Nyota Uhura sits alone at her console listening to a white hole, and what she hears is music, faint and patterned, and then, underneath it, the sound of Montgomery Scott screaming, even though Scotty is standing perfectly safe a few decks away. That is how “Tomorrow’s Enterprise”, the season four finale of “Strange New Worlds”, pulls you in, and it is a better hook than most of the season managed. The episode went up on Paramount+ on Thursday, and it closes the penultimate season of the show with something unusual for a Star Trek finale: no battle, no cliffhanger in the usual sense, and a plot that turns out to be about a birth.
Celia Rose Gooding carries almost the entire hour, playing two versions of Uhura at once. The one we know is back aboard Pike’s Enterprise after a Starfleet refresher course, and the other is the same woman roughly a year older, serving aboard a very different ship under Captain James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley). The white hole links them, and as the two women compare notes it becomes clear that in the future, Scotty (Martin Quinn) is dead. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Strange New Worlds” season four finale and for what it sets up for the final season.
The episode went up on Paramount+ on Thursday, and it closes the penultimate season of the show with something unusual for a Star Trek finale: no battle, no cliffhanger in the usual sense, and a plot that turns out to be about a birth.”
The mechanics are pure Trek, and they are handled with real confidence. The white hole is behaving like the far side of a black hole, and the energy pulses coming off it have folded time so that the two Uhuras can hear each other across a year. In the future, Scotty died during the ship’s first encounter with the phenomenon, which from the present Uhura’s point of view has not happened yet. So the stakes are clean and personal. If the two of them cannot work out what the anomaly is, the man the younger Uhura is only just starting to fall for is going to die.
Midway through, another pulse swaps them. The younger Uhura wakes up on Kirk’s Enterprise, and the older one lands back on Pike’s, and this is where the episode has the most fun. The future ship is recognizably moving toward the Original Series: the uniforms are closer to the 1960s design, Chapel (Jess Bush) has a towering retro hairstyle, and the doctor on duty is Boyce rather than M’Benga. Small details carry a lot of weight here. Ortegas has left to teach at the Academy, M’Benga has spent time on Vulcan, and when the younger Uhura mentions La’An, Kirk’s reaction tells you that something has gone badly wrong.
The swap also gives Anson Mount one of his quieter scenes of the season. Pike, meeting an Uhura who has already served under his successor, does not ask about his own future, which may be the most Pike thing he has ever done. She tells him instead that she can let the younger Uhura know how much his belief in her helped shape the officer she became. Paul Wesley has played Kirk since season two, and this is the fullest look yet at the ship he inherits from Pike.
That La’An beat is the one piece of the finale that works like a traditional cliffhanger, and it is a sly one, because the show never says what happened. It simply shows you a man who does not want to talk about it. Given how carefully the series has built the connection between La’An and Kirk, that silence is a very deliberate choice, and it is probably the thread the final season will pull hardest.
The solution to the anomaly is where the episode will divide people. The music Uhura has been transcribing on the wall of her quarters turns out to be a message, and once it is decoded it reads, more or less, as a plea: the beings in the white hole are midwives, and the baby is breeching. The phenomenon is a lifeform being born across several points in time at once, the energy pulses are contractions, and the two Uhuras have to go inside it together to help turn the child. It is, to put it plainly, a space baby, and at least one critic found it a step too far.
It works better than it sounds, we would argue, largely because of how it is staged and because the idea has deep Trek roots. A being that exists outside linear time and has to be communicated with rather than fought is close kin to the Prophets of “Deep Space Nine”, and some viewers have already drawn that line, although the episode never makes the connection explicit. The resolution also gives Uhura the thing the series has always said is her gift, which is listening. The crisis is solved by translation, not phasers, and that seems right for the character in the show’s last full season with her.
Gooding is the reason it holds together. Playing two versions of one person in the same scene is a trap for most actors, because the easy move is to make one of them a caricature, and she avoids it. The older Uhura is calmer, more guarded and quietly grieving, and the younger one is still a little unsure of herself on the bridge. The difference is small and it is exactly the right size, and it gives the finale an emotional throughline that the space-baby plot could not provide on its own.
The episode also lets the Scotty and Uhura romance finally land. It has been a slow, sweet thread all season, and here it becomes the stakes of the whole story, since the younger Uhura is trying to save a man she has only just said yes to a drink with, while the older one is trying to get back someone she has already lost. When the entity sends both women home and the future timeline resets, the older Uhura walks onto a shuttle bay to find Scotty alive and kisses him in front of everyone. It is probably the most purely happy ending the show has given anyone in a while.
The critical response has been warm, with the AV Club calling the episode charming and original while noting a few logic gaps in the one-year timeline, and other reviewers grading it higher still. The loose threads are real. The episode never quite explains why the two Uhuras had to physically switch places, and the compression of so many crew changes into a single year is a lot to accept. But those are the complaints of people who clearly enjoyed the ride.
What the finale does best is set the table for the end. “Strange New Worlds” has one more season to go, a shorter one arriving in 2027, and this episode has quietly shown us where everyone is headed: Kirk in the chair, Ortegas off the ship, M’Benga on Vulcan and La’An in some kind of trouble nobody wants to name. The show has always been a prequel that knows where it has to end up, and it closes season four with a look at the destination and a reminder, from both Uhuras, that the present is the part worth living in.
What Do You Think? Did the space-baby reveal work for you, or did it undercut a finale that was building so well? What do you think happened to La’An in the future timeline? And now that we have seen Kirk’s Enterprise, how much of the Original Series crew do you want the final season to bring in?
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