I Almost Turned Off Strange New Worlds Episode 7, Then It Gave Me the Best Scene of the Year

I missed two weeks of Star Trek coverage, and I want to be careful about what I am apologizing for because it is not what you would expect. I am not sorry these took a while. What I am sorry for is the quiet. I should have told you I was sitting with it instead of letting you wonder whether I had walked away from the season. I am not going to promise a schedule, because I think I would be writing a check I cannot cash, but I will tell you if life eats up my week.

What that extra time bought me is this: both of these hours are about a bill. Something in them costs something, and the show has to decide who pays it. Two weeks running, at the exact moment the check hit the table, Strange New Worlds slid it to somebody else. Episode 7 wants to be a soap opera and will not pay what a soap opera actually costs. Episode 8 lets Kirk do the boldest thing the show has ever let him do and then will not pay for it either.

Both hours also carry the counterproof. Both have a moment where somebody picks up their own check out loud with nothing to hide behind, and in both hours that moment is the best material in the episode. Not even close.

Episode 7 Turns the Enterprise Into a Soap Opera, With Pike as the Only One Who Notices

Pike wakes up with amnesia after a shuttle accident, and the ship he wakes up on plays like Days of Our Lives. Everybody is in love with the wrong person, everybody has a secret, and the show plays all of it dead straight except for one man. Pike is the straight man, the only person on the ship who can hear the music. As he puts it on screen, "Everything looks so different. It's bright, and I don't know, hazy. Did you change the lights?"

That is exactly where you put him. He hears the sting, he clocks the push in, he asks why the lighting is wrong, and every time he does it he is doing my job from inside the frame. It is a very old comedy structure, and it is the right one because it hands the guy who cannot stand this kind of humor, which is me, a man to hide behind. The joke is built well. It is how they built the soap opera around it that comes apart.

The Soap Opera Look Is a Costume, Not a Commitment

I went looking for how this hour was actually shot. Nobody has published a word about it, no director interview, nothing from the camera department, so I am reading the screen the same as anyone. Everything in the first half is a layer: diffusion on the lens, real glass or a filter added in post, I could not tell you which, plus hot flat lighting in sick bay. A soap look is not a look, it is a shooting model, and the look just falls out of it. Real soaps run three or four cameras live at once at video frame rate, and nobody gets their own key light, which is why they look flat. No filter really reproduces that.

This episode did not do that. It put the soap opera costume on a single camera, film style, beautifully lit Star Trek show and kept the body underneath, which is exactly why Pike can stand there and notice the haze. The haze sits on top of the normal photography instead of being different photography.

I wanted them to commit to the bit, rent the cameras, light it flat, go to the frame rate. That is an investment, but it is a rentable one, and it has been done on shows with less money than this one. Scrubs turned the hospital into a multi camera sitcom with a laugh track and a studio audience once, and hired fifty dancers for a musical episode another time. WandaVision had Panavision build custom lenses for its 1950s episode and shot it on three cameras because that is how a sitcom was shot in 1955.

Let me be fair about what this is and is not. The show is filmed excellently every single week, and the crew is one of the best working in television, so nothing about this hour is sloppy. It is a missed opportunity, and I think it is the first time I have watched the show flinch at a price tag.

Trelane's School Project Explains a Joke That Never Needed Explaining

Trelane is from Squire of Gothos, first season of the original series, 1967, a spoiled cosmic child with a costume fetish who turned the Enterprise crew into his toys until his parents showed up and sent him to his room. Last season made official what fans had been saying for decades, that he is Q's kid. This week he is running the soap opera as, and I am not making this up, a school project, complete with a judge dressed a lot like Q used to dress, only more flamboyant.

I did not mind the mashup of ideas. What moved me was that it needed a reason at all. What I said out loud at my television was, "What in the world are we doing? You people handed me puppets and ghosts and a musical with no reasoning behind any of them, and I took every one of them on faith. So why does this one need a reason?"

If you have ever had to sell a bit to a client, you know what happens the second you explain it, the bit dies. The explanation is an apology, and it told the room the writers did not believe in it. It felt like the writers apologizing for the soap opera before I had even decided whether I needed one.

A Cookbook, a Daughter Named Juliet, and a Scene I Cannot Stop Thinking About

At some point the haze comes off. I saw it coming from the lighting alone, because after four years of staring at how this show lights a room, suddenly it was lighting one the way it always does, no diffusion, normal glass. The second that happened, the story felt like a Star Trek story again. Picture that cut being made from real flat video cameras to the film style the show lives on. That transition was sitting right there, and the show settled for a smaller version of it. It is still the best transition in the hour.

Then it gets muddy, and I have watched it twice. Pike has a daughter, not in this universe but in one that did not happen, a life he had with Marie Batel, with a girl named Juliet. As best I can tell, she has done this before: when Pike passes near a spot in space where the walls are thin, she comes through, sits with him, and then takes the memory away. My read, and it is only my read, is that Trelane's game crashed into the middle of one of those visits. I am still not sure whether she is an entity, a projection, a ghost, or something the show has not named.

