Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Premiere Takes The Enterprise Back To The Age Of Dinosaurs — Grade It!

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" kicked off Season 4 this week with a wild, time-tripping adventure that looked more like "Jurassic Park" than the "Trek" we're used to.

As the Season 4 premiere opens, Pike is enjoying playing cowboy and riding horses on a desert planet that looks like the Old West. (Yee-haw!) Back on the ship, though, Una warns him that they've been on six missions in a row — and it seems like Pike is running away from something. (Maybe from the memory of losing his love Marie Batel last season?) Plus, Pike is up for a promotion, but he's not ready to think about that yet, and the Enterprise gets a new cadet from Starfleet Academy: a female Vulcan whose rude, abrupt manner makes Spock seem warm and fuzzy by comparison.

The ship's next mission is to monitor a Category 10 interstellar squall: basically a huge space storm that could rip the Enterprise apart if they're not careful. But they get a distress signal from inside the storm, so they carefully navigate inside to find a distress buoy and get swept up in the storm. They're left with no power and no weapons, nothing beyond life support. So Una, La'an, and Ortegas take a shuttle to a nearby planet to search for iridium to help power the ship.

On the mystery planet, they spot an active volcano, and La'an's sensors pick up "large" life signs nearby. "Large," you say? Meanwhile, the Enterprise gets trapped in a force field by another ship and has no weapons to fight back. The other ship's captain, Commander Kassell, has never heard of Starfleet and says they're seizing the Enterprise as salvage; they're at war, and they need all the resources they can get. Back on the planet, the trio hears a screeching creature and gets closer, just as Spock discovers the storm sent them back in time 65 million years. The screeching creature is a dinosaur — and they're actually on Earth!  

Una, La'an, and Ortegas find themselves face-to-face with a snarling Tyrannosaurus Rex, and just when it looks like they're about to be dino-food, Una fires a phaser blast into the beast's mouth and manages to stun it to sleep. Back in space, Commander Kassell boards the Enterprise with two bodyguards and demands to see their weapons, curious about their strange technology. She also doesn't understand the concept of the Federation and of various planets working together: "Alien to me means evil." She explains that her home planet has lost millions of lives fighting the Dol'drm, a mindless alien species that does nothing but feed. Brute force is the only thing they understand, she insists.

Spock realizes they'd need the energy equivalent of a supernova to catapult them back to their original time period, and Kassell nabs the ship's antimatter fuel cell, saying she needs it to win the war. Meanwhile, Una, La'an, and Ortegas discover the wreckage of an alien ship that can provide the iridium they need. They also discover a hungry raptor... but La'an swiftly punches the dinosaur in the nose, sending it scurrying away. They head back to the Enterprise with the iridium in tow, but La'an is surprised to find she doesn't feel a thing from that punch, even though she broke her hand. Hmmm... are her Khan superhuman genes kicking in after all?   

The iridium gets the ship up and running again, and Pike worries that Kassell is going to use their antimatter fuel cell to destroy the Dol'drm home planet. They rush to intercept the antimatter after Kassell deploys it — but then Pike orders his crew to stop. The Dol'drm home planet is the fifth planet in the solar system, and "in our future, there is no fifth planet." The antimatter detonates and destroys the planet, along with Kassell's ship, and the Enterprise manages to ride the powerful blast wave all the way back to its original time period. Oh, and a fragment of the Dol'drm home planet collides with Earth... and wipes out the dinosaurs, paving the way for the evolution of humanity.

"Everything happened as it was meant to," they realize, and M'Benga theorizes that the Dol'drm would have wiped out trillions of lives if they weren't destroyed. The admiral presses Pike for a decision on the promotion, and Pike decides to decline — but he does recommend Una for a promotion instead. So she's a commander now! Once they get a chance to exhale, the crew pesters Una, La'an, and Ortegas for details about their close encounter with dinosaurs, and they're more than happy to spin stories about T-Rexes, pterodactyls, and more marvels of the past. 

Alright, Trekkies, it's your turn: Give the premiere a grade in our poll, and then beam down to the comments to give us your thoughts.