Stardate: 2344.2 (as continued from the previous episode)
Original Air Date: July 17, 2025
Writers: Henry Alonso Myers (story) and Davy Perez (story & teleplay)
Director: Chris Fisher
“We are prey.”
In the middle of open conflict with the Gorn (picking up right where the second season cliffhanger left off), and with Enterprise shields falling dangerously low (20%), the ship makes a risky maneuver by jamming the comms of the Gorn (their comms use light) using a particular harmonic frequency to pierce the Gorn destroyer ship’s energy shield and tag it with a dud photon torpedo that is actually a tracker beacon. This is in order to track the ship and retrieve the captured survivors and colonists. Meanwhile, Admiral April (aboard the USS Pablo Picasso) has given orders to retreat and rendezvous with the fleet. He informs Captain Pike that Starfleet must maintain its current position and defend its member worlds (comprising billions of lives), and these Gorn strikes were on colonies outside Federation territory. Plus, Starfleet is still recovering from the Klingon War. However, Admiral April tells Pike that “officially” his orders are to monitor the demarcation line for any Gorn encroachment, but “unofficially” Pike can find a way to strike back at the Gorn.
Nurse Chapel attempts to put Captain Marie Batel under a frozen stasis in order to hopefully rid her of her Gorn impregnation (or “infection”), but unfortunately Batel is allergic to cryoserum so she is just put to sleep. Every other option is run through the computer but they all have a 100% fatality probability, since the host has now become just as dependent on the infection, but when Spock joins Nurse Chapel, he suggests microscopic debulking for an infusion of Zadora extract (an Orion street drug). However, this too fails until Nurse Chapel suggests using a plasma transfusion of Illyrian blood from Una Chin-Riley. This gives her an 86% chance of survival, which is not quite good enough, so Spock suggests they sate the hungry Gorn baby hatchlings to prevent them from bursting out of Batel’s body. Also, Montgomery Scott is aboard the Enterprise and is joined by the quirky Commander Pelia in building a “contraption” that emits a polarized EM signature that tricks the Gorn into thinking the Enterprise is one of them (it’s like a “cloaking device”). This is the transponder he alluded to in the previous episode. Miraculously, it works when the Enterprise crosses into Gorn space.
Number One and Cadet Uhura run an analysis on every major Gorn sighting to see what might be learned, and every Gorn sighting correlates to a pattern of specific stellar events, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), stellar flares set off a frenzy. But likewise, during periods of extreme Gorn inactivity, there is unique stellar activity that seems to trigger hibernation. Under the right conditions they become docile, X-class flares and super arcade downflows precede the Gorn absence. But this research indicates this period of downtime could be just the start of a prolonged Gorn invasion.
Meanwhile, aboard the Gorn destroyer ship, La’an awakens inside an amniotic egg sack. She breaks herself free and then does the same for Dr. M’Benga, Ortegas, and Sam Kirk. They realize they are in a giant “digestive chamber,” waiting to be food fed to the Gorn. La’an decides they must rescue the other trapped colonists before they are all eaten. La’an manages to confiscate the Gorn transport codes and they commandeer a Gorn hunter ship, driven by a severely wounded, barely conscious Ortegas (a fascinating scene which allows us to see the inside of a Gorn ship). Ortegas’s hand has been nearly burnt off and she has been stabbed by a Gorn, as well.
When the Enterprise arrives at the tracked Gorn destroyer, they enter the intense radiation zone of a nearby star and they watch as a Gorn heads directly into it and disappears. Could this be the path to the mysterious Gorn homeworld? Suddenly, the Enterprise spots hundreds of Gorn ships plotted on a trajectory headed straight for Federation territory, but the radiation prevents the Enterprise from communicating with Starfleet. They’re effectively sitting ducks. So Pike suggests they follow the theory that in creating an artificial stellar flare by passing around the nearby star and creating a magnetic force via the hull of the ship. The hope is that this will trigger a Gorn hibernation.
