A dead civilization. An ancient temple, whispering through stone and sand. And one bright-eyed ensign who looks at a glowing orb and thinks, what’s the worst that can happen?

Today’s Strange New Worlds takes the soft light of nostalgia and bends it, literally bends it, until it’s a little wrong. Through the lens of time, what you see isn’t always what you get. And sometimes what looks back sees you first.

This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3, episode 5, “Through the Lens of Time,” and it’s probably the first episode in a long time that has felt very much like a classic Star Trek episode. For me, anyway. A TOS episode, if you will. It’s one of those times where I feel like they were really trying to emulate, I want to say, better episodes. There’s time travel. Well, there’s no time travel, there’s time stuff, time shenanigans, whatever. There are traps. There’s a temple. It’s that kind of hour.

The Most Spock He’s Been in a Long Time

Of course we open with the whole Korby, Spock, La’an, Chapel of it all, which I guess I could live without. I don’t necessarily know that I needed to have all of them in there, but I’m fine with it. It doesn’t matter.

What I did notice is that this felt the most like Spock I think I’ve seen in a very long time, just in his behavior and the way he’s carrying himself. It could be him trying to cut himself off very coldly from all the stuff he’s had to go through, or it could very much just be his own way of perceiving the situation. But it always seems like he’s a little awkward around Chapel.

“Why are we always so quiet when we need to talk?”

“Is there something to discuss?”

Gamble Was Never Long for This World

Then you get to Gamble. I loved Gamble. I feel so bad for him. He’s a fun character, and the moment the episode started with him doing his log, I went, oh God, he’s not long for this world, is he?

“Junior medical officer’s log, reporting from the USS Enterprise. Enterprise. I will never get tired of saying that.”

Sure enough, spoilers, he wasn’t.

Korby’s Mission and the Horror Side of Star Trek

So they get to go on this expedition, and they sort of hand wave the tech, very Star Trek. The ship sends a deflector thing and boom, it reveals this temple.

The species they’re working with I found interesting, because I feel like in all of Star Trek, if we want to go really alien, we make it a blue species. And it’s a blue species. I appreciated the nuance of those characters and how they’re shown, and I appreciated going deeper into the quote unquote science, or the metaphysical science, of Korby’s whole mission. He’s looking for ancient technology, and they’re definitely seeding what will eventually be Korby’s final destination, for those of you who are TOS fans and follow all that.

I’m really looking forward to talking to Salty about this on Nerd Fights, because I feel like he’s going to have a better take than I do on what the original series did in terms of seeding things. “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, those kinds of things. That darker side, or what I like to call the horror aspects of Star Trek.

And when you see the characters start to problem solve, it feels, again, very Star Trek. La’an’s down there. These people have never joined the Federation, so they’re not letting a whole away team go down. Eventually they end up going into the thing, and it’s funny, because Korby’s got this knife out, he’s about to just cut his hand open, and Chapel stops him.

“Whoa, hold on. Just take a moment before we choose a dramatic option.”

Only to stick her own hand under the thing and give it a sample. And I’m sitting there like, how is that less rash? Whatever.

A Bottle Episode Wearing a Temple

This was essentially a bottle episode. Most of it takes place on the standing set, which is sickbay, or at least a sickbay and a hallway. The rest takes place on what I can only assume is some form of volume, which we know they have, because that’s what makes engineering look so big. They use a volume wall for that. So I’m assuming the parts where they’re moving around the rooms were either green screen or a volume of some sort.

I didn’t mind it. It was very alien, the way they were portraying it. I liked the podium setup.

I also thought it was interesting that they brought Ortegas’s brother along for the ride, and how he worked into the plot of the thing. He sends his little MacGuffin bot, his little hovering robot, into the next chamber, and it sees what looks like a spire, glowing, in the next room. Except there’s a door, and the door is dark on the inside.

Then one of the locals gets vaporized. Why? Remember Chapel doing a little blood thing? Apparently that told the building she’s the one allowed in, and everybody has to go with her. The dude tried to run because he found out what this place was.

