‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Stars on Pike’s Relationship, Ortegas’ Confidence & More
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Where No One Has Gone Before
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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 4 “Among the Lotus Eaters.”]
The trouble the Enterprise runs into in the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds means seeing different sides of some of its crew.
Just as Pike (Anson Mount) worries his and Batel’s (Melanie Scrofano) relationship is hurting her career (after she doesn’t get a promotion) and suggests they take a step back, he must return to the site of a previous mission during which he lost three members of his crew. Joining him are La’an (Christina Chong) and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) — though the captain doesn’t need the latter for healing, rather as someone who can handle himself against warriors.
“It was fun,” Olusanmokun tells TV Insider of exploring that side of his character. “It was something he didn’t want to go back to, but he was called upon and so it took him back to a point in time that he’d rather forget. But he was asked by the captain to use his skills and he was up for it and he did his duty.”
Meanwhile, due to radiation on the planet, the landing party loses their memories, something that the man in charge there (who was one of the crew Pike thought to be dead) takes advantage of. And after Pike gets his memories back, he realizes what his necklace (a gift from Batel, a keystone meant to bring lost sailors home) means to him. He tells Batel he was wrong and she brought him home. He asks for her forgiveness, and she kisses him.
“I hope” that relationship lasts, Mount says. “I just like working with Melanie. She’s still around because everybody likes working with her, and I think that it’s a very smartly placed relationship within the series because it allows us to chart Pike’s ability to have relationships outside of work, given what he knows about his future.”
As Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 revealed to Pike (which then haunted him throughout Strange New Worlds Season 1), he knows the fate that awaits him. And while he has spoken to a couple of his crew about it, the same cannot be said of the other captain. “She does not know [about it],” Mount points out. “And I would assume that’s going to be something he has to address going forward is, when you have a relationship that naturally starts to question the future, what does that mean when you know your future already?”
Michael Gibson/Paramount+
Meanwhile, Ortegas (Melissa Navia) nearly joins them — and is so excited to be leaving the ship on a mission — until she’s needed on the bridge to pilot the Enterprise by hand. And the crew, too, is affected the same way those on the planet are by the radiation, meaning the person who’s to fly the Enterprise has no idea what she’s doing. As a result, we see Ortegas first retreat to her quarters, then regain confidence (“I’m Erica Ortegas. I fly the ship.”) and control.
Exploring this new side of Ortegas was something Navia embraced. “I was so excited when I spoke to the writers and saw what [this] story was going to be and especially because it was mirroring a bit of what I was feeling for personal reasons in my own life,” she shares. “[It’s] this idea of when things happen to you that are completely outside of your control, which also personally I completely understand, and you suddenly feel like everything that you were before — that confident, capable, lovable person — no longer exists, how do you find that again?”
With this episode that, “in the beauty that is Star Trek, encapsulates that … here is Ortegas, the person who we need to fly this ship and suddenly cannot remember how to do the thing that defines her, not just for herself but also for fans, and how do we see her overcome that,” Navia continues. “I could see myself in that and then I also could see what that was doing to Ortegas, somebody who really takes her job as her defining feature because she’s worked so hard for it, she loves doing it.”
The star goes on to point out that while Season 1 was focused more on the legacy characters, for those who were introduced and fans fell in love with like Ortegas and Hemmer (Bruce Horak), “their job was so integral to their persona.” That truly comes into play with this episode. “You see her having to rediscover who she is and to fight past these outside forces that we can all relate to and that oftentimes suck,” Navia explains. “But it’s not what happens to you, it’s what you make of what happens to you.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Thursdays, Paramount+
