Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x09 "All Those Who Wander" (2022) TV Show Review

 Hey everyone! Happy Friday! It's Canada Day today, but I'm not doing much today so I'm here to talk about this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "All Those Who Wander", which is the penultimate episode of season 1. The season finale is next week, so get ready for an episode review and the full season 1 review as well. Right now though there will be spoilers in THIS review, so if you haven't seen the episode please do so before reading the review. Let's get into it.

I'm not a fan of horror. Not entirely anyway, I mean I like the Universal Frankenstein movies, Goosebumps (books, movies and the TV show), and It by Stephen King (book and 2017 movie), but on the more terrifying stuff like the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13th franchises, and things like The Evil Dead aren't my thing and I don't gravitate towards them. So when I watched this episode last night, it never even crossed my mind that this episode was an homage to the Alien and Predator franchises since I've never seen those movies. It was a really good episode though.

The Gorn are absolutely terrifying. Even moreso than they were back in the Enterprise episode, "In a Mirror Darkly" from 2005. And definitely more terrifying than they were in the TOS episode, "Arena". And yet they're far less terrifying than if they were a completely unknown threat. The writers built up to this episode throughout the entire season, going as far back as the pilot episode when they established La'an's backstory. So this did not come out of nowhere. Which is the mark of amazing storytelling.

I loved the interaction between the crew in this episode. Tensions were high but, with the exception of Sam Kirk, everyone kept a level head during the crisis. My favourite interactions were between La'an and Chapel, and of course, Spock and Chapel. Especially at the end, during Hemmer's funeral. I suspect that Spock and Chapel will have a similar relationship to Trip and T'Pol from Enterprise as the series goes on.

Speaking of Hemmer's death, that was gut wrenching. Sacrificing himself to save his friends and shipmates was hard to watch. But, it worked so much better than Airiam's death in season 2 of Discovery did. Why? For the very reason I've talked about in other reviews of modern Star Trek. We spent time with Hemmer in seven of the first eight episodes of the season (he was in the pilot for two seconds) and we grew to like him. So when he died we felt it in a way that we could never feel about Airiam's death because we spent no time with her and only got a backstory for her in the episode where she was killed. 

I loved this episode. It can be a bit rough to handle at times, but it's nowhere near as bad as it could've been, or would've been if this was a first season episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Trust me they went crazy during that first season, but have held back quite nicely here. Which I really appreciate.

Alright my friends that is going to be it for me for this week. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.