Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spins a classic story this week, yet still achieves a unique episode with “Terrarium.” While the idea of enemies forced to work together to survive has been done before, the episode gives Melissa Navia a stellar showcase.
Ortegas’s personal log discusses the Enterprise exploring a section of space that has inspired numerous space ghost stories. That includes a sector with strange space readings, with Ortegas volunteering to fly a shuttle solo to investigate.
Ortegas assures Uhura she’d be fine on her own and does enjoy taking the shuttle into the storms to drop off a signal tracker. Without warning, a wormhole opens up before the ships, with the shuttle caught in it. The Enterprise is helpless, hearing her communicator before it winked out.
The shuttle is spat out of the wormhole with its shields failing. Ortegas tries to pilot it through debris while sending out an automated SOS. One crash landing later, she wakes up to a battered shuttle with life support fading. Being Ortegas, she talks out loud about her plans, including how to tend to her wounds and create a water condenser out of random objects.
Back on the Enterprise, the crew discusses how the wormhole popped out of nowhere, with Uhura hopeful she is still alive. Una has to point out that the Enterprise has a mission to deliver a needed vaccine to a planet suffering from a pandemic, limiting their time to look for Ortegas, with Pike insisting they could do both.
Ortegas explores the mostly barren moon, seeing that the wormhole is still active and possibly her way back. Ortegas quickly realizes that the moon would pass through a gas giant, so she has to find shelter before she is caught outside. Spotting lights in the distance, she wonders if she has neighbors.
Uhura manages to find the "SOS" signal, with Una and Spock doubtful. Uhura suggests sending probes into the wormhole, with Pike agreeing. Back on the moon, Ortegas reaches the rocky shelter to find her “neighbor” is…a Gorn.
Enemies to...allies?
The probes find no signal. Uhura suggests a shuttle trip for herself.
The Gorn catches Ortegas, who is expected to be killed, only for a strange worm creature to pop out of hiding to attack them. To Ortegas’s confusion, after killing the creature, the Gorn simply walks away.
Despite all of Uhura’s simulations, nothing is working, but she refuses to give up, and Spock has to respect it. The Gorn is feeding on the creature and tosses a piece to Ortegas, who briefly thinks it's a trap before eating the offering. Coming into the tented area, she finds the Gorn’s comms array with the Gorn now sleeping. As she approaches the shuttle, Ortegas sees the odd light again just before a quake swallows the shuttle up.
Walking, Ortegas is attacked by more of the creatures, with the Gorn showing up and holding them off with a force field. Uhura is “thinking outside the box” to figure out that the only way to get to Ortegas is to use the Enterprise to prop open the wormhole. She also “fixes” the data to show this plan has a better chance of success than it does to convince Pike to okay it.
In the now protected shelter, Ortegas is doing the last thing she ever expected: helping heal the wound of the Gorn. After creating a fire, Ortegas sees the Gorn’s helmet to realize it is a pilot like her. The pair slowly begin using sign language to try and communicate with each other.
Seeing the wormhole shrinking, Ortegas whips together a makeshift universal translator to tell the Gorn she needed its help. She realizes the Gorn (which is female) can understand her and that they have more in common than she thought. Before long, the two even play chess (both human and the Gorn equivalent).
Ortegas manages to get the array working, with the Gorn looking less than excited over it. The Gorn shelter doesn't show up on her scanners, and she has the feeling she is being watched, with the Gorn agreeing. Ortegas wants to get more healing gel, but the Gorn refuses. Ortegas figures out that to the Gorn, being injured or defeated means it is “broken” and doesn't want to be rescued.
Ortegas refuses to accept that, as she wants to show her people how the Gorn aren't truly monsters. Pike himself takes the helm to pilot the Enterprise to the wormhole with Uhura offering up a Swahili prayer. The ship can only stay a few minutes before making its rendezvous.
Ortegas is getting more of the gel when she is attacked once more by the creatures. Her attempt to drive them back with a flare backfires as it shortens the battery powering the shield and array.
A bitter end to a beautiful friendship
At first despairing, Ortegas realizes that the gas giant and the planet’s atmosphere colliding would make the air flammable, and igniting it would be a huge signal to the Enterprise. The Gorn refuses at first before revealing a thruster and a heat shield from its ship. Ortegas has her own brief moment of doubt before the Gorn offers its aid.
The pair has the thruster set up and hid behind the shield, only for Ortegas to realize it has to be set off manually. She does so, barely making it to the shield in time. As the flames roar around them, Ortegas tells the Gorn, “At least we know we’re not broken anymore.”
Uhura is about to confess she fudged the numbers, but Pike knows already. They see the flame as Uhura sums up that only Ortegas would be crazy enough to set a planet on fire to get their attention.
La’an leads an away team to the planet to find Ortegas, and as the Gorn rises up behind her, they open fire, killing it. A distraught Ortegas cries in agony over losing her new friend.
Time stops for everyone else as the light transforms into a humanoid form, identifying itself as the Metrons from the classic TOS episode “Arena.” It admits they had arranged for this meeting as an experiment to see what would happen when two mortal enemies were forced to live together to survive. They decide they’d need more “data” and that Ortegas won't remember the Metrons but would remember her Gorn friend.
Back on the ship, Ortegas has a warm reunion with Uhura and tries to reconcile with La’an killing the Gorn. The episode ends with Ortegas looking at the game piece the Gorn had given her, now on her shelf.
It is a classic Trek storyline that addresses Ortegas’s issues and has a bittersweet ending, yet it works overall to send a message that “know thy enemy” has different meanings to different people.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+.