Strange New Worlds Review: Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass

By the Prophets, it feels good to wholly enjoy an episode of Strange New Worlds again.

Spoilers below

This is possibly the best installment of the show since "A Space Adventure Hour". There's a way in which this realisation is a little depressing, not just because that episode was over a season ago, but just because both stories work by deliberately parodying both the show and its franchise. It's never great news when a show reaches the point where it can only entertain through making fun of itself (cf. The X Files). It's also true that "Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass" has its effect somewhat muted by it being the third comedy episode this season, and because working in soap opera mode seems less notable in the context of a season-long exercise in visiting other genres.

While all that is true, though, I don't want to linger on any of that here. The headlne here is that this is the first time this season's approach has fully and wonderfully clicked. Not merely because of how smartly the production standards of TV soaps are adopted here - "The Griffin Incident" was just as competently constructed, and for all my problems with "A Case Of Chiaoscuro", the planet-side scenes there weren't just the standard SNW production style filmed in black and white. The choice of genre here is both inspired, and used to say something genuinely interesting.

It's a fun coincidence that this episode came out just two days after I highlighted my old essay on "Skin Of Evil", as part of this blog's 10th anniversary celebration. One of the points I make there is that Tasha Yar's sudden death feels much more like a soap opera beat than something you might expect to see in Trek. But then, as I say in that post, and as many others have said before me, the barrier between Trek and soap opera has always been chroniton-thin. For all Trelane's willingness to break the fourth wall here, it's the knocking through into the world of soap opera that distinguishes this episode, precisely because of how much it doesn't distinguish it. This week's sidestep into a different genre turns out to be the smallest movement possible.

Because of course Trek is a soap opera, as "Chronitons...." makes clear. The delightful idea to have Ethan Peck play Sybok as an evil twin works in part because Peck does it so incredibly well (he absolutely nails the brief, in that he's clearly not Sybok but La'An's idea of Sybok), but it also highlights how ridiculous it was for Spock to have a secret brother we never learn about until the fifth film building on three years of television. It's an absurd development, though little more absurd than us learning in Wrath Of Khan that Kirk has an adult son he'd just never mentioned before. Trek has been walking the territory of the soap opera for over half a century at this point.

And it's not just the surprise relatives. Much is made here of the silliness of a "living heart transplant", but focussing a subplot on Spock's heart very deliberately reminds the viewer of the schlocky, melodramatic nonsense of "Spock's Brain". The wonderful "I'm into my enemy" steaminess aboard La'An's "shuttle" recalls Michael and Ash, Chakotay and Seska, and mirror universe Sisko and Kira at the very least, as well as the planned storyline for DS9 in which it would be reveaed Kira and Dukat were ex-lovers (nixed - incredibly sensibly - by Nana Visitor, so that it became her mother who'd secretly been Dukat's Bajoran lover instead). For all the fun here with lighting and music, camera angles and zooms, scenery chewing and stares offscreen, and borrowing Deidre Hall from her fifty (!) year stint on Days Of Our Lives, what makes the episode work isn't what's been changed, it's what has basically remained the same.

The result is an episode that reads as a rebuttal of those who don't see Trek as soap, and are desperate that it be the hard sci-fi series as originally conceived by Roddenberry. The fact they'd lost this war by the second season of TOS at the absolute latest (what was Pon Farr but an excuse for Spock to speed-run a soap opera romance plot?) never seems to bother such people. For the rest of us, Trelane's thesis - that Star Trek is a show in which our characters never have time to consider their feelings because they're too busy having, well, space adventure hours - is obviously ridiculous. It's literally a child's view of what the show is about.

This is made clear by the way "... Hourglass" handles Pike. Part of the episode's savviness lies in revealing what's happening and why extremely quickly. The mystery here isn't why the Enterprise is in a soap opera - it always was anyway. The mystery is why Pike isn't in the same soap opera as anyone else. The answer ultimately turns out to be because he's deliberately trying to do what Trelane thinks everyone is doing; using his job to crowd out thoughts about anything else. There's nothing wrong with the Enterprise crew; it's within Pike that the actual problem lies.

I mentioned last week how much of this season concerns itself with overwork and exhaustion, and here we see at least part of what this has been leading to. As hinted all the way back in the season premier, Pike has been pushing the Enterprise as hard as he can because he can't face taking time to process the loss of a family that didn't exist in what he considers "reality". Everything else collapses into a soap opera with ease, because that's already the mode the show was operating in, but Pike resists the change because he's trying to keep within the story format the anti-soapers want Strange New Worlds to have.

And it isn't working. It can't work. It simply isn't what Trek is. It certainly shouldn't be what we want Trek to be. Dr Chivers (who Hall plays with comparative restraint throughout, further underlining how thin the membrane is between this episode and every other episode) makes the point plainly when she discusses Pike's discomfort with being in a soap opera. First she notes that he's already experienced time-travel, Klingon zombies, and his partner ascending to a new plane of existence, and that none of those are fundamentally more sensible or "real" than the behaviour his crew are exhibiting. Then though she gets to her main point: "The search for emotional truth and scientific truth are the same".

And there we go. That's Trek, the whole of this ludicrous and thrilling and maddening and beautiful and gleefully shallow and impossibly deep franchise. Starfleet isn't just exploring space. It's exploring ourselves. You can demand only the former matters, you can yell about how any episode which doesn't nod at some scientific explanation, however self-evidently fucking ridiculous, is "betraying" Trek (some of the takes I've read on "The Griffin Incident" in particular are downright embarrassing), but this simple truth remains. Science is not the only lens through which to view the world, and insisting it is simply means leaving yourself blind to everything else.

There's so much more to say on this, but this is a review, not an episode essay. Perhaps the best way to summarise my impression of "Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass" is that this is the first episode this season which I'm actually looking forward to actually writing up properly, thirty years or so from now.. It does exactly what a genre swap should do, which is both to celebrate the place you're visiting, and to remind you throughout why you loved where you were in the first place.

For the first time this season, the show stops being Trek in a way that lets it be more Trek than ever.

Ordering

1. Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass

2. The Griffin Incident

3. Level-Five Transporter Accident

4. Off-Hour 5. Human Best Friend

6. Valles Marineris

7. A Case Of Chiaoscuro