The S2 finale found the Enterprise under vicious attack by the Gorn, who were in the midst of invading one of the Federation’s colony worlds. The new footage shown at NYCC picked up where the finale left off, giving us the kind of harrowing high-stakes pitched space battle against a ferocious enemy that has long been a hallmark of the franchise. With the ship’s shields down to 50 percent, Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his team brainstorm possible counter-strategies to ward off the Gorn and find a way to rendezvous with the rest of Starfleet. They decide to try to jam the Gorns’ communications so they can’t coordinate their attacks, which involves modulating the electromagnetic spectrum since the Gorn use light for ship-to-ship communications.
They also need to figure out how to beam crew members trapped on a Gorn ship back onto the Enterprise—except the Gorn ships are transporter-resistant. The best of all the bad options is a retreat and rescue, tracking the Gorn ship across light-years of space using “wolkite, a rare element that contains subspace gauge bosons,” per Spock (Ethan Peck). Finally, the crew decides to just ram the Gorn Destroyer, and the footage ends with a head-to-head collision, firing torpedoes, and the Enterprise on the brink of warping itself out of there, no doubt in the nick of time.
Oh, and apparently Rhys Darby (Our Flag Means Death) will guest star in an as-yet-undisclosed role, which should be fun. Strange New Worlds S3 will premiere sometime in 2025, and the series has already been renewed for a fourth season.
Lower Decks
The final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks premieres this week.
Ars staffers are big fans of Lower Decks, so we were saddened when we learned that the animated series would be ending with its fifth season. Paramount gave us a teaser in July during San Diego Comic-Con, in which we learned that their plucky crew’s S5 mission involves a “quantum fissure” that is causing “space potholes” to pop up all over the Alpha Quadrant (“boo interdimensional portals!”), and the Cerritos crew must close them—while navigating angry Klingons and an Orion war.
The new clip opens with Mariner walking in and asking “What’s the mish?” only to discover it’s another quantum fissure. When the fissure loses integrity, the Cerritos gets caught in the gravitational wake, and when it emerges, seemingly unscathed, the ship is hailed—by the Cerritos from an alternate dimension, captained by none other than Mariner, going by Captain Becky Freeman. (“Stupid dimensional rifts!”) It’s safe to assume that wacky hijinks ensue.
The final season of Lower Decks premieres on Paramount+ on October 24, 2024, and will run through December 19.
