Star Trek SNW: Season 3, Episode Six “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”

Stardate: “What is the stardate? They’re all blending together…”
Original Air Date: August 14, 2025
Writers: David Reed & Bill Wolkoff
Director: Valerie Weiss

“Destroyer of worlds…”

In a rare First Officer’s personal log entry by Commander James Kirk aboard the USS Farragut, we learn that the Farragut is conducting a planetary survey of Helicon Gamma, an uninhabited M-Class world outside Federation space. Lately, Kirk has been bored and finding himself constantly questioning Captain V’Rel’s orders since she is far too risk-averse for his liking. But just when Kirk pushes V’Rel to take more risks, like sending a landing party down to the surface of Helicon Gamma, a massive unknown force suddenly impacts the planet and quickly destroys it, leaving the Farragut badly damaged. What could this be? A Doomsday machine? A Death Star of sorts? It seems to be a ship that is several magnitudes larger than a Starfleet vessel. The crash has left comms cown on the Farragut (along with everything else) and Captain V’Rel has been badly wounded with a cerebral contusion. This leaves Kirk in charge of the damaged Farragut.

The Enterprise arrives for a rescue –a landing party consisting of Spock, Scotty, Chapel, La’an, and Uhura. They attempt to restore communications and La’an beams back with tactical information on the mystery ship, however after she beams back to the Enterprise, the Farragut crew plus Uhura, Scotty, and Spock watch in horror as a terrifying massive mystery ship appears and captures the Enterprise as Enterprise power systems go down. The crew believes they have been boarded by an incredibly advanced species. La’an suggests the alien vessel might be the mythical Asaasllich (also translated as Astrovore) –a story familiar to every child who grows up on remote colony worlds. It is the tale of a scavenger ship, hundreds of years old, prowling just beyond the edges of known space, consuming resources from planets and ships alike. The Klingons call it “Chach-ka” (or “The Annihilator”).

The Farragut examines some of the wreckage and finds a D7 class Klingon cruiser –could there still be Klingons alive in there? Then Spock and Uhura make a breakthrough in their research into the alien vessel (while they remain aboard the Farragut). The mineral that the scavenger ship was harvesting on Helicon Gamma was called aldentium, a mineral which some species use for their propulsion systems. There is also another planet nearby with heavy quantities of aldentium, known as “Sullivan’s Planet.” It is inhabited by over a hundred million people, a pre-warp society, and thus the Prime Directive applies.

Meanwhile on the Enterprise, Pike and La’an and the others meet up with Dr. Pelia in the heart of the ship where Pelia describes a large “umbilical” which is sucking the ship’s power. In order to revive communications, Ortegas and Dr. M’Benga resort to using Pelia’s old rudimentary landline cable telephone system in order to bring back communications (here we are given a rare glimpse inside Pelia’s quirky quarters).

With things seemingly bleak, Kirk has a crisis of confidence (especially after his flawed push for a landing party on Helicon Gamma moments before it was entirely destroyed and his order for Scotty maximize the already failing warp engines of the heavily damaged Farragut). But he and the others aboard the Farragut discern that what actually drives the scavengers is a pursuit of bottomless greed, so Kirk and team decide to make the Farragut appear to be filled with aldentium because when aldentium decays it releases anti-protons (Scotty says he can flood the intermix chamber with anti-protons to make it look like the Farragut is running on aldentium). When they lure the scavenger ship to the Farragut, Spock posits a theory for disabling its power while Pike and La’an battle two heavily armored scavengers and detach the “umbilical” (though they tragically lose an unnamed female crewman). Then when power is restored on the Enterprise, the Farragut fires photon torpedoes deep into the scavenger ship, utterly destroying it.  

“The sehlat has eaten its tail, Captain. The scavenger ship has been disabled.”

In a twist ending, the life signs of the dead scavengers are all actually human. Uhura later explains that in the mid-21^st century, prior to first contact with the Vulcans, a group of scientists, who believed earth’s environmental crisis was too severe to recover from, contructed a ship to carry humanity to other civilizations and other worlds. The ship then disappeared entirely, the whole crew and their families were gone. Pelia remembers when it was launched (earth had barely put out the fires of the third world war). One of the few remaining nations standing was the United States, descendants of the original inhabitants: 7,000 souls killed, they were the best humanity had to offer.

“…the next time you’re in that chair, you will remember we are often not that different from our enemy.”

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My Thoughts on “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”

Far and away the best episode of Season 3 thus far, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” is about the monumentally difficult decisions leaders like Kirk and Pike are forced to face. In particular, this is a terrific Kirk character episode. He starts the episode in a state of boredom & arrogance, only to end it with a new sobering perspective on the burdens of captaincy. It shows his early flare for risk, as well as the dangers of his way of doing things. In the end, he leaves 7,000 humans killed (they are the scavenger descendants of people who fled earth after the third world war). Did Kirk make the right decision? Or could a truce have been attempted with the scavengers? We may never know; the episode ends on a note of ambiguity.  

For me, the absolute low point of this episode is an early string of awkward glances between Kirk, Spock, and La’an when the latter two first board the Farragut. Thankfully this was not expanded upon further –yet another love triangle would have been just absolutely ridiculous. And the brief questionable moment when Ortegas picks up the archaic telephone and seems to question whether or not it’s a sex toy (another swing and a miss for SNW).

Even though I guessed the twist ending very early in this episode, I still thought this was a great Trek adventure, a real standout for the NuTrek interpretation of Kirk. Somewhere down the line I wouldn’t mind learning more about these scavenger descendants and what led them to pursue this life in the far reaches of space.

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Star Trek Trivia:

• The Sehlat was first mentioned in TOS (“Journey to Babel”) where we learn that Spock had a pet Sehlat in his youth named I-Chaya on Vulcan. I-Chaya was first shown onscreen in the TAS episode “Yesteryear.”
• The original pronunciation of Sehlat in TOS sounded something like “sell it” but over time it came to be pronounced as “say-lot.”
• Kirk says his mom was fond of the expression: “the dog who caught the car.” Spock recalls a similar expression on Vulcan: “The Sehlat who ate its tail.”
• Scotty uses the phrase: “What in Baird’s name happened here?” A reference to Scottish inventor John Logie Baird (1888-1946) who demonstrated the world’s first mechanical television.
• Scotty calls the giant scavenger ship “Nessie’s gob” a reference to the Loch Ness Monster.
• Dr. Pelia reminds us she is over 5,000 years old.
• Captain V’Rel of the USS Farragut is a Vulcan. She is played by Zoe Doyle.
• This episode technically features the first moment of Kirk taking the captain’s chair as acting captain, albeit of the USS Farragut. And this would also be the first moment of Spock, Uhura, and Chapel serving under “Captain” Kirk.
• Even the Gorn considers the scavengers monsters. No one has seen what they look like.
• Pelia says she was once a roadie for the Grateful Dead.
• Admiral April apparently likes Aldebaran Whiskey, per Captain Pike.
• Many fans have noted this episode seems to be serving as an unofficial pilot for the “Star Trek: Year One” series idea which has apparently been pitched to executives at Paramount for a prequel show.
• This episode features a scene in Pelia’s eccentrically decorated quarters. Among the many quirky antiquities (many from the 1980s), an Andy Warhol print of Pelia herself can be found in the background on the wall.
• The mythical scavenger ship “Asaasllich” (also translated as Astrovore) is called “Chach-ka” (or “The Annihilator”) by the Klingons.