Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2.6: Jimmy Kirk
An excellent episode 2.6 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount+ tonight, in which we get to see much more of James T. Kirk, introduced in this episode as Jimmy, as he helps Uhura save an intelligent life form that lives in deuterium, an essential fuel for starflight.
That's a good story in itself. But the real payoff comes in seeing young Kirk and Uhura work together, capped off with Kirk meeting Spock for the first time, and the threesome sitting at a table as the camera pulls away and the credits roll.
This is really what Strange New Worlds is most about: giving us precious knowledge about what our heros in the original Star Trek were all doing before we met them on the Enterprise in the TV sets in our living rooms in the 1960s. Last week, we got a tender, powerful episode featuring Spock and Nurse Chapel. Two weeks before, we saw James T. Kirk and La'an Noonien-Singh. These episodes are carefully constructed, and build upon each other.
Tonight we briefly saw James and La'an together again, in conversation. There's clearly some romantic energy between them. But the greater thrill was seeing James Kirk and Nyota Uhura. And then Spock joining them at that table at the end.
And all of this takes places, of course, on a ship captained by Christopher Pike, whom we also know from Star Trek: TOS and that iconic two-part episode. I can't recall a prequel series that does this as well at Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It's on its way to providing a priceless foundation to what we grew up watching all those years ago, when The Beatles were playing on AM and then FM radios, Marshall McLuhan's books were brand new, and NBC had this extraordinary series, starting a story that, like The Beatles and McLuhan's work, is still very much with us today.
See also Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2.1: Nurse Chapel ... 2.2: Racism and Sexism in the Courtroom ... 2.3: Time Travel and Alternate Universes ... 2.5: Chapel and Spock
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