“All Those Who Wander” is a bug hunt — and this, to me, was not a good thing. I’m still not sure what exactly the game plan with this week’s outing was, beyond “Hey, remember Aliens?” I just don’t understand the need to do that kind of storytelling in a Star Trek format, especially in the context of Strange New Worlds.

The episode starts in a vaguely sensible place, with Cadets Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) and Chia (Jessica Danecker) attending a farewell party as their Academy rotation aboard the Enterprise is coming to an end. Uhura still finds herself to be unsure about place in the world — and in Starfleet — which has always been the strongest thread this season; even it’s only briefly touched upon in this episode, it’s nice to see it picked up properly for the finish.

There’s no chance to dwell on it, as Starfleet has tasked Enterprise with a priority mission: the USS Peregrine (NCC-1549) has gone dark in their vicinity, crashing on the planet Valeo Beta V, a know communication dead zone. Despite Enterprise’s main mission — the time sensitive delivery of power cells to Deep Space Station K-7, the Peregine must be salvaged and her crew rescued.

So it’s time to go on a road trip, as Captain Pike (Anson Mount) calls it — while Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and the Enterprise travels onward to K-7, the captain leads a two-shuttle landing party to investigate, bringing Spock (Ethan Peck), La’an (Christina Chong), M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), Chapel (Jess Bush), Hemmer (Bruce Horak), Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte), the newly-minted Lieutenant Duke (Ted Kellogg), and Cadet Chia along for the ride.

What they find on Valeo Beta V isn’t pretty: Peregrine is perched at the edge of a deep ravine, with her warp drive out and ships’ batteries inoperative. 20 members of her crew, including her captain, lie dead outside in the surrounding snowy tundra — showing signs of death as a mix of exposure and some sort of savage physical attack.

Worse, it turns out that the cause of the disaster came from three passengers who made their way onto the vessel — one of whom was carrying Gorn eggs within him. The Gorn are back! In evil, unthinking, animalistic, unapproachable form! Oh, joy. Thankfully, though, it appears that the crew’s frozen graves managed to draw the Gorn hatchlings outside, with the elements killed them.

The crew (stupidly) split up, with Hemmer heading to engineering to restore power while the rest of the team search for the two life sign readings. La’an, Pike, and Uhura encounter a strange alien guarding a human child, both identified by La’an as survivors of a Gorn breeding colony.

The alien — cutely named Buckley (Carlos Albornoz) by young Oriana (Emma Ho) — says the monsters are gone, but La’an doesn’t buy it. Her conviction is vindicated when an unwell Buckley, after some heavy wheezing and oozing of blood, collapses to the ground as four (!) Gorn hatchlings burst from his body, killing poor Cadet Chia in the process.

I do not like Gorn chestbursting, simple as that. I was barely okay with the idea of Gorn breeding colonies as a concept, but I gave it it’s due because it was interesting, but chestbursting? It’s visceral, yes, but it’s not really Star Trek, right? (I’m deliberately ignoring “Conspiracy” because it was awful there, too.)

Surely we have better things to do than write the young of a spacefaring civilization as horrifying lizard people, who burst out from aliens and rip people apart. Apparently not, considering how we’ve heard the Strange New Worlds showrunners continue to refer to the alien race as ‘the perfect monsters.’

Apparently not. Instead, we get the rather simplistic — though well-acted and filmed —  horror of Gorn hatchlings menacing the crew, and dragging off poor Lieutenant Duke into the darkness to devour him while spitting venom at Hemmer and Uhura.

There are some sweet moments, like La’an reminding the terrified Oriana that’s there’s more to living than just surviving (the same advice she heard from Captain Pike in the season premiere) and Hemmer giving Uhura more sage wisdom about and her fears of connection, but it all sits within the deeply-disappointing Aliens-inspired story which would feel much more at home in the world of, say, Starship Troopers.

That’s not to say they don’t get the tropes right — Sam Kirk’s anger at Spock, calling him a
“pointy-eared computer” is a perfect classic-era jab as you can get, but it just all sits atop this very unnatural setting. Even as they plot to trap and kill off the remaining three Gorn aboard the ship, it all still feels wrong. Gorn aren’t animals — we saw them pilot several starships with tactics and communication only five episodes ago,  and yet they’re being talked about as such, without any attempts to contemplate or understand them.

Yes, they might be scary and different, but having a species who we know are actually intelligent, with legitimate grievances (yet to be discovered by our characters) as being just monsters, crawling around on their arms and legs and trying to rip everyone to shreds… it just feels like such a weak use of the race.

I will say that I did quite enjoy Spock’s battle with his emotions here, both when they are suppressed and when he finally frees them to try and bait the Gorn out with anger — yelling and screaming at them with all his unleashed fury. Peck does it well, and his instinctive lunge for Sam Kirk was frightening (but I’m not quite sure why Spock had to unleash his emotions in the middle of this bug hunt).

The character work is great! Everyone is acting their hearts out, thanks to good writing and great directing, but the Gorn are just part of the environment now. Even their attack in “Memento Mori” was calculated, impersonal, vicious — but still clearly that of an intelligent species. Here? They’re just brutal animals, tearing each other apart just the other side of a doorway, or jumped from bulkhead to bulkhead as they chase La’an down to the cargo bay to pound ceaselessly on the container she’s hiding in.

