Somewhere in the first act of episode seven, I had the remote in my hand. The lens is smeared. The music is doing the soap opera swell every time somebody turns their head. Uhura gets a push-in so slow you could park a car in it. And I hate this kind of humor. I mean it. Watching a person squirm through rejection while a camera lingers on it is, for me, one of the most horrible feelings you can find in produced television. I couldn’t do The Office. I wasn’t going to do this.
But I stayed. And about a half hour in, a man opens a cookbook in a bar, points at one line on one page, and Star Trek gave me the realest scene it has given me all year.
So I sat with that, and I kept sitting with it. I sat with it long enough that episode eight showed up, which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me, because episode eight walked in wearing a completely different costume and did the exact same thing.
Two hours, two weeks, one move. And I could not have seen it until I had both of them in front of me at the same time.
Housekeeping First
I owe you this before I owe you anything else. I missed two weeks of Star Trek coverage, and I want to be careful about what I’m apologizing for, because it isn’t what you’d expect.
I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m sorry these took a while. I’m not. This right here is what taking a while produced, and I’ll stand on it.
What I am sorry for is the quiet. I should have told you I was sitting with it. You shouldn’t have had to wonder whether I’d walked away from the season. Somebody finally came and asked me, and that’s on me, not on him.
So I’m not going to promise a schedule. I’d be writing a check I can’t cash. What I will promise is that you’ll hear from me if life eats the rest of my week. I’ll say that out loud. Because you came here to watch me think. That’s the deal we have.
The Bill
Here’s what I found. Both of these hours are about a bill. Something in them costs something, and the show has to decide who pays it. And two weeks running, at the exact moment the check hit the table, Strange New Worlds slid it to somebody else.
Episode seven wants to be a soap opera and won’t pay what a soap opera actually costs. Then it wants to take a wild swing and won’t own the swing, so it brings a note from home. Episode eight lets Kirk do the boldest thing the show has ever let him do, and then will not pay for it. It hands it to the doctor instead.
And here’s what told me I wasn’t reaching. Both hours also carry the counter-proof. Both of them 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.
That’s the back half of this season, and I couldn’t see it one episode at a time.
The Costume Without the Camera
Start with what works in episode seven, because it works before anything else does. Pike wakes up with amnesia after a shuttle accident, and the ship he wakes up on is Days of Our Lives. Everybody’s 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. He’s the only person on the ship who can hear the music, literally. He hears the sting, he clocks the push-in, he asks why the lighting is wrong. Every time he does it, he’s doing my job from inside the frame. Very old comedy structure, and it’s the right one, because it hands the guy who can’t stand this stuff, which is me, a man to hide behind.
So the joke is built right. How they built the soap opera around it is the part that’s mine, and that’s where it comes apart.
Fan hat off, I went looking. As of this recording, nobody has published a word about how this hour was shot. No director interview, nothing from the camera department. I’m reading the screen the same as you are.
Everything in the first half is a layer. Diffusion on the lens, real glass or a filter in post, I couldn’t tell you. Hot, flat lighting in sickbay. The push-ins. Performances doing the pause, the look, the turn to camera. All of that is working. All of that is also cosmetic, because a soap opera isn’t a look. It’s a shooting model, and the look is just what falls out of it. Three or four cameras running at once, switched live on video at a video frame rate. The lighting is flat because when four cameras cover a scene at the same time, nobody gets their own key light. That’s why soaps look like soaps. It comes out of the physics of how the thing is made, and no filter reproduces it.
This episode didn’t 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 is sitting on top of the normal photography. It isn’t different photography.
I wanted them to commit to the bit. Rent the cameras, light it flat, go to the frame rate. That’s an investment, and it’s a rentable one, and it would have bought them something they had to fake with a lens filter instead.
Scrubs did it twice, once turning the hospital into a multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track and a studio audience, once hiring 50 dancers for the musical. WandaVision had Panavision build custom lenses for the 1950s episode and shot it on three cameras, because that’s how you shot a sitcom in ‘55. So it’s doable. It’s been done on shows with less money than this one.
