After the lighthearted rom-com of “Wedding Bell Blues,” Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 has swung all the way back to the tonal opposite side of the Final Frontier. With the season’s third episode, “Shuttle to Kenfori,” the series is circling back to the Klingon War storyline that not only dominated Discovery Season 1 in 2017 but also redefined Dr. M’Benga’s (Babs Olusanmokun) character, via flashbacks, in the Season 2 episode, “Under the Cloak of War.” In Season 3, Episode 3, M’Benga and Pike are again faced with fallout from the Klingon War, and M’Benga’s killing of a war criminal named Dak'Rah.
But all of this Klingon canon isn’t the episode’s most jarring element. Instead, for the first time since 2003, the Star Trek franchise has dared to depict one very famous horror trope in live-action: zombies. Here’s why Pike using “the Z-word” in Strange New Worlds is a big deal, and how it’s a bit of a callback to the 2003 Enterprise episode, “Impulse.” Spoilers ahead.