It seems so tonally dissonant to me that Strange New Worlds –- a show that has been largely about bridging gaps between different people and different worlds, which opened with an episode about how conflict was not always the inevitable end to everything –- is just perfectly comfortable with committing to the Gorn as being closer to a Demogorgon from Stranger Things than a interstellar society.

With the Gorn defeated, all seems well — until Hemmer reveals that he’s been infected with a final dose of Gorn eggs, making it too late to save the engineer who has already prepared himself to die to keep his Enterprise crewmates safe.

Beyond the rather concerningly short incubation period of these Gorn, I am bewildered and annoying at the decision to — quite literally — ice Hemmer at this point. While the Aenar was apparently always planned to be a single-season role according to the shows’ creative team, it’s just a weird choice. Bruce Horak played an exceptional character who deserved a lot more screen time than he got, and a much better ending than dramatic cliff-dive out of a cargo bay after appearing in barely half the season.

There’s just something about this that also feels cheap. The drama is on point and all our heroes are affected deeply by his sacrifice, but it still doesn’t feel right. To bring in a very good actor and an important piece of disability representation, and then let him go out like this? If this season had been 22 episodes long, I think I could have forgiven this happening in the penultimate episode. We’d have had time to explore all the facets of Hemmer, either as the primary character in a plot or as part of the ensemble cast — but in Strange New Worlds’ tight ten-episode run it seems like such a waste of potential.

Hemmer’s funeral is sad, and cut off a little as Spock leaves to confront his still-uncontrolled anger, bashing up a corridor wall and nearly injuring Nurse Chapel before she calms him down — and assures him that his emotions are no weakness. Jess Bush is very good at handling these emotional scenes, and hopefully we’ll get more of them next season.

The final unexpected touch was the departure of La’an, who takes a leave absence to search for Oriana’s family outside of Federation space — if she couldn’t ever get her own family back, La’an at least has a chance to help another victim of Gorn terrors.

Sounds like a Season 2 setup to me!

CAMP NONSENSE OF THE WEEK

This week’s award goes to Captain Pike, who cheekily referred to the rescue mission as a road trip — hopefully, most of his other road trips don’t involve parasitical eat-you-from-the-inside alien infestations.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• In a new interview with Bruce Horak published at The Hollywood Reporter today, the actor confirmed that while his time as Hemmer has ended, he’s not done with the Star Trek world — a good thing for a fine member of this cast.
   
• The Peregrine is described as a Sombra-class starship, built using Constitution-class parts to serve as a kind of fast explorer vessel. The resemblance between the two designs is quote close close, though with a few distinct differences (including darker red nacelle caps and a shorter secondary hull).
   
• Peregine’s internal color scheme — a redress of the Enterprise sets using blues and greys instead of the hero vessel’s bright oranges and blacks — may be an homage to the original color scheme of the Enterprise bridge set in “The Cage.”

• Also like “The Cage,” the landing party’s mission jackets feature attached hoods to protect wearers from the environment, along with protective goggles reminiscent of those worn by Number One and Dr. Boyce in that original production.
   
• The Enterprise’s main destination this week was Deep Space Station K-7, the primary setting of “The Trouble With Tribbles.” The nearness of K-7 to planet Valero Beta V implies that it — and potentially Gorn-occupied space as well — may be quite near the borders of the Klingon Empire.
   
• Emma Ho — who plays young survivor Oriana — is the sister of Ian Ho, who portrayed the young First Servant of Majalus in “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” just a few weeks ago. (The pair also appeared together as brother and sister in the “Strange Dogs” prologues in the final season of The Expanse.)
   
• Can Captain Pike please make me breakfast? If La’an can have that kind of reaction to an egg quiche, sign me up!

The character work is great, especially with Spock’s emotional walls breaking down and La’an finally fighting her worst enemy, but overall, I just can’t come to like “All Those Who Wander” — it just seems wrong, somehow. What was the point, beyond some gory scenes, a mildly interesting bait-and-switch montage, and the chance to knock off a character for good by infesting Hemmer with deadly Gorn eggs and then have him jump into a ravine?

Think about the greatest monster episode of the Original Series – The Devil in The Dark – and how the story follows a similar path. Horrifying monsters killing all the encounter, impossible to find, growing more dangerous with every minute…and yet right at the end, we find out that the monster is just a terrified mother, trying to protect her children from destruction by clueless miners, who drop all of their violent bellicosity the moment they find out they’ve been destroying a sentient being’s children.

This is not to say that Star Trek can’t play around with the horror genre… but where’s that twist? Where’s the moment of fear from the Gorn, the possibility of mercy, the moment of mutual growth? Maybe it wasn’t deemed necessary. Maybe it is impossible to come to terms with a species that embeds it’s young in other beings like that. But the writers could have written it to be like that. Instead, they went with this – and I’m disappointed.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds caps its first season with “A Quality of Mercy” on Thursday, July 7 on Paramount+ in the United States, Australia, Latin America, and the Nordics, as well as on CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada.

The episode will follow on Paramount+ in the UK and Ireland later this summer; additional international distribution has not yet been announced.