Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 finally concludes with the tenth episode, “New Life and New Civilizations.” How will remaining lingering plot threads be resolved? Will we get any potential teases for next season? And will Marie Batel actually do something before the season is over?
All these and more will be answered in our full spoiler breakdown of “New Life and New Civilizations.” This is your final warning if you haven’t yet watched the season finale for yourself, so without any further delay, let’s jump right in.
What happens in Strange New Worlds Season 3’s “New Life and New Civilizations”?
The crew of the Enterprise holds a party for Marie Batel celebrating her incoming promotion to director of the Starfleet Judicial Committee. At the party, Chapel informs Batel that Dr. Corby has been studying the Vezdas, the race of evil entities that possessed Ensign Gamble in “Through The Lens of Time,” on the planet Skygowan, where they are worshipped as gods. While there, Corby has the misfortune of running into an escaped Vezda in the reconstituted body of Ensign Gamble, who made it out of the transport buffer without being detected by the Enterprise crew using interdimensional lay lines.
Learning of this, Pike sends an away team to Skygowan consisting of M’Benga, La’an, Una, and Uhura to try and stop Vezda while he, Chapel, Batel, and Spock gather all the data they can on their initial Vadia 9 encounter. On Skygowan, the away team manages to infiltrate the temple, but M’Benga is dragged through a portal by the Vezda, who then explains his plan to release his imprisoned army of fellow entities, have them possess everyone on the planet, and unleash pure evil upon the universe.
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Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise, while studying the Vadia 9 encounter, Chapel discovers that the Beholder statue, which kept the Vezda and his fellow prisoners at bay, shares the exact same genetic makeup as Batel. Given how lost she’s been feeling lately, Batel theorizes that stopping Vezda could be her true destiny, especially given she now has the DNA of Gorn, Illyrians, and humans: all species with instinctive abilities to fight off pure evil like the Vezdas. So, Pike and Batel travel to Skygowan to stop Vezda and help Batel fulfill her apparent destiny as the sentry of pure good.
When they get there, they discover that the portal can only be opened by the specific combination of energy provided by Vezda and M’Benga, Vezda for the obvious reasons and M’Benga because the obelisk that the portal opens out of has a prophecy written on it that is specifically about him for some reason. (Legitimately, they don’t explain why it’s about him beyond vague platitudes about destiny.)
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The equivalent amount of power needed to open it would be roughly equal to Earth’s sun or two precise simultaneous phaser blasts aimed at the obelisk. But the phasers would have to be fired exactly at the tower at the exact same time from two different ships moving in perfect sync. Luckily, the Farragut is nearby, and Spock is able to convince a reluctant Kirk to do a Vulcan Mind Meld with him to ensure synchronicity.
The portal opens and Batel starts doing a magical glow at Vezda before we suddenly cut to Pike and Batel living in domestic bliss sometime after Vezda is defeated. They exchange wedding gifts and discuss their upcoming marriage before Pike hears a knock on the door from someone offering the Starfleet Academy training job that he knows will eventually lead to his death (Remember that from Season 1?).
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When he answers the door, we jump forward again to Pike and Batel living with a dog and a young daughter named Julia as Pike is preparing to board the vessel wherein the accident that kills him occurs. He hears a knock at the door, and we then jump even more forward to just after the “accident,” said in quotes because it miraculously didn’t happen.
Going even further into the future, we see a slightly older Pike and Batel getting ready to have dinner with a now grown-up Julia and her fiancée Elijah. Finally, we cut to an old and gray Pike and Batel as the two exchange their last goodbyes before Batel peacefully passes away and Pike finally answers the door. Returning to the present, Vezda declares that Pike, Batel and everyone they love will soon be gone but Batel destroys him and his imprisoned army with the power of pure love (Not a joke) before transforming into the Beholder statue.
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As the episode, and the season, ends, the various members of the crew reflect on how far they have come, the various relationships they’ve gained and lost, and what’s next for them. That last one presents itself very quickly in the form of a map to previously uncharted planets provided by Dr. Corby from his time on Skygowan. Despite still mourning Batel, Pike is encouraged by the rest of the crew to embrace this new adventure as Ortegas takes the ship out to an M Class planet “as fast as she wants to.”
Is Strange New Worlds Season 3’s “New Life and New Civilizations” worth watching?
To be brutally honest, I don’t think this is a very good ending at all, especially considering how strong the rest of the season has been up to this point. But it’s not all bad. The montage of Pike and Batel growing old together is genuinely moving, particularly old Batel passing away, and both Anson Mount and Melanie Scrofano really sell it. There are some good character moments in the sequence following Batel’s death, particularly the scene with Kirk and Spock playing 4D chess post-Mind Meld. And the tease for Season 4 of exploring uncharted worlds is an intriguing one.
But the more I think about the main narrative of this episode, the more I honestly kind of hate it. Vezda is somehow an even less interesting villain than he was in “Through The Lens of Time,” Batel gets killed off right as she was starting to become more of her own character, and all the “pure good vs. pure evil” magical destiny nonsense is at once overly convoluted and simplistically dull, with the episode only having one, admittedly cool, “achieving the goal through science” moment with Kirk and Spock firing the phasers in sync.
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Trying to force a destiny storyline into Star Trek didn’t work in the J.J. Abrams films and it doesn’t work here. Speaking of those movies, it should be noted that Strange New Worlds co-creator Alex Kurtzman also co-wrote both Star Trek Into Darkness and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, each of which utilize a “magic blood” plot device not dissimilar to the “magic DNA” plot device used to turn Batel into the ultimate weapon of pure good. And though Kurtzman is not credited as a writer on this episode specifically, I’m choosing to blame him anyway.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 deserved to end on something better than its worst episode. Literally every other installment this season was at the very least pretty good, usually great. This doesn’t ruin the season for me by any means, and I am still very much looking forward to Seasons 4 and 5, but they definitely dropped the ball on this episode in particular.
