SNW 402: The Griffin Incident

The latest episode of Strange New Worlds is another "genre of the week" installment, this time the genre is "horror flick." It's not the first time Star Trek has gone this route, exactly, but it is more overtly in-your-face in terms of horror tropes and scenes of mutilation. Generally, I am most definitely not a fan of such things, and while I don't exactly hate it here, it's not good, either.

Which isn't to say the episode itself isn't good taken as a whole. It's...well, it's hit-and-miss, like most SNW efforts. There are some semi-interesting character bits, and some things that may or may not move a season arc along, but once again we have a script that wouldn't have been deemed ready for production under Gene Coon or Ira Behr.

Let’s get into it (spoilers and very nerdy nitpicks ahead):

Episode 402: “The Griffin Incident” | Written by Robbie Thompson | Directed by Axelle Carolyn

★★

Spock and La'an are returning to the Enterprise after attending something called a "Future Federation Leaders" seminar (sounds like something more suitable for cadets, but OK), joined by fellow attendee Lt. Cdr. Kirk of the Farragut. Why Kirk is hitching a ride with them is unclear, it isn't like the two starships are likely to be near each other. But whatever, this script calls for Kirk, so we get Kirk, and for once it isn't a completely stupid rationale for having him there. The shuttle ride takes a detour when they come across a weird signal that upon investigation they find coming from the starship Griffin, lost for nine years but now apparently floating in an asteroid field.

They read no life signs aboard, but after sending a message to the Enterprise apprising them of the situation, they beam over to the Griffin to check it out. (This is the first of the plot points that takes me out of the flow of things, because I have to stop and headcanon some reason this particular shuttlecraft has a transporter when the common starship shuttles of the day are not so equipped. I postulate that this is a longer-range craft more akin to a 24th-century Starfleet runabout and not a standard ship-based shuttle so I can move on with the story.) They beam over wearing breathing apparatus, but no EV suits, so I guess there's air and heat aboard, it just might be contaminated with something? The gravity is on, too, which they at least recognize as weird. The three of them check out the engineering controls and determine the ship has power—weirdly, as after nine years of neglect there should be none—for an hour or so before all systems will fail. Spock gooses some control or other to make the air safe(r) to breathe and they discard their breathing masks. This may have been a huge mistake, but as we'll discuss later, we'll never know.

Exploring the ship, they see a ghostly figure in a corridor and chase after it around a corner to find it has disappeared, but they somehow find enough with tricorder readings to track it to sickbay. The sickbay doors are barricaded and scarred with scorchmarks from a variety of weapons, suggesting that our three future federation leaders aren't the first people to board the derelict ship. Inside, they find a stack of empty body bags (labeled with names of Griffin crew) but nothing more, so they opt to split up, fulfilling another horror movie cliché, with Spock tasked with getting info from the sickbay computer as Kirk and La'an head for the bridge. Both parties independently find information pointing to the Griffin's security chief, Lt. Harper, as the "ghost" they chased; Spock's research tells him that Harper beamed most of the Griffin's crew into space while a few dozen others died by person-to-person violence. La'an has found Harper's logs, which describe her dealing with the crew as a threat, under some mysterious influence. At this point, Spock is trapped in sickbay when the doors seal shut; Kirk sees that their shuttle has been destroyed by an asteroid; and La'an heads to the engine room to try and divert some more power to the communications array so they can call for help. Now that everyone is alone, we can get into the psychological horror stuff.

