Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Review: Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach (Season 1 Episode 6)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 Episode 6, “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach,” is an installment that is almost too timely and evergreen.
Throughout the run of the franchise, Star Trek has never shied away from telling social commentary to support the times it appears in, often with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Whether it is the Cold War and racial discrimination on The Original Series, Reagan-era policies on The Next Generation, or religious fundamentalism on DS9, it has always pushed the envelope.
Star Trek, on its best days, has served as a mirror to our modern society and shown us the ways in which we still have a long way to go. This episode continues that grand tradition in a way that might hit too close to home for some people.
The interesting thing about “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” is that this is not an episode with any answers at all to give. It’s asking something very simple yet impossible at the same time. Would any of us be willing to sacrifice a single life — a child’s life — if it meant that our lives could be as perfect as possible?
It’s the same kind of debate that we regularly find ourselves in, even though it feels wrong. Each time a new school shooting occurs, this is the conversation. Is a perceived right more important than the life of a single child? During the heights of the pandemic, the conversation became how many lives are we willing to offer up if it means that things feel normal?
This episode gets into the hypocrisy of exclaiming that the safety of children — First Servant effectively being a stand-in for all hypothetical children — and offering them up to the pyre when you feel you have to.
That is given to us this episode by Alora (Linda Booth), who is shown throughout the episode to be warm, compassionate, empathetic, an all-around good person. The episode tricks its audience by making us think that if we are on her side, then we must be on the good side.
This continues only for the rug to get pulled out from our feet. The truth is that she isn’t a good person. If we’re to take her word for it, she searched a long time for an alternative to this death sentence for First Servant, which makes her perhaps not a bad person but there’s a wide gulf between being a bad and good person.
Ultimately, there aren’t easy answers to be found here, though. If anything, the episode makes the case that the only way out of something like this, something that is so ingrained into the fabric of society, is long-term systemic change. It’s something that will have to be advocated for a long time.
The impulse with Star Trek sometimes is to visit a world, fix what’s wrong there, and wrap it up into a nice bow. Of course, that doesn’t take into account how complicated worlds and governments are. Some things don’t have a quick fix. You can’t always tell people to behave and let that be that.
That’s perhaps the best lesson of the episode: if you’re willing to fight for something, be prepared to do so for a long time.
What did you think of this episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs Thursdays on Paramount+.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.