Gods Are Just Higher Order Aliens

What they’re speculating is that this is a form of prison for alien creatures. The people who built it were studying quantum destabilization as a way to create immortality, because if you can live in a quantum state, you’re essentially going to be immortal. At least that’s the theory they’re putting forth. Because Trek.

And that’s what I liked about TOS when I finally got a chance to see it years later. I’d been introduced to TNG first. When I started watching TOS, I loved the fact that they took the fantastic and made it scientific. They said, what are gods? Well, gods are higher order aliens. They’re like Q or Trelane or whatever. So in this instance, okay, these people are trying to gain immortality. What’s the thing they’re going to do? Destabilize themselves.

Now, a lot of the MacGuffin-ness of that explanation bordered on TNG style technobabble, which they’ve kind of been falling into a lot this season. It didn’t bother me, but I found myself going, what now?

Three Rooms, One Room

So they figure Chapel’s the one who gave the sample, she’s the one who can go through the door, and we all have to go together. They all go together, and they all get separated.

It’s Chapel and La’an. It’s Uhura and Ortegas’s brother, Beto. And it’s Korby and Spock. They’re all in the same place, out of phase.

It’s funny, this really gave me video game vibes. It felt like an adventure game, like the old Myst games, where you have to do a certain thing with a certain object. They’d already found a plate of some sort and a little ring of some sort in the dead aliens’ packs. That’s also where Gamble picks up this gold ball thing and looks into it, and his eyes are completely vaporized out of his head by this electrical charge, and he gets taken up to the ship.

Down below, the communicators still work, which makes sense, because Beto can still see the video feed from his little hover drone. That’s when he makes the discovery. The drone is still there, and on the feed he sees everyone in the same room. So they find the spot on the panel, they put this thing here, they put the ring there, and they’re all together again.

Before that, Spock had grabbed one of the little visor thingies off the aliens they found dead and managed to look down into the well. It’s this center thing, and it’s full of little glowing balls like the one that hurt Gamble. They conjecture that while it was opening doors through time and quantum whatever, the species must have let something in. And it’s these things.

Something Else Is in the Driver’s Seat

Up on the ship, Gamble is talking, but the doctor has determined his brain is dead. So something else is in the driver’s seat, and that’s the whole emotional roller coaster up there.

They juggle a lot of parts in this one, and what I loved is that it felt supremely like Star Trek. By that I mean a lot of moving parts all coming together, and you know for a fact it’s going to get wrapped up by the end of the episode. Sure enough, it did.

And it ends in such a great way, because this thing that’s got Gamble calls Pelia a Lanthanite child. She’s over a thousand years old. So it’s clearly an ancient thing, and it’s got her scared and worried.

This is one of those times where I start to think to myself, what would the original series have done with the Borg? Seriously, how would they have handled it? Because this is essentially that kind of scenario. They’ve now encountered something ancient, and they’re carrying a warning of some kind as the episode ends.

The Cast, and the Storyline I Can Live Without

The episode’s very well acted. Everybody’s doing a good job. The character distinctions are very good. Obviously Gamble’s now gone, which is sad, because I really liked him.

As for Spock and Chapel breaking up, I don’t care too much about that storyline. A lot of folks on TikTok especially were like, “But I love it.” And that’s fine. I respect that you love it. I’m not going to tell you not to love it. I can probably still live without it regardless. Your mileage may vary.

The Verdict

Strange New Worlds “Through the Lens of Time” lands at an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

Honestly, it was a better episode than last week. Much better, in fact. I liked everything they were doing, more or less. For me it was definitely the culture stuff and the alien stuff and the discovering, all of those things. I’d love it if they would finally just leave Starfleet space officially, but they’re not going on their full-blown five-year mission just yet.

Drop a comment on the video above and tell me what you thought of the episode. Am I wrong? Am I right? Are you coming along for the ride? And are you looking forward to the rumors we’ve been hearing about Star Trek: Year One? We talk about all of this and more on the Nerd Fights show, so go check that out too.