By the time this goes up, the argument’s already started. Half the takes are calling “The Griffin Incident” the scariest thing Star Trek’s ever put on screen. The other half are calling it a gorgeous haunted house with nothing inside. Scary, but empty. And I’m telling you right now, both sides are having the wrong fight.
But before we get into any of that, you need to know exactly who’s talking to you. I am not a horror guy. I don’t do horror. My entire policy on spiders is that there’s only one way to handle a spider, and that’s to burn the house down. That’s the man reviewing this episode. Hold on to that, because what this episode did to me anyway, that’s the whole story today.
This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 4, episode 2, “The Griffin Incident.” Same day it drops, like always, and fair warning, we’re doing full spoilers. If you haven’t watched it yet, go get scared and come back.
Here’s what I think actually happened this week, and it’s bigger than the scary-or-empty fight. Star Trek handed an episode to a horror director, a real one. And then, and this is the part that almost never happens inside a franchise this old, it got out of her way. So the question worth asking isn’t whether it was too scary, or not scary enough, or scary but hollow. The question is whether horror craft is allowed to be the substance in a Star Trek episode. And the beautiful thing is you don’t have to take anybody’s word on that. You can settle it from the frame.
Hired on Purpose
Let me start with how I actually experienced this thing, because I went in blind on the credits. No idea who made it. And within about ten minutes I’m sitting there going, wait a minute. This isn’t Star Trek doing a spooky episode. This is shot like a horror movie.
I don’t mean that loosely. I’ve worked on an indie film set that was built around practical horror, and here’s what that teaches you real fast: horror is a language. It’s a whole other way of doing things. Where the camera sits, what it refuses to show you, how long a hallway is allowed to stay quiet before something has to move. You can’t fake fluency in it. You either speak it or you don’t. And whoever made this episode speaks it.
So after I watched it, I went looking for the names. The director is Axelle Carolyn: The Manor, American Horror Story, Creepshow. A working horror director, not a TV utility player, doing the assignment. The script’s credited to Robbie Thompson, and that resume runs through Supernatural and a stack of Marvel comics, and he’s attached to a Poltergeist series in development right now.
And then the showrunners basically said the quiet part out loud. Space.com sat down with them for the season, and Akiva Goldsman put it plainly: we built it and shot it like a horror movie. Those are his words. Henry Alonso Myers said they’ve taken a swing at horror basically every season, but they’d never quite done a ghost story. Sixty years of this franchise, and this is the first time they fully committed to one. So my eyes weren’t lying to me. The fluency I was feeling in my chest at midnight was hired on purpose.
And listen, I felt it. This episode gave me the willies, the genuine heebie-jeebies. My wife loves horror. Honestly, Mrs. Know-It-All would be better equipped to review this episode than I am, which is never going to happen. So when I tell you this episode is doing its job, understand that I’m the control group. There’s nothing in me that wants to be scared. It got me anyway.
No Baseline
Now let me show you how it got me, because this is where the craft argument actually lives.
The single smartest thing this episode does is refuse to give you a baseline. Think about how most haunted-anything stories protect you. They hand you an anchor: a cutaway to objective reality, a rules scene, some steady point of view you get to be scared from. Carolyn takes that away and never gives it back. There’s no scene where the show steps outside the Griffin and tells you what’s real.
Worse, it does the opposite. It has Spock, the one character whose entire function is to be your instrument panel, examine an apparition and certify it as real. His readings indicate a living, breathing person. The most reliable narrator in the franchise looks into the camera, functionally, and tells you the hallucination has a pulse.
At that point you have nothing. I had nothing. When the Enterprise crew finally shows up, I didn’t believe they were real. I’m watching Pike act completely normal and thinking, what the hell, this could be the ship wearing his face. And there’s one image, and we’ll come back to it, that no surviving character even witnesses, which means the episode is willing to show you things it never confirms for them.
Midwatch, I’ll be honest, that frustrated me. I kept saying, give me a baseline. Give me something. And then the episode ended and I realized the frustration was the design. My not knowing what to believe wasn’t a flaw in the storytelling. It was the storytelling. That’s the difference between an episode that shows you scary things and an episode that does horror to you.
And it does it inside a TV-14 box.
The Gore Is Load-Bearing
Which brings us to the gore, because yes, we need to talk about the gore. This episode takes Spock’s ear, takes Pike’s hand like he’s prepping carrots, and puts Sam Kirk in the void with his entrails out, which is a first for this franchise, and I still can’t quite believe they showed it.
I’m not a body horror person. The Saw movies were not my jam, and parts of this episode, I think, are past my personal line. There genuinely should be a warning in front of this thing. But here’s the craft observation underneath my squirming: count where the explicit beats land. They’re not wallpaper. Every time this episode actually shows you the terrible thing, it’s marking the moment a specific person falls to the ship. T’Pring takes Spock’s ear when his anchor is being cut. Sam’s death gets the most graphic image in the episode because Sam is the one the Griffin fully wins.
The gore isn’t decoration. It’s an escalation gauge. A TV-14 rating means you only get so many bullets, and Carolyn spends every one of them on a story beat instead of a jump scare. That’s the discipline that separates horror craft from splatter. It made me deeply uncomfortable, and it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, and both of those are true at the same time.
The X-Ray
So the scenes are fluent and the gore is load-bearing. That’s the how. Now the why, because this is exactly where the scary-but-empty crowd and I part ways.
Run through what the ship actually shows each person and notice something. The Griffin doesn’t invent a single fear. It x-rays them. Everything it uses is a wound this series already spent three seasons documenting.
La’An gets her haunting, and honestly, I don’t have an issue with what happens with her here. What she goes through is part and parcel of the demons she’s already carrying. She’s felt like she’s on a trajectory to implode for a while now, and the show clearly isn’t done with that. That is not an empty scare. That’s a down payment.
