Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Under the Cloak of War Review

When I wrote about M’Benga’s episode arc in my review of the Strange New Worlds season premiere, I commented that I suspected PTSD and its impact might serve as a through-line for this season of the series. Of course, I wasn’t expecting the writers to dip back into that particular well with M’Benga once again – truly asking the character, and the incredible Babs Olusanmokun, to confront the trauma of the past and try to cope with coming face-to-face with the worst instigator of that trauma. What a dark, smart, and complex episode of television we got in return.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Star Trek is at its absolute best when it asks its audience to ponder complicated moral questions for which there might not be a clear answer. The classic one is whether or not you should allow the death of one person to save the lives of many – one that Strange New Worlds riffed on (with the other popular moral quandary of whether or not you kill baby Hitler – or Khan – or if you allow the many to die to preserve a better future you know will come) earlier this season. But here we get the big question of what is true justice? Should you allow someone who claims they are reformed a second chance to live a full life – to participate fully in the world around them, to be lauded for their apparent deep change – or should that person be forced to fully atone for the atrocities they were a part of before their change of heart? It’s not an easy question, one made even more difficult with the revelation that the apparent change of heart occurred following M’Benga’s massacre of General Rah’s command team, not after Rah turned on his own men (as he’s been telling – or at least insinuating – in the years since the J’Gal battle).

I pointed out in my season premiere review that it was important to remember that those who fought in the Federation-Klingon War have vastly different views on what occurred compared to those who didn’t; that Pike would never truly know just what M’Benga experienced. And we got to see that up close in this episode, with Pike flat out asking his friend to enlighten him as to why he refused to trust that Rah’s transformation was genuine, why he couldn’t accept that Rah was on the Federation’s side now, why M’Benga couldn’t just acknowledge that some people can change for the better. But M’Benga (correctly, I might add) was just as targeted and clear in his response: What does someone have to do in order to be deemed not worthy of forgiveness? Not worthy of a second chance? Do they need to kill hundreds? Thousands? Kill civilians? Kill children – not just order it, but actually participate? Where is the line? When do we, as a society, as a government, decide someone is beyond the pale and we cannot allow them to be free and get that second chance? It’s a question that reverberates today, in our world. And it’s one that clearly still exists in the 23^rd century as well. And there’s no clear answer. It depends on the person, on their experiences, and how close they are to the situation at hand. Pike will never understand what M’Benga, Chapel, or Ortegas went through during the Federation-Klingon War, and he will never be able to understand the depth of the trauma they suffered as a result.

In order for this episode to work as well as it did, it required Olusanmokun to be at the top of his game, making sure that we followed M’Benga journey from “just a doctor” to the Butcher of J’Gal. But Olusanmokun made sure that we could see each moment that broke M’Benga, how each painful beat led to the doctor deciding to take up the mantle of Ghost and kill those responsible for the death and destruction he had been forced to witness over the previous months. And how much that choice ate at his soul then – and continues to eat at him into the present day. Some scars eventually stop causing the bearer pain after time, but this one, this massive traumatic decision that saved countless lives but only after countless more were lost, will continue to fester with M’Benga – and, to a lesser extent, Chapel, who saw what he saw and very much approved of his actions – for the rest of their lives. It’s a very dark story to tell – after last week’s joyous cross-over and right before next week’s musical episode, no less – but what a wonderful character piece. The greatest strength of this series is how incredibly this cast inhabits their characters – and how the writing is able to make use of each of their strengths in turn. “Under the Cloak of War” was an episode that brought all of that together – even taking the time to showcase Olusanmokun’s world champion jiu-jitsu skills – to give us a great complex story that forced us to think on major themes and see where our own thoughts fall.