Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 3 Review — Shuttle to Kenfori

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

One of the best things about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is its utter fearlessness. A show that’s willing to try anything once, we’ve seen the series tackle musical episodes, alternate realities, courtroom dramas, rom-coms, and war stories, all while doing some fairly remarkable character work at the same time. “Shuttle to Kenfori” is something of a swerve from season 3’s first two installments, a proper horror story that boasts some fairly disturbing visuals, dark themes, and life-or-death stakes in more ways than one. 

“Shuttle to Kenfori” also continues the season’s trend of mixing self-contained missions with serialized character arcs, as Captain Batel’s medical condition worsens once again—it’s apparnetly quite challenging to fully neutralize invasive Gorn tissue in the human body—and Captain Pike and the crew are forced to undertake another off-the-books mission to try and save her life. On the hunt for a rare plant with powerful healing properties (the Chimera Blossom) that’s known to have been used in a former Federation research facility, the Enterprise crew must venture into the highly forbidden Restricted Zone, sneak their way onto an abandoned planet, and track down a specimen they’re only mostly sure is actually there. 

What follows is a trope-filled monster-of-the-week mission, a Trek pseudo-version of Night of the Living Dead that sees Pike and M’Benga, pursued by a ravenous horde of creatures that look an awful lot like zombies, even if both men are reluctant to call them such. To its credit, the creatures are genuinely terrifying, a swarm of fast-moving, drooling, ravenous monsters driven by a mindless, bottomless hunger, and the hour doesn’t pull any punches about the violence they inflict or the grisly destruction they leave in their wake. (Here’s hoping The Walking Dead franchise is paying attention.) 

But though “Shuttle to Kenfori” is remarkably dark throughout, the hour is cut with a surprising amount of levity, from Pike and M’Benga’s refusal to say “the Z-word” to their casual swapping of memories from their earlier days together in Starfleet and gossiping about Chapel’s new boyfriend. (Plus, I’m a sucker for any time Pike reveals some snippets about his days as a test pilot.)

Pike and M’Benga aren’t a pairing we get to see together all that often, and the duo’s quiet, easy camaraderie is refreshing, a genuine bond that also reflects that they’re both men who have Seen Some Shit and come out the other side. Much of this hour involves M’Benga dealing with fallout from the choices he made in last season’s (excellent) “Under the Cloak of War” and the death of the Klingon ambassador Dak’Rah. That installment was equally willing to poke at some fairly dark themes and ideas, and while “Shuttle to Kenfori” doesn’t go quite as far as its predecessor, it still allows us to glimpse once again the darkness within the Enterprise’s kind-hearted medical officer. The sudden appearance of the ambassador’s daughter, furious not that her father was killed, but that she was robbed of the chance to do it herself, is an unexpected twist, and forces M’Benga to openly address both his decision to kill a man he viewed as a war criminal and his insistence on covering it up. 

Babs Olusanmokun’s performance is delightfully complex, and it’s to the show’s credit that this episode is full of such genuine tension. Pike and M’Benga have the sort of plot armor that means we all know going into this that no matter how threatening or scary these creatures may be, both men will make it out alive. Alive is not the same as unscathed, however, and although M’Benga’s decision to spare the life of Dak’Rah’s daughter (even after she threatened Pike’s life!) is certainly indicative of some fairly important personal growth, it’s also equally evident that he doesn’t regret what he did to Dak’Rah, merely that he lied to Pike about it.  Pike, bless him, seems remarkably unfazed about it all, and more worried that M’Benga didn’t feel he could tell him the truth of what he’d done. 

But although Mount does some excellent emotional work throughout this hour —Pike’s genuine hurt when he realizes that Batel and a big chunk of his senior staff have lied to him about what this treatment will mean for her, and his refusal to judge M’Benga for the truth of what happened with Dak’Rah are both quite moving—Strange New Worlds continues to struggle when it comes to anything involving Captain Batel. This is personally painful for me to admit to, given that Wynonna Earp essentially means I will love Melanie Scrofano forever and ever, amen. But Batel, as a character, is still little more than a cipher, and seems to exist largely so that Pike has a place to focus his hero complex whenever the story requires it. Though the two have been together in some capacity since Strange New Worlds’ first episode, we still know relatively little about Batel as a character in her own right or what it is, precisely, that they see in one another. 

What’s worse, Batel has been given precious little agency or depth in a story that’s predominantly about her, which is why her argument with Pike over her treatment feels more than a bit like we’ve skipped a step. “I don’t have time to worry about how my dying hurts your feelings,” Batel snaps at one point, which is certainly fair, even if it feels a bit mean, given Pike’s general golden retriever demeanor. But it’s also part of the problem: other than a general assumption that the prospect of dying sucks for anyone, we have no idea how Batel feels about any of this! Her mind meld with Spock earlier in the hour is literally the most interiority this character has ever received! Don’t get me wrong, Mount and Scrofano sell the heck out of the pair’s mutual terror, but it’s difficult not to wonder how much more emotionally affecting all of this would be if this were a relationship that anyone was deeply invested in for its own sake. 

Elsewhere on the Enterprise, Ortegas’s extremely evident but very unspoken PTSD is not doing anyone any favors, as she argues with her superiors, disobeys orders, and otherwise acts as the bridge crew’s number one problem child throughout the hour. She’s so obnoxious about her views when it comes to both Klingons in general and this rescue mission specifically that it’s difficult to find her attitude anything close to sympathetic. Are we meant to be rooting for her to disobey orders or horrified that she has done so?

Admittedly, it’s kind of fun to watch Una get to play the heavy and read Ortegas the riot act at the episode’s end for endangering everyone in the name of her own reckless conviction that she was right, but it certainly feels as though whatever’s going on here is going to get worse before it gets better.

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