Una gets the ceiling on her career whispered back at her. Pike, and this one is quietly brutal, gets offered freedom from his own fate. The man who knows exactly how his story ends gets told he doesn’t have to be the captain anymore. And the funny thing is, he’s not even really there. That’s what kills me. But they’re still treated like victims, which in effect puts us in the mindset that they are there. It’s a mind screw all day.
Spock’s haunting is the one I think this season is actually built on, because anybody else notice T’Pring was becoming a regular this season? I’m just saying. The apparition wearing her face argues both directions. First it tells him his humanity is his greatest strength. Then it offers to fix his Vulcan side. And what saves him is a couplet, a piece of logic and memory tied to a story only the real T’Pring ever knew. Watch the signals here. I think this is one of the first major steps toward Spock becoming the logical Spock, the one we know he becomes, and the cost of that is it’s really going to be pointed away from the person he is right now.
An empty haunted house doesn’t do any of this. A haunted house with nothing inside doesn’t need your medical file before it scares you.
The Kirk Family Well
And then there’s the well I didn’t expect to be this deep, which is the Kirk family. I need a minute here, because I think this is the best thing in the episode, and almost nobody I’ve seen previewing it is talking about it.
The ship gets to Jim through David, his son. And I already know some people are tripping over the idea that Kirk interacts with David at all, and I don’t know that I can believe that’s a hard idea for people, because we knew this. Go back to The Wrath of Khan, 1982. The whole shape of that story is that Carol wanted David in her world and asked Jim to stay away. “You had your world and I had mine, and I wanted him in mine.” And Jim’s position is essentially: I did what you asked. I stayed away. Why didn’t you tell me? Staying away is not the same thing as never having met his son. So this episode isn’t rewriting the Kirk family. It’s showing you the years that line was always pointing back at.
And it makes the thing genuinely generational, because Sam’s on the ship, and Sam has his own version of the wound. There’s this little toy, this little tchotchke that Jim bought for his boy, and it kicks off the most quietly devastating exchange in the episode, where the Kirk brothers basically admit they’ve got more of those crappy little gifts in a box somewhere than they’ve got memories of playing with their old man.
This is my own read, and I’ll own it: I’ve carried this one for years, as a guy who became what he became trying to live up to his father. So watching the two of them measure their dad’s absence in trinkets hit me somewhere the ghosts couldn’t reach.
Then the ship uses it. The voice Jim chases through the corridors is his boy’s. The voice that breaks Sam is his. And the way Sam goes is raw, and it’s graphic, and it’s the single most disturbing thing in the episode, and the episode knows it, because that’s the image it refuses to confirm for anyone still alive.
And then we get the epilogue. Jim, safe, rigging a relay to reach Carol and David, using Sam’s own nightly sign-off with his kids: good night, I love you, and I’ll see you in your dreams. The haunted house episode ends with a man calling his son. If that’s empty, I don’t know what full looks like.
The Covenant
Which brings us to the ending, and the covenant this episode breaks on purpose.
Star Trek has told great ghost stories before. “The Tholian Web,” original series, season 3, episode 9, 1968. “Night Terrors,” Next Generation, season 4, episode 17. “The Haunting of Deck 12,” Voyager, season 6, episode 25. And every single one of them ends the same way: the ghost turns out to be science. Interphase space, a rift and telepathic distress, a life form in a nebula. Sixty years of a franchise whose only covenant with you is that the universe is knowable. That if you scan long enough, the terror resolves into a phenomenon with a name.
That’s the tradition I was raised on, and I’ll own this on camera: mid-episode, I was begging for it. I kept thinking about how Doctor Who does it, where even the scariest thing eventually gets a real answer, some alien bleeding into reality, something. I said out loud, “If this is one of those episodes where we never get answers, that’s really going to suck.”
We never get answers. And it doesn’t suck. It’s probably the boldest choice of the episode.
Because instead of an explanation, we get Division 12. And as far as I can tell, and believe me, I checked, Division 12 is brand new. Never heard it before this episode, couldn’t find it anywhere in prior canon. The closest things Trek has ever had are Section 31 and the temporal investigations guys. So when the episode ends with the USS Thor towing the Griffin away to a Starfleet department that just collects the unexplainable, that’s new furniture in this universe.
And Pike gets an exchange about it that hasn’t left my head. He’s referred six cases to Division 12 in his career. Four came back with scientific explanations. Two never came back at all, and are still pending. That’s deeply disturbing in the best way. Forget Section 31, man. Division 12 is Star Trek X-Files, and I want that series. Give me that series.
Honest Edges
Now, honest edges, because this channel doesn’t do valentines. The episode earns its refusal to explain, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing mechanically. The ending is really abrupt. One minute we’re in the worst hour of these people’s lives, and all of a sudden everybody’s just beamed back safe, and I’m sitting there going, hold on, was their shuttle just destroyed? Did we account for that? After 40 minutes of that much dread, the exit needed more room than it got. It’s a small thing, but I feel like it’s a real thing.
The Verdict
I’m scoring this one in a way I have never quite had to before: on the merits of how it made me feel. This episode made me as uncomfortable as a good episode makes me comfortable. It worked me over for a full hour, and it did it in a genre I actively avoid, and it did it with craft I could name, shot by shot, choice by choice.
“The Griffin Incident” gets an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. And understand what that number is. That is an 8.5 from a hostile witness.
Star Trek spends 60 years promising that if you scan the dark long enough, it turns into science. This week, a horror director aimed the camera at the dark, left it dark, and the dark looked back.
Drop a comment on the video above and tell me the moment the Griffin actually got you. And be honest, because I told you mine. I sat through body horror for you people. I cover every episode the day it airs, same lens every time, a filmmaker reading the choices.
