Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season four opens back in time… and goes back even further. “Valles Marineris” opens with Pike (Anson Mount), La’An (Christina Chong), and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) riding horses in a spacey, yet still Wild West-type area. When they are beamed back to the Enterprise, Spock (Ethan Peck) is waiting for them. He offers to take Pike’s saddle from him, but it is just a sly excuse to get a glimpse at La’An in her riding gear. She invites him back to her room instead. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Admiral April (Adrian Holmes) is on the Enterprise to see Pike. He offers Pike a promotion to Commodore, but he has some time to think about it—his answer is required when he gets back from his next mission. For their next mission, the crew is to face a Category 10 interstellar squall. The key element is that there is no one they have to protect, as there are no inhabited planets nearby. They are just there to observe. Spock is concerned about being torn into “small particles of subspace.” Pelia (Carol Kane), however, is all about the “theater” of the show.
The crew is watching the solar storm from their ship when Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) gets a mayday message from inside the storm. So, naturally, the Enterprise flies into the storm, determined to save whoever sent out the mayday signal. The ship swirls and spins dangerously. When things finally stop, the ship is essentially shut down: no shields, no weapons, no warp drive. Just life support. The iridium drives are down, and they need new ones if they want to go home. The stellar storm pulled them into a warp field, as far as they can tell.
