36 Years Later, Star Trek's Most Popular Series Is Referencing An Iconic TNG Episode
Are we looking at some more Enterprise time travel?
In 1990, Star Trek: The Next Generation expanded our understanding of the lineage of the starship Enterprise by introducing the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C, the direct predecessor to the Enterprise-D, Captain Picard’s ship. These days, the Star Trek timeline on TV is a bit more spread out, with Starfleet Academy all the way in the 32nd Century, while Strange New Worlds is in the early 2260s, a century before The Next Generation, and currently just a few years before The Original Series. With the release of all the episode titles for Strange New Worlds Season 4, it seems that the show may be referencing its past and future all at the same time.
Here are the just-released titles for every episode of Strange New Worlds Season 4, and why the title of the final episode should raise an eyebrow higher than Spock.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode Titles
On July 15, ahead of the launch of Season 4 on July 23, Strange New Worlds unveiled all 10 new episode titles. Those are as follows:
- “Valles Marineris”
- “The Griffin Incident”
- “Human Best Friend”
- “A Case of Chiaroscuro”
- “Level-Five Transporter Accident”
- “Off-Hour”
- “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass”
- “Orders of Magnitude”
- “Once La’an A Time”
- “Tomorrow’s Enterprise”
There are certainly a few Easter eggs here outside of the obvious one, “Tomorrow’s Enterprise.” For example, “The Griffin Incident” could be a reference to the TOS episode “The Enterprise Incident.” Meanwhile, “Once La’an a Time” is clearly a reference to La’an herself, and maybe that’s a callback to another storybook style episode like Season 1’s “The Elysian Kingdom.” One of these episodes is the upcoming puppet episode of SNW, which could be several of these, to be honest. Finally, “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” seems to suggest a time travel episode, as chronitons are theoretical particles that Star Trek often uses in conjunction with time travel.
But “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” seems to have the most significance here, as it's the Season 4 finale and seems to gesture at the Trek franchise as a whole.
“Tomorrow’s Enterprise” will air close to the 60th anniversary of Star Trek
Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4.
Because the overall anniversary of Star Trek is September 8, the episode that will actually air that week is the eighth episode of the season, “Orders of Magnitude,” on September 10. But because “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” is the season finale and it's airing in September, it seems possible that this episode could be some kind of secret anniversary tribute episode.
What could the title refer to? Will the SNW crew encounter some future Enterprise — perhaps even an Enterprise from the TNG era? Does the title suggest that we’ll get hints at how SNW Season 5 will transition to the timeline of The Original Series? Or is this title not literal?
In any case, it seems very, very likely that “Tomorrow’s Enterprise” will be a contemporary Trek season finale to remember, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, travel across the Trek timeline in unexpected ways.
