Strange New Worlds Review: Orders Of Magnitude

Spoilers below

This week, Strange New Worlds takes a break from its seven-episode streak of playing around in other people's sandboxes. It's an odd decision, insofar as you'd think, once the idea was raised of doing a season of genre-hopping/gimmick-nicking (depending on your viewpoint), you'd want to fully follow through on it.

One way to think about this though is that Strange New Worlds is already inhabiting another show's world, and has been all along. This isn't news; it's the explicit point. Deep Space Nine aimed to expand the galaxy we saw in The Next Generation. Strange New Worlds is focussed on trying to keep itself inside the boundaries of The Original Series.

This has commonly been a problem for the show. One of the reasons I didn't like "A Case Of Chiaoscuro" was the extent to which it felt like a retelling of "Errand Of Mercy", with its most interesting aspects removed. This week's episode similarly feels like an equally clear riff on "The Doomsday Machine" - a senior Starfleet officer becomes consumed with vengeance to the point where he's risking innocent lives, and Kirk has to stop him. This week, the genre we're visiting is TOS itself.

The good news is that "Orders Of Magnitude", unlike "...Chiaoscuro", improves upon the Kirk-era story it most clearly wants to pay homage to ("A Taste Of Armageddon" and "City On The Edge Of Forever" are also in the mix). The decision to switch those in danger from the Enterprise crew to 5,231 people we've never met allows for an exploration of the maths of command, This is so fundamental to the episode that it inspires its very title: as well as General Order 24 being literally an order of great magnitude, in the sense of power and weight, the central dilemma here is whether it can be justifiable to murder Y people in order to destroy a ship responsible for 1000Y deaths, and which may be responsible for 1000Y more if not destroyed now. That's a difference of three orders of magnitude.

There are, of course, no ways to argue purely from the numbers. Picard points this out from one direction in insurrection - "how many people does it take, Admiral, before it becomes wrong" - and DS9's "Progress" looks at it from the other side - there's just no way to accept one farmer's refusal to leave his home should stop the process which will keep hundreds of thousands of people warm during the coming winter. Accordingly, "...Magnitude" moves on from talking about the underlying numbers, and considers instead how people make their peace with the cost to others their decisions incur.

"Progress" is a useful point of comparison, actually; key to that episode is Kira refusing to make the trade abstract. She gets to know the man she's been told to make homeless, and then burns his house herself. Not as a way to absolve herself of what's she's doing, but as a way to recognise such absolution doesn't exist. Mullibok may or may not come to forgive her for what she's done, but that isn't the point. The point is she's not spinning a story or giving a speech aimed at salving her own conscience.

Reeger, in contrast, is clearly focussed on finding the magic words which will cast a spell of forgiveness over the decision to murder over five thousand people. His issue with Kirk is obviously complicated by what happened on the Constitution, but much of the friction here stems from the fact Jim is operating as the admiral's conscience. Reeger is trying to persuade himself just as much as he is Kirk, and it isn't working. You can tell this by how the focus of his argument keeps shifting - is this a trolley problem with a thousand times as many people on one track or the other, or is the argument that the people on the track you want to switch to might actually have it coming to them? Is this about protecting future victims, or delivering "justice" to past ones, or is it actually just about scaring the enemy into never attacking the Federation again?

All of this has obvious political valence, of course. "The Doomsday Machine" was about how vengeance can get you and your people killed; what if Moby Dick could eat a planet? "Orders Of Magnitude" is about how military leaders justify civilian casualties during wartime, and in particular, how those justifications constantly shift to match the moment's rhetorical needs. We all know the claims: they're ultimately saving lives, the people we're killing might actually be allied with the enemy, a strong response is needed to show our resolve, etc. etc. etc. There's no single coherent justification for the slaughter of innocents, just a series of deflections to pick through as an when needed. The only constant element in the shifting rationalisations is that "There's no other way" - Ortegas even asks for confirmation of that fact explicitly, to help her feel better about participating in what's fairly clearly a war crime.

It's for this reason, I think, that the episode ends with the revelation that someone had drugged Reeger into having his meltdown. This is an absolutely fascinating addition to the episode, partly because at first blush, it seems wholly unnecessary. Reeger's breakdown over Kirk's nakedly mutinous actions and his public revealing of Reeger's shameful secret certainly seems enough dramaturgical justification for the admiral to lose control, especially given the build-up. But the fact we learn his breakdown was chemically induced is important, because it shows us Kirk knew the simple facts of what Reeger had done and was about to do wouldn't be enough to sway the rest of the crew. The story Reeger had spun had worked too well, and Kirk needed his own story to beat it. This isn't about right and wrong - Reeger clearly is wrong, and everyone knows it. This is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as people.

This is all, when you think about it, an absolutely stunning indictment of Starfleet. The implication from Kirk's chat with M'Benga is the fleet has a method of removing a commanding officer who is medically compromised, but no way of dealing with one who is ordering a war crime while of (seemingly) sound mind. Clearly no-one is comfortable with what Reeger is demanding, but equally clearly, they all have a way of justifying their participation. Ortegas, as mentioned, is telling herself there's no other choice. Scotty is assuming that Reeger has to be bluffing [1]. La'An is using her recent crisis of confidence as an excuse to just focus on doing her job, and not thinking about any of the consequences of what that job entails. No-one bar Kirk is prepared to do anything but look sad. They are all, quite literally, just following orders.