Let me be fair about what that is and isn’t. The show is filmed excellently every single week, and the crew is one of the best working in television. Nothing about this hour is sloppy. It’s a missed opportunity. And I’d argue it’s the first time I’ve watched this show flinch at a price tag.
The Note From Home
Then the show tells you why it’s doing any of it, and that’s the part that got me. Trelane.
For those of you playing at home, Trelane is from “The 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, the show brought him back and made official what fans have been saying for decades, that he’s a Q kid. This week, he’s running the soap opera as, and I am not making this up, a school project. There’s not really a courtroom, but there’s definitely a judge who looks a whole lot like the outfit Q used to wear, only a little more flamboyant in places.
I didn’t mind the marriage to those ideas. The Q dressing didn’t move me one way or the other. What moved me was that it was there 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’ve 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 an apology tells the room you didn’t believe in it. That’s what Trelane is in this hour. It felt like the writers’ room apologizing for the soap opera before I’d even decided whether I needed one.
(I’ve got a lot more on Trelane, on what the Q connection actually cost this show, and on a second reading of the ending in episode eight. I go a good bit deeper in this week’s sidebar video for members. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll join me over there.)
When The Haze Comes Off
At some point the haze comes off, and I saw it coming. I knew it from the lighting before anybody said a word, because I’ve been staring at how this show lights a room for four years, and 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.
Now picture that moment if the soap half had been shot on real soap opera cameras. Picture the cut from four flat video cameras to the film-style single camera the show lives on. That cut was sitting right there. The show settled for a smaller version of it, and it’s still the best transition in the hour.
Then it gets muddy, and I’m going to be honest about how muddy, because I’ve watched it twice.
Pike has a daughter. Not in this universe, in the one that didn’t happen, the life he had with Marie Batel, with a girl named Juliet. As best I can tell, she’s done this before: when Pike passes near this spot in space where the walls are thin, she comes through, sits with him a while, and then takes the memory away. My read, and it’s only my read, is that Trelane’s game crashed into the middle of one of those visits. Twice through, and I’m still not sure whether she’s an entity, a projection, a ghost, or something the show hasn’t named.
The cookbook bothers me more than the mechanics do. Juliet? Who’s Juliet? That was supposed to hit. That was the moment. A man points at a birthday for a child who never existed, and I sat there with no idea who he was pointing at. I’m the fan who should have caught that, and the show assumed I would. I think it assumed a level of rewatching that old Star Trek could count on, and this Star Trek can’t, because nobody’s running this show five nights a week in syndication. I didn’t know who she was until they flat out said it, spelled out in dialogue. So the same scene trusts me too much and then trusts me too little inside about two minutes. The idea is fine. The tuning is off.
But once I knew who she was, I reread everything that man was doing. Every look, every hesitation, the way he holds the book. Anson Mount conveyed all of it without a word of help from the script. Then the script caught up with him, and the two of them landed it together.
There is no moment in this season that felt realer to me than that one. None. This is some of the best work I’ve seen from him. 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, and never once reaching for either.
The Chair Instead Of The Flute
And this is where the hour pays me back for staying.
First time through, I thought, this is “The Inner Light.” 1992, Next Generation, Picard lives an entire life on a dead planet inside one episode and wakes up on the bridge with a flute. Then I sat with it, and the comparison flipped on me, because the place this episode wins is the place it stops being “The Inner Light.”
“The Inner Light” gives Picard a whole life, then hands him a flute and a captain’s chair and calls that the resolution. He’s Jean-Luc Picard. He’s of such moral character, he’ll carry it. That always bothered me, because it’s the same move Starfleet made after the Borg. Assimilated, used as a weapon against his own fleet, and they strap him back in the chair and say, well, good luck, off you go.
This episode doesn’t do that. This episode makes Pike sit down.
He’s been dodging the ship’s counselor all season, and the resolution of this hour isn’t a flute. It’s a chair across from a doctor. Deidre Hall, cast because she spent decades on the actual Days of Our Lives, walks out of the parody into the real show and plays it completely straight. It’s the best guest casting joke this show has ever told, because the joke stops being a joke.
Sixty years of Star Trek, and I can’t 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, on camera, with no gimmick left in the room to hide behind. It’s the best half hour of television this season has produced.
