What’s up, my know-it-alls. It’s Thursday, and you know what that means. It’s time for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, episode three, “Ghosts of Illyria.”
The Enterprise runs into a contagion that ravages the ship. One by one the entire crew is incapacitated, except for Number One, Una Chin-Riley, who’s got to confront a secret she’s been hiding while she races to find a cure and save the ship.
Like all the others, this one’s been really exciting, and it’s Number One’s hour. If you watch Trek Talk Tuesday, we talked about this in the looking ahead segment: the show’s continuing a pattern, which is to pick a crew member and stay on what they’re going through. It isn’t new storytelling. These are concentrated versions of things we saw in The Original Series and The Next Generation back in the day, character-driven hours where you watch these people develop as the bigger story moves along.
The Illyrians Terraformed Themselves
We open on the Enterprise pulling up to a planet with a massive ion storm rolling in. If you remember anything about Star Trek, you know ion storms and Starfleet are not a good mix.
Down on the planet they lay out the story, and you get your next major reference to genetic manipulation. The Illyrians were a species trying to get into the Federation, which you find out from Spock a little later. Because of the Eugenics Wars, Starfleet doesn’t allow that kind of thing, so they couldn’t be let in. You hear genetic manipulation and you think megalomaniacs and despots. The Illyrians were a scientific species. Instead of terraforming planets, they terraformed themselves. If there’s something bad in the atmosphere of the place they’re headed, cool, they’ll genetically modify themselves so the bad thing doesn’t affect them.
Pike and Number One are standing there looking at the storm, and Pike says he’s getting tired of how genetic manipulation has kept certain species out of the Federation. Then you get a quick shot of a character named Ensign Lance going through a cupboard, and wherever his flashlight goes, these little embers float in the light.
The storm picks up, so they decide to come back after it blows over. Up on the ship, Transporter Chief Kyle is having a problem. It almost looks like static on a television. He tries to transport and the transporter fails. He calls down to engineering for more power, and you see Hemmer pulling from the ship. There’s a little diagram, and you understand he’s routing that transport through all the other transporters on the Enterprise.
Kyle gets the away team aboard. The captain, though, had to go looking for Spock, who was nowhere to be found, so it’s the search for Spock all over again. He finds him in a little archive room and says, can we go, please, before the storm destroys the whole building. They get outside, the storm’s on top of them, and Pike can’t raise anybody on the ship. Number One wants them beamed up and she’s told no, that’s not happening until this thing passes.
A Bug That Travels on Light
Una rides the turbolift to the bridge, and it really is terrible, because she has to tell everybody they left the captain and Spock behind.
Meanwhile Ortegas gets off duty, and walking down the hall she sees Ensign Lance stripping down right there in the corridor. Brother’s decided this is the place to do that. She calls him on it and he says, “I need the light.” The ship has these panels, vitamin D panels essentially, UV panels. That’s not uncommon on naval ships, specifically submarines, where if you’re going to be in a deep dive for a while you need somewhere to get your fix, because as human beings we’ve got to have vitamin D. So he opens up this panel and he’s rubbing his face all over it, kind of like the Know-It-All cats do to me. Ortegas is like, sure, whatever, get your freak on, I’m fine. Next thing you know he smashes his head through the panel.
Clearly that’s not good.
Then we cut to Number One in her quarters doing a log. She puts her hand near a light, and ooh, that’s nice, and she’s getting real close to it. Then she lays back and proceeds to rip open her shirt, Hulk Hogan style. Calm down, you sickos, it’s nothing like that. She feels constricted and she wants as much of her skin in that light as possible. And that’s when this orange, fiery glow comes up around her. It reminded me of Extremis from Iron Man 3, which is what I said on Trek Talk Tuesday. That orange glow comes from inside her, and it’s got nothing to do with what’s spreading on the ship. It’s part of the secret.
As soon as it happens, it’s gone. She’s suddenly awake, fully aware, very capable. She calls down to Dr. M’Benga and asks if everything’s okay with the away team, and he says it’s funny you should say that, I’ve got a bunch of them here right now complaining of some things.
