This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 1The mission of any ship in Starfleet involves boldly going and seeking out new life and new civilizations. That’s especially true of Strange New Worlds, where the mission statement is there in the name. Yet, the first episode of the series’ fourth season seems to reject that premise. In “Valles Marineris,” Captain Pike stays firmly in our solar system, visiting Earth and dealing with visitors from the planet Mars, albeit in the distant past.Banal as that might seem, Star Trek has long had an unconventional approach to the third planet from the sun. Throughout the franchise’s sixty-year history, Trek has bucked the standard sci-fi tropes to make Mars one of the strangest new worlds that members of Starfleet ever visit.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Mars is a part of Star Trek lore from the beginning, as early episodes of The Original Series and The Next Generation both make mention of colonies on the red planet. Further, the series regularly engages with pop-cultural ideas about Mars, perhaps most notably in the delightful Deep Space Nine episode “Little Green Men.”Officially, however, Mars serves a key part in the world’s lore. As seen in the Voyager episode “One Small Step,” Mars was one of the first planets that humanity colonized. Even though the Ares IV mission seen in that episode did not complete its goals, it did enough to prove the feasibility of deep space exploration. By the time we get to the late Enterprise episode “Demons,” we can see that Mars has become an Earth outpost, an extension of human civilization.Eventually, Mars becomes most important for Starfleet and the Federation as the home of the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards, a key site for building new starships. Since its introduction in TNG, Utopia Planitia has been a key location, mentioned as background information in episodes and explored in non-canonical works.Of course, that status as an important but under-represented part of Trek lore made Utopia Planitia an obvious choice when the creators of Star Trek: Picard wanted to shock viewers. So when the writers needed Synthetics to rebel in such a way that the entire universe would pay attention and Admiral Picard would need to defy Starfleet to investigate, they chose Mars as the site of the uprising. The Short Treks episode “Children of Mars” and the first episodes of Picard showed how the Synths turned against Starfleet and destroyed Utopia Planitia, killing countless lifeforms in the process.Since then, there have been only passing references to Mars, as the event forever changed the planet’s role in Trek lore.“Valles Marineris” changes that approach, in a few different ways. As a prequel to TOS, Strange New Worlds takes place long before the events of Picard. Moreover, the time travel element allows Pike and crew to go back even further, long before the birth of humanity, let alone the founding of Starfleet. Freed from such constraints, “Valles Marineris” ignores Trek lore completely and instead has some fun with genre.While Number One conducts an away team on prehistoric Earth, Pike must deal with aggressors who lay siege to the Enterprise. Those aggressors are led by Battle Commander Cassell (Saffron Burrows), a regal military strategist who learns to respect Pike’s non-aggressive ways, but who cannot see past the a long-standing war for the planet that has left her people desperate. Throughout the episode, Pike tries to reason with Cassell, trying to convince her not just to steal key parts from the Enterprise, but to also find a different way to solve her conflict. Only toward the end of the episode do we realize that Cassell hails from Mars, and that Pike’s actions with Cassell have monumental stakes for the future of human evolution.Dressed in ornate robes and striking armor, Cassell and her people do not recall the little green men often associated with Mars. However, in the final scene, Pike reads aloud from the Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novel A Princess of Mars before debriefing with Admiral April, underlining the episode’s inspiration for Cassell and the Martians.The coda provides a nice nod to Trek‘s genre predecessors while reminding us that the franchise has never been content to repeat familiar tropes. Instead, Strange New Worlds helps Trek continue to go boldly forward, remaking Mars in the process.Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.The post Strange New Worlds Returns to the Messiest Planet in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.