In Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (S3 – EP3) Shuttle to Kenfori

Synopsis: In “Shuttle to Kenfori,” Pike and M’Benga travel into a disputed and abandoned sector, where a dangerous mission to cure Batel forces M’Benga to confront ghosts from his past.

The Story

When the Gorn DNA inside Captain Batel begins to reassert itself, Spock and Dr. M’Benga devise a daring treatment plan: to fully fuse her human DNA with the Gorn DNA, resolving the internal conflict once and for all. However, the procedure requires a rare plant that only grows on Kenfori — a planet jointly abandoned by both the Klingons and the Federation during the war for reasons that remain classified or unknown.

The catch? Kenfori lies on the border of Klingon space, meaning Captain Pike and Dr. M’Benga must covertly travel there via a modified shuttlecraft designed to avoid triggering local security alarms. Upon arrival, they find that no animal or humanoid life remains — only plants — making their journey to an old, derelict Federation science lab relatively easy. There, they locate the rare plant needed to save Batel.

But things take a turn when a Klingon war party detects their presence and begins hunting them. Matters worsen when both Pike and M’Benga — and the Klingons — are suddenly ambushed by former Federation and Klingon soldiers, all of whom have been horrifyingly reanimated as zombies.

In a desperate move, Pike activates a forcefield that traps himself, M’Benga, and a lone surviving Klingon warrior inside, shielding them from the undead horde. That Klingon soon reveals herself to be Bytha — daughter of Ambassador Dak’Rah, the so-called “Butcher of J’Gal,” whom M’Benga killed in self-defence in last season’s Under the Cloak of War.

Bytha, whose family name was disgraced by her father’s defection to the Federation, seeks to restore her honour by defeating M’Benga in ritual combat — to the death.

Meanwhile, aboard the Enterprise, efforts to rescue Pike and M’Benga without provoking a diplomatic incident are complicated by Ortegas, who begins to question orders and deliberately sabotages Number One’s plan — leaving her with no choice but to carry out Ortegas’s own riskier strategy.

The Acting

This episode features solid acting performances throughout. Christine Horn delivers a strong turn as Bytha, Ambassador Dak’Rah’s vengeful daughter. The build-up to the reveal of what M’Benga had hidden from his friend and Captain is brilliantly executed, with Babs Olusanmokun matching Bytha’s intensity beat for beat. We also get a standout performance from Melissa Navia as Ortegas, who continues to struggle with the lingering effects of battlefield PTSD — a burden that’s clearly clouding her judgment and putting her crewmates at risk.

Overall

A solid episode that hopefully brings the Captain Batel/Gorn storyline to a satisfying close so the show can move forward. I was generally happy with how M’Benga’s arc surrounding the death of Ambassador Dak’Rah was handled, though I feel there’s still some unresolved story there. The inclusion of zombies was a fun touch, and the explanation of their origin made perfect sense within the story.