Tag: james t kirk

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series Seasons 1 and 2, The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home, The Next Generation Seasons 1, 2, and 7, Deep Space Nine Seasons 1 and 4, Voyager Season 7, and Discovery Season 2.

Last week saw Strange New Worlds’ fourth season get off to a bit of a lacklustre start, to say the least. An overstuffed story with too many things on the go at once didn’t have the space to do justice to “the dinosaur episode” concept that pre-season marketing material had teased, so I had hopes that this week’s outing – The Griffin Incident – would be a significant improvement.

Going into Season 4, we’d seen a couple of tiny clips from the episode as part of pre-release trailers and teasers, but nothing to really gauge what kind of episode The Griffin Incident was going to be. When it was revealed that this was going to be a horror-inspired story, my curiosity was genuinely piqued! Depending on how we count things, Strange New Worlds has done horror or horror-adjacent episodes about half a dozen times up to this point in its run, and some of those episodes – All Those Who Wander from Season 1 most notably – have been exceptional. So there were reasons to be optimistic heading into this “ghost story.”

As always, I’d like to give a caveat. Everything we’re going to get into today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one old Trekkie. If you disagree with me on the strengths and weaknesses of The Griffin Incident, if you don’t like my take on Strange New Worlds in general, or we just have different opinions on what makes for a fun Star Trek episode or a good horror story… that’s okay! The Star Trek fandom is big enough for a wide range of opinions to peacefully coexist, and there’s no need to get into an argument.

Okay, so what did I make of The Griffin Incident, then?

This is a bit of a toughie, to be frank. On the one hand, I spent close to fifty minutes on the edge of my seat, engrossed in a horror mystery that took me right to the edge of my personal comfort zone, with jumpscares, gore, a fantastic soundtrack, great cinematography, and some wildly unhinged (in the best way possible) performances from some of the show’s main cast! But on the other, The Griffin Incident broke what I consider to be one of the fundamental rules of storytelling within Star Trek by failing to provide an in-universe explanation for what happened aboard the titular USS Griffin.

The Griffin Incident was, in a sense, a bit of a “bottle episode,” using only a couple of guest stars and no new sets or filming locations; the action took place aboard the Enterprise sets. But working within that limitation, I have to give credit to the set designers, artists, and camera crew for coming up with some incredibly creepy and creative ways to make the familiar seem strange, unsettling, and genuinely frightening. The Griffin Incident, in that sense, reminded me a lot of All Those Who Wander from Season 1, which likewise took advantage of existing sets to tell a horror story. Or, going back even further, we could point to episodes like Voyager’s The Haunting of Deck Twelve, DS9′s Empok Nor, or TNG’s Starship Mine as examples of spooky or creepy stories which mostly relied on their shows’ main stages and sets.

When you have to work with sets that aren’t really designed with horror in mind, figuring out how to make them feel intimidating, unsettling, or spooky is a genuine challenge. It’s never as simple as “just turn the lights off,” or “mysterious blood stains;” episodes like The Griffin Incident have to do more if we, as the audience, are to buy into the idea of being trapped aboard a derelict starship where terrifying things are unfolding. And that comes from a combination of things: set dressing, to take existing sets and “spookify” them. Camera work, using established horror techniques to ramp up the tension. Focus, by keeping certain creepy characters just far enough out of focus that our imaginations run wild. Sound design, including the use of familiar sounds, silence, and unexpected noises. This goes beyond just “bumps in the dark!” And finally, music. The score has to learn from old horror films and episodes to really elevate the tension and fear factor.

For me, The Griffin Incident did all of those things phenomenally well.

The lights aboard the USS Griffin weren’t just “off,” there was an ethereal glow to a lot of the scenes set aboard the derelict ship. And computer panels and displays used a shade of green that, in some films and horror stories, is associated with ghosts or supernatural phenomena. In past iterations of Star Trek, that same shade of green is often used for the Borg – another faction with a definite fear factor! There was an almost sickly feel to parts of the USS Griffin: the medical bay and the hallways in particular. Scenes set in these locations, through little more than changes in lighting, conveyed a real sense that something wasn’t right – that spooky shenanigans were afoot.

