Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 2

Star Trek Strange New Worlds

Season 4 Reaction: Episode 2

The Griffin Incident

Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) makes an appearance, as he, Spock and La'an are in a shuttlecraft on the way back to the Enterprise from a conference when the detect a distress call.  Following it they find the dead, derelict USS Griffin which disappeared 9 years ago.  After sending a message to the Enterprise they beam over to find the ship powerless but gravity still working.  The three examine the ship and find the crew all long dead, the bodies missing.  After reviewing messages left by the ships' security officer reporting the crew acting strangely the three themselves begin acting strangely and hallucinating.  Spock's T'Pring, Kirk sees his brother Sam and hears the crying of his infant son David, and La'an sees what they first believe to be a survivor, later seen as a "ghost" or "zombie" version of USS Griffin security chief Harper.  The dark derelict ship with out crew members trapped onboard and a (possible) baddie on the loose gave me shades of DS9 "Empok Nor" with the body bags/body horror stuff in sickbay being reminiscent of Dr. Crushers scene in TNG "Night Terrors".  Personally I felt that the horror/gore stuff was off putting and a bit much for Trek, the blood, the torture of Spock by T'Pring, the death of Sam (which took me out of it since we know that Sam Kirk dies on Deneva in TOS "Operation Annihilate").  I also felt that the horror was a more that a little bit drawn out, although a decent amount of time was spent at the end dealing with the emotional aftermath for Kirk, Spock and La'an.  One big negative for me was not getting a resolution for the events that occurred or the fate of the crew on the Griffin, the ship and whatever was going on with it turned over to Section 12 so the Enterprise can wipe their hands of it.  Very, very un-Star Trek.  One plus for the episode is that the hallucinations gave us some nice little character lore drops (Spock and T'Pring, Kirk and Sam, Sam's family, David and Carol Marcus).  Overall interesting: yes, good: yes, would I watch it again: probably no, was this episode really necessary: no.