s escape from the black hole, wounded but still flying.

It’s a hopeful ending, with the ship safe and La’an’s relationship with her traumatic past taking an early step on the path to improvement — but once again, Strange New Worlds isn’t going to let you leave that plot behind as the final beats strongly hint this won’t be the last time we’ll encounter the Gorn during Captain Pike’s era.

CAMP NONSENSE OF THE WEEK

Nothing can beat Ortegas’ (Melissa Navia) sardonic “Aye aye, skipper — dive dive dive!” response to Captain Pike. I was half-expecting her to say “Fly, big E, fly!” as they went into the black hole — but I guess you can only lean against the fourth wall so many times in one episode.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Spock’s explanation of the brown dwarf’s effects — and Pike’s counter that it will impair the Enterprise just as much as the Gorn — is a clear parallel to Saavik and Spock’s discussion in Wrath of Khan, as the Enterprise is about to lead Khan’s Reliant into the Mutara Nebula.
   
• While M’Benga and Una consider intravenous drugs to be “ancient” medical technology, IV med were used in “Whom Gods Destroy” and “Obsession,” and later to treat Odo and Quark after their wilderness adventure in “The Ascent.”
   
• The Enterprise docking gangway is much more realistic than the neon blue force-field system we saw in “Such Sweet Sorrow.”

• Spock’s makeshift motion sensor appears to be a prototype of the one used to track the Romulan Bird of Prey in “Balance of Terror,” even making the same sonar “ping” sound upon sensor contact.
   
• The cargo bay where Hemmer and Uhura get stuck appears to be on the underside of the Enterprise secondary hull, in a similar location to the cargo holds seen briefly in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
   
• The ‘depth charge’ torpedo dropped onto the Gorn ship is launched from the bottom of the Enterprise saucer section, confirming the location of the torpedo tubes as established in the Original Series.

• Khan Noonien-Singh’s sleeper ship, the SS Botany Bay, was named for a penal colony near an Australian body of water; La’an Noonien-Singh’s ship, the SS Puget Sound, was named for an American body of water.
   
• Captain Pike’s memorial badge honors the USS Discovery, which was reported as destroyed following the big battle in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2.” While Discovery’s leap to the future is highly-classified, the ship’s apparent destruction became the public cover story for the events of that episode.
   
• As La’an begins to sense Spock’s thoughts during their mind meld, archival Ethan Peck dialogue from “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” can be heard as he recalls one of his final conversations with Michael Burnham.

I really, really liked “Memento Mori.” I don’t think Star Trek has produced anything like it since The Wrath of Khan. For a long time, the slow, tense scenes of the ‘sub hunt’ have been limited to the Original Series — but this episode is more than an homage to “Balance of Terror,” as it adds so much more the formula, with an unseen and dangerous enemy for the crew.

For the second episode in a row, the medical cast are side-lined despite being  somewhat  central to the plot. Considering the centrality of the McCoy’s role as Enterprise chief medical officer in classic Trek, as well as M’Benga’s place as one of three three POC characters in the main cast, this could be construed as a problematic omission — with all the action, though, it wasn’t a glaring issue.

Reimagining the Gorn as a genuine threat is an inspired choice, even if we’re never going to forget their iconic first appearance. La’an’s place in the limelight this week is deserved, if a little restricted; then again, what remained unsaid about her trauma and experiences is probably a deliberate move. Having the character open up and process over a period of time — instead of in 15 minutes at the end of an action-packed episode — is a substantially better idea.

There’s a lot going on in “Memento Mori,” and almost all of it is excellent.