Spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 3, episode 3 follow.
"Star Trek" is a sci-fi franchise with a flexible tone. Things can easily get as silly as a musical or as dark as "In The Pale Moonlight" when you're on the final frontier. Indeed, every "Star Trek" series has featured at least one scary episode.
The first ever-aired "Star Trek" episode, "The Man Trap," is technically a vampire story. The Enterprise visits distant planet M-113, where they run afoul of a telepathic "salt vampire"
with a lamprey mouth. Back in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 1, the show did an "Alien" riff in "All Those Who Wander," when the Enterprise crew is trapped on a shipwreck with juvenile Gorn hunting them.
"Strange New Worlds" dives back into monster movie territory in its third season 3 episode, "Shuttle to Kenfori." The Enterprise is visiting the eponymous planet, which has been off-limits since the Klingons invaded it, on a MacGuffin hunt. Captain Christopher Pike's (Anson Mount) partner, Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano), is infected with Gorn larvae. Kenfori's Chimera blossom is a miracle cure that can repair infected tissue while destroying any malignancy.
Pike and Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) land on Kenfori and discover it's not quite abandoned. Before the Klingon invasion, Starfleet scientists were experimenting with the Chimera to create a new kind of fast-growing crop. They mixed the Chimera DNA with a local moss that "never dies" and consumes every plant around it to spread. When the experiments abruptly ended, the resulting moss kept spreading ... even to the human and Klingon corpses.
The bodies the Chimera-moss has possessed now have the same drive to spread and consume. In M'Benga's words, "[they're] devouring anything that breathes." Pike describes the creatures as "for serious lack of a better word, zombies," but M'Benga says they shouldn't call fallen Federation scientists by that name. Even so, "Shuttle to Kenfori" calls on many zombie movie tropes.
Read more: The 10 Most Powerful Star Trek Ships, Ranked
How Zombies Fit Into The Star Trek Universe
Pike and M'Benga get locked inside the abandoned outpost, sieged by a horde of zombies trying to get inside. One of the Klingons hunting the pair is swarmed by the zombies, torn apart, and devoured. (I can't imagine the Klingons consider that an honorable way to go.)
Ever since George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" turned zombies into go-to movie monsters, their onscreen portrayals have varied. The Kenfori-zombies are the fast-moving kind, not lumbering dullards. Tying their origin to plants also feels pulled from "The Last of Us." In that video game/TV series, the zombies aren't actually undead. Instead, the story suggests what would happen if the real cordyceps fungus evolved from possessing ants to possessing human beings. The set for the abandoned outpost on Kenfori, filled with plant growths containing half-devoured human remains, resembles both "The Last of Us" and Alex Garland's sci-fi film "Annihilation."
The existence of movies in the future of "Star Trek" is contentious. By the 24th century, cinema appears to have lost any cultural relevance in favor of the holodeck's interactive storytelling.
Given Pike and M'Benga's familiarity with "the Z-word," one has to assume that zombie movies (or at least books) still exist in the 23rd century, though. "Star Trek: Enterprise" showed that, at the very least, humans are still watching James Whale's "Frankenstein" movies in the 22nd century. Are they still watching George Romero pictures in the 23rd?
Wherever Pike and M'Benga learned about zombies, it wasn't from their "real" world. Yes, somehow, "Star Trek" has never done proper, undead zombies before. The franchise has done vampires, witches ("Catspaw"), and even devils ("Devil's Due"), but not zombies. The closest thing to zombies in "Star Trek" before "Shuttle to Kenfori" was in the "Enterprise" episode "Impulse." In that episode, the Enterprise NX-01 crew comes across a wrecked Vulcan ship, the Seleya. The ship discovered a mineral, trellium-D, that is toxic to Vulcans, making them less intelligent and violent. When the Enterprise gets to the Seleya, the crew have degenerated into an unrelenting horde.
Like how "Shuttle to Kenfori" seems influenced by "The Last of Us," "Impulse" (which aired in 2003) nods to the then-recent "28 Days Later" with its fast zombies that aren't actually zombies, just people infected by a "rage virus." "Star Trek" has and always will be set in the future, but it connects its audience to the future by drawing on their present. You can track that by which movies which "Star Trek" series chooses to homage.
"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes of the ongoing third season premiering on Thursdays.
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