Later on the bridge she finally gets hold of the captain, gives him a preliminary report, and of course they lose signal. So she goes digging through whatever Illyrian records they have. They’re all classified and she has to override them, and that’s when La’an comes in. La’an hates the idea of what she calls augments. I’m sorry, it’s her accent, I love it. She’s laying into Number One about it, she leans on the desk, and the lamp’s lit up next to her. She kind of touches it. Then she full-on grabs the lamp. It’s almost uncomfortable, the level to which she is into this lamp.
The Lockdown Felt Close to Home
Sickbay’s full now, and the contact tracing isn’t getting them anywhere. So Una does the only thing she can and locks down the ship. A level five lockdown means they’ve quarantined the Enterprise. If you’re non-essential, you’re in your quarters and you’re locked in.
Man, that feels a little close to home. It wouldn’t surprise me if this episode was written at the height of the pandemic. I know they were already planning Strange New Worlds before that, but I feel like when they were putting this together they said, this is what this needs to be right now. It’s a nice little parallel with real life.
Then a really tight close-up of Uhura’s eye, and she’s sweating. We pull back and she’s in her bunk in cadet quarters, with light coming from the other side of the privacy screen. She opens it and her two roommates are standing there with their arms wide open and a simulated sun smack in the middle of them. She shuts off the simulation and they look at her like, what are you doing.
Bro, you’re burned. These guys are red as lobsters. Even the Black guy is red as a lobster. Trust me, I love going out to the lake or the beach, and I’m telling you right now, I don’t burn. I get really, really hot. So the fact that this dude is burnt, wow. That’s how far these people will go to get to light, because this virus is carried on light.
Back in sickbay, M’Benga says they’ve had to open the auxiliary sickbay to handle the overflow, and it’s all hands on deck. It looks like a hundred medical people in there. I don’t think it’s really a hundred, because you’ve probably got about 400 people on the ship, so realistically it’s 25 to 30 trained medical professionals. For anybody thinking that’s an awful lot, it’s redundancy. You’re out in space, there’s every possibility you’ll have to answer a distress call or run an evacuation, and you’ve got to be staffed for it. It makes sense for Starfleet.
And there’s no rhyme or reason to who gets sick. Chapel says so. You’ve got crew who were in close contact and are infected, and then you’ve got Uhura, who was right there with her roommates and didn’t get it.
Hemmer comes in chasing the transporter glitches, the technical side of the investigation, and M’Benga’s right behind him: I’ve got experiments going on here, you can’t mess with the emergency transporter. The lights shut off. M’Benga says you’re causing problems, Hemmer says that shouldn’t have affected the lights, and he leaves. Right after, you see Hemmer flick the lights back on behind him, and M’Benga shuts them off again.
Number One sits down with Uhura, and I love that Uhura is in all her nighttime glory. Pajamas, the little hair wrap that keeps your hair looking good and nice. I was like, okay, that’s pretty cool, I like it. Una lies down in the bunk herself and asks, was it like this? And Uhura says, well, I shut the door, because I’ve got to have total darkness to get to sleep.
That’s the answer. Every crew member who got infected had light around them, and the light is what carries it. When Uhura was exposed, it was pitch black, so the light never got to be part of the equation. So what do they do? That’s right, they shut off all the lights. There’s nothing creepier than a starship floating through space all blacked out.
Arming Us With Knowledge
Down on the planet, Pike is pacing while Spock sits and reads through the archive. Spock says, “I believe there’s a human adage. A watched kettle never boils.” And Pike goes, first off, it’s pot. A watched pot never boils. Spock tells him he can be snippy all he wants, getting angry isn’t going to do anything.
Then they look out at the storm and see what look like firebirds made of energy, two or three of them, swooping around. Pike’s like, you saw that, right? I’m not crazy? No, I saw that.
The energy bird things try to get in the door. Pike and Spock fight to keep them out and get it locked, and then you hear it. Boom. Boom. Pike asks how long the door can last, and Spock thinks they ought to raise their chances of success, so they start stacking things against it.
This is where you get the joke from the trailer. Spock’s looking at one of the archive pieces and Pike says, “Does that have a stun setting?” And Spock goes, “I am arming us with knowledge.”
