If you are anything like me, you might want to watch this episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with the lights on. While it is not the most frightening hour of Star Trek ever made (there are far more disturbing episodes), “Shuttle to Kenfori” does add a dash of zombies to its medley of various ongoing storylines that might not be everyone’s cup of raktajino.
Just as we thought that Captain Batel was out of the woods with respect to her infection of Gorn embryos from “Hegemony,” we discover in this episode that Gorn genetic material is returning. Dr. M’Benga and Mr. Spock tell Captains Batel and Pike that the only cure comes from using the Chimera Blossom, which is only found on Kenfori, a planet within the Federation-Klingon Buffer Zone.
Although Spock and M’Benga offer to go to Kenfori to retrieve the plant, Captain Pike insists on joining this clandestine mission in Spock’s stead. Upon landing on Kenfori, M’Benga and Pike find Chimera Blossoms and soon after encounter a Klingon hunting party. Meanwhile, Number One is commanding the Enterprise, trying to sneak past the Klingons’ ship and beam the landing party back.
On the planet, both the Klingons and our landing party must contend with the zombified corpses of Klingon and Federation personnel who had died on the planet. Dr. M’Benga explains that these zombies (though he doesn’t want to call them that) are the result of the Chimera Blossom. He also reluctantly admits to Pike that the Blossom will be used to fuse Batel’s DNA with the Gorn DNA.
Needless to say, Pike does not take this information well, but there is not much time to discuss it, as the lead Klingon, Bytha, takes Pike and M’Benga hostage, explaining that she is the daughter of Dak’Rah, whom M’Benga killed in season 2’s “Under the Cloak of War.” For convoluted honor reasons, Bytha now wants to kill M’Benga.
Of course, M’Benga defeats Bytha while refusing to kill her, and he and Pike are about to escape in Bytha’s shuttle when they are beamed up by the Enterprise, which makes it within transporter range thanks, in part, to insubordinate actions by Lt. Ortegas.
As the episode comes to a close, Pike and Batel have an emotional exchange about her impending treatment using the Chimera Blossoms, and Number One reprimands Lt. Ortegas for her insubordination, which we are led to believe was caused by Ortegas’ traumatic experience with the Gorn in “Hegemony.”
Honestly, when I first saw the zombies in this episode, I was expecting that to be the focus of the episode. As a non-fan of zombies, I wasn’t thrilled about that prospect, but it seemed like it could be an interesting conundrum. In actual fact, however, the zombies are a fairly minor part of this episode, which is instead filled to the brim with character drama.
At certain points, the sheer number of different characters having different flavors of drama gets tedious. Unlike the mounting tension in “Hegemony, Part II,” this episode plods along, incrementally adding to various characters’ backstories and futures. This is disappointing, as it means this episode does not stand on its own as nicely as many other Strange New Worlds episodes.
That being said, “Shuttle to Kenfori” helps lay a lot of groundwork for future stories. While that may make this episode a bit slow, it will hopefully mean that these various plot threads can be woven gracefully into the backgrounds of future episodes, until they inevitably come to a head down the line.