It's this element of the A-plot that keeps it from being as good as it could have been, I think. There's too much weight to the argument that this is an episode about how Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise and teaches the crew how to deal with being ordered to do the indefensible. Still, that's a minor flaw, and particularly given how much of this season I've struggled with, I'm not inclined to pick at it too deeply. Particularly as the script genuinely works hard to make Reeger's decisions at each point tactically justifiable - not bulletproof, but not obviously flawed enough for Kirk to be clearly tear down any individual aspect. To return to the broader theme, Kirk is trying to make a moral argument, but the structure of Starfleet is such that he's having to fight over tactics. The result is he can't help but make himself look like the problem (Reeger manoeuvring him into a position where he either has to let his objections drop or express doubt in La'An's abilities is a particularly deft move). Kirk is made to look like he wants to make this about himself.

And making it about yourself is part of the problem here. This is why Kira refused to do that very thing in "Progress", and why Kirk starts his case against Reeger with the fact he lost family in the Vaardan attack, rather than the revelation that the admiral falsified logs to take the credit for a victory actually won by Jim's father. This is also reflected in the episode's B-plot, which I haven't talked about at all yet. I don't think many viewers will have been surprised by the fact Uhura was planning to double-cross the Andorian pirates all along, but to the extent the possibility of her disobeying orders is at all plausible, it's because she's allowing her feelings of responsibility for A'Sha to take precedence over her duty. She's letting it become about herself. And yes, it's a trick, but Uhura isn't being wholly dishonest. She really has let herself conclude that A'Sha's future is hers to mould, and that a decision she doesn't want to A'Sha to take represents her own failure when that decision is made.

In this sense, both plots are pulling in the same direction - things go wrong when you make it about yourself. The first sign things are going to wrong with Reeger in command is when he takes it personally that Kirk asked a question about his orders. Uhura pretends to have the same problem (or more accurately, pretends the problem is an order of magnitude bigger than it actually is) in order to effect an escape. The away team's dilemma parallels the A-plot more broadly, too. Pike and Una clearly recognise what Uhura is up to (it's possible the "I remembered my training" line is meant to imply Pike actually gave her the idea). They're not accepting a situation in which they sacrifice A'Sha to save people in the future, so they take a risk. This, ultimately, is what Reeger refuses to do. Kirk and Spock both offer alternative plans that Reeger judges might not succeed, insisting on General Order 24 as being the only certain plan. As it happens, this is asinine - they have no idea where the alien ship is, and as soon as they open fire that ship will choose to leave over being obliterated. Reeger clearly hasn't considered this, though; for him, the plan which is most likely to destroy the ship that attacked Vaardan must automatically be the best plan. For the away team, the best plan is defined as one in which nobody but the actual enemy has to die.

And if it feels like that's entirely bloody obvious, I'll remind you of what I said earlier - this has clear parallels to the crimes we see committed apparently endlessly. It's also not always been so well-explored in Trek as it is here. Discovery tried a similar plot of "shall we kill billions of civilians to end the Klingon War" at the end of its first season, and just ended up making everyone look like monsters (the implication that some of the failure to challenge Reeger here comes from lingering trauma from the Klingon War is therefore additionally interesting). We could also point to "Valles Marineris", in which Pike encounters a trolley problem which is, ironically, orders of magnitude bigger than that of "Orders Of Magnitude", and makes entirely the wrong choice.

Not only is this one of the season's strongest episodes, then, it's long-overdue evidence that the show can still function during Paramount's fascist period. It's also a reminder of how far the franchise, and television has come; we get an updated and more thoughtful remix of "The Doomsday Machine", and a thematically coherent B-plot, and some nice bonding between the Kirks - a much better use of Paul Wesley's Jim than pairing him with either Spock or La'An, I think. There's also a nice, if brief, consideration of how worklplace bullies operate, by being so pleasant to those they've not selected as their targets, their targets feel unable to speak up about how they're being treated. "Orders Of Magnitude" is absolutely stuffed as an episode, and manages to make it all work in a way the show seemed to have forgotten how to as recently as "Off-Hour". This episode had to come later in the series for A'Sha and M'Benga's stories here to work, but leaving that aside, using this episode as the season opener might well have given the season in general something of a boost.

Still, we are where we are. Two great episodes in a row, and this season sticking the landing now looks like a challenge, rather than an impossibility. We boldly continue.

[1] There's doubtless going to be a lot of chat about how this episode fits in with "A Taste Of Armageddon", the story which introduces General Order 24. I've argued previously that I think Kirk was bluffing when he gives that order, and that Scotty must have known he was bluffing. I am very much taking their conversation here as being an "I told you so" moment.

Ordering

1. Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass 2. Orders Of Magnitude

3. The Griffin Incident

4. Level-Five Transporter Accident 5. Off-Hour 6. Human Best Friend

7. Valles Marineris

8. A Case Of Chiaoscuro