Strange New Worlds Review: The Griffin Incident

Spoilers below

We return once more to the Scary Place.

I've talked a few times about how Trek should - and should not - work in this mode. The short version of my position is that the Scary Place can work very well, so long as its understood as an abberation - something that can happen between instances of the glory and wonder of the galaxy, rather than its base state.

"The Griffin Incident", within the broader context of Strange New Worlds, fits in just fine with this theory. Pike's crew has seen enough of what makes the Alpha Quadrant beautiful and, well, strange, for it to be able to sustain even this, a straight-up horror film. The episode makes savvy use of the shorthand a television series allows; condensing the first act of a ghost ship movie into the opening minutes, allowing the rest to play out as it would on the big screen. Trek has played around with horror tropes many times before ("Night Terrors", "Impulse", last season's "Shuttle To Kenfori"), but this perhaps the closest the franchise has come to letting the horror take full reign. For all that it's fun to see Gia Sandhu as T'Pring once again, and for all we know where the Carol and David subplot will eventually go, it would take extremely little rewriting of this script to turn it into something like Ghost Ship or (the most obvious antecedent) Event Horizon.

Whether this is palatable to the viewer will likely depend on how they feel about horror films in general. One can make the case that the horror averse will find this a bit much (the finger scene in particular), and the horror seeking will find this not quite enough. "The Griffin Incident" is a very well-realised horror film, but it's not an even remotely original one. The only surprise here for the genre aficionado is that these tropes exist in a Trek episode at all.

For me personally, that's enough. Particularly after all the ways in which the last season of the show bounced upon being silly in its hyperbolic melodrama and just silly full stop, it's nice to see an episode which wholly nails a dark tone. It's obvious immediately that the away team aren't real, but there's still enough questions about what's really going on to keep matters interesting. I once said that my favourite horror mode is an experience akin to trying to solve a jigsaw on a rollercoaster with a skeleton in the seat next to me, and "The Griffin Incident" conjures precisely that feeling.

The episode loses steam in its last ten minutes. The rescue, while obviously inevitable, feels like it happens a little too early, and we're pointedly refused an explanation as to what was actually going on. I don't just mean in the sense of there being no theory as to how Harper (or whoever it was) was haunting USS Griffin - although I know a lot of viewers will be annoyed by that, and I can sympathise. For me, though, what's lacking is an explanation as to why. La'An's theory that this was all about family seems to me clearly incomplete; this was about the fear of letting down one's family, and in so doing losing them. This is both not really consistently applied during the episode (why did the vision of T'Pring take full credit for the collapse of "her" relationship with Spock?), it doesn't have any pay off, beyond the second episode in a row of La'An worrying biology is destiny.

Still, much better horror films have had much worse pay-offs than "The Griffin Incident". And I've got to give the episode credit for putting these three characters in first a shuttle craft and then a metaphorical pressure cooker and almost wholly avoiding a spiky love triangle - all stories like that give you in the end is a trio of pricks. If it continues to be frustrating how much this show is willing to sideline almost its entire main cast whenever Paul Wesley happens to be available, then at least this time they got a decent yarn out of it.

Right now, that's going to have to be enough.

Ordering

1. The Griffin Incident

2. Valles Marineris