22 Years Later, Star Trek Just Rebooted A Wild Genre Mash-Up

Wait 5 sec.

Paramount+After the lighthearted rom-com of “Wedding Bell Blues,” Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 has swung all the way back to the tonal opposite side of the Final Frontier. With the season’s third episode, “Shuttle to Kenfori,” the series is circling back to the Klingon War storyline that not only dominated Discovery Season 1 in 2017 but also redefined Dr. M’Benga’s (Babs Olusanmokun) character, via flashbacks, in the Season 2 episode, “Under the Cloak of War.” In Season 3, Episode 3, M’Benga and Pike are again faced with fallout from the Klingon War, and M’Benga’s killing of a war criminal named Dak'Rah.But all of this Klingon canon isn’t the episode’s most jarring element. Instead, for the first time since 2003, the Star Trek franchise has dared to depict one very famous horror trope in live-action: zombies. Here’s why Pike using “the Z-word” in Strange New Worlds is a big deal, and how it’s a bit of a callback to the 2003 Enterprise episode, “Impulse.” Spoilers ahead.M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Pike (Anson Mount) prepare to face Klingons and zombies. | Marni Grossman/Paramount+Star Trek does more horror than you might think. The Original Series was replete with horror concepts; the very first episode, “The Man Trap,” featured a “Salt Vampire,” while the early episode “Dagger of the Mind” focused on a sci-fi insane asylum. Psycho novelist Robert Bloch wrote three TOS episodes: “Wolf in the Fold,” “Catspaw,” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” the latter of which is why the character of Roger Korby, who’s a major part of SNW Season 3, exists at all. Jonathan Frakes even told Inverse that when he directed First Contact, he wanted to push Trek into a scarier realm, seeing it as “kind of a horror movie in many ways.”Directing duties here were handled by Dan Liu, with a script from Onitra Johnson and Bill Wolkoff. In it, Pike and M’Benga are in pursuit of a rare plant called Chimera Blossom, which might be the only hope to save Captain Batel’s (Melanie Scrofano) life. But they encounter Klingons and zombies instead.This might seem like the first time a live-action Trek episode has done full-blown zombies. M’Benga doesn’t like that Pike keeps calling the infected people on Kenfori “zombies” or “the z-word,” but as we know from the show’s very first episode, Pike is a fan of old-school pulp movies, so it would make sense to call an undead spade a spade.But this is actually the second time we’ve seen zombie-like action in Trek. Way back in Enterprise Season 3, in the episode “Impulse,” the NX-01 crew encountered a Vulcan ship that had been exposed to trellium ore, which turned the Vulcans into violent zombies.Vulcan zombies getting blasted in the 2003 Enterprise episode "Impulse." | CBS/ParamountWritten by Jonathan Fernandez and future-Picard showrunner Terry Matalas, “Impulse” is arguably much darker than“Shuttle to Kenfori.” While Pike and M’Benga are in serious trouble throughout the episode, the Klingon’s vendetta against M’Benga feels like a much bigger deal than the zombies themselves. But in “Impulse,” the Vulcan zombies were the main event. The idea that even the super-rational Vulcans can end up acting like zombies helped amplify the horror in a way the franchise had never really tried before. With “Shuttle to Kenfori,” the zombies are a huge surprise, and terrifying in their own way, but maybe not as loaded with pathos as yesteryear’s Vulcan zombies.Then again, zombie stories are hard. And ultimately, Strange New Worlds was telling an M’Benga story, one filled with the weight of his Season 2 history while also incorporating everything we know about the violence between humans and Klingons. While Pike was cracking-wise about “the z-word,” M’Benga was the episode’s true star. While it's easy to think of Pike as a Kirk-like figure, M’Benga’s issues with Klingons make him more like Kirk than any other member of the current crew. And all the space zombies in the galaxy can’t really compete with Klingons, and their very specific rules for how to murder.Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is streaming on Paramount+.Phasers on Stun!: How the Making — and Remaking — of Star Trek Changed the WorldAmazon -