Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Finally Has A Terrifying New Villain To Call Its Own

In the "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" episode "Through the Lens of Time," Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and her new boyfriend Roger Korby (Cillian O'Sullivan) have discovered an impossibly ancient temple hidden beneath the rocks of a distant world. The technology in the temple is still active after countless unhallowed centuries, and it requires a drop of blood to enter. Everything is scary and mysterious. Inside, the crew of the Enterprise find a series of glowing orbs that contain ... something. They also find that they can pass through unusual stone passageways and step into different planes of existence. The six crew members are all in the same room, but they can't see one another because they are out of phase. It's like a haunted house or an abandoned asylum. 

When the ship's new nurse Ensign Gamble (Chris Myers) picks up one of the mysterious orbs, it explodes in his hand. The flying glass and bolts of eldritch energies immediately destroy his eyeballs(!). Luckily, this is "Star Trek," so the medical tools exist to grow him some new ones. 

There's a problem, though. The eyeball re-grower doesn't seem to work. There is something else in Ensign Gamble's body. He begins to see into people's heads and fish out their unhappiest memories. He mocks people for their failings. Something has clearly possessed him. The crew will eventually discover that the orb contained an evil, noncorporeal entity of unknown origin. The crew comes to the conclusion, by interpreting ancient alien glyphs, that these entities have been deliberately imprisoned in the temple below.

Even Pelia (Carol Kane), who is herself many millennia old, admits that looking at these demonic aliens gives her the heebie-jeebies. They are scary, and evoke the scariest parts of movies like "Event Horizon" and "Prometheus." 

The aliens are also, perhaps, the first wholly original villain in the annals of "Strange New Worlds." This is very exciting for us Trekkies. 

While "Star Trek" doesn't typically deal with moral absolutes, there are plenty of characters and/or species that fans still consider to be "villains." The wicked Cardassian Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo), for instance, is driven by military ambition and a sense of superiority, while possessing a smug streak of cruelty. He's a complete character, and an interesting one, but he's also villainous by most measures. Ditto, the Borg, a species of non-thinking cyborgs that capture every ship they encounter and strip it for parts. The Borg assimilate people into their collective and continue to grow. They would eventually be given a Queen and a voice, expressing their uncaring philosophy of perfection, and are also seen as "villains." 

"Strange New Worlds" has, of course, had plenty of monstrous villains. The show has already featured several stories with the Gorn, a lizard-like species that reproduces like the xenomorphs in "Alien" (in that they implant other beings' bodies with their eggs). The "Strange New Worlds" version of the Gorn is a dramatic re-imagining of the slow-moving lizard-masked monsters seen in the original "Star Trek." "Strange New Worlds" has also featured several episodes wherein Klingons are villains, usually in a wartime context. There was also recently an episode wherein a Klingon aimed to engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the middle of a zombie outbreak. 

But the new noncorporeal entities in "Through the Lens of Time?" The ones that can possess a person after destroying their eyeballs? Eek. That's a scary new wrinkle for "Strange New Worlds." These entities — called the Vezda Lifeforms on a computer monitor — are a new threat altogether. 

The tendency of the Vezda Lifeforms to read minds and mock others for their past mistakes is reminiscent of the demons seen in Paul W.S. Anderson's terrifying sci-fi horror movie "Event Horizon," a 1997 film about a starship that accidentally passes through Hell. They are more or less demons, made all the more terrifying by their impossible ancientness. Some of the "Strange New Worlds" characters are convinced that the Vezda Lifeforms are, without pretense, evil. Perhaps they are so ancient, these beings are the originators of the concept of evil. "Star Trek" is always best when dealing with giant, long-form, cosmic mysteries of this sort. 

Of course, the Vezda Lifeforms aren't the first time "Star Trek" dealt with demonic entities that can take possession of people. Fans of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" will recall (usually with dismay) the Pah-wraiths, a noncorporeal entity that was locked in a rivalry with the equally noncorporeal Prophets who lived inside a stable wormhole. The Bajorans referred to the wraiths as "false prophets," and the ghostly demons had a way of creeping into our universe and occupying the minds of the corporeal beings they encountered. The wraiths first appeared in the episode "The Assignment" (October 28, 1996), but would play a large part in the show's later seasons. 

The Pah-wraiths are, I should hasten to add, widely disliked by Trekkies who bristle at the "magical" nature of their existence. Evil demons that possess people strays very far from a lot of "Star Trek's" more traditionally scientific thinking. They feel cartoony in a bad way. 

The Vezda Lifeforms, however, feel a little more practical (well, as practical as noncorporeal evil entities can). They seem to have passions, goals, and unknown missions. And, most chilling, they survived the events of "Through the Lens of Time." We were just introduced, but perhaps we'll see more of them in the future.