SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” the Season 4 finale of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,“ now streaming on Paramount+.
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” brought its fourth season to a close this week, with an episode that firmly sets up the show’s fifth and final season and teases the show’s entry into “Star Trek: The Original Series” territory. (Or as Trekkies call it, “TOS.”)
The finale is anchored by the newly promoted Lt. Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding). She returns to the Enterprise after a Starfleet conference as the ship is preparing to observe a white hole, which is believed to be the counterpoint to a black hole.
Uhura hears music coming from the white hole, when in true “Star Trek” space phenomenon style, a sudden energy burst strikes the ship. Uhura is knocked to the ground, but then hears what sounds like her own voice trying to save Scotty (Martin Quinn) from some kind of emergency.
As it turns out, she is not going crazy. We see that on the other side of the white hole, the Enterprise, one year in the future, is investigating a black hole. In this future timeline, Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) is now the captain, Spock (Ethan Peck) is his first officer, Pike (Anson Mount) has been promoted to admiral, and La’an (Christina Chong) is mysteriously absent for … reasons.
Future Uhura is in a romantic relationship with Scotty, and the two fly out on a shuttle with Ortegas (Melissa Navia), who is now a flight instructor at the Academy, to investigate the black hole. But the same sudden energy burst hits the shuttle. This Uhura manages to make an emergency transport back to Enterprise, but Scotty is killed. Uhura is then told that Scotty had died a year earlier, setting up some fun “Star Trek” timey-wimey paradox stuff.
The episode establishes that “Strange New Worlds” Uhura and “TOS” Uhura are able to communicate across time, but perhaps most importantly the episode sees Gooding rocking the classic “TOS” Nichelle Nichols hairdo. According to Gooding, it took her a bit of adjusting to settle into the new look.
“I was a little insecure about it at first, because I thought I looked just different, and the human brain takes a minute to understand that different doesn’t mean danger,” Gooding tells Variety.
The two Uhuras (Two-hura?) must work together to save Scotty without disrupting the timeline any further. That proves to be tricky, especially since “TOS” Uhura has to guide her past self without getting into too much of what is to come in the intervening year.
“The hardest part was making them talk to each other and having ‘TOS’ Uhura speak on experiences that ‘Strange New Worlds’ Uhura hasn’t had yet, and to live in that sort of liminal space,” Gooding says. “As a recovering control addict, it was hard for me to live in that space and not immediately feel like I need a a point in ‘Strange New Worlds’ Uhura’s mind to leap off of and talk on.”
“I crave an answer, and to be met with yourself saying, ‘Hey, that’s not going to help you,’ it was a struggle for sure in the character,” she continues. “She had a hard time being told, ‘You’ve just got to trust me. You have to trust the me, that is you.’”
Past and future Uhura figure out a way to balance out the timeline using a dilithium diamond, but just when they are set to use it, another energy pulse sends them the opposite Enterprises. Meaning “TOS” Uhura is back in the past, while past Uhura is now in the future.
But past Uhura in the future is able to unlock the secret of the music she heard at the beginning of the episode. It turns out it was an alien entity within the white hole/black hole, telling the Enterprise to stay back, because a child is about to be birthed from it. The energy blasts, in other words, have been “contractions.”
The two Uhuras will be able to rebalance all that has gone awry if they can successfully birth this “space baby” using specialized drones that they can control from outside the ship. They both venture out and end up meeting each other face to face in space as the birth is happening — and Gooding says that shooting that was a mind-bender in and of itself.
“There were three different Uhuras on the call sheet at any given time,” she says. “It was me, my stand-in Lisa, and my stunt double Sammy. There were times in which I was having a conversation with a tennis ball on a stick, and there were times where I was having my conversation with Lisa, but we recorded my dialogue so mt stand-in wasn’t saying it — it was me having a conversation with my voice so the timing was right. So it was me looking at her, but hearing the voice of God, as we call it, as my voice.”
The space baby is successfully born, and the two Uhuras are transported to the bridge of the Enterprise and thanked by the alien midwives. They also get a chance to talk to each other, which Gooding calls a “passing of the torch” between “Strange New Worlds” and “TOS.”
“‘Strange New Worlds’ has done all the work that we are gonna do,” she says. “We have told the stories. They are written, recorded, edited. ADR is done. All we have to do is share it with the world. And I think what we have done with the series finale of ‘Strange New Worlds’ is tee up a series of opportunities. We could veer off and have more conversations about Kirk’s captaincy, or we can launch right into the original series.
“We found a way to close this chapter for the legacy characters, but we’ve also been able to say goodbye to characters that only exist in ‘Strange New Worlds,’” Gooding says. “And we’ve done it in a way that I think is really satisfying.”