SNW 406: Off-Hour

This week's Strange New Worlds episode is more like Star Trek than anything since the season opener has been, and it may well be the best episode of the season thus far. That said, it's also another empty-calorie episode that doesn't leave us with anything to think about after it's done, at least not in a big-picture kind of way. The stuff we have to think about after is more like, why was that guy there, or is the macguffin of this story plausible, or can we accept the implausibility of the macguffin.

The gimmick of the week—what, you thought they were done with that? If only—is real-time countdown. It's a disaster/action movie, one part The Poseidon Adventure one part Speed, one part 24 (the TV show). Trek homages to other stuff is nothing new, of course; nothing inherently wrong with doing a riff on another film if done well. And this one is better than just OK.

Let's get into it.

Episode 406: “Off-Hour” | Written by Bill Wolkoff | Directed by Dan Liu

★★★

There's a countdown clock onscreen as we begin the episode, our first clue that Something Bad is going to happen soon. But for the moment, all is copacetic and the crew is readying for a shift-change. Ortegas and Uhura are looking forward to some drinks and bemoaning that Number One is probably already in the rec room drinking all the good stuff. M'Benga and Chapel are having an argument in sickbay about which of them is more inclined to leave the ship given M'Benga requested the ship's former CMO, Dr. Philip Boyce (last seen in "The Cage"), transfer back and Chapel never did anything to change her temporary assignment status. Scott is dog-tired in engineering and his subordinate, Ensign Early, tells him to go ahead and "clock out" ahead of schedule. But before Pike turns over the conn to Lt. Rahda (deep cut, as Rahda appeared in one episode of the original), something pulls the Enterprise slightly off course, delaying the changeover. Scott, having already turned things in the engine room over to the doomed Early, is paged in the turbolift by said ensign, who has a question about something odd. Checking out the oddity, Scotty immediately orders engine shutdown, but it's too late.

The ship is whisked into a sort of high-warp neutrino river, for lack of a better term, which will later be called a "slipstream wormhole." Terminology is unimportant as this is something new. What's important is that it is a huge mass of high-velocity neutrinos, carrying along the Enterprise in subspace at increasingly dangerous speeds, and they need to get out of it before they hit the "warp threshold," which is supposed to be the point at which speed becomes so great that matter cannot contain itself no matter how good your inertial dampening tech is and everyone would become so much space dust.

Before we learn any of that, though, the abruptness of the ship being caught in the slipstream causes a loss of deuterium fuel (the matter in a matter/anti-matter reaction used to power the warp drive) and systems failures galore, including the most important one when moving at high speed, inertial dampeners. (This is a bit of tech that I'm surprised we've never seen used as a jeopardy device before, given how critical it is.) With dampeners failing, we get to have scenes with crew sliding along the deck as in Poseidon or any other sailing-ship-in-a-storm film until Ortegas is able to stabilize them. Surfaces throughout the ship are then electrified somehow, and to put a stop to that they need shields—the controls for which are electrified, so Pike immediately gives Ortegas the conn, lunges at the shield controls to activate them, and gets shocked unconscious. Stuff has stopped zapping, but damage done; engineering has to be evacuated as breaches occur in various containments, and poor Ensign Early and several others don't make it out before doors seal. This also means Scott can't go back there to effect repairs, so he tries to access systems remotely from the transporter room, presumably the only suitable place on the deck he lands on after being freed from a turbolift by Cadet A'sha.

Dr. Boyce, why are you here?

Number One, along with Spock, La'an, and Dr. Boyce—already aboard, it seems—are in the port galley/rec room with many other off-duty personnel, and are informed by Ortegas that Pike is incapacitated and that dampeners are barely stable and could deteriorate at any moment, so no one should move around much if they can help it. Scott manages to further reinforce inertial dampening by routing power from life-support, disabling heat and atmosphere in corridors and thus confining everyone to their current locations even with dampeners reinforced. All this monkeying with dampeners has caused the gravity plating to go wonky in places, though, including the galley/rec room, where the gravity is uncomfortably high and gets higher the closer one gets to the exterior of the ship. Helpfully, there is an easy gravity-reset button in the galley (and presumably in other sections of the ship as well?); unhelpfully, it is on the far wall where gravity is highest. Number One takes it upon herself to reach the control, but in so doing her tibia snaps in gruesome fashion just as she hits the button. Stupid artificial gravity.