The cookbook bothers me more than the mechanics do. A man points at one line for a birthday of a child who never existed, and I sat there with no idea who he was pointing at. I did not know who Juliet was until they spelled it out in dialogue. The scene assumed a level of rewatching that old Star Trek could count on, and I do not think this Star Trek can, because nobody is running it five nights a week in syndication. The same scene trusts me too much and then too little inside about two minutes.

But once I knew who she was, I reread every look, every hesitation, the way the man holds the book. Anson Mount conveyed all of it without a word of help from the script, and then the script caught up with him. There is no moment this season that felt realer to me than that one. Four seasons of Pike, and this is the hour where he stopped being the leading man holding the show together and became a character actor, confused with dignity in the first half, wrecked with it in the second, never once reaching for either.

Pike Finally Gets to Grieve, and That Beats a Famous Next Generation Comparison

My first thought was that this is like The Inner Light, the 1992 Next Generation episode where Picard lives a whole life on a dead planet in one hour and wakes up on the bridge with a flute. Then I sat with it and the comparison flipped, because the place this episode wins is the place it stops being The Inner Light. That episode gives Picard a whole life and then hands him a flute and a captain's chair and calls that the resolution, the same move Starfleet made after the Borg assimilated him, strapping him back in the chair and saying good luck.

This episode makes Pike sit down instead. As one line puts it, "When we lose someone, we don't just mourn that person, we mourn the loss of a future with them." Pike says of Juliet, "Juliet was our daughter and we had a whole life together. And I know that... doesn't make sense like it couldn't be real, but it was," and the counselor answers, "Well, she was real in your world."

Pike has been dodging the ship's counselor all season, and the resolution here is not a flute, it is a chair across from a doctor. The actress cast as the counselor spent decades on the actual Days of Our Lives and walks out of the parody into the real show, playing it completely straight, which I think is the best guest casting joke this show has ever told, because the joke stops being a joke. In sixty years of Star Trek I cannot think of another time a captain got to grieve like that in a room with somebody whose job it was to sit there. Nobody paid that bill for him. He paid it himself, with no gimmick left in the room to hide behind, and it is the best half hour of television this season has produced.

Two smaller misses in the same hour: a misdirect asks me to remember a thread the show planted seasons ago and never touched, plus a movie reference from 1989 on top of it, which is a lot to carry for a gag. And a bit with the doors, the camera pushing through them like a curtain going up, survived into the real half of the episode and read cutesy, something I only noticed because everything around it was so clean.

Episode 8 Hands Kirk the Same Bluff He Made Famous in 1967

At the end of episode 8, an admiral looks across the table and says somebody drugged his coffee. He is right, and the man who did it is sitting right there and does not say a word because a doctor beats him to it. I had to go back not because I missed it, but because I wanted to see who in the room reacted, and the answer was one person, and she was not the one talking.

The thing the admiral invokes is General Order 24, which shows up once in the original series, in A Taste of Armageddon from February 1967, where two planets fight a computer war for five hundred years, with casualties calculated by machine and people reporting to disintegration chambers on schedule. Kirk breaks it by calling Scotty and saying that if he does not hear from him, Scotty should execute General Order 24, destroying the entire surface of the planet. He is bluffing. He never means to do it, he means for them to believe he will.

For fifty nine years that order has been Kirk's bluff, the biggest gun in the drawer, pulled out to end a war without firing it. This week it is in somebody else's hand, and he is not bluffing, and Kirk is the one saying no. Five thousand people are on a planet outside the Federation, a cloaked ship underneath them killed five million, and the admiral is willing to burn the five thousand to be sure. Lining up 1967 and this scene, I stopped thinking of this as a rogue admiral story, which is a very popular kind of Star Trek story. It is Kirk finding out what his own bluff sounds like from the other side of the table.

My first instinct was that this is another Commodore Decker, the officer from The Doomsday Machine who commandeered this exact ship in 1967 and had to be relieved on medical grounds. Star Trek has a shelf of these admirals, but a shelf is a form, and a form is there to get a character somewhere they could not otherwise go. What this one is for is putting Kirk in the first officer's chair with a choice in front of him: a planet or his career. As the admiral puts it, "We must make certain that ship never leaves the planet," and when asked what he is proposing, answers, "As painful a choice as this is, I only see one option."

Joe Morton Plays the Admiral as a War Hero, Not a Villain, Until the Drug Hits

Joe Morton, known for Miles Dyson in Terminator 2 and for Rowan Pope in Scandal, a role that won him an Emmy in 2014, keeps the admiral's dignity throughout. He is right about the ship, right that it killed five million people, and he is a war hero with a chest full of reasons. For most of the hour he sounds like a man who has done the math and can live with the answer, not a lunatic. When the drug takes him and a different man comes out, I believed that man had been in there the whole time, because Morton never signaled the switch.

Watching both episodes back to back paid off here. Count the sets in episode 8: bridge, sick bay, corridor, ready room, transporter room, one cave. One guest star, one consequence. No period lenses, no puppets, no diffusion, no haunted house. I do not have a budget sheet, but I have sat through enough production readings to know what week eight looks like after seven weeks of custom builds, and it looks like this.

