Trek Thursdays: Trekking Towards Sixty #23 — “Similitude” And “Valles Marineris”

On September 8th, 1966, an intrepid crew of explorers boldly went where no one had ever gone before on television. At that moment, Star Trek was born. A series that launched a franchise that has kept a firm grip on audiences for decades.

As the sixtieth anniversary approaches, we here at Comicon are ready to celebrate one of the greatest science fiction franchises. While Star Trek has graced the silver screen, most of its life has been on our television screens. So, that’s where our focus shall remain.

Every week through September 17th, we’ll be spotlighting two Star Trek episodes, from any and every iteration, that we feel are some of the greatest. At this point there are over 950 episodes of Trek, so it goes without saying some favorites won’t make the cut for this list of 60.

Traveling through the universe isn’t all just exploring strange new worlds or fighting off alien threats. Part of the “human” experience also means dealing with hard choices. Sometimes those choices might cross moral or ethical lines and the maker must choose in the moment which path to tread.

In the words of a great Vulcan, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” Making these choices might damn those who are the decider, but they believe that they made the choice for the right reason for others. Whether that is the case or not is where the drama and tension comes from in storytelling.

In this entry we’ll be looking at two of these moments, one from the furthest back in the timeline a series has gone and the other being a first for us: an episode that just aired. In one the captain must weight the life of two individuals and decide what is best for the mission and the crew while the other includes the complexity of time travel in the decision making.

-RED ALERT: SPOILERS FOLLOW-

“Similitude”
Star Trek: Enterprise — Season 3, Episode 10 (11/19/2003)

Synopsis: When Commander Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer) is seriously injured, the choice is made to create a perfect clone to provide the neural material needed to save Trip. As the clone quickly ages and interacts with the crew, they are left with facing the emotional and moral ramifications of his creation.

When it comes to Captain’s making the choice to end a life to save others, the episode mostly spoken of is “Tuvix,” for obvious reasons. One could say that Voyager and the Tuvix episode walked so that “Similitude” could run.

Oh yeah, run it did.

From the beginning it’s known that Trip’s clone, named Sim, only will live for a short period of time. It’s part of the cycle of the Lyssarian Dessert Larvae that Doctor Phlox (John Billingsley) utilizes in his creation. Everything about Trip from his DNA to his memories are copied over, making Sim just as much Trip as Trip himself. Except, Sim has his own experiences to add onto the memories, such as growing up with Phlox as his “dad” in the short time of his youth to the interactions with the crew.

He is Trip but he is not Trip, which is what makes it hard for the crew as they start to interact with Sim.

There isn’t the “easy” beat with Tuvix that the character had to be ended so that the two main cast members could be back for the next episode (though many fans would have been fine with Neelix staying gone if one has followed fan chatter over the decades since.) Anyway, that’s for another column or day.

Here it is Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) that has the weight resting upon his shoulders. For their mission to continue, to find and stop the Xindi weapon, they need Trip. The ship is greatly damaged after a test to increase the warp potential, which is how Trip was hurt. While Sim knows what Trip knows, the real deal is what is needed, especially with the biological ticking clock working against Sim.

Even with that knowledge, the crew is caught up in this not only being a copy of their friend but a unique individual in their own right. We understand Archer’s thoughts, as well as know that he is very adamant about this mission and the consequences if they fail, it’s hard to not root for Sim in his own respect.

Thrown into the mix is knowledge of an experimental treatment that could extend Sim’s life to that of a normal being. The catch is there is no guarantee that it would work, which is why Phlox didn’t bring it up in the first place.

In the end it is Sim who makes the choice, after almost planning to escape, to give up his life for Trip. The cold open started with a funeral for what seemed to be Trip, only for the end to reveal that it’s a full service for Sim — canonically one of the first to be seen getting the shot out of a torpedo into space burial that we see often in Trek now.

There is no easy answer to the moral and ethical complications that Archer wrestles with here. Even creating Sim for that purpose crossed lines that normally wouldn’t be crossed. Desperate measures and time not being on theirs or the Earth’s side complicated factors. There is no iron clad “right” answer here, and the way that the cast and the writing handles it all is amazing.

There is a reason that this episode, and this season, of the series are high up on many favorite lists.

“Valles Marineris”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — Season 4, Episode 1 (07/23/2026)

Synopsis: After six months of back-to-back to back missions, the crew of the Enterprise is tasked with observing an interstellar storm. Answering a distress call gets the ship damaged and thrown far off course, 65 million years off course. Dinosaurs, Mars, and paradoxes abound as the crew struggles to find a way home without wrecking the timeline in the process.

Personally, I love a good bootstrap paradox.

For those not familiar with the term, you’ve seen it played out before, it’s the idea that a sequence of events occur that actually were in essence the cause of the sequence of events that seemingly first occurred. Essentially, in the case of this episode, the events that caused you to go back into time were actually caused by you while back in time.

Time travel is always a situation that brings up conundrums for characters. More often than not they are thrown into a situation where they could change something, or want to change something, but have to struggle with the fact that doing so could irreparably alter the timeline.

Previously in this very column I tackled the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Timeless” and the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “The City On The Edge of Forever.” These two episodes tackled the issue from opposite ends of the spectrum. With Voyager, the change to what we the viewer would call the present erased a potential future, whereas the TOS episode events had to play out in the past in order to avoid a terrible future that wiped out the TOS present.

Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew face an even more dire situation, being so far back in Earth’s history. Changing anything, intentional or not, could cause the future to shift in ways they don’t know. They didn’t have the knowledge or resources that the other two crews had in determining their choices in this matter, even if the choices were still hard.

In this episode they learn that there are numerous life carrying planets in the Sol System, including Earth and Mars. There’s an advanced civilization on Mars while dinosaurs roam the Earth, and the Martians are at war with an insectoid species from the fifth planet of the system. Not Jupiter though, but a previously unknown fifth planet.

While Pike tries hard to convince the Martians there is another way beyond war, they find out where Pike is from and take the antimatter pod from the ship as a weapon. It’s hard not to understand where the Martians are coming from as they point out that the arrival of the Dol’drm left a massive mark on their planet as they sacrificed millions of lives to eject the perceived invaders.

At the same time, we see on Earth a crashed ship with cryopods carrying the Dol’drm people. We never meet them or see them beyond that to know their side of the story. Perhaps they were explorers or settlers who were mistaken for invaders, or perhaps they were out to conquer Mars. It doesn’t matter though, because the hard choice that ended up being made was the one that had to happen.

In the last moment we see Pike make the choice to not stop the Martians from shooting the Antimatter pod at the Dol’drm planet as a weapon. It obliterates the planet, sending shockwaves that kill the Martian commander that Pike was getting to know, and sending the Enterprise hurtling back to their time. It is discovered that the destruction of the planet led to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, created the asteroid belt that we know, and moved Earth and Mars where Earth cooled some and Mars became uninhabitable.

Pike’s struggle comes in that he made the choice without knowing whether it was right or not. Yet, as is pointed out to him, he spends a lot of time thinking about the past and the future (since he’s actually seen his future). There is no sugarcoating the choice made to let a species be wiped out, but as noted it had already happened. Neither of these species or their planets existed that way in the future.

In the end, the Enterprise crew were the cause of their own eventual creation and the creation of everything that they know. Not a heavy concept to have to have on your shoulders. But hey, Number One Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) got a promotion and Lieutenant La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) got to punch a raptor.

Come back next week as we dive into two more of Star Trek’s greatest episodes.