While all this is going on, there's drama in sickbay as the magnetic seals on a lab table cut out while the dampers were failing and M'Benga was pinned against a wall by the heavy table sliding right at him. Chapel realizes that he's been fatally wounded, nearly bisected by the table's impact, but hasn't bled out because the pressure from the table is keeping things in place. She remagnetizes the table where it is to keep M'Benga alive and frets about how she can possibly save him. When comms come back, Boyce calls sickbay to ask for additional help in the galley before corridors lose heat and air, and Chapel sends him M'Benga's scan, hoping he has some ideas. Instead, he demands Chapel leave him as there's nothing anyone can do; she's ordered to get to the galley to assist with treatable injuries. Chapel refuses, unwilling to either give up on M'Benga or leave him to die alone. Soon after, the door seals to sickbay crack and heat starts leeching out of the room (not air, though, apparently, at least not very quickly compared to the heat). M'Benga says she should have left while she could, but is still kinda glad she didn't.

Scott needs information on this slipstream thing, so has Ortegas launch a sensor buoy. The buoy is destroyed almost immediately, but it did provide enough data for Scott to figure out the fast-approaching warp-threshold danger and add even more jeopardy to our disaster day. Pelia, stuck in her quarters, tries to advise, but they still don't know how to get out of the thing, and with sensors wonky and buoys useless, there's no means of gathering data—unless the ion pod, a self-contained ion-storm monitoring area, can be reconfigured for neutrinos. Scott beams to a Jeffries tube near the pod to make those adjustments.

Back in sickbay, Chapel has come across some theoretical research suggesting that strong-force neutrinos—a hypothetical particle that may or may not exist—would have regenerative properties that could be used to heal M'Benga's wounds. Scott hears this report and chimes in that, though he doesn't know about any medical applications, if strong-force neutrinos were real, they would replicate elements they interact with, such as deuterium, and if they could scoop some up—or as Scott puts it, "use the Boussard collectors as a straw to slurp up a neutrino smoothie"—they could replenish their fuel supply and potentially break out of the slipstream. Pike has regained consciousness by this point and gets briefed; the ion pod could potentially tell them if strong-force neutrinos exist in this dense and intense neutrino river. Unfortunately, because engineering has been sealed off, the only way to currently access the ion pod is from outside—someone will have to do an insanely risky spacewalk along the hull, at high warp and exposed to exotic radiation from this wacky slipstream river, to get there.

Pike orders Spock to do it, as he is the most likely to survive the ordeal. Spock goes outside, does the EVA and gets into the ion pod, but communications are lost (natch). The pod, now also exposed to the exotic radiation, absorbs too much of it and is in danger of exploding; Spock is ordered out of it, but no way to know if he hears the order so Pike delays as long as possible before jettisoning the ion pod, but he soon has to and it explodes as soon as it is free of the ship.

A beautiful day for a spacewalk

Chapel lays out an outlandish plan to M'Benga: She will wrap herself in mylar blankets to keep relatively warm and don an oxygen mask, open the doors to the corridor to purge all heat from sickbay to freeze M'Benga, then move the lab table, then use collected strong-force neutrinos (which she has somehow constructed a means of routing from the outer hull to essentially a hose in sickbay, attached to a handheld device like a triggered spray nozzle) to surgically repair his enormous wounds, then reheat sickbay when life-support is restored, then restart M'Benga's heart and revive him. Sure. Easy-peasy. Still need the magic particles, though.

La'an demands to follow Spock's journey to the ion pod housing in case he's still alive and managed to exit the pod before it jettisoned. She browbeats Number One into letting her go, does the spacewalk, and finds an unconscious Spock and a data chip with, presumably, the all-important data on it. Somehow (we don't see any of it), she carries Spock back inside and they return to the galley/rec room. Number One retrieves the data chip only to discover it's damaged and there's not nearly enough time to try and recover what's on it. La'an, however, knows what to do as Spock returns to semi-consciousness—she draws upon their now-former intimate relationship to prompt him into a mind-meld, he communicates what he found in the pod to her, she relays it to the bridge, Pike relays to Scotty, Ortegas nudges the ship to the optimum point to collect the found-to-be-real strong-force neutrinos, and they start collecting as the clock runs down. Not enough time! They'll pass the threshold before they can collect enough magic particles! Scott, however, after having a nice back-and-forth over the comm with Pelia about ships and their capabilities, leans into an intuition and a feel of the ship and is confident that they can last a bit longer than the countdown clock. They do, of course; the magic neutrinos work as theorized, the ship gets enough deuterium to break out of the slipstream, and Chapel is able to spray enough magic neutrinos into M'Benga's chopped up torso to regenerate it.

