The first indication that “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” will break with this season’s habit of alternating lighter and darker episodes comes with its “previously on” segment, a string of moments in which various characters reflect on death. It’s a sure sign that anyone expecting a less intense episode after the harrowing events of “Through the Lens of Time” should probably brace themselves.
The clip package includes scenes of James T. Kirk, who quickly makes an appearance via a log he records in his capacity as the first officer of the Farragut. Kirk’s condition: bored. His captain, a Vulcan named V’rel (Zoe Doyle), is going about the business of scanning a Class M planet from a distance, but Kirk wants to see it firsthand. That the planet in question almost immediately suffers a cataclysmic event, badly damaging the Farragut, doesn’t exactly support the wisdom of his argument. However, it will soon become apparent that this wasn’t exactly a naturally occurring phenomenon. With his captain down, Kirk takes command. His first task: trying to figure out the source of the bizarre, threatening low growl picked up by the comms system.
Fortunately, the Enterprise is close enough to help. Unfortunately, the Farragut’s in really bad shape when a team of five — La’an, Uhura, Scotty, Spock, and Chapel — beams aboard. To deal with this, they split up. In sick bay, Chapel finds that she’s now the highest-ranking medical officer and that the injured Captain V’Rel will not be resuming command anytime soon. On the bridge, Spock, Uhura, and La’an find Kirk doing his best to keep things together. Speaking to Pike, who’s remained aboard the Enterprise, Kirk lays out what he knows: The planet was hit by a “focused gravitational beam” that seems to have come from a really, really big starship of the sort the Federation could only dream of creating. The description prompts La’an to utter a term that will prove central to the episode’s events: “destroyer of worlds.”
Pike’s plan: Get everyone off the Farragut, starting with the badly injured, and get the hell out of there. But before they can put this plan into action, the low growl returns — along with a ship of almost unfathomable size that swallows the Enterprise. (That’s a pretty literal description of what happens, too. The titanic ship is outfitted with what looks like a giant set of teeth.) What’s more, Captain V’Rel has been beamed to the Enterprise for surgery. This leaves Kirk in charge of everything, which is what he wanted at the beginning of the episode, but almost certainly doesn’t want now.
Inside the larger ship, the Enterprise finds itself surrounded by tentacle-like mechanical appendages as multiple systems threaten to shut down. Different parts of the ship can’t even talk to one another, thanks to interference, and runners have started to disappear, leading Pike to assume they’ve been boarded. La’an, who returned to the Enterprise shortly before it was subsumed into the belly of the monster ship, hits Pike with her “destroyer of worlds” theory. It’s a legend common among those who live in the remote colonies about an ancient scavenger ship that consumes whatever it encounters. This does not sound good at all.
As Kirk frets about commanding a hybrid Farragut–Enterprise (but mostly Enterprise) crew, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and Chapel arrive with an assessment of the situation. The view outside the monster ship is no less grim than the view from within it, but while Federation regulations would require them to flee and seek help elsewhere, nobody wants to play by the rule book. Maybe Kirk’s worries about getting the Enterprise crew members he barely knows aligned with his thinking were misplaced after all. He sounds quite captainlike as he issues his commands: Chapel should patch up the wounded; everyone else needs to work to head off the monster ship at the pass as it heads to a place called Sullivan’s Planet so they can rescue the Enterprise.
Kirk brings this plan to Scotty, who tells him it’s virtually impossible, that it might even tear the ship apart. With a smile on his face, Kirk asks Scotty to do it anyway, a pattern they’ll repeat more than a few times in subsequent adventures, even if neither of them knows this yet. This also won’t be the last time it works — at least until it breaks down, leaving them, in Scotty’s words, “dead in the water” and directly in the path of the scavenger ship.
But will there even be an Enterprise to rescue? On their way to engineering, Kirk and La’an encounter Pelia, who brings the grim news that an umbilical-like appendage has begun pumping toxic gas into the ship. Detaching it will have to be their first order of business. Even if they can detach it, escaping won’t be easy, as Ortegas explains to Una. Assuming they can maneuver out, they won’t be able to communicate with one another due to the limitations of the comms systems. Enter Pelia, who says, “This may be the first time I’m glad to have lived through the 1980s.”
This brings them to Pelia’s quarters, a kind of intergalactic thrift shop whose accoutrements include a Tiffany lamp, a Kit-Cat Klock (“You were once bouncy and chipper, but once the novelty wore off, you got a little creepy”), an Atari 2600, and what appears to be an Andy Warhol portrait of Pelia. Pelia also has a classic landline phone, and though Ortegas mistakes it for a “personal massager,” it will soon be revealed to have far more practical applications. “We’re going to wire the Enterprise!” she excitedly tells them.
While this is happening, Pike’s party meets their visitors, intruders in hulking uniforms. After losing their companion, Pike and La’an take shelter in the ship’s lounge, where the enemy soon begins pounding at the door (and, in the process, breaking a lot of glassware). Fortunately, this does not include a bottle of high-proof liquor that Pike and La’an use as a kind of rolling Molotov cocktail, a tactic that proves more effective than phasers against the intruders — well, most phasers, anyway. In the corridor, La’an discovers that a well-placed phaser shot can have an effect as she rescues Pike. But it’s the intruder’s hesitation that allows her to take the shot in the first place. “Why didn’t it kill me?” Pike asks her. The answer will be more troubling than he can suspect.
