there's going to be spoilers for the worst episode of strange new worlds in this so read forward at your own risk I guess?
Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach is not only the worst episode of Strange New Worlds, but I would argue that it's one of the worst episodes of Trek, period. I'm not talking "lmao this is goofy" bad like Threshold, but outright, mindbogglingly awful like Dear Doctor, the Enterprise episode where Archer and Flox ultimately go "You know what? Yeah, genocide time." I also fear that, like Dear Doctor, it's going to be remembered as a good episode by a lot of people.
I'm only going to go over the A plot of the episode here because honestly the B and C plots in Strange New Worlds are real nothingburgers anyway and it really doesn't matter much here. The episode starts with the Enterprise rescues the crew of a shuttle being attacked and rescues a lady, a kid, and a dude. The lady is Alora, the minister of Majalis, a city that floats over an otherwise inhospitable planet; the dude is Gamal, who is the father of the kid, who is simply called The First Servant. He's kinda a dick but it makes sense because his kid is going to be attached to the child murdering computer later.
Pike and Alora have a history, which is why I jokingly say "Strange New Worlds dares to ask the question 'what if you fucked the mayor of Omelas?'" because that's basically what this episode is. See, The First Servant has to be hooked up to a computer to make sure the city of Majalis doesn't plummet into the acid and lava covered planet below. To the audience, this is a big reveal. Kinda. See, they put so many death flags on The First Servant (from not having a name to making it effectively conspicuous at just how great a kid he is and how much he loves being alive) that if something bad didn't happen to this kid it'd be weird. On top of that, Majalis is semi-frequently under attack by a dramatically less advanced society for Reasons.
Those reasons being, of course, that they think shoving a child into a computer to preserve a better way of life is Bad Actually.
Now, the audience doesn't know this. I don't think the audience is consciously aware of what's going on. There's something suspicious, but it's really not until the last act that things are made explicit, as Pike watches this kid get shoved into the child murdering computer. If The First Servant isn't shoved into the child murdering computer, the entire city will fall from the sky and crash into the planet below, which would be just a real bummer for a civilization that is advanced enough that they make a lot of Federation member planets look almost backwards by comparison. Like, these people have a level of advancement and ease of living that makes Vulcan look like... fuckin'... I dunno, pick a city where you live that's not bad but also you don't like being there.
So anyway, Pike's mad about this. He's like "hey Alora, uhhh... what the actual fuck? That's fucked up" and she goes "can you really say nobody suffers in the Federation? We just choose to acknowledge it" and aside from being an absolutely garbage argument when these people could just fucking move, people who don't even know how the child murdering computer even fucking WORKS, it has some real weird and bad implications for the rest of the series. Like, aside from being an episode that sucks on its own, it actually brings the rest of the show down with it because of what it means. The whole episode I feel is supposed to take a more critical look at "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" but just completely fails at it and makes the rest of the show kinda suck for it.
See, Pike is basically going to get fucked up real bad by a reactor explosion and ends up consigned to a Space Wheelchair to keep him alive where he can only communicate with beeps and blinking lights indicating "yes" and "no." He knows this is going to happen because he touched a Space Rock that showed him the future. Well, he's not the only one who gets fucked up by that, because a couple Starfleet cadets end up completely dead. In fact, in the last episode of the season, Pike actually meets one of these cadets who, at the moment, is really interested in joining Starfleet. He thinks Pike is fuckin' rad and has a model Enterprise and everything. So Pike goes "hey, maybe I can stop this bad thing from happening."
Can you guess where this is going?
Pike starts writing a letter to try and coax the bad future for him and this kid away from happening when all of a sudden his future self shows up. Pike gets to touch a Space Rock again and gets to see the future that would be created from this. When he does, he sees that those kids are alive, he's an admiral now, Kirk's dad is a captain, and everything is just kinda alright. At least, until the Romulans declare war on the Federation and billions end up dead. See, it's that kinda situation. Change the future at all and everything will suck. You have to be in a wheelchair. These kids have to be sacrificed.
The kid has to be hooked up to the child murdering computer.
And I fucking hate this. I hate this because these episodes together justify each other in all the worst ways. Not in a compelling scifi kind of way, not in a way where you have to consider the conflicting moral situations that exist between the Federation and Majalis, but in a way where everything seems incredibly awful and contrived just so these two stories can function the fuck at all, just to make sure that Pike ends up in that Space Wheelchair, because that's just What Happens In Star Trek Canon. Because the other thing that happens is that Pike, upon seeing this future, goes "damn bro you're right" to his future self and decides not to send the letter. Pike realizes that this sacrifice, both of himself and others, has to be made for the good of the Federation.
I just... I fucking hate the Omelas episode so much. I hate everything it does with the story. I hate this "damned if you do, damned if you don't" bullshit that just seems to lack any sort of imagination. I hate that the final episode of the season validates this episode in retrospect! Bad episode!