Each of the three characters hallucinates other people. La'an sees ghost-Harper and other similarly ghost-zombie members of the Griffin crew, with Harper specifically imploring La'an to stop fighting and join them in their ghostly bliss because, after all, she is "one of us." Kirk hallucinates his baby son David crying someplace and is convinced David is inside the communications console, which he tears apart and we see a tiny baby hand before it disappears. Spock hallucinates his ex-betrothed, T'Pring, who at first seems mystified as to where she is and how she got there before veering out of character and claiming her relationship with Spock failed because he was not human enough and she stuns him with a phaser. On the bridge, Kirk sees a rescue party beam in from the Enterprise consisting of Pike, Una, Ortegas, Uhura, and Sam Kirk. They try to beam Kirk back to the Enterprise but can't because of reasons, so all but the Kirk brothers head to the transporter room to see if they can make the Griffin's transporter work. Kirk needs a minute after the David hallucination and he and Sam talk about balancing career and family and about their own absentee dad.

La'an has moved on to Harper's cabin—on deck 17, which doesn't make sense, but whatever, she's got bigger things to worry about—where she finds more log recordings that address her by name. She is found by Uhura and Ortegas, who bring La'an with them to the transporter room. Meanwhile, Pike and Una find Spock in sickbay, where he's been strapped down to a biobed by T'Pring, who has decided to excise his Vulcan half by slicing off the tips of his pointed ears (ew) and is about to cut into his side to "move" his heart to where it should be. Interrupted by Pike and Una, she doesn't cut open his side, but instead of rescuing him, Spock is re-confined by Pike and Una and Una slices herself open to relieve herself of her Illyrian blood, which she says holds her back in the fleet. Pike has donned an apron and says he can stay aboard this ship and not be the captain anymore, just be the head chef as the ship as all the best ingredients. He then chops his own fingers off and collapses. On the bridge, the brothers Kirk find they can't leave and that asteroids are starting to pummel the forward viewports; when one is breached, Sam is pulled out to the hole and is gruesomely sucked out into space bit by bit as Kirk finally gets into the turbolift. In the transporter room, Uhura has gotten the unit to function well enough to transport one person at a time, and La'an has Ortegas get on the platform to beam back the the Enterprise, but instead of beaming her off ship, La'an accidentally tried to beam her into her own body, which reminds us watching of the grisly transporter accident in Star Trek—The Motion Picture. Uhura flees, La'an pursues, protesting that she didn't know how that happened, and they come across ghost-Harper, whom La'an tries to stab with a sort of dagger she'd taken from Harper's cabin. Turns out that she'd actually stabbed Uhura.

Obviously, the rescue party were also hallucinations, and Spock—prompted by something the ersatz T'Pring said earlier—is able to essentially meditate his mind to clarity before "T'Pring" can slice into his heart. Spock opens his eyes to see, finally, the real condition of the Griffin sickbay, full of corpses; he also notes that he holds the surgical scissors that cut his ear tips off in his own hand. Kirk, having escaped the bridge, finds La'an, still holding the dagger. She seems to have been fully subsumed by ghost-Harper's entreaties to give up and join the Griffin insanity and stabs Kirk.

Of course, this is when the Enterprise arrives for real and beams them all back to safety. Kirk is treated in surgery, Spock has his ear tips grafted back into place, and La'an is becalmed, though very troubled. Each has a moment with another character to process things—Kirk with Uhura, Spock with Chapel, and La'an with Pike. The episode ends with La'an looking out at the Griffin, being towed away by Starfleet tug, and she (we think) sees ghost-Harper through a Griffin window.

So. The ghost ship thing was creepily effective. The character study with each of the three aboard the Griffin confronted with their big fears is interesting to a point—it's reasonably well done, but none of it is new information; we knew all of it already and the only insights gleaned are about how some of Kirk's fear involves becoming as lousy a dad himself as his own is/was. We know Spock's struggles with his dual heritage, we know he's been trying to balance them and we know that within a couple of years' time he's going to more greatly favor his Vulcanness over his humanness (I do give credit for the choice of T'Pring as his hallucination figure, though; that relationship represents to him a failure to conform to Vulcan norms. It also provided the memory to spur him into his quasi-meditative centering that broke the illusion, so his subconscious is working overtime there). We know La'an's worries about her own genetics and that she's afraid of recessive augment genes being activated and taking over her psyche. We know Kirk is going to be an absentee father at the request of David's mother and it's going to be weird for him.