Two misses, fast, because I’m grading the whole hour. The Sybok misdirect asks me to remember a thread the show planted seasons ago and never touched, plus a movie from 1989 on top of it. That’s a lot to carry for a gag. And the doors, the camera pushing through them like a curtain going up, survived into the real half and read cutesy. I only noticed because everything around it was so clean.
Then Thursday Came Around
And the show did the whole thing again, with people instead of cameras.
At the end of episode eight, an admiral looks across the table and says somebody drugged his coffee. He’s right. And the man who did it is sitting right there and doesn’t say a word, because the doctor beats him to it.
I rewound it. Not because I missed it, because I wanted to see who in the room reacted. The answer was one person, and she wasn’t the one talking.
For those of you playing at home, the thing the admiral invokes is General Order 24, and I went back and checked where it comes from, because I only remembered the shape of it. It shows up once in the original series, “A Taste of Armageddon,” February 1967. Two planets fighting a computer war for 500 years, casualties calculated by machine, people reporting to disintegration chambers on schedule, and Kirk caught inside it. The way he breaks it is he calls Scotty and says, if you don’t hear from me, execute General Order 24. Destroy the entire surface of the planet and everything living on it.
He’s bluffing. He never means to do it. He means for them to believe he will.
So for 59 years, that order has been Kirk’s bluff. The biggest gun in the drawer, pulled out to end a war without firing it. And this week, it’s in somebody else’s hand, and he’s not bluffing. And Kirk is the one saying no.
Five thousand people on a planet that isn’t in the Federation, a cloaked ship underneath them that killed five million, and an admiral willing to burn the five thousand to be sure. When I line those two scenes up, 1967 and this one, I stop thinking of this as a rogue admiral story. It’s Kirk finding out what his own bluff sounds like from the other side of the table.
My first instinct on Reeger was probably the same as everybody’s. Another one of those. Decker in “The Doomsday Machine,” who commandeered this exact ship in 1967 and had to be relieved on medical grounds. Satie. Marcus. Star Trek has a shelf of them. But a shelf is a form, the same way a shore leave episode is a form, and what that means is you use the form to get a character somewhere they couldn’t otherwise go. That’s how you do it. So I asked what this one was for, and what it’s for is putting Kirk in the first officer’s chair with a choice in front of him: a planet or his career.
Joe Morton, Miles Dyson in Terminator 2 and Rowan Pope in Scandal, which won him an Emmy in 2014. What he does with Reeger is keep the man’s dignity. Reeger’s right about the ship. He’s right that it killed five million people. He’s a war hero with a chest full of reasons, and for most of the hour he sounds like a man who’s done the math and can live with the answer, not a lunatic. So when the drug takes him and the second man comes out, I believed that man had been in there the whole time, because Morton never signaled the switch.
Producer Hat
This is where watching them back to back paid me.
Count the sets in episode eight. Bridge, sickbay, corridor, ready room, transporter room. One cave, stage build or location day, I couldn’t tell you. One guest star of consequence. Andorians, a makeup the show already owns. No period lenses, no puppets, no diffusion, no haunted house.
I don’t have a budget sheet and I’m not going to pretend I do, but I’ve sat in enough production meetings to know what week eight looks like after seven weeks of custom builds. It looks like this.
And here’s what you could not have gotten from either of these reviews on its own, and frankly neither could I. The hour that spent the money on a costume it wouldn’t finish paying for is the one that hurt my soul. 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 eight is a cheap hour that plays like a courtroom. Alan McElroy wrote it, and his background is horror and action plus eight episodes of Discovery, which might be why the bridge plays like a pressure cooker instead of a conference room. Sharon Lewis directed. Paul Wesley told SlashFilm the thing they talked about on set was A Few Good Men. His words: “It almost feels like this.” He said he played it like a military drama with no science fiction in it. Once he said it, I couldn’t unsee it. The bridge is a courtroom this week anyway, and the coffee is the confession.
One craft note. Every time we leave the bridge for the cave, the bridge loses pressure and has to earn it back. A courtroom drama wants to stay in the courtroom.
