Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ second season finale, ‘Hegemony’ is a fantastic capstone on the run and leaves about a third of the cast in mortal danger. Captain Batel is infected with Gorn eggs and La’an, Ortegas, Sam Kirk and Doctor M’Benga are captured by the Gorn along with hundreds of colonists. The show wants us to think we’re looking at another major character death. Alasdair Stuart has… theories. Here’s what we know and what we hope.

Captain Marie Batel

Captain Batel is in trouble from the pre-credits scene. Her ship, the USS Cayuga, is destroyed by the Gorn and she and her landing party are trapped on Parnassus IV. To make matters worse, Batel is infected with Gorn eggs.

The ghost of former engineer Hemmer has hung over this entire season in a variety of ways and never more so than in Batel’s plot. This is Starfleet’s worst nightmare and the crew’s worst nightmare combined: the Gorn taking aggressive action and a member of the extended Enterprise family in mortal danger.

Killing Batel gives you added poignancy for Pike, and drives him further away from the people around him. That could fold back into the distinctly cold figure we met way back in The Cage and it also isolates the Captain at the exact moment he’s cautiously accepting that perhaps he does deserve happiness.

Lt. La’an Noonien-Singh

This really has been La’an, Chapel and Uhura’s season and La’an has made big, difficult personal strides. I could see a case for her not making it back because she’s so closely tied to the Gorn anyway that it would make dramatic sense for them to be responsible for killing her.

But there’s another, way more fun, option. All season we’ve been carefully reminded La’an still has the watch from the trip to the past earlier in the season. She’s also told people about what happened, something she was expressly ordered to not do. I could see a situation where she’s apparently killed but is instead recruited ‘upstream’ into Starfleet’s temporal division. Or perhaps becomes an instructor at Starfleet Academy in the Discovery-era, as that show is still in development.

Lt. Erica Ortegas

I’m worried about Starfleet’s best pilot. The payoff to her season-long desire to go on an away mission, Pike’s ‘You were born for this, Erica’ comment and even her line to M’Benga about ‘Christine does a better me’ – there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that Ortegas isn’t going to make it out of this one. Perhaps most interesting of all is Boimler’s response to meeting her in ‘Those Old Scientists’. He calls her ‘the war hero’ but does not at any point specify which war…

Much like Batel this feels like the show tipping its hand. But I think it might be trying a little too hard to be entirely convincing. Ortegas is a fan favourite character and one with a lot more to be explored. Plus given skirmishes aside, Starfleet never have a canonical war with the Gorn. At least not yet. if we assume Erica’s ‘war hero’ status is from the Klingon war, there seems to be a much better than average chance she’s coming home from this one. Plus she and Chapel are my favourite characters so I kind of have to believe this.

Lt. Sam Kirk

Is going to have the WORST. TIME. So much so this could well drive him out of Starfleet as we see him as a married, civilian, and dead, colonist in the original series’ ‘Operation: Annihilate’. Let’s just not think about Sam watching horrible things happen to his close friends and leaving Starfleet and move on shall we?

Doctor Joseph M’Benga

Babs Olusanmokun has had a staggeringly good season as the Pike-era Enterprise’s CMO. We know he eventually steps down or is replaced as CMO but we also know he makes it home from this episode.

And now, the wild card.

No One

They all make it home.

  • Captain Batel being saved would be in lockstep with Starfleet changing how they perceive the Gorn. Plus, honestly, the organization is so traumatised by the wars we already know about it makes sense for them to get (kind of) a pass on this one.
  • La’an, as discussed above, either makes it home or is pulled out of the timestream. That gives her some really fun things to do and continues the path she’s on. That’s it. That’s the reasoning. She’s awesome. More of her please.
  • Sam Kirk: Bad times coming, but we know he doesn’t die here.
  • Dr M’Benga: We know he lives.

More importantly, a hopeful outcome would be a neat way of continuing that exploration of the Gorn as an adversary and eventual ally. Pike comes into the episode convinced they’re monsters. If he leaves the story with a healthy fear of them but an understanding that they’re a genuinely alien culture, that’s the show’s premise and theme in a nutshell. Exploration. Discovery. Understanding. Boldly going.

Either way, it’s going to be a long wait until Season 3 but one I know will be worth it. Here’s hoping the studios pay what’s owed soon.