Strange New Worlds Review: A Case Of Chiaoscuro

Spoilers below

We've already identified the extent to which this season of SNW is using genre-hopping as a kind of cheat-code for ensuring each episode has its own distinctiveness. As I said last week, I'm not necessarily opposed to this approaching. Including TAS (as we always do around here), this is the fiftieth season of Trek to be broadcast; seeing how many ways one can tell a story from this universe while visiting someone else's strikes me as a perfectly reasonable way to spend 2% of the franchise's time.

With "A Case Of Chiaoscuro", though, we run into problems. A lot of people didn't like "The Griffin Incident", arguing Trek shouldn't do straight up supernatural horror. Even more were frustrated with the broad stoner comedy of "Human Best Friend". But both episodes wholly committed to the bit; you might not have liked what they were doing, but it at least was clear what was being done for us to like or not like.

This week's episode feels different. I don't know if this is my fault for not having seen enough movies from the 40s and 50s, but I can't actually figure out what "... Chiaoscuro" is actually trying to work as. The obvious answer here is Casablanca - indeed its so obvious that Uhura quotes the film early on. But Casablanca is funny, a delight to watch, a joyous refusal by its central characters to let the occupying Nazis be the only concern in their lives. "...Chiaoscuro" has none of that sense of defiant pleasure. Kor as played by John Colicos would have fit perfectly in Casablanca - he was clearly dangerous as hell, but he was also overwhelmingly charismatic and sharp-tongued. Demore Barnes' Kor has the occasional flash of his predecessor's murderous joie de vivre, but he's mostly played straight, to the point where it's not clear why he's being used, beyond the episode's broader similarities to "Errand Of Mercy".

Nor does the episode work along the lines of film noir, which seems closer to having the energy the episode wants to capture. Identities are coopted, loyalties are shifted, and everyone has a secret. M'Benga at least seems a good fit here; I'm never sure quite how I feel about the idea of a Starfleet doctor who keeps ending up in situations where he sadly has to kill a whole bunch of people, but it's at least interesting to explore, and Babs Olusanmokun is clearly relishing the material.

But the fact M'Benga just about fits within a noir story (broadly defined) just highlights how much Una and Uhura don't. Noir doesn't really go in for obvious heroes; everyone is compromised to one extent or the other, and the question is always whether the poor schmuck who gets themselves over their heads has enough wit and fibre to get back out. Attempting to liberate a city or struggling to tell the most basic lies doesn't fit into that schema at all.

Maybe I'm wrong, of course. As I say, I haven't really watched enough films from the era SNW is referencing to be all that confident I'm getting this right. But that's a problem of its own, surely? If Trek wants to dabble in other genres, it has to make sure it's making it clear what genre's rules we're playing by. Otherwise, what's the point? And all I really got from this episode was "Let's do the kind of things you'd see in a black and white movie".

There's one short stretch of the episode that crystallised all this. I really like the idea of a Klingon early-warning system that plays notes outside of their hearing range. It would be easy to detect such a thing technologically, of course, but first the Klingons would have to imagine the local population might think of something like that, and clearly the thought hasn't occurred (more of this kind of colonial self-defeating smugness when I cover "Memento Mori" next year). But the episode makes a thing of how the system now has wires that go to Nevette's office, to save our heroes having to reveal they don't know where that office is. Once they get to the office - and remember this is a culture that is still using wires to transmit sound - we find a computer deliberately made to sound like it's from the 90s/00s, a cyrogenic pod, and a holo-generator. 20th, 21st and 23rd century tech are all crowded together for the sake of keeping the episode running, creating a mishmash that genuinely ignored me more than the fact the head of the Resistance apparently kept her entire plan on an unencrypted chip (also out of place with the technology elsewhere), containing an autorunning Powerpoint presentation.

But that's just par for the course here. Everything that happens here does so to keep the train running. A D7 cruiser appears out of nowhere, forcing Una's shuttle to land (how fortunate the Klingon sensors are even more ludicrously shitty than the shuttles, though the episode does give a brief justification for all this later). Una happens to look like the local resistance leader - an extremely aggravating contrivance television grew out of decades ago - so that she, M'Benga and Uhura can immediately be plugged into a tale of wartime resistance. It's recognisable as narrative shorthand, sure, and I can head-canon just about everything but Una looking so much like Nevette she can fool facial recognition software that this 1940s bar apparently has. But the more strained and implausible your set up, the better the pay-off needs to be to justify the effort needed to get there.

And "A Case Of Chiaoscuro" doesn't succeed in that justification. Not even close. It's just a basic tale of amateur espionage and sabotage. The A-plot makes a big thing about how Una excels at impersonating a double agent because she's so used to hiding her true self, but the conclusion we're left with isn't that Number One is an incredibly adept manipulator, but that the Klingons and their collaborators are all idiots (why in particular weren't Una and M'Benga picked up when they left the line for showing identification, just after the woman they were with was arrested?). There's a brief attempt to turn this into a debate about regulations versus morality (also tying into the B-plot, which appears to exist solely because a noir film should probably involve some detective work), but this falls flat both, because here's no sense of why helping the locals would violate regulations (Kirk and Spock try exactly the same thing in "Errand Of Mercy"), and because there's no-one on this show it makes less sense to prioritise following rules over saving lives than Dr Joseph M'Benga, as this very episode reminds us.

A potentially interesting exercise for this season (at least so far) is to figure out when during the development of an episode the genre/IP it would borrow from was settled on. I'd wager it was more or less present from the beginning for "The Griffin Incident " and "Human Best Friend", and could have come in at various points for "Valle Marineris", depending on whether the time-travel idea came before or after deciding to do a Disney-era Who episode. With "...Chiaoscuro", it feels like an afterthought; like this episode was originally just going to be a straightforward riff on "Errand Of Mercy" before someone realised the plot had faint Casablanca vibes, and went from there.

And hey, this wouldn't have been a good episode without the on its own, for the reasons given. Something needed doing. But trying to overlay "40s/50s cinema" on top just makes things worse, because now rather than fixing the problems with the script, you've created a whole bunch more. You're now not functioning as an interesting twist on a classic episode or as an exercise in genre-hopping. You've doubled your criteria failure states, and hitting each and every one.

If there's cause for hope here, it's that this is the first episode of this season which actually feels like a Trek story. Not, you know, a good one, but there's a recognition here that you can't just keep visiting other story forms and hope for the best. Even there, though, it's tough not to worry that when the show remembers the game its supposed to be playing, it immediately drops the ball.

The first three episodes of this season suggested the show isn't sure it wants to tell Trek stories anymore. "A Case Of Chiaoscuro" suggests that it can't.

Ordering

1. The Griffin Incident

2. Human Best Friend

3. Valles Marineris

4. A Case Of Chiaoscuro