SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for “Valles Marineris,” the Season 4 premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Don’t read any further until you’ve watched it. That’s it. That’s all I’m gonna say. If you keep reading like a dumbass, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Okay, so here’s the thing. I thought “Valles Marineris” was really good, and honestly, it might be one of the better episodes this series has done. Not because it tried to be cute, shocking, funny, romantic, scary, or whatever else Strange New Worlds has occasionally thrown at the wall while trying to become the Star Trek show for absolutely everyone.
I mean, that’s all cool and stuff, but damn, I really miss Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 1 of Strange New Worlds brought back some of those TNG vibes, when exploration and discovery felt like the entire reason we were watching. Somewhere along the way, though, the series started feeling like it was trying on a different costume every week to see what fit.
Not gonna lie, this episode felt a bit different for me, and in a good way. It felt like the show finally found a little bit of the identity it started losing along the way. This is the kind of episode Trekkies like me can rally behind because it’s built around the thing Star Trek has always done best: exploration.
Not just flying somewhere new and scanning a few rocks, either. I’m talking about boldly going where no one has gone before, finding something impossible, and slowly realizing that the discovery is much bigger than the crew first understood. That’s the good stuff, and “Valles Marineris” gives us a full plate of it.
The episode premiered here in the US on Paramount+ on July 23, 2026, as the Season 4 premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It starts with horses, a strange landscape, and just enough familiarity to make you wonder what the freak is going on. Then things begin going sideways, and from there, the episode keeps pulling you deeper.
Holo Pursuits, Perhaps
That opening really did fool me for a second. Pike, M’Benga, and La’An are riding through this beautiful landscape, and it has the exact feeling of one of those Next Generation episodes where Picard decides he needs some relaxation and somehow ends up dressed like a 1940s detective. I half expected Data to ride over the hill wearing a cowboy hat and asking everyone to call him “Durango.”
Then I remembered that Pike’s Enterprise doesn’t have TNG holodeck tech yet. That’s probably for the best, since the technology eventually becomes a machine capable of producing anything the human mind can imagine, but mostly uses that power to disable its own safety protocols and trap senior officers inside. Somebody at Starfleet really needed to stop adding features and focus on quality control.
The peaceful horseback ride doesn’t last, because peaceful moments aboard the Enterprise usually mean the universe is winding up its pitching arm. The ship flies into a violent stellar storm, takes a beating, and comes out somewhere that doesn’t look quite right. The stars are wrong, the ship needs repairs, and nobody has a clue where they’ve ended up.
Have We Been Here Before?
Una, La’An, and Ortegas beam down to collect what the Enterprise needs, and the planet looks like another dangerous alien wilderness. There are enormous animals roaming around, the landing party is suddenly much lower on the food chain, and La’An appears ready to fight the entire planet one creature at a time. Honestly, that tracks for her, given the crazy DNA cocktail flowing through her veins.
The episode doesn’t rush the reveal, which is exactly why it works. It lets us notice the vegetation, the landscape, and the creatures while that little voice in the back of our heads starts asking why everything looks so familiar. Then the answer finally lands, and it’s even better than whatever explanation you were starting to build in your head.
They’re on Earth 65 million years ago, and those giant creatures aren’t aliens at all. They’re dinosaurs, and watching Starfleet officers sprint through prehistoric Earth is exactly as cool as it sounds. Even better, La’An responds to one of them with the universal language of a punch that would’ve made Kirk proud.
She doesn’t exactly send the creature into early retirement, but she definitely gives it something to remember. I felt a little sorry for the poor animal, and then, for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking that it reminded me of somebody. A second later, it clicked, and suddenly I couldn’t unsee the striking resemblance to a certain senator from Kentucky.
Blue Sky on Mars
While the away team is trying not to become part of the fossil record, Pike discovers that Mars is home to an advanced civilization. This isn’t the dystopian Mars with recycled air, mutated humans, and some corporate lunatic controlling oxygen with an iron fist. There are no three-breasted hookers, no cab driver named Benny, and definitely no Kuato waiting to crawl out of somebody’s stomach. Give these people air damnit! Sorry, I clearly need to get my Total Recall fix with Arnold this weekend.
