Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 6 Review — The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail

This Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review contains spoilers for season 3 episode 6.

If it seems as though every episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is almost immediately declared the best of the season to date, well, that’s because it’s true. The show’s third outing has genuinely been nothing but bangers so far. (When your premiere is the weakest episode of the season, it’s probably a sign you’re doing something right.) But there’s also genuinely something special about “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” an installment that manages to embody some of the best of what this particular series is capable of, while simultaneously giving us a preview of what the future of this franchise could become.

Given how many characters Strange New Worlds has to serve at any given moment—-where is my Pelia episode, I ask you—it’s admittedly a bit weird to swerve off of season 3’s many other ongoing plot threads to essentially give us a Kirk episode, but the final product is so good (and so thoughtfully made) that it’s hard to be but so mad about it. If anything, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” feels like nothing so much as a sort of backdoor pilot for that Star Trek: Year One series that showrunner Akiva Goldsman has been unsubtly pitching in recent weeks, the hour spends a huge chunk of time giving us a proto-verson of the future Star Trek: The Original Series bridge crew and laying the initial groundwork for what those relationships will one day become. Smartly, however, Strange New Worlds also takes pains to remind us that these characters, especially one James T. Kirk, still have a lot of growing to do before they reach the point in their history where we know them best, and what befalls them all in this episode will likely be an important piece of that process. 

When the hour opens, Kirk, who’s officially gotten a promotion to First Officer of the USS Farragut since last we saw him, is bored. He’s chomping at the bit to explore, to take risks, to do something cool, not just conduct boring planetary surveys from a safe distance and write reports about them. He’s convinced he knows better than Captain V’Rel, and is loudly insistent about it and maybe that should be our first hint that this is going to be an episode imparting some important life lessons to the franchise’s most famous character.  (“Risk is why we’re here,” he says bluntly, in a way that echoes the speech he’ll give some years later in The Original Series episode “Return to Tomorrow” about risk being Starfleet’s business, so don’t worry, he’s not going to grow but so much.)

One of the most refreshing things about the way Strange New Worlds depicts Kirk is that the show’s not overly precious about him. Yes, it’s very aware that viewers know who he is, and Paul Wesley loves to throw an offhand William Shatner mannerism or two into his performance whenever possible. But for the most part, the show (thankfully) doesn’t treat the character as though he’s somehow preserved in amber. This Kirk makes mistakes, is frequently abrasive, reckless, more than a little full of himself, and even downright unlikable at times. This is a good thing, by the way—it makes the character feel more three-dimensional and human than he might otherwise.

The crew’s routine survey takes a dark turn when the planet they’re meant to be studying is suddenly destroyed in front of them, courtesy of a monstrous, gigantic starship. The behemoth almost immediately turns its weapons on the Farragut, and the ship is saved only by the timely arrival of the Enterprise. (Thank goodness they just happened to be conveniently in the neighborhood!) Though it’s bigger than anything anyone on Strange New Worlds has ever seen, the bizarre vessel, essentially a massive ship full of space pirates who destroy whatever’s in their path to scavenge the remains, bears a striking resemblance to the Narada, the Romulan mining vessel commanded by Eric Bana’s Nero in the Kelvin timeline. The two ships have little in common otherwise, but it feels like the sort of Easter egg that’s a deliberate nod to the way these two universes still manage to vibe and rhyme with one another. 

The Scavenger ship, complete with a horrific gaping maw, giant tentacles, and the ability to essentially swallow other ships whole to strip mine them for parts, is pure nightmare fuel. It also comes complete with its own preexisting lore, which is the sort of wildly interesting collective worldbuilding I wish this show had more time to indulge in. This ship is something of an urban legend; it goes by many names among the border planets and those who traverse the edges of known space: The Annilhator. The Destroyer of Worlds. The Monster Past the Edge of the Map. Whatever it is, even the Klingons fear it. And with good reason—it destroyed a planet, crippled the Farragut, and essentially ate the Enterprise all within the first fifteen minutes of this episode. 

