Now that’s more like it. What an episode. Easily one of the best in the entire series up to this point. As those who watched AppleTV+’s hit Widow’s Bay this spring know, it’s not easy to craft an effective horror episode. You have to balance legitimate scares – having creepy ghouls walking in the background is always a good start – with the psychological horror that goes along with it all. And the best horror is pulled from the emotional center of the characters impacted. So, to use Kirk’s fear over not being enough as a father – like his own dad was to him and Sam, Spock’s worry that his two halves mean he’ll never truly be able to find someone to love him the way he wants to be loved, and La’an’s sense of impending doom that her newly activated genome will eventually cost her the only family she has – either through her succumbing to the murderous impulses of her ancestor or through being found out and banned from Starfleet – was a stroke of genius in each case. None of the fears felt forced, everything flowed naturally from what we already know about each of these characters, and it was just scary enough – and gory enough – to have me on the edge of my seat throughout.
One of the baked-in issues with Strange New Worlds has been that we know the fate of almost every character in the series. We know who stays on the Enterprise, who has a tragic ending, and who manages to live to a ripe old age and cross paths with future generations of Starfleet officers. But we don’t know what happens to a couple of characters, including La’an. Now I never thought the series was going to kill her off at this stage of the game, however spending the first two episodes of this season really driving home just how scared the normally unflappable security chief is in light of her recent discovery, well, that really has me on high alert moving forward. Heck, I didn’t even mind that the episode started off like it was going to focus on the world’s most unnecessary love triangle before it swerved into telling us one hell of a horror story.
As I said up top, it’s not easy to craft a great horror story – especially not in the course of a single episode of television. What you need are characters the audience knows well and cares about (and it never hurts to bring in the rest of the cast at some point as red herrings – which worked great in this instance because I genuinely wasn’t sure if they were real or not), some true shocks – such as the return of the always wonderful T’Pring, and a ghost that can’t just be swept up under the rug at the end. Which is exactly what we got here. Whereas last week relied so heavily on the idea of paradoxes that it made the story overly complex too late in the arc to matter, this week we had the always worrying threat of losing one’s grip on reality. When you can’t tell what is real and what is a product of your own mind, well, there’s truly nothing scarier. And to saddle two of the show’s most stoic characters with this ailment? And then ask Kirk to delve into the emotional depths he tries so hard to avoid? That’s a great basis for a horror story.
My one hope from this episode is that we see the lingering effects of this experience on each of these characters moving forward. We know Kirk isn’t suddenly going to become father of the year – we know he and David have a strained relationship in the future. And we know Spock isn’t about to reconcile the two halves of who he is to find love. As for La’an, well, all we know is that once Kirk is captain of the Enterprise, La’an is not on the ship. I’m not asking for this to become a trauma that festers – although I suspect it will impact La’an a great deal more than our other two, who are both insisting that they’re just fine even when they’re not – but I would like this not to be something that the show hand waves away right away. And once it’s confronted – again, I’m guessing, by La’an – it doesn’t just magically get resolved a la Ortegas’ PTSD last season. Because this is something that fucks without your mind for a good long while. And we know none of these three is likely to want therapy.
But, boy, what a great episode. Scary, smart, and character-driven. It had all the hallmarks of what makes a television episode an all-timer. Excellent writing. Great performances. And some truly scary beats that remained grounded in the emotional journeys of these characters. I was genuinely worried about this season of Strange New Worlds after the season premiere, but now? I’ve got a lot of hope.
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