The following contains spoilers for the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 finale.Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wraps up its fourth season with a finale that’s full of sentimentality. A love letter to Nyota Uhura, a character we’ve watched grow from a nervous, try-hard cadet to a capable crew member over the course of the show’s four seasons, the hour gives us a satisfying glimpse of what’s to come for her and her compatriots. In fact, if we didn’t already know that Strange New Worlds was returning for a final six-episode fifth season next year, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” actually wouldn’t be a terrible series finale. (It’s hard not to wonder if this was originally written because someone was hedging their bets.)cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});With a title that’s an obvious callback to the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” an alternate-timeline story that’s primarily about needing to fix an event in the past in order to save the future. “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is also about that, but told from the perspective of looking toward the future where an event needs to be fixed. (It’s a bit like the whole black hole/white hole being two sides of the same thing idea that this episode explores.)In doing so, we’re given a glimpse of the Enterprise a year in the future—*Kirk’s* Enterprise, to be exact. It’s clearly early days of his command, but the bridge essentially mirrors that of The Original Series. Several key Strange New Worlds figures are absent: Pike has apparently been promoted, Ortegas has a Starfleet teaching gig, and M’Benga is spending an increasing amount of time on Vulcan. Una’s whereabouts are unmentioned, but a reference to La’an prompts the sort of ominous reaction that hints something less than great has happened to her. To be fair, this time jump feels like a bit of creative rewriting; the changes aboard this future Enterprise (and its crew) feel far too expansive to have taken place in the space of just a single year. Perhaps changes were required to make it mesh with whatever is still to come in the series’ final six episodes, but it’s the kind of strange you basically have to purposefully decide to ignore. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not enough to derail what is otherwise a fairly satisfying episode, but it is strange. The plot of “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” involves a lot of Doctor Who-style timey wimey nonsense that works a whole lot better if you don’t think about it too hard. While investigating a rare white hole (which apparently do theoretically exist!) the Enterprise is hit with a strange series of lights and chimes that precede a pulse of energy that causes a sort of temporal shift. Uhura begins hearing things—Scotty screaming, calling for help in a way that hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, in a future timeline, an older Uhura is part of an Enterprise mission to study a black hole when a shuttle Scotty is on blows up…only no one remembers him being on it. In fact, they all insist he’s been dead for a year. (See: Timey wimey!)The upshot of all this is that Present Uhura and Future Uhura have to work together to save Scotty’s life and put their respective timelines back on the right track. It’s a clever plot, and once the two women manage to figure out how to talk to one another through the black/white hole, it’s an hour that highlights all the things Uhura is best at in any reality: Communication, loyalty, and care. Fair warning, however: If you’re a person (like me) who struggles not to throw things whenever a genre series uses a bootstrap paradox to solve occasionally prickly or difficult problems of time travel, you’ll likely have to scream into a pillow during several key moments that rely on one Uhura performing an action that immediately impacts the other Uhura’s timeline in ways it probably shouldn’t. But the nifty visuals (Uhura passing through herself in hallways, the split screen of the two bridges) and Ethan Peck’s spot-on deadpan responses to her increasingly bizarre requests in both timelines help make most of it bearable. (Although, personally, I do really need to know if Pike actually becomes an Admiral.) It also doesn’t hurt that this episode is a heck of a showcase for Celia Rose Gooding, who hasn’t had a ton to do this season beyond mentoring a genuinely terrible intern. She gives a remarkably nuanced performance playing two very different Uhuras, one sporting Nichelle Nichols’s signature 60s hairdo as an identifier we don’t really need. (But that is awesome, nevertheless.) The inclusion of the Scotty/Uhura romance that was briefly hinted at in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is honestly adorable, and another example of Strange New Worlds just fearlessly going for it when it comes to updating existing canon. “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is full of delightful Easter eggs and shoutouts that feel all the more valuable given that it’s pretty obvious we’re never getting the Star Trek: Year One prequel meant to bridge the gap between Strange New Worlds and The Original Series that so many fans want. From a Gary Mitchell reference (he’s Jenna’s step-brother!) and a McCoy mention to Chapel’s new hairdo and shots of never-before-seen-in-live-action aliens like Catians and Skorr, there’s a lot of stuff that seems specifically included to make long-time Trek fans do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.Sure, the resolution of the larger plot—everything was caused by the birth of a giant “space baby,” really??—is kind of ridiculous and never even fully explained. (Hit me with your theories on who or what the Midwives and this interdimensional “child” actually are, please.) But there’s something honestly lovely about this hour’s bittersweet conception of the passage of time, and the way each of us is on a journey to, in a sense, meet the people we’ll one day become. In many ways, that is—and always has been—Strange New Worlds’s true mission. It’s a journey with a known end point, but that doesn’t matter. It never has. Stealing a line from Doctor Who feels particularly relevant this week for many reasons, but as the Eleventh Doctor once said, we’re all stories in the end. And while we may only be seeing a chapter in these characters’ lives, we know the story goes on. And it’s fantastic. All 10 episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 are available to stream on Paramount+ now.The post Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Finale Review — Tomorrow’s Enterprise appeared first on Den of Geek.