Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "The Griffin Incident" | Season 4, Episode 2

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Ah, space madness. Are there any sweeter words in the English language? (“Cellar door” is fine and all, but you can’t really build a story out of it. At least, not just that.) After the time-jumping, world-destroying adventures of the season 4 premiere, “The Griffin Incident” narrows its focus, spending the majority of its running time following La’an, Spock, and Kirk as they navigate what turns out to be, quite literally, a ghost ship. It’s an episode that takes a little while to get going, and one that’s not without its flaws; however, it won me over by the end with its commitment to its central ideas, and its willingness to go far darker than I was expecting.

I’m going to deal with my issues with the script first, because I want to get them out of the way. The biggest one is one I’ve had with a lot of modern Trek: this is a fantasy story with some sci-fi tropes thrown in for cover. We never get any explanation for what’s going on aboard the Griffin, a Starfleet ship that disappeared a decade ago, or what, exactly, is driving the mental breakdowns that each of our heroes experience in turn. When it comes times for answers, we get hand-waves, Captain Pike telling ghost stories, and not much else.

There are times when this is an effective answer to a story question, but it feels a bit lazy here, mostly because the show makes so little effort in general to explain things that the lack of an actual root cause here feels less like an outlier and more like the standard routine. You can do “The universe has its mysteries!” stories maybe once a season before it starts to feel like a cop-out, and while this season has only just begun, I’ve seen enough of the show at this point to know that this isn’t the last time we’ll get a shrug instead of some made-up science.