Tomorrow’s Enterprise (SNW)

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SST433: Two Uhuras, a year apart, and one Scotty who shouldn’t be dead. “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” the Season 4 finale of Strange New Worlds (Season 4, Episode 10), turns Star Trek’s own “Yesterday’s Enterprise” inside out. Pike’s Enterprise is studying a white hole, Kirk’s Enterprise a year later is studying a black hole, and a shuttle accident leaves Uhura trading places across time to undo Scotty’s death.

Dom Bettinelli and Jimmy Akin take apart a finale written to work as a possible series ending and as a backdoor pilot for Star Trek: Year One, the proposed series about Kirk’s first year in command. With Season 5 confirmed as the last, they look at what the Strange New Worlds Season 4 ending sets up: Uhura grown into the officer Nichelle Nichols played, Scotty running engineering, Dr. Boyce as chief medical officer, M’Benga spending time on Vulcan, and a line that finally explains how Jenna Mitchell is related to Gary Mitchell.

Celia Rose Gooding earns high marks for playing two Uhuras with a real difference in maturity, and Anson Mount for a quiet scene where Pike admits he knows “a little more than I wish I did” about time travel. The Scotty and Uhura romance draws on Star Trek V, and Kirk-era Spock gets one of the best lines of the season.

Not everything lands. Jimmy docks the episode for its science: nothing can enter a white hole, nothing flies in and out of a black hole, and a cosmic “space baby” in a breech birth borrows human biology far too literally. The midwife aliens, their tractor beams, and the moment the two Uhuras stop talking across time all needed a line of explanation they never got. Ortegas jumping from lieutenant to captain in a year, and Uhura calling Kirk “Jim,” get a skeptical look too.

The sharpest conversation is a moral one. When Uhura is told a relationship with no future still has “a now in it,” Jimmy argues that romance is meant to lead toward marriage and a life built together, and that pursuing one you know won’t last is unfair to both people. Dom reads the scene as a warning against a career-first life that never settles down, and finds the two readings arrive at the same place.

The episode closes with a look back at a genre-jumping season and which episodes felt most like Star Trek, listener feedback on “Orders of Magnitude” and “Once La’an a Time,” and Jimmy’s offer to tell the plot of his own Voyager pitch, which carried the same title decades earlier.

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