There can be something inherently unsettling to seeing usually bustling places abandoned or deserted. This is the explanation behind the “liminal space” idea that’s become popular online, and has even translated to big-budget horror films like this year’s Backrooms. Seeing spaces that should be populated left empty and abandoned makes the hairs on the backs of our necks stand up; it’s an instinctual thing, I guess. And, again, this feeling was present in the deserted hallways and rooms of the USS Griffin – elevated by the lighting and an absolutely fantastic musical score.

From the moment the trio boarded the Griffin, we were also treated to some fantastic cinematography and camera work. The way the camera would linger over certain shots, or keep spooky ghostly figures just out of focus behind whoever was in front isn’t earth-shattering stuff for the horror genre, but it was pulled off absolutely pitch-perfectly here. The production team had clearly watched plenty of horror films for inspiration, and managed to recreate established techniques to really convey that sense of dread, unease, and fear.

The combination of these techniques – lighting, cinematography, set design, and the camera – would still have fallen flat, though, were it not for music and sound design. The Griffin Incident used silence to great effect, but also brought in recurring noises from everyday life that – thanks to the inherently creepy setting – became genuinely frightening. Hearing a baby cry or a wind-up toy in motion wouldn’t even register most of the time, but these became almost motifs for the episode’s intensely frightening story. And the score, once again, was just perfect for this kind of spooky episode.

I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror, and supernatural stories in particular really give me the creeps! Past Star Trek episodes – including in Strange New Worlds – have occasionally caught me out with a jump-scare or frightening moment, but I think it’s fair to say that The Griffin Incident is unmatched anywhere in the franchise for its unsettling, haunting, and downright creepy atmosphere. From the first moment the away team boarded the USS Griffin, that sense of dread and fear set in… and didn’t let up again until they made it back to the Enterprise.

We got some interesting character moments in The Griffin Incident for each of the three primary characters. I’ll cover each of La’an, Kirk, and Spock in turn.

For La’an, The Griffin Incident seems to further a storyline that last week’s episode raised – but didn’t have enough time to do anything of consequence with. For some context, I felt La’an’s scene with Dr M’Benga and Nurse Chapel in Valles Marineris was little more than clunkily-worded exposition; the worst part of an episode that was already disappointing. But there was scope, I felt, for that storyline to be expanded upon.

The Griffin Incident feels like the next chapter of an unfolding La’an story. I’m not one to speculate or theorise (okay, that’s a *blatant* lie) but if I were, I’d stand by what I said in my review of Valles Marineris: that this storyline involving La’an’s recessive augment DNA is, somehow, going to lead to the end of her time on the show. The tagline for Strange New Worlds Season 4 has been “one step closer to where it all began;” i.e. that the season is going to bring the characters on the show closer to where they were at the start of The Original Series. Only… La’an is one of several characters who isn’t serving aboard the Enterprise by that time.

I won’t dedicate too much time to theory-crafting, because the truth is that I really don’t know precisely where this storyline will lead. It could conceivably lead to La’an’s death; Strange New Worlds has already killed off Hemmer, Captain Batel, and others across its three-and-a-bit seasons so far. Or it could see La’an take a leave of absence, quit Starfleet altogether, go rogue and have to be taken out… the list goes on! But this idea – that La’an’s latent augment genes could be becoming more active – is clearly tied to her arc this season, and with this season beginning to set the stage for the end of the series and a transition, of sorts, to TOS, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing the first steps down a path which will lead to La’an’s end… one way or another.

Kirk and Spock were both able to push past the supernatural nonsense of the USS Griffin, at least to an extent. Spock drew on his inner logic, and Kirk – despite hallucinating wildly – managed to repeatedly tell himself that the noises he was hearing weren’t real, and retained more of his sanity than La’an did. But La’an, by the story’s climax, had been fully claimed by whatever was aboard the USS Griffin, and I think it was implied that that was tied to her augment heritage and DNA. As happened last season, when she was briefly given Vulcan DNA and turned into a Romulan, La’an’s recessive augment DNA seems to have caused her to have more of a reaction to the Griffin and whatever was going on there.

