Synopsis: In ‘Tomorrow’s Enterprise ‘, a temporal crisis brings Pike’s Enterprise face to face with the future Kirk will one day inherit.
The Story
Although she has been ordered to rest, Uhura keeps searching for the source of the transmission and eventually contacts her future self. A year later, Kirk’s Enterprise is investigating a black hole. Scotty, Ortegas and Uhura take a shuttle towards it, but the shuttle is destroyed and Scotty is killed. When Uhura is treated for her injuries, however, the doctor tells her Scotty died a year earlier.
The two Uhuras must work together to untangle the mystery, which leads them to the unusual birth of a space-based life form that exists in the past, present and future all at once.
The Acting
Celia Rose Gooding puts in a fantastic performance as both the less assured Uhura we know in the present and the more confident woman she becomes. There were moments when I could completely buy Gooding as a younger Nichelle Nichols. The hairstyle helps, but so does her performance as the older Uhura.
That future Uhura is in a relationship with Scotty, which feels like a nod to the chemistry between them in the later movies. Perhaps this episode gives us a glimpse of how it began. Speaking of Scotty, Martin Quinn is wonderfully awkward in the opening scene when he tries to ask present-day Uhura out on a date.
I also enjoyed future Uhura’s scene with Pike. She knows what lies ahead for him, and the things left unsaid make it especially touching. There’s a lovely contrast when present-day Uhura finds herself aboard the future Enterprise and Kirk quickly rumbles her. He tells her how he taught her to bluff over five straight days of poker with him and Gary Mitchell.
These scenes give us a feel for the experiences that will turn the Uhura of Strange New Worlds into the woman we know from The Original Series.
Overall
Despite some rather iffy science, which I’ll come to in a moment, this felt like a proper Star Trek episode. For me, that’s a first this season. The show has taken several big swings into other genres, and I think it has turned a lot of people off in the process.
Uhura gets some proper character development here. The Strange New Worlds version is eager to please and anxious about what comes next. By comparison, her future self lives more in the moment while retaining the professionalism we expect from her. Celia Rose Gooding plays the contrast beautifully, particularly in Uhura’s scenes with Pike and Kirk. There’s also a callback to “Children of the Comet”: the music Uhura hears over comms is the same music she heard inside the comet.
I liked the reveal that the pulses were connected to the birth of a life form that exists across past, present and future, as well as the crew’s solution to the problem. But the decision to use a white hole and a black hole to let the two Uhuras communicate—and then switch places in time—comes with some caveats.
I can understand the visual appeal. Spock describes a white hole as the theoretical other side of a black hole, placing an Enterprise at each end. But that doesn’t make the connection a working communications channel. In the standard Einstein–Rosen bridge model, the bridge closes too quickly for even light to get through. Nor does it explain why a signal would reach the same ship exactly one year later.
The episode adds energy pulses and a temporal shift, suggesting something stranger than ordinary black hole physics is happening. But those elements end up doing the heavy lifting for the time travel. I can’t help feeling that a temporal anomaly would have served the story just as well, without making the explanation more complicated than it needed to be.
- Story8.5
- Acting9.8
- CGI & Stunts10
- Incidental Music10
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