Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Off-Hour" | Season 4, Episode 6

There’s a podcast I listen to regularly called It’s Christmastown; the focus is Hallmark movies, and the two gentlemen hosts (Jeb Lund and David Roth), along with the occasional guest, go through “movies made for the gentlest people” with wit, a critical eye, and a surprisingly empathetic understanding of why these movies are made in the first place. One of the ‘cast’s segments, “Over-determined,” is about finding the moments in each movie (few of which are scripted with much care) where the writer or writers decide it’s necessary to make a character motivation or moral as obvious as possible, lest the audience (drunk on egg-nog, presumably) miss the point.

I was thinking about that watching “Off-Hour,” a disaster episode that works best when people are suffering and not saying much. The Enterprise is thrown into a wormhole (or something) and has a limited time to escape it; we check in on every major character throughout the hour (Kirk is elsewhere for once), but the emotional focus is on Scotty, who has to learn to love the ship, and Nurse Chapel, who’s stuck in Sick Bay with a bisected M. Benga. On the whole, I thought this was decent, and I appreciated the episode’s willingness to push everyone to their apparent limits and beyond. 

Still, this is Strange New Worlds, and we are past the point of having unadulterated nice things. The reason I brought up my friends’ podcast (besides it being a fun time) is that there are multiple lines throughout “Off-Hour” that struck me as being prime candidates for the “Over-determined” award in a way I found simultaneously distracting and condescending. If you want character beats to land, you have to do the work to establish them, and that work isn’t simply “having the character say the thing out loud.”