That’s my read on her side of the story, anyway.

La’an was also the one who decided that the group should split up (which, let’s be honest, is a bit of a horror cliché, but I think we can overlook it!) This saw Spock left alone in the abandoned sickbay, and later, Kirk alone on the bridge. La’an seemed to be taking on a leading role, at times, offering suggestions and, while not exactly giving orders, certainly taking charge of the situation in those crucial early minutes. I like this, at least in theory, less for what it does for La’an than what it says about these younger versions of Spock and Kirk. If we return to the season’s promise to take us “closer to where it all began,” we’re seeing Kirk and Spock before they were captain and first officer, and I think I’m right in saying that they’re all the same rank as of this episode.

La’an’s storyline also saw her uncovering parts of the story of the USS Griffin’s security officer, Lieutenant Harper. The episode leaves it open to interpretation, I guess, how much of what La’an saw of Harper’s logs was real and how much was illusory, but I think there must’ve been at least some truth to it. We’ll get into a bit more detail about this when I talk about my biggest dislike from The Griffin Incident, but for now, suffice to say that this was an interesting idea that I don’t think the episode managed to make the most of.

Harper’s logs depicted a “descent into madness” that mirrored La’an’s own – though it was ambiguous whether she was the only one affected on the ship, whether she might’ve been immune, at least at first, or whether any of the things she reported actually happened. As I said, we’ll cover this in more detail later on, but for me… this side of the story started out very strongly, but didn’t end spectacularly. If a storyline is going to tease us with an engaging and horrifying mystery, that’s fantastic! But it needs to have an ending. And Harper’s story… doesn’t.

I did like, however, the makeup and costume that brought Harper back to “life” in her scenes with Kirk and La’an. The grey, cracked skin and moulded, decaying uniform made her look truly unsettling and spooky; somewhere between a ghost and a zombie, perhaps. Combined with all of the cinematography and lighting stuff we talked about earlier, I got the sense that Harper – or whatever entity was using her form – was almost constantly watching the away team, ready to materialise at any moment. For this kind of story, that’s exactly what the audience should be feeling!

Let’s move on to Kirk.

Kirk’s story bridges a gap between something we learned last season and what we’d eventually see in The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock: the birth of David Marcus and Kirk’s relationship with him. In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk didn’t immediately recognise David, but did know who he was when he confirmed his name. The Wrath of Khan makes it pretty clear that Kirk was an absent father – by Carol Marcus’ request. With David being a baby in this era, it doesn’t tread on the toes of canon to say that Kirk might’ve visited Carol and David, attempted to maintain some kind of a relationship with them for a time, and even, as we see in the episode, treated David to gifts and messages.

This is the kind of thing that, in my opinion, modern Star Trek hasn’t always done particularly well. If you’re writing a prequel, or a story which otherwise has to fit in with an existing, long-running franchise, there’s a balance to be struck between doing something new and ensuring your story doesn’t retroactively change things. Moments in The Griffin Incident with Kirk showed that he had an interest, at least in the beginning, in being part of Carol and David’s lives, which I think is actually an improvement for his character. One of Strange New Worlds’ producers, in a pre-season interview, said something along the lines of wanting to transform Kirk into less of a “deadbeat dad,” and while I never really interpreted Kirk and David’s relationship that way in The Wrath of Khan or The Search for Spock, I think you can make the argument that doing something like this is a net positive for Kirk’s characterisation.

When you’re writing a prequel to a well-established story, it’s not difficult to come up with moments that seem to “foreshadow” events which transpire further down the timeline. La’an’s line to Kirk about how his son would die “at the end of a blade” – referencing the famous scene in The Search for Spock – really did hit me, though, because it was such an unexpected callback (or call forwards, I guess). It was an impactful line referencing one of Star Trek’s most brutal and unexpected character deaths, and on a first viewing, not knowing that La’an was about to say it? It really landed.