We learn nothing by the end, we don't even learn what happened to the Griffin. There is no resolution to the ghost story whatsoever, it's just handed off to "division twelve," which I guess is like Starfleet's version of the X-Files?

One reason this episode was made, we can infer, is money—with all the budget-busting of the season premiere, they needed one on the cheap, so this one was all existing sets, one guest actor (not counting semi-regular Paul Welsey), and no frills aside from creative lighting and set dressings. That's not a big deal, some of the best Treks have been "bottle episodes" that require the writing to carry the whole weight of things (e.g. "The Doomsday Machine," "Duet," "Similitude"). But this one ain't that.

It was a deliberate choice to have no resolution, which, OK, maybe on another show that would fly, but here... We should at least have some speculation. Even without confirming anything, there ought to be an attempt to solve the mystery, but no, we just hand it off to D12, whoever they are, and it'll never be spoken of again. In the immediate aftermath, I get Spock not wanting to delve into it, but as soon as his ears are fixed and he's had time to sleep on it, you know he'd be puzzling it out, theorizing on what environmental agents could cause fear-based hallucinations or researching alien beings that could affect mental processes. Initially, I thought the boarding party exposed themselves to whatever caused this by taking off their breathing apparatus, but then I realized that the Griffin seen from the shuttlecraft at the beginning is far more intact and undamaged than what we see at the end being hauled off by the tug. So the illusory, hallucinogenic effects extend past the ship itself, and thus it wouldn't be due to something airborne.

Anyway, it's clear that I, and I'm sure many other viewers, care that this story be resolvable by logical means rather than supernatural ones (because, again Star Trek is science-fiction, not space-fantasy) a lot more than the people making the show do.

I blame Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, the showrunners. Maybe I should blame Alex Kurtzman because of his guilt-by-association with J.J. Abrams, but I feel like this is a more granual, writers'-room-level consistent problem of not-quite getting what Star Trek is that no one seems to think is important.

Stray ions:

• Kirk reveals that, contrary to what Carol Marcus tells their son in Wrath of Khan, he was, in fact, a Boy Scout
• Since we can assume that everything our heroes saw while on the Griffin was illusory, it's probable that their shuttlecraft is fine and not at all damaged, so an alternate ending might have clarity-endowed Spock getting the three characters back there and leaving without aid from the Enterprise. Of course, if they did that they wouldn't have been able to stab Kirk through the chest.
• Pike chooses to omit details of La'an's behavior while under the influence of the haunted spaceship for his report. Is this good? Not sure. It is empathetic, which is very Pike.
• While possessed La'an is stabbing Kirk, she taunts him by saying his son will die just like this, "at the end of a blade in a corner of space." Which is accurate, but it's a gratuitous line, as it just makes the viewer wonder if the ghost-thing knows the future, and if it did it would know it wasn't going to succeed in what it's doing.
• At various points, we see La'an expressing some genuine affection for Spock, a nice counter to the early scene in the shuttle where she's kind of annoyed with him. We know that relationship isn't going to last, but I'm interested in how they'll develop it and a bit concerned that these writers will just fuck it up in a dumb way.
• The production continues to ignore continuity from Star Trek: Discovery when it comes to uniforms; given the time at which the Griffin was lost, its crew should be seen in Discovery-blue unis or the hybrid-type uniforms we saw Enterprise crew wear in Disco season two and in the Short Treks episode "Q&A." They already strayed from this in season two's "Among the Lotus Eaters," plus everything we see on board the Griffin is illusory, so I'll allow it.

It was a lot easier to forgive episodes like this back when we got 22-26 a season. With just 10, each failing just gets magnified.

Next up: "Human Best Friend." I have avoided spoilers and know nothing in advance. I'll find out what it is tomorrow night!