Wrapping up, we get a nice scene with a recovering M'Benga, praise from Captain Pike to Chapel for saving the day with the magic neutrino idea, and a commitment from Chapel to stay on even if M'Benga leaves.

It's a fun ride, for sure. And there is good character stuff throughout. The strong-force neutrino thing is pretty ridiculous, but at least it's something that they can't go back to; the circumstance of the story makes it too dangerous to ever try and get more.

Mostly this is a good development episode for Scotty, who is beginning here to really bond with the Enterprise and get a sense of how it differs from other ships. We also get interesting things with Chapel and M'Benga, though I wouldn't call it development per se; in fact, their interactions (aside from the mortal wounds and such) raise questions rather than show much growth. Like, what's up with M'Benga planning contingencies for his absence? Will that be followed up on? And, why has Roger Korby not been mentioned at all this season in general and especially in this episode given the talk of Chapel's goals or lack thereof? That's a big loose end. Is there a reason M'Benga requested Boyce's return? Why him? Is this just another instance of the writers throwing in an original series character for no reason, ala Kor, or will this be relevant later? Because this guy did not remind me of the Phil Boyce we met in "The Cage" at all.

If there's any kind of message in this ep, I guess it's a "good of the many" sort of thing? Many characters have a kind of hero moment of sacrificing themselves for the mission, from poor Ensign Early—who actually died—to Pike getting himself electrocuted to Number One's broken leg to Chapel risking herself on an insane gamble to save M'Benga to Spock getting irradiated to La'an following suit (for Spock specifically as well as the crew as a whole, I'm thinking). But there's no real "big idea" at the heart of this one, it's just a wild ride with some nice character moments.

Even so, I liked it.

Stray particles:

• Though clearly meant to invoke “24,” along with some split-screen moments, the countdown clock first brought to mind the "Life Time" episode of M*A*S*H. Like with most things, M*A*S*H did it better.
• There are several very convenient elements to this plot, including the gravity-reset button in the galley/rec room, the lab table in sickbay, and there being EV suits stored in the rec room. Star Trek has a storied history of this sort of thing—handy concealer makeup for "evil" Kirk after he gets scratched in "The Enemy Within," conveniently displayed antique scalpels in sickbay for Khan to swipe in "Space Seed"—but it still strikes me as lazy.
• The explanation for why the ion pod had to be reached from outside is that you'd have to go through engineering inside the ship and it had to be sealed off due to radiation that somehow got in from outside. This struck me as implausible, but, sure, fine. Made for really nice effects, in any case.
• The ion pod itself was a major plot point in the original series episode "Court Martial," but this is the only other time it's even been mentioned.
• There's mention of "lethal" neutrino radiation. This would have been flagged by a science adviser if SNW bothered with one. Neutrinos are harmless until you get to a supernova's density of them. Is the slipstream supposed to be such an environment? If so, how does the ship survive it? Better to simply posit other exotic radiation in the slipstream.
• The actor playing Boyce, Brian Markinson, has been in a few episodes of Trek before, most notably Deep Space Nine's fun "In the Cards," in which he played a weirdo obsessed with keeping his cells entertained as he battled "soulless minions of orthodoxy."
• The "warp threshold" is a concept we've heard of before, but not in this kind of context; in a very early episode of The Next Generation it's referred to as the "warp barrier," a point at which velocity is "infinite" and one traveling that fast would exist everywhere all at once. An infamous episode of Voyager refers to the "transwarp threshold" and has characters surpassing it end up mutating in "hyper-evolution."

Next week we get more gimmickry, with the crew emulating a melodramatic daytime soap opera. Er, what?