One character I feel that Strange New Worlds has sidelined and hasn’t fully taken advantage of is Kirk’s brother, Sam. When Sam was introduced as part of the crew back in Season 1, I felt it was a good idea – a way for the new show to include someone connected to Captain Kirk but without making Kirk himself so prominent. But I think it’s fair to say that the writers have favoured Jim over Sam in stories where a Kirk has been present! The version of Sam Kirk that we encountered this time was a fiction; a completely illusory character created from his brother’s mind. But it’s still the most significant time we’ve spent with Sam in… ages, really, and we got a few interesting moments from those sequences.

Firstly, I thought it was interesting how the brothers talked about their father and how he’s been absent from their lives. I can’t help but feel it clashes a little with a line from Star Trek ’09, where Spock Prime told JJ-verse Kirk that his father watched him become captain of the Enterprise… but, thematically at least, it was in keeping with Kirk’s storyline in The Griffin Incident, as Kirk contemplated his own role as David’s father and contrasted it with his own memories of his father’s parenting skills.

Sam Kirk also got one of Star Trek’s most genuinely gruesome and brutal deaths, being sucked out of a hole in the Griffin’s damaged bridge. Seeing his intestines ripped out through the hull breach and then his body ejected into space was shocking stuff – and by Star Trek standards, at least, exceptionally graphic and visceral.

This theme of visual brutality was present throughout the episode. We’ve talked about the makeup used for Harper – and for numerous other ghostly apparitions, particularly in La’an’s engineering scene – but there are two other powerful moments that have really stuck in my mind. I think you’ll probably guess which ones they are!

First we have Captain Pike.

Anson Mount’s performance as the illusory version of Pike was truly fantastic; he could go from the regular version of the character to this unhinged maniac in a heartbeat. And his smile – or grimace, really – when staring down Spock was menacing. It reminded me of Heath Ledger’s take on the Batman villain the Joker from 2008’s The Dark Knight. There was something so truly unsettling seeing Pike’s instantaneous switch from the captain we all know and love to this dark, twisted vision… and Mount was exceptional at pulling it off.

Then we come to the moment of sheer unhinged brutality. Taking Pike’s love of cooking – long-established in the series – as a starting point, this illusion of the captain slices through his own fingers as if they were carrots or spring onions… and it was truly gut-wrenching stuff to watch. The prop used to represent Pike’s hand in that scene was fantastically detailed, and I think using a physical prop rather than trying to do something with CGI was absolutely the right call for this moment. It was gruesome, shocking, and bloody… and – again, by Star Trek standards – really sickening and unsettling to watch.

Then we come to Spock.

We’ll start with Spock’s brutal moment, then talk about the rest of his storyline. Spock’s moment of visceral, bloody insanity saw the pointed tips of his ears sliced off – apparently not by any physical entity, but by Spock himself while his mind was controlled by whatever was happening aboard the USS Griffin. I kept expecting the camera to pan away or for the scene to fade to black before the illusory T’Pring made her “incisions;” the fact that we had to sit through the whole thing was, once again, exceptionally shocking and painful viewing!

The subsequent revelation that Spock injured himself – while under the sway of whatever happened aboard the Griffin – was equally shocking. Though it seemed obvious that T’Pring was just an illusion… there were moments, especially early in Spock’s storyline, where I just wasn’t sure what was going on. Could an entity (like Q, for instance) have beamed T’Pring to the wreck of the Griffin? It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility! The fact that The Griffin Incident could set up such a mysterious storyline is testament to the quality of the writing (in the first, like 90% of the episode, anyway… more on that later) and I was absolutely gripped.