What follows is a dual focus plot—in which the Enterprise crew attempts to find a way to detach themselves from the Scavenger’s Matrix-like interior framework (complete with a technological “umbilical cord” slammed directlyinto the engineering department) as a skeleton crew aboard the badly injured Farragut attempts to come up with ways to help. In the wake of V’Rel’s injury (and the fact that she got beamed to the Enterprise right before it was swallowed up), Kirk assumes command, but he immediately finds the pressures of the captain’s chair more stressful than he expected. Luckily, he’s got almost every future The Original Series figure on this series on hand to help him. In fact, these one-day TOS-ers—Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and Scotty—are essentially his bridge crew, and it’s sort of a charming moment to see them all together like this, knowing how much still lies ahead of each of them. 

It’s also a great opportunity for the show to engage in another philosophical debate about styles of command and leadership. Kirk immediately shoots down his new squad for trying to work the problem collectively in the same way that Pike always encourages them to do. It’s not exactly a great look for him, being so immediately dismissive of everyone else’s opinion, but at least Spock is there to help talk some sense into him, establishing a pattern that will continue throughout the forthcoming decades of their friendship. Wesley and Ethan Peck have genuinely great, easy chemistry with one another, and it’s easy to see their banter evolving into the Spock and Kirk relationship we know. Even though we’ve spent the past two weeks watching Spock agonize over his love life, he’s back in top Vulcan form here, stressing logic and calm in a way that’s helpful and also…vaguely hypocritical? Physician, heal thyself. 

But while Kirk and the Strange New Worlds crew ultimately come up with a plan to stop the Scavenger ship from destroying an innocent planet full of people and help the Enterprise free itself, his choices come at a terrible cost. Because it turns out the Scavengers were human, and the ultimate destruction of their ship means that Kirk, in his literal first day on the job as a captain, now has the blood of seven thousand people on his hands. Not to beat a dead horse, but the lore of this Scavenger situation is ridiculous and every fact I learn about them makes me want to know more about how any of this could have possibly happened. Because this ship that’s spent centuries prowling the edges of the galaxy and killing everything in sight also happens to contain the descendants of some of the best and brightest humanity once had to offer.

According to Pelia, who was on Earth when all this went down, a group of 21st-century scientists who were concerned about long-term climate damage to the planet decided to take to the stars in the hopes of seeking out humanity on other worlds. Before the invention of the Warp Drive and well ahead of First Contact with the Vulcans, the mission had low odds of success, so it didn’t surprise anyone when the ship disappeared along with its crew and their families. But it turns out they did survive, and the monstrous Scavengers are what they and their legacy ultimately became. It’s all bleak and horrifying in a way this show rarely digs into, but all the more powerful for that fact.

Smartly, Strange New Worlds has never felt the need to put Pike and Kirk at direct odds with one another, and that trend continues here. “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tale” doesn’t ask us to rank them, or choose between their specific styles of leadership, it just shows us two men who now speak a unique language, discussing the burdens of a job that few will ever share or understand. Plus, the idea that part of Pike’s legacy is going to involve helping shape the captain that Kirk becomes is satisfying in a nerdy sort of way.

“The big decisions seem so simple, when someone else has to live with the consequences,” Pike tells Kirk, who is wallowing in guilt, torn up over so many deaths, about how little empathy he felt for the beings he only viewed as an enemy. “The choices you have to make in that chair are yours to make, and what comes after is yours to live with. Some decisions you’ll regret for the rest of your life, but you still have to make them.” 

Pike, remaining the Platonic ideal of what a Starfleet captain should be and do, leans into the idea that empathy is a necessary component of leadership, and a key to being a good custodian of the chair he’s been entrusted with. It’s not conditional, it’s not given to creatures—human, alien, or otherwise—because they, specifically, deserve it, but because it’s simply the right thing to do. In Pike’s view, Kirk’s lack of empathy now will be the lesson he takes with him from this horror, and help him make different choices in the future. And it’s a nice dream—even if we know it won’t always be true.

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.