Posted in: Paramount+, Review, Star Trek, TV | Tagged: Carol Kane, Celia Rose Gooding, Nyota Uhura, paramount, paul wesley, Rebecca Romijn, Review, star trek, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E06 Review: Uhura's Night Terrors

Celia Rose Gooding shines in her finest performance to date in this week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Lost in Translation."

This week, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds "Lost in Translation" tapped into the horror-thriller genre again, which they previously tackled in the season one episode "All Those Who Wander." The difference is that, thankfully, the U.S.S. Enterprise doesn't have to deal with the Gorn in this episode, but it does focus on a character that hasn't been much of one up to this point in Celia Rose Gooding's Nyota Uhura. The episode focuses on Enterprise and the Farragut benefiting from a new mining source, but the communications officer starts to suffer from visions. The following contains minor spoilers.

Star Trek: SNW – Celia Rose Gooding's Finest Performance Yet

Since we see the Farragut again, we see perhaps the biggest contribution from Paul Wesley's James T. Kirk on the series since his previous major contributions were alternate timeline episodes. We get to know more about the relationship between Jim, who's quickly rising the ranks on the Farragut, and his brother, serving on the Enterprise, George "Sam" Kirk (Dan Jeannotte), who encounters some professional jealousy over Starfleet's golden boy. At the very least, we get the dynamic between the two, and it gives us a better sense of who they are as individuals as well as siblings.

As we progress in the episode, we find the Enterprise encountering some unusual problems along the way and investigating the issues are Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and Pelia (Carol Kane). We discover the two have a contentious relationship as the Enterprise's first officer attempts to pull rank with the far more experienced chief engineer using her intuition to go down the rabbit hole. It makes a little fun back-and-forth and fills the time, same as the Kirk brothers. At the heart is Gooding's Uhura, who we finally see coping with her friend Hemmer's (Bruce Horak) death. There's a lot more than the mourning as she tries to not only make sense of his death but learn whatever lessons he imparted to her. I get the infrastructure of the series, but I wish the series didn't wait until half the season was over before a character dealt with a death that happened in the season one penultimate episode. What are you going to do? It's one of those rare opportunities we're able to deal with the loss of someone we may have invested in.

Any time a major death happens, the nature of Star Trek usually forces characters to have short memories unless it's structured to be a serial story. Just a few examples, the first is Denise Crosby's Tasha Yar. She had her own memorial scene, but the only other leftover ties came from Data (Brent Spiner), the one without emotions, and we saw an Easter Egg in Picard during his final confrontation with Lore (Spiner). The two other appearances give Yar a little more substance, like "Yesterday's Enterprise" and the series finale "All Good Things…" Unfortunately, at the conclusion of "Yesterday's Enterprise," we discover upon Crosby's return as Commander Sela, Tasha's daughter, that we got an off-screen backstory death, which doesn't really indicate a more honorable warrior's death, just another way to cheaply write off the character.

When Terry Farrell's Jadzia Dax was killed on Deep Space Nine, we felt a greater sense of loss because Farrell was on the series for the bulk of its run. The only other major Trek character that was in the cast to die is Connor Trinneer's Trip on Enterprise, which was in the series finale. I get the purpose of these short memories for cohesion's sake, but considering what the franchise churned out in 1982's The Wrath of Khan and the gut-wrenching final moments of the film that killed Leonard Nimoy's Spock, I feel they could do a better job with its characters in regards to death. Even in the context of the Paramount+ era, it felt like there was more weight to Ro Laren's (Michelle Forbes) death when she sacrificed herself to help her former shipmates in a final act of redemption on Picard.

Directed by Dan Liu and written by Onitra Johnson and David Reed, "Lost in Translation" represented a watershed moment and torch-passing scene that Gooding is now in full ownership of Uhura in the way that Nichelle Nichols would have loved that opportunity to have done that on The Original Series. It was similar to what we saw in the tour-de-force performance by Ethan Peck in the previous episode "Charades," but in a far more serious setting. One final note about this week's episode, it's probably one of the best endings in franchise history for long-time fans.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 2 Episode 6 "Lost in Translation"

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Review by Tom Chang

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8/10

While "Lost in Translation" does have a questionable moment here and there, it was an impressive spotlight for The Original Series character Uhura - with Celia Rose Gooding offering her finest performance to date on Paramount+'s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Special mention definitely needs to be extended to Paul Wesley, Rebecca Romijn, Carol Kane, and Dan Jeannotte.

Credits

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Director

Dan Liu

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