I was pleased to welcome back Gia Sandhu as T’Pring for this week’s outing. More than that, though, I was positively *thrilled* that we got a Spock storyline that didn’t rely on a love triangle, his romantic life, or some other kind of cringeworthy “Vulcan comedy” idea. I said multiple times last year that the writers seemed to have latched onto this idea that “Vulcans are all stoic and stuck-up, isn’t that hilarious?” and didn’t really know what else to do with Spock. It had gotten so bad that I genuinely wanted Spock to take a back seat if those were the only kinds of storylines that Strange New Worlds was going to throw him into.

There were brief hints at Spock and La’an’s relationship this week; a line in Kirk’s log, and a kiss between them near the beginning of the away mission. But for the most part, Spock’s romantic life wasn’t in focus – and when it was, it was *finally* played straight instead of as a joke. The illusory T’Pring brought up Spock’s insecurities – his half-human heritage, how she perceived him as lesser than other Vulcans because of his “emotional” side, and so on. And it was far and away more interesting than pretty much any “Spock comedy” storyline has been in the show so far. I might even be tempted to say that this was Spock and T’Pring’s best storyline in all three-and-a-bit seasons of the show to date.

What I think could be interesting for Spock and Kirk – we’ll have to see next week, or in subsequent episodes – is whether *this* away mission is going to be one of the inciting incidents in establishing their bond. We’ve seen glimpses in pre-season trailers and heard from producers in interviews that Season 4 is going to bring Kirk and Spock closer together – again, that “one step closer” idea from the season’s tagline coming into play. I was admittedly a bit surprised that the final act of The Griffin Incident didn’t so much as put Kirk and Spock together, let alone give them time to talk about what happened and share their experiences. But maybe that’ll come next time.

Kirk and Spock were both injured during this mission – Kirk more gravely than Spock, but even so. They both experienced hallucinations and other intense psychological effects from whatever happened to them aboard the USS Griffin, and bonding over a shared traumatic experience is an established way of setting up characters as friends. Or more than friends, if Strange New Worlds is bold enough to go full Spirk! I’m going to be very interested to see how the ramifications of this week’s adventure are handled for all three of the main characters; Strange New Worlds is semi-episodic insofar as most episodes offer a self-contained adventure, but characters grow, change, and develop over time, as well as retain what happened in previous episodes. If The Griffin Incident and its traumatic effects are just dropped and never mentioned again, I think that’ll be a bit of a black mark against it; if these events build up Kirk and Spock’s friendship or contribute to whatever’s happing with La’an, I think we can view it more favourably.

But that’s the hard thing about reviewing individual episodes before we know how the season as a whole will unfold, I guess!

I mentioned at the beginning that I felt reviewing The Griffin Incident was tricky because, as much as I enjoyed the vast majority of the episode and its horror-tinged story, it came with a pretty glaring flaw. In short, practically every other Star Trek story that I can call to mind does *something* to explain what happened, resolve its mysteries, or at least provide a definitive-feeling ending… but The Griffin Incident, despite setting up a truly engaging mystery, left things completely unresolved as the credits rolled.

I’ll give a few examples from past iterations of Star Trek, so we’re all on the same page.

The Doomsday Machine, from Season 2 of The Original Series, doesn’t tell us exactly who built the planet killer and why… but we learn enough about the automated weapon over the course of the story to understand its purpose, the threat it poses, and the necessity of stopping it. The Whale Probe, from Star Trek IV, likewise has an unexplained origin, but we understand what Kirk and the crew must do to save Earth in the future, and why they need to undertake their mission. The D’Arsay Archive, from The Next Generation Season 7 episode Masks, presents the crew with a problem to solve and mysteries to unravel, and despite the D’Arsay never being seen in person, we get a satisfactory resolution to the story.

There are many other stories like these across Star Trek’s six-decade run: the nebula aliens from Voyager’s The Haunting of Deck Twelve, the Sphere in Discovery’s second season, the Ennis and Nol-Ennis from Battle Lines in DS9′s first season, the neural parasites, the Conspiracy parasites, the infections from The Naked Time and The Naked Now, the Crystalline Entity… all of these, and many more, were never given full, in-depth explanations about their origins, their species, their overall objectives, etc.; some are still unknown decades later. But we understood their roles in the stories they were part of, and each of these stories and episodes received a proper ending.

