How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds brought back Hemmer
By Chad Porto
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds brought back Hemmer.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and its fans said goodbye to Hemmer in the second-to-last episode of season one. Hemmer ended up dying due to a Gorn attack, and instead of succumbing to the injuries and allowing the Gorn to spurt from his body, he ended up sacrificing himself to help minimize the threats against his friends and fellow crewmembers.
His death on the show left a lot of characters reeling, but none more so than Nyota Uhura. Uhura was learning the ins and outs of the ship from him and started forming a bond with the Andorian. His death shook her commitment to Starfleet but she remained with the Federation despite his passing.
Yet, in “Lost in Translation”, Hemmer, and the actor who brought him back to life, Bruce Horak returned to the role and the show. Horak played his former character in “archival footage”, where he and Nyota were working on a portion of the ship together, with him teasing her a little along the way.
Later in the episode, a visage of a dead Hemmer came to Nyota, but this wasn’t Hemmer, but a projection of her dead friend. See, the Enterprise was part of a mining operation to get deuterium but in their attempts to do so, they were inadvertently killing an alien lifeform that lived within the deuterium field they were harvesting. They used Nyota’s connection with himto try and get her to stop the mining and the killing of their people.
It was great to see Hemmer back in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
While it’s been great to have Pelia on the ship, Hemmer was a treat. He was sardonic and confident, and his energy radiated whenever he was on screen. Losing him was a blow, and while his actor, Horak, promised to return in season two as a new character, we all thought that would mean a brand new recurring character.
So far, unless there’s another Horak sighting, it would appear as though his return as Hemmer and the alien assuming his form, may have been what we were promised.