Just as the ship starts approaching critical radiation exposure, the Gorn all turn back and disappear, believing a stellar flare has occurred. La’an makes contact with the Enterprise and sends the coordinates so that Pike is able to beam aboard all the Parnassian colonists followed by his four crewmen in the stolen Gorn hunter ship (La’an, Ortegas, Dr. M’Benga, and Sam Kirk). The episode ends as Pike tells Admiral April that they found a way to “punch back” at the Gorn. He pays a visit to Batel, who is emotional after having survived the ordeal, while Spock and Chapel decide to spend some time apart so she can pursue a three-month leave of study with Roger Korby (this comes after Spock apologizes for the fight they had in Season Two). In the end, the Gorn hegemony has been stopped, at least for now.
My Thoughts on “Hegemony, Part II”
A thrilling mile-a-minute sequel episode to the wild season two finale (“Hegemony”), “Hegemony, Part II” is a head-spinning banger of an adventure. It is another Gorn episode and, as such, it is filled with a whole load of action, technobabble, and horror tropes, the likes of which we have come to expect from other SNW Gorn episodes. And it appears we won’t be seeing the Gorn again soon…
But this is also a ridiculously complex episode, it packs far too many subplots into a very busy episode for an utterly epic, dizzying, chaotic plot that seems suspiciously familiar to the style of the J.J. Abrams Kelvin Timeline, with characters frantically running about, shouting absurdly complicated plans, the likes of which would be utterly miraculous if achieved. This is quite distinct from the careful, rational, methodical approach of Kirk and Picard in TOS and TNG. Even Starfleet under Admiral April seems eager to grant Pike permission to break all the rules so we can have a heroic, unbelievable, Hollywood ending that rights all wrongs and returns the ship to a state of normalcy prior to when the Gorn arrived. And somehow the solution to Batel’s Gorn infection is simply to put the baby Gorn to sleep? I wasn’t exactly blown away by this plotpoint (why wouldn’t the computer have come up with this scenario in the first place?) At the same time, the solution for the Enterprise is to make itself into a makeshift magnetic star in order to spawn a stellar flare, thereby tricking the Gorn into collectively entering a period of hibernation. At least at the end of this episode, the Enterprise outsmarted the Gorn –it was brains that won out over brawn, and that is the marker of classic Trek, regardless of how implausible the conclusion might have been. In my view, it’s better not to think too hard about this episode, especially when Pike responds to Scotty’s haphazard technobabble as the ship is set to approach dangerous levels of radiation and he simply says, “We’ll just turn it off before we blow up.” It dumbs things down for the audience, making the crisis all very convenient to fit the needs of the script, but it’s a fun ride all the same.
As expected, “Hegemony, Part II” presents some absolutely incredible special effects and it kicks off Season Three with a serious bang. It’s a lot of fun, but personally I prefer the more patiently-paced, cerebral episodes of Star Trek (episodes like Season One’s “Children of the Comet” or Season Two’s “Ad Astra per Aspera”).
Star Trek Trivia:
- Spock mentions Wolkite: a rare element that contains subspace gauge bosons which could be used with a modified honing beacon to track a ship across light-years of space.
- Admiral April is aboard the USS Pablo Picasso in this episode.
- Gorn energy shields work on harmonics. And this episode re-establishes that the Gorn are dependent on light from stellar flares.
- Nurse Chapel reiterates in this episode that she still plans to leave for three months to study under Roger Korby (a nod to the TOS classic “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”).
- La’an suffers from flashbacks in this episode, visions that take her back to the Gorn breeding planet. She briefly mentions her brother Manu.
- This episode features what is presumably Scotty’s first canonical appearance on the bridge of the Enterprise (assuming we accept SNW as canon).
- Towards the end of the episode, Captain Pike confesses he is worried this has just created another problem for someone else down the line (perhaps a nod to the TOS classic episode “Arena” which first introduced the Gorn).
- Captain Pike’s religion and relationship with his father is alluded to again in this episode as he says a little prayer when he watches a recovering Batel in sickbay.
- Season Three was heavily delayed in its release because of the writer’s strike.
- Shortly before this episode aired, SNW was greenlit for a total of five seasons, with the fifth and final season being described as six episodes long.
- In this episode, Scotty says a Hubble K7C Stellar Assessment Array is needed in order for him to build another Gorn transponder.
- Many commentators have noted that this episode is an homage/ripoff of “The Best of Both Worlds” two-parter TNG episode.