No, these are actual Martians, and they’re fighting an insect-like species living on a mysterious neighboring home world. Their problem isn’t a rigged air supply or a corrupt regime squeezing the planet dry. It’s a full-scale war for survival, and the Enterprise has just stepped in some serious dino poop.
This is where the episode starts tightening the screws. Pike wants to help because that’s who Pike is, but every new piece of information makes it clearer that the Enterprise has wandered into something much larger than a local war. He can’t simply switch on an ancient machine, give these people air, and fly home in time for Corn Flakes.
The title itself gives us a clue. Valles Marineris is the massive canyon system stretching more than 2,500 miles across Mars, reaching around 120 miles wide and more than four miles deep in places. It was named after Mariner 9, the spacecraft that became the first to orbit another planet and mapped much of the Martian surface in 1971.
Calling Valles Marineris the Grand Canyon of Mars feels almost disrespectful. It’s less like a canyon and more like somebody tried to split the planet open with a planet sized bat’leth. In the episode, that enormous scar begins to look less like a natural formation and more like evidence.
The Martians Finally Believe in Something
The Martian commander is Cassell, played by Saffron Burrows, and she’s terrific. She gives the character this calm, commanding presence, but you can always feel the suspicion, grief, and exhaustion sitting just beneath the surface. Burrows never overplays it, which makes the moments when Cassell’s defenses begin to fall hit much harder.
Cassell and her people have every reason to be skeptical of the Enterprise. Their first experience with an alien civilization has turned into a brutal war with the insect-like species next door, so they don’t see Pike and immediately think, “Hey, these seem like nice people.” They see another unknown ship, another possible threat, and potentially another species they’ll have to kill before it kills them.
Pike slowly gets through to Cassell by showing her that humanity eventually becomes something better. Humans work beside Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites, and countless other species instead of trying to wipe each other out every Thursday. For a little while, the Federation becomes proof that her people might survive their fear, end the war, and build something peaceful too.
There’s a little bit of “First Contact” here (The Next Generation, Season 4, Episode 15), where Picard has to convince a frightened civilization that meeting outsiders doesn’t automatically mean losing everything they are. There’s also a touch of “Darmok” (The Next Generation, Season 5, Episode 2), because underneath all the technology, fear, and confusion, the real breakthrough happens when two people stop seeing each other as threats. Pike’s greatest weapon has never been a phaser anyway because it’s his stubborn belief that people can still choose to be better.
Then Cassell figures out just how far into the future the Enterprise has come from, and you can see the hope drain from her face. There’s also a real sense of betrayal in the way she looks at Pike, like he let her believe in a future he knew might never belong to her people. Damn you, Prime Directive!
The peaceful Federation she thought might be waiting just over the horizon isn’t a few years away, a few generations away, or even a few thousand years away. It’s tens of millions of years in the future, and suddenly Pike hasn’t shown her the world her people will build. He may have shown her a world they’ll never live to see.
Burrows plays that realization beautifully. Cassell had allowed herself to believe, just for a moment, that the fighting might end and her people might finally breathe without looking over their shoulders. Then time itself reaches across the room, takes that hope away, and basically tells her, “Sorry, wrong civilization.”
Now the Pieces Start Clicking
Cassell’s loss of hope is where the emotional story and the enormous science-fiction idea finally collide. Pike realizes that the Enterprise hasn’t merely traveled into the past to watch history happen. The ship and its crew have become part of the chain of events they were trying not to disturb.
That gave me serious “All Good Things…” feelings (The Next Generation, Season 7, Episodes 25–26). Picard spends that story trying to understand a temporal anomaly, only to discover that his own investigation is helping create it. Pike’s facing a similar nightmare here, because every answer the Enterprise finds pulls the crew deeper into the event.