Back To The Table
Two weeks before this, in the Scotty episode, I told you M’Benga was planning to leave the Enterprise. He’d recruited his own replacement, Dr. Boyce, the man who had the chair before him, and hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. And I told you where he ends up: still aboard in 2268 in the original series, a doctor under McCoy, and not the chief.
Kirk put cordrazine in the admiral’s coffee. That’s “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The drug McCoy takes a hundred times too much of by accident and turns paranoid and violent and jumps through a time portal. Two drops save a life. A lot more than two drops makes a man show you who he is, and Kirk, who’s been in and out of that sickbay all episode for his own reasons, knew exactly what it does.
The admiral names him. M’Benga says, “It was me.” And Kirk says nothing.
There’s the bill, and somebody else is holding it. A doctor’s career goes on the record, and now I know why the man is a junior doctor six years from now.
Everything else in this episode moves like it’s supposed to. Kirk finds out the admiral lied, digs into the medical file, pulls the phaser codes so the order can’t fire without hurting the ship, spikes the coffee. I bought every one of those. Kirk will do whatever it takes to win. That’s been true since ‘66, and it’s true here.
Then the doctor says, “It was me,” and Kirk lets him.
I can’t get across that, because Kirk has done whatever it takes for 60 years and he’s never once been without honor while he did it. He cheats the Kobayashi Maru, and he tells you he did it. He steals the Enterprise, and he stands in front of the tribunal for it. Whatever it takes has always meant whatever it costs. Not whatever it costs the guy standing next to him.
And this show knows how to do that. It’s been doing it all season. Scotty got his crucible, 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 Kirk, and the fire gets handed to somebody else.
I know exactly what you’re thinking right now, because I thought it too. You’re thinking, this is the guy who told you the puppet episode was the most important hour of the era, and now he’s got a problem with one quiet scene at a table. Yeah, I do. And I know what word is coming with it: character assassination. I’m not using it. I’m not swinging on this, and the show does not fall apart over one scene. What I’ll say is mischaracterization, and I’ll say it plainly, because the same hour that got General Order 24 exactly right got the man who invented the bluff wrong in the last two minutes.
That’s just me. Fight me on it below.
The Counter-Proof, Twenty Minutes Apart
And then, in the same hour, the show shows you what it looks like when somebody picks up their own check.
A’Sha, the Vulcan cadet Uhura’s been carrying all season, gets cut with a poison crystal in that cave, watches Uhura break orders to save her, and comes out deciding Starfleet isn’t for her. She goes home to Vulcan, quietly, on her own account. No speech. The show hasn’t given me enough of her for that to land the way it wants it to, and I’ll be honest about that. But sit it next to the table. The one person in this hour who looked at what Starfleet asks of somebody and said no out loud said it herself. She didn’t let a doctor say it for her.
And the woman who broke orders to save her gets the other honest ending. Uhura disobeys Pike in that cave on her own account, stands there afterward, and takes whatever’s coming. What comes is a promotion. Lieutenant junior grade, one rung from where we meet her in ‘66.
Same hour, same ship. One officer breaks the rules, owns it, and gets pinned for it. Another one breaks them and lets a doctor own it. The show put both of those in front of me twenty minutes apart, and I don’t think it noticed. Which is the same thing episode seven did with the cameras. The half that wouldn’t pay for itself is the half I almost turned off. The half that paid in full is the best thing I’ve seen all season.
The Verdict
Two numbers, because these are two episodes and they earn them separately.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” lands at a 7.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. It’s a five and a nine stapled together. The soap half asked permission it never needed and put the costume on without renting the cameras. Then the haze came off, and it gave 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’ve ever seen from Anson Mount. It isn’t a bad episode, and it isn’t a very good one either.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Orders of Magnitude” lands at a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. It’s 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. The last one’s about the man I came to see.
Star Trek spends 60 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.
Two questions on the video above. If you had the cookbook figured out before Pike said it out loud, tell me what tipped you, because I want to know whether I missed a clue or the show buried one. And would your Kirk have let M’Benga take that? If you’ve got the episode that proves me wrong, put it in the comments with the season and the title.
