Our Strange New Worlds Season 2 Finale Breakdown is here! After several all-time great episodes including "Those Old Scientists" and "Subspace Rhapsody," we get a straight-up Federation vs Gorn thriller that introduces us to….SCOTTY! We break down every Easter Egg and Trek references to TOS, Next Generation, The JJ Abrams films, and more!

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Written by Ryan Britt http://twitter.com/ryancbritt
Hosted by Ryan Arey (http://twitter.com/ryanarey)
Edited by Randolf Nombrado, Brianna McLarty, and Lee Mazzio

#StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds #EasterEggs

If you’ve been sleeping on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, you’ve been missing a bonkers good time with Pike Spock, Uhura and the gang, all aboard the USS Enterprise back in the time just before TOS, better known as the era of “Those Old Scientists.”

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But, we’re not here to talk about the big crossover between Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds

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OR the ambitious musical episode…

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Instead. We’re here to talk about the most important thing in all of Star Trek canon: The Gorn Identity
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First off, the episode is called “Hegemony,” which is a reference to the governing body of the Gorn, a government called “The Gorn Hegemony.” In canon, this name wasn’t established in dialogue until the Enterprise episode “Bound,” [clip] but had existed in non-canon books for a while, even going all the way back to the 1979 roleplaying game Starfleet Battles.

We open with a captain’s log for the USS Cayuga, (Kai-oo-gah) Captain Batel’s ship, which takes its name from three real-life US Navy ships all named in honor of the Cayuga native peoples.

Batel tells us that the people on Parnassus B have made their colony in the vein of an “old midwestern united states” town.The idea that human colonies out in space would replicate old-timey Earth settings goes back to The Original Series. Back then, Gene Roddenberry wanted many of the strange, new worlds of Star Trek to actually seem familiar, and populated with people we could relate to. He called this the “parallel Earths’ theory in both writer’s guides and pitch documents. It certainly saved some money on sets for TOS! Later in the episode, Pike order’s everyone to take shelter in the “barber shop.” Which could be a reference to this old timey barber shop from the TOS classic “City on the Edge of Forever.”

Nurse Chapel has hitched a ride with the Cayuga crew, on her way to a fellowship that will find her studying Archaeological Medicine. Batel asks Chapel [“Doctor Korby doesn’t mind you arriving a little early?”] This references the TOS character Dr. Korby [clip]. Who, will eventually become Christine Chapel’s fiance, before vanishing, and then, resurfacing in the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” In which he reveal he’s become a robot version of himself, and is adept at making robot clones of people, including Captain Kirk

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Korby studies medicine from the distant past, which, in TOS will end-up meaning ancient robot bodies, like Ruk.

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But, within SNW, this field of study doesn’t involve robot bodies (yet) and Chapel has been into for a while, as was mentioned in Episode 5, this season, and in the episode right before this one, “Subspace Rhapsody,” she sang about it.

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Batel and Pike also reference this episode in a cute little Zoom call, in which they say that [“not bursting into song every 10 minutes” is a “minor victory.”]

But then Batel and Pike’s chat gets cut short, and Batel says:

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When Pike loses contact with Batel, he touches his mariner’s keystone, which was a gift from Batel in the episode “Among the Lotus Eaters,” which, was its own massive Easter egg heavy episode, in which Pike and the Enterprise actually returned to the very firsts, strange new world, Rigel 7.

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But back in the TOS/SNW era, Rigel 7 looked more like this:

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Back on Parnassus B, Doug and Batel see a shuttle crashing, and Batel wonders if it’s a shuttle from the Cayuga.

Turns out, much later in the episode, that shuttle crash was not one of theirs at all. Instead, this early shuttle crash is later revealed to be an Easter egg in the form of…Scotty! [clip, him saying hello]