That contrasts with The Griffin Incident. In addition to not even pretending to make up a technobabble explanation (negatively-charged ions was pretty much all we got, and that was right at the start), the episode just… ended. As soon as the trio were beamed away from the USS Griffin, La’an snapped back to normal, and Kirk and Spock were already most of the way there, pretty much. The episode provided neither an explanation for what happened nor a resolution to the story… and that’s unsatisfying in a fundamental way.

I don’t want to go so far as to say that this lack of ending or explanation “ruins” The Griffin Incident, because – as mentioned – I enjoyed the preceding fifty-plus minutes of the story. But I’m afraid that the ending – or lack of ending, really – does taint the finished product. We got absolutely no explanation for what happened to either our away team or to Lieutenant Harper and the crew of the USS Griffin. Was it a disease or a pathogen, akin to what happened in episodes like The Naked Time or Genesis? Was it an unseen, aggressive alien messing with everyone, like a particularly sadistic Q? Was it technological, like a radiation leak or nano-bot infection? Was it a genuine ghost, spectre, or spirit? No character so much as offered a word of technobabble to explain it… and in some horror stories, that might be okay.

But this is Star Trek.

Star Trek has always been about heading into the unknown, exploring strange new worlds… and trying to make sense of it all. In the episodes and films I used as examples, we don’t always get a fully fleshed-out, down-to-the-millimetre explanation for everything. Sometimes our characters encounter aliens or phenomena in space that are too ancient, too incomprehensible, too different, or too… weird to really have a proper explanation. But in all of those stories, they at least *try* to figure out what happened, and don’t do what Pike did at the end of The Griffin Incident: hand-wave all of that away with a “space is weird, don’t even worry about it” kind of line.

As I said above, this is an exceptionally unsatisfying way for a story to end *in the Star Trek franchise,* even if such an ending might work just fine in some other sci-fi or horror series. Starfleet sets out to uncover the unknown, and in almost every other story in the franchise – of which there are 1,000 already – they achieve that, one way or another. That doesn’t mean we need to get into the weeds with the minutiae of every alien race or weird space phenomenon, but it does mean that, somehow, a story like this needs to end with either some kind of explanation for what happened or at least with the defeat of a clearly malicious adversary.

The Griffin Incident did neither.

Instead, the story ends with all three characters starting to get back to normal and process their experiences. And there were some genuinely great moments in this final act. I liked how each of Kirk, La’an, and Spock were paired up with a different main character for their epilogue. La’an got a mentoring moment from Captain Pike, which, deficiencies in the plot aside, was a nice moment for his character and hers. Spock got a rare scene with Chapel that was neither sexually charged nor ridiculously cringeworthy – again, a net positive for both of them. And Kirk got far and away the best of these little epilogues with Uhura.

Season 3 gave us some interaction between Kirk and Uhura, particularly in the episode The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail – but this epilogue, I feel, did a lot for their relationship. Uhura calls Kirk by his first name for what I think is the first time, and if we’re looking at the story (and the season as a whole) from the point of view of bringing these characters closer to their TOS depictions, that’s a great thing. Kirk and Uhura were clearly on good terms by the time of The Original Series, establishing a firm friendship that saw them get through many different adventures together! Setting up how that began is an interesting idea with these younger, less-experienced versions of the characters.

But the epilogues, for all they brought to the table, still left things open-ended, as emphasised by the final shot of the episode: the ghostly form of Lieutenant Harper in the window of the wrecked USS Griffin. And, as I said, the lack of either a coherent explanation for what happened – alien entity, possession, infection, etc. – or the defeat/destruction of Harper and the Griffin leaves The Griffin Incident feeling unfinished and just unsatisfying.

As with La’an’s ongoing arc, though, perhaps it’s possible that we’ll revisit the ending of The Griffin Incident later in the season, or even next year in Season 5. If that’s the case, and if the mysterious Division 12 has found something to explain what happened… maybe we’ll be able to revisit the episode with the benefit of hindsight and cross out this line of criticism. I’m not holding my breath for that, given the way Strange New Worlds’ episodes have been structured… but you never know, eh?