On the Farragut, the Enterprise crew members present Kirk with several options. When he rejects them all and storms off in a huff, claiming a need to be away from the chatter, they even consider removing him from command. If he really worried about those under his command not trusting him, maybe he wouldn’t behave this way? Uhura, who’s seen directly how Kirk can be cool in a crisis, begins the process of talking them down, saying, “We should consider that he’s still working on his command style.” That bit of diplomatic phrasing leads to the decision to send Spock to discuss the matter with Kirk, hoping his “less emotional style” will serve as a counterbalance to Kirk’s dramatics. (And, as it does with Kirk’s interaction with Scotty, the episode is giving us an early example of a dynamic that the two will have for the rest of their relationship.)
“I’m frozen,” Kirk tells him when Spock interrupts the unexpected captain’s attempt to restore a game of three-dimensional chess he’d been playing with V’Rel. He’s spent much of his career thinking he knew better than those in charge. Now that he’s in charge, he’s experiencing a crisis of confidence. It recalls his mom’s homey expression “the dog who caught the car,” a parallel to the Vulcan phrase that gives the episode its title: “the sehlat who ate his tail.” But maybe, Spock suggests, there’s a simple solution to his frozen state, albeit one that’s not especially Vulcan-y: continue to rely on his human intuition.
Then it’s time for Kirk to return to the bridge, where he quickly wins back the confidence of his crew by asking for their input as they try to arrive at a plan. A brainstorming session quickly produces one: fake being a ship so rich in resources that the scavenger ship will have to come after them. And then? Next comes some fancy piloting, the detachment of the thrusters, and then the scavenger ship is effectively so much deadweight in space, at least for now.
On the Enterprise, La’an and Pike decide the best way to disconnect the umbilical will be to force it to ingest something really nasty, a necessary step before the other crew members, now connected by landline, can maneuver out of the scavenger ship’s guts. Somehow, it all works out, but that doesn’t mean the Enterprise or the Farragut are out of danger. It will take some well-placed photon torpedoes to ensure that — an assault that also seems to destroy the scavenger ship for good. However, the moment of triumph reveals some uncomfortable truths: They’ve killed the nearly 7,000 inhabitants of the scavenger ship, all of them humans from Earth. This, it turns out, is what became of a group of astronauts sent into space in the mid-21st century in the hopes of finding a solution to Earth’s environmental crisis. They were the best and the brightest, Pelia recalls, but whatever happened to them over the 200-year course of their mission changed them and turned their descendants savage. And now what happened to them might never be known.
As the episode ends, Pike gives Kirk a pep talk after Kirk reveals he’s shaken at the thought of taking so many human lives. In fact, he didn’t even think of them as people at the time. “Having empathy for your adversary is part of the job,” Pike tells him, continuing, “Maybe that’s the lesson: Empathy isn’t conditional; it’s either given or it isn’t.” It’s an insight Pike tells Kirk, whom he addresses as “Captain Kirk,” that will continue to guide him. And with that, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” offers one last preview of what’s to come when Kirk becomes a proper captain.
In some ways, any time Kirk shows up, it plays like a preview of what’s to come in other incarnations of Star Trek if not here. Paul Wesley has settled nicely into the role of young Kirk, and each appearance finds his acquaintanceship with various Enterprise crew members evolving into respectful friendships that will deepen in the future. His jitters felt believable, even if the swiftness with which he won the Enterprisers back after bailing on them felt a little convenient. Maybe it’s hard to hold on to misgivings in a crisis.
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• The generation ship that’s turned bad for unknown reasons in space is also an intriguing idea, kind of like Star Trek: The Motion Picture’s V’Ger but in human form. Will this be the end of it? The scavenger ship seems to have been truly destroyed, but is it possible that the humans might have settled elsewhere? Maybe not. You don’t get dubbed a “destroyer of worlds” if you make your home on them.
• Scotty’s baffled that no one had heard of John Logie Baird. Baird was a Scottish inventor who failed in his attempts to create diamonds from graphite or a razor out of glass. But he did have great success with an invention you might have heard of: television. The issue of who invented television is complicated, but Baird was the first to demonstrate the device and the first to send a transatlantic transmission.
• Two silent moments of note: the look on La’an’s face when she sees Kirk and the look on Spock’s face as La’an beams back to the Enterprise. There are some deep feelings going on in this almost love triangle.
• Directed by Valerie Weiss, who also helmed season two’s “Ad Astra Per Aspera,” and written by David Reed and Bill Wolkoff (each of whom also co-wrote other season three episodes), the episode throws in a neat nod to classic Hollywood via the split screens that appear when Pelia’s landline system goes into effect. For a brief moment, Strange New Worlds turns into Pillow Talk. Also, we need an episode about Pelia’s time with the Grateful Dead, obviously, and maybe one about her relationship with Warhol, too.