I’m sorry, I hollered. I did it when I saw the trailer and I did the same exact thing when I saw the episode. I don’t care whether you like the show or not. If you don’t see some straight-up Leonard Nimoy in that, the straight man work from the original, you’re blind. Dude channels it so well. He delivers that joke and I’m down, I’m here for it.
Then Pike’s ears pop. The storm has fully ionized the environment outside that room, and it’s deadly to organic life. The creatures bust a hole through the door and start pushing in, and at the same moment the window they’ve been looking out of explodes inward. They’re going to die.
That’s when the firebirds swoop in. Pike’s pointing the gun at them, they knock his hand away, and they take up positions around the two of them. If you go frame by frame, what we thought were wings become almost like arms, and they cover Pike and Spock. Little by little the storm passes, and they go swooping out. Pike says, “They’re gone.” And Spock says, why do I get the feeling that without them, we’d be gone too.
Very Star Trek. The thing you thought you knew, turns out you don’t. I like when they do it this way. It’s an intelligent way to do it, and it didn’t feel contrived to me.
Get a Better Body Double
Back on the ship, Number One is in the classified files again when she gets word a transporter room is about to blow its circuits. She rushes down and Hemmer is trying to beam up a piece of the planet’s mantle. This thing is 10,000 degrees, literally, and he’s having trouble fully materializing it. If he hadn’t had that trouble, it would’ve blown up the ship. He lunges at the pad to get to all that light, Una stuns him, and she gets the thing shut off.
And then, my first major criticism of this series.
Una carries him out. I don’t care that she carried him. They couldn’t have gotten a more accurate looking Hemmer? This dummy they used, you can see it’s made of some kind of cloth, because of the way the arm folds. You know what I’m talking about. Having worked in the film industry, I’ve had to use body doubles, and the hardest thing about them is that any closer than you need to be, you can tell. We’re supposed to see that she’s strong, because we’re about to be told her secret. I’ve got it. But the body’s too flat, and the arm folds wrong.
Guys, get a better body double. You could’ve CG’d the stupid thing. And there’s a shot from behind where somebody who’s supposed to be Una picks up an actual person. Might’ve been Hemmer, might’ve been an extra made to look like him, a little lighter, a little smaller. It’s a whole Lord of the Rings perspective thing, where the camera’s back far enough that a buff double can pass for Number One and a smaller guy goes up on the shoulder.
I’m not going to get stuck on this. But it took me out of the moment, and I wasn’t happy about it.
The Secret
Una walks into sickbay with Hemmer over her shoulder and drops him, and they get into a pretty in-depth conversation about what’s happening. In essence, she says she’s immune. Chapel asks how she knows that. And she says she’s already been infected, and her body did what it was bioengineered to do.
Boom. Penny in the air, penny drops.
They let the shock pass, because nobody has time to unpack it, and frankly they don’t care. Federation regulations be damned. If there’s a way you can help, we’d love to have it. And bioengineered is underselling it. Una is Illyrian. Full-on Illyrian, a member of the species whose colony they’re investigating right now.
M’Benga tells her there’s nothing in her blood, no antigens and no antibodies. When she got infected, her body did what it does and went back to normal. It’s designed to fix, repair, move on. The genetic modifications did what antibodies would do, so there’s nothing left behind. So I can’t help anybody, she says. No, I’m sorry, you can’t.
He also admits flat out that he’s already sick and shouldn’t be involved in this, and she needs to sedate him. At that exact moment we cut outside his office to Chapel, and behind her La’an sits up, all Frankenstein style. Okay. That’s not going to be good.
M’Benga tells Una she’ll have to do her best, and that he doesn’t care about any of those regulations. In that brief moment you find out Starfleet went out there and found itself some other bigotries. I guess the future isn’t as perfect as we thought.
Una comes out, Chapel’s unconscious, and the computer says a warp core breach is imminent. Down in engineering, La’an is about to open up the warp core field. So they fight.