A few final thoughts before we start to wrap things up.

This is the second time (after the fantastic episode Terrarium in Season 3) that “Division 12” has been mentioned. Are we going to learn more about this mysterious outfit later in the season, or at least before the series comes to an end? It feels suspiciously like Strange New Worlds is trying to drop hints at something to come, especially given how easy it would’ve been to say something more generic, like “the Starfleet science department” instead. I also wonder, unfortunately, whether this Division 12 might be tied to a story idea that, because of the show’s cancellation, we’re never going to get to see.

The “future leaders’ summit” was an interesting idea, and I appreciated that The Griffin Incident found a more natural-feeling way to include Kirk, as well as to set up the whole “there’s no immediate help” thing that was so crucial to the episode. It provided a solid way for the episode to get started, and all three characters feel like they could conceivably have been part of something like that – perhaps recommended by their captains, or else volunteering off their own backs.

Among several things left on the table were: was the shuttle really destroyed, or was that just another illusion? Did Spock actually learn the real fates of the Griffin’s crew – were they stabbed and beamed into space as the sickbay computer indicated? How did Pike and co. determine that it was safe to beam the away team to the Enterprise, given the conditions aboard the USS Griffin? Why did all three members of the away team have visions or hallucinations of the same Enterprise away team, and why weren’t any characters “duplicated,” or appearing to be in two places at once? Was that just for the benefit of us as the audience, to sell the illusion that Pike’s away team was real?

So that was The Griffin Incident.

A huge improvement on last week’s outing… most of the time. The unsatisfying lack of explanation or a proper ending does, I’m afraid, put a bit of a downer on the final moments of the episode. And that’s such a shame, because not only was this Star Trek’s best and most terrifying horror story ever, but it really wouldn’t have taken much more than a couple of lines of technobabble to completely negate that.

Imagine if the episode ended with Spock saying something like this: “I have determined that a leak in the Griffin’s warp core caused the entire ship to slowly flood with negatively-charged ions, which affected the mental health of the crew – and, in turn, us as well.” Boom. Mic drop, science-y explanation delivered, and we could move on with our lives! Or, alternatively, La’an could’ve said something like this: “Lieutenant Harper’s logs showed that the Griffin visited Beta Sigma IX, where a member of the away team was infected by an unknown virus. I think this virus must’ve spread throughout the ship and compromised the crew. Residual viral spores then infected us – until the transporter cured us when we beamed back to Enterprise.” Again, we technobabbled our way to an explanation and a proper end to the story.

Despite the fundamentally unsatisfying way The Griffin Incident concluded, I can’t lie: I had a lot of fun with the rest of the episode. We got a genuinely unsettling and frightening ghost story set aboard a derelict ship, deliciously evil illusory versions of several familiar characters, some absolutely brutal gore, an interesting idea that could bring Kirk and Spock closer together, and what feels like another step down a difficult path for La’an as she wrangles with her ancestry. There are plenty of wonderful things that the episode brought to the table, and while the lack of a proper resolution does put a downer on the story as a whole… it isn’t fatal, by any stretch.

Next week, Strange New Worlds is going to give the crew shore leave in Human Best Friend, and I’m already intrigued by both the concept and the episode’s title! I hope you’ll join me for a review of that. And if you missed it, I’ve already reviewed Valles Marineris and every episode from Seasons 2 and 3 of Strange New Worlds. Click or tap here to check out any of those reviews. As Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary approaches, I’ve got a few more ideas for articles and essays, too, so I hope you’ll stay tuned. Earlier in the year, I wrote about the very first Star Trek episode that I can remember watching: click or tap here for that. And if you didn’t know already, I had a wonderful experience in May, when I got to meet William Shatner – Captain Kirk himself – at Comic-Con: click or tap here to check that out.

Thanks for reading, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. Some still frames used above have been adjusted for brightness and ease of viewing. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.