It also reminded me of “Time’s Arrow,” one of my favorite TNG two-parters (The Next Generation, Season 5, Episode 26 and Season 6, Episode 1). Data’s head is found beneath San Francisco centuries before he travels into the past and leaves it there. The evidence exists before the crew experiences the event because time has already closed the circle.
That’s kind of what happens here, only on a solar-system-sized scale. The insect species comes from another planet sitting between Mars and Jupiter, which means there’s an entire fifth world in our solar system that nobody in the future knows ever existed. At first, you’re wondering whether this is some parallel universe or alternate-reality mind twist, but nope, this is our solar system.
Then the insect home world is destroyed and becomes the asteroid belt. What’s wrong, you thought the insect planet was going to survive? This is Star Trek, after all, and we’ve still got several billion years of messy history to explain before Kirk starts ripping his shirt in fistfights.
The destruction of that world also devastates Mars and sends a piece of the wreckage hurtling toward Earth. That impact ends the age of the dinosaurs, opens the door for mammals, and eventually gives us humanity, Starfleet, and the Enterprise. The Enterprise then travels backward and becomes involved in the very events that allowed the Enterprise to exist in the first place.
That’s the best mind twist yet. The future didn’t accidentally change the past because the future was always part of the past. If you’ve got a headache by now, feel free to pop some Advil.
Get Your Ass to Mars
By now, it’s obvious that I’m obsessed with Total Recall. And by that I mean the OG with Arnold Schwarzenegger, not that piss-poor job with Colin Farrell. Although I can’t really complain about Kate Beckinsale. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a beautifully choreographed, wire-work-heavy hand-to-hand combat sequence between La’An and Kate? Honestly, the writers need to figure out a way to get her into an episode of Strange New Worlds. Where’s Gene when you need him?
Wait! What the hell am I talking about? Let’s get back to the article. Focus, dammit!
Jurassic Finale
Then we get that gorgeous final flyover through prehistoric Earth. The camera sweeps across this enormous living world filled with dinosaurs, and for a moment, the episode just lets us enjoy the sight of it. These creatures have no idea what’s coming, but we do, and that changes the entire feeling of the sequence.
The camera keeps moving until it reaches the T. Rex, standing there like it has been waiting 65 million years for its close-up. It raises its head and lets out that huge roar, bringing the episode just shy of having that blood-sucking lawyer from Jurassic Park kick down Paramount’s doors. Somewhere at Universal, somebody probably stopped chewing, slowly turned toward the television, and reached for the phone.
It’s funny, spectacular, and surprisingly sad. The dinosaurs started as the coolest part of the adventure, but by the end, they represent an entire world that has to disappear for ours to begin. The episode doesn’t just show us their extinction as a historical fact because it makes us feel the loss.
That’s why “Valles Marineris” worked so well for me. It’s fun, clever, a little ridiculous, and filled with the kind of huge science-fiction idea that Star Trek was built to explore. More importantly, it feels like Strange New Worlds stopped trying to be everything for everyone and simply decided to boldly go somewhere strange again.
Dinosaurs, Martians, impossible choices, and one enormous temporal circle. That’s not just good Star Trek. That’s dino-mite Star Trek, and yes, I’m ending with that because the episode earned it.
“Valles Marineris” is streaming now in the United States on Paramount+. It’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 1, with new episodes arriving weekly on Thursdays through the September 24, 2026 season finale. Watch it on the biggest screen you’ve got because that final flyover deserves more than something the size of a communicator.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Trailer
In case you haven’t already caught it, here’s the trailer for Season 4:
Buy the Star Trek Movies, Shows, and Gear Mentioned Here
Loved the ideas, characters, and ridiculous Mars detours in this episode? Here are some of the movies, shows, and collectibles connected to everything we talked about.
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Blu-ray
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Complete Series
- Star Trek: The Next Generation Movie Collection
- Star Trek: The Next Generation Enterprise-D Model
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Enterprise Model
- Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger
- Star Trek Books and Collectibles
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