It’s a fight. It isn’t a great fight, mainly because at no point did I feel like Una was in danger. It reminded me of a parent play wrestling with their kid, playing keep away, where you’re just pushing them off and their arms are too little to reach you. Why do I feel like I’m the only person who did that? Stop judging me.
In the middle of it La’an says, “Augment. That’s what the kids used to call me when they found out my name.” She’s giving Una so much crap. There’s a lot of vitriol and bile coming out of her, and she’s mad. Then Number One throws this horrible punch. Clearly Rebecca Romijn hasn’t been trained to throw one. Fine, it’s all good.
Then the warp core starts to break down, there’s this big light behind Una, and the radiation makes her body do its thing, because it suddenly has to shield her. She’s straddling La’an, and if you look closely at the floor, La’an’s skin is glowing too.
The Ghosts Themselves
In the library the storm’s calmed down, and behind Spock and Pike one of those cylinder things slides out of the wall, ghost movie style. All I needed was the Ghostbusters music.
Spock pulls it out and reads it. It’s the account. Some of the Illyrians wanted to join the Federation so much that they started trying to undo their own bioengineering, and while they were doing it, a group of them ran off into the storm. Spock’s conjecture is that those people were absorbed into the ionosphere, their bodies did whatever they were going to do to save them, and they became the energy firebirds.
Those are the eponymous ghosts of Illyria.
Back on the ship, M’Benga wakes up startled, and Una tells him it’s all good, they synthesized a cure. Chapel explains that even though La’an isn’t Illyrian, the modifications in Una created chimeric antibodies inside La’an.
Welcome to fan theorying, because this is just me. I think it’s La’an’s lineage. She’s got a genetically modified ancestor, and I believe that’s what let her hold on to what crossed over from Una. She’s predisposed to it because of her history. They even name drop Khan, by the way. So that’s two series now where I’ve talked about Khan recently, and you know someone’s going to have the bad idea to bring him back soon. All I want is a Spanish dude. Give me Ricardo Montalbán’s great-grandson, I don’t care.
La’an and Una have to make up, of course. They’re in the lounge having a moment, and you get to see the trauma La’an has had to carry.
Then Una goes to Pike and tries to resign her commission. Pike says no. You’ve worked super hard, and you’ve proven that everything Starfleet believes about the Illyrians is wrong. I don’t accept your resignation. She asks what happens when they discover it, and he says, “I’ll have that discussion.” He’s willing to take on whatever this could mean.
That’s also where it gets spelled out that the Illyrians aren’t like Khan. They only want to survive better wherever they land, and nobody’s out to dominate anybody. They’re essentially a benevolent species who did their thing. I don’t know why humans give them such a hard time, at a point in history when the human race is supposed to be about exploring and the betterment of people in general.
What M’Benga Is Keeping in the Buffer
Una goes to talk to Dr. M’Benga, and it turns out the transporter problem started with him. He didn’t allow anyone to upgrade the emergency medical transporter in sickbay, because he’s keeping a pattern in the buffer. It’s a callback to something we already know is very much possible, and it’s pretty awesome.
It’s his daughter. She has a rare disease and her prognosis is weeks. Every so often he rematerializes her, has a conversation, and puts her back in the buffer, where she lives in stasis and never ages. His reason is that somewhere out there is a race that has the miracle he needs.
So now he has a motivation, which is great.
Then there’s a brief commander’s log where Una voices all of her trepidation about the future. What if I wasn’t a hero? What if something had gone bad? What would the captain have said then? I don’t like doing that. I feel like it’s begging for trouble. But I understand why she’s there.
The coda’s really nice. M’Benga materializes his daughter, they talk, and he reads her a story.
The Verdict
Strange New Worlds “Ghosts of Illyria” lands at an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
This was a really good episode. I enjoyed it a lot, actually. I liked what they were doing and I didn’t have many issues. The VFX thing is what kept it from being a 9, because dude, I’m sorry, that body double was not happening. Guys, really. No bueno. I would’ve gone to CGI before I let somebody put that dummy on screen.
Drop a comment on the video above and tell me what you thought, and leave me your questions for the next Trek Talk Tuesday, where we go a little deeper and theorycraft. I’ll have watched this one about three more times by then.