The hour that spent the money on a costume it would not finish paying for is the one that hurt. The hour with a cave and a corridor is the one landing hardest with everyone. Constraint is not the enemy, genius is usually somebody solving a money problem elegantly, and episode 8 is a cheap hour that plays like a courtroom. The writer's background is in horror and action, plus eight episodes of Discovery, which may be why the bridge plays like a pressure cooker instead of a conference room. Paul Wesley told Slash Film that on set they talked about A Few Good Men, saying "it almost feels like this, you can't handle the truth," and that he played it like a military drama with no science fiction in it. Once he said it, I could not unsee it. One craft note: every time the episode leaves the bridge for the cave, the bridge loses pressure and has to earn it back, because a courtroom drama wants to stay in the courtroom.

Kirk Lets a Doctor Take the Fall, and That Is Where the Episode Loses Me

Two weeks before this, in the Scotty episode, Dr. M'Benga was planning to leave the Enterprise and had recruited his own replacement, Dr. Boyce, the man who had the chair before him, without telling anybody. M'Benga ends up still aboard in 2268 in the original series, a doctor under McCoy. In this episode, when the admiral accuses Kirk of drugging his coffee, saying "A drug, that's how you did it, you're finished, Kirk," Boyce steps in with, "No, it wasn't, Kirk... it was me. I did it. I drugged you in order to declare you unfit."

Kirk actually did put a drug in the admiral's coffee, the same drug from a classic original series episode where McCoy takes far too much of it by accident and turns paranoid and violent. Two drops save a life, a lot more than two drops makes a man show you who he is, and Kirk, who has been in and out of sick bay all episode for his own reasons, knew exactly what it does. The admiral names Boyce, and Kirk says nothing. That is the bill, and somebody else is holding it, which explains why Boyce is a junior doctor six years later.

Everything else in the episode moves the way it is supposed to. Kirk finds out the admiral lied, digs into the medical file, pulls the phaser code so the order cannot fire without hurting the ship, and spikes the coffee himself. I bought every one of these moves, Kirk will do whatever it takes to win, and that has been true since 1966. Then the doctor says it was him, and Kirk lets him. I cannot get past that, because Kirk has done whatever it takes for sixty years and has never once been without honor while doing it, cheating the Kobayashi Maru and telling you he did it, stealing the Enterprise and standing before the tribunal for it. Whatever it takes has always meant whatever it costs him, not whatever it costs the guy standing next to him.

This show knows how to do that, it has been doing it all season. Scotty got his moment the night he stopped blaming the machine and started listening to it. Spock got his in the puppet episode, which I called the most important hour of this era when it aired. Those were men walking through the fire themselves to come out the other side as the people we already know. Then it gets to Kirk, and the fire gets handed to somebody else. I know what is coming with a comment like that, and I am not calling it character assassination, I am not swinging on this, and the show does not fall apart over one scene. What I will call it is a mischaracterization, because the same hour that got General Order 24 exactly right got the man who invented the bluff wrong in the last two minutes.

Uhura Pays Her Own Bill While Kirk Does Not

Twenty minutes apart, the same hour shows what it looks like when somebody picks up their own check. The Vulcan cadet Asha, whom the show has been carrying all season, gets cut by a poison crystal in the cave and watches Uhura break orders to save her. She comes out of it deciding Starfleet is not for her and goes home to Vulcan quietly, on her own account, with no speech. I will be honest that the show has not given me enough of her for that to land the way it wants it to.

Sit that next to Uhura, the one person in this hour who looked at what Starfleet asks of somebody and said no out loud, herself, without letting a doctor say it for her. She disobeys Pike in that cave on her own account and stands there afterward taking whatever is coming. What comes is a promotion to lieutenant junior grade, one rung from where audiences meet her in 1966, on the same ship.

One officer breaks the rules, owns it, and gets pinned for it. Another breaks them and lets a doctor own it instead. The show put both of those in front of me twenty minutes apart, and I do not think it noticed, which is the same thing episode 7 did with the cameras. The half that would not pay for itself is the half I almost turned off. The half that paid in full is the best thing I have seen all season.

My Scores for Both Episodes

Episode 7 is a five and a nine stapled together. The soap opera path asked permission it never needed and put the costume on without renting the cameras. Then the haze comes off and gives me the only time I can remember a Star Trek captain being allowed to sit down and grieve, plus some of the best work I have ever seen from Anson Mount. It is not a bad episode and it is not a very good one either, which is why it lands at a seven and a half out of ten.

Episode 8 is the cheapest hour of the season and the best written one, and every move on the board is the right move until the last one, which is about the man I came to see. It lands at a seven out of ten. Star Trek spent sixty years teaching me that the captain pays. Two weeks running, this show went looking for somebody else to hand the check to, and the one time it paid up, it gave me the best scene of the year.

Would your Kirk have let Boyce take that fall, or can you think of an earlier episode where he let somebody else carry the cost instead?