Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 5 Review — Through the Lens of Time

This Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review contains spoilers for season 3 episode 5.

While Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a series that’s largely known for its sunny optimism, hopeful determination, and communal can-do spirit, it’s also a show that can get pretty darn dark when it wants to. From war stories that reveal hidden emotional traumas to grim alternate realities that explore bleak possible futures, the show has told stories about everything from child sacrifice and survivor’s guilt to PTSD and murder. 

“Through the Lens of Time” is another surprisingly dark installment, a story of discovery that takes a hard swerve into a meditation on the nature of evil and what it truly might mean for a civilization to live forever, if only because of the inevitable horrors you’re likely to encounter along the way. Perhaps it’s that this episode arrives fairly closely on the heels of Doctor Who installment “The Well,” another deeply creepy episode from a sci-fi elder statesman that also explored the threat of an unseen, unfathomable, and almost unnameable evil, but its overall vibe is one of harsh, uncomfortable foreboding. (Maybe the real lesson here is that we should immediately stop trying to imprison terrifying monsters we don’t understand in bottomless pits and losing the keys. Just a suggestion!)

The hour begins innocuously enough, a pleasant reminder that Star Trek is, at its heart, a story about exploration and the very specific nerdy thrill of acquiring knowledge. “Through the Lens of Time” is an hour that takes the whole “seek out new life and new civilizations” part of the show’s mission statement very seriously, sending the Enterprise crew to help Chapel’s new boyfriend Roger Korby investigate a magnetic anomaly that indicates the presence of ancient advanced technology. Located on a planet populated by an unfamiliar species the pair believe are descendants of a ancient civilization that claims to have achieved immortality via some sort of quantum transference, both are champing at the bit to learn more about whether that’s possible.

Much of this exposition throughout this hour is little more than technobabble-style gobbledygook, but it all ties in neatly with Korby’s established interest in molecular memory and corporeal transference (foreshadowing the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of,” where he puts his consciousness in an android). Chapel gets to take point on leading the landing party, which is immensely satisfying for those of us who’ve been longing to see her get the chance to do more than be M’Benga’s assistant or Spock’s love interest. She and Korby are surprisingly sweet together, and the gang almost immediately turns up some ancient ruins that promise potential history-changing discoveries ahead. But what they find there is darker than anyone (including us) likely expected. (Spoiler alert: It’s ancient monsters. Or the devil. Or parasitic hitchhikers, depending on which potential translation of alien text you choose to believe.)

Things almost immediately go south: A pile of dead bodies, a mysterious exploding orb that injures the cheerfully adorable Ensign Gamble, and a booby-trapped exit mean that suddenly everyone’s more concerned with survival than scientific advancement. The layered reality of the ruined temple is strangely and beautifully rendered, a fascinating, shifting setting that somehow resembles both a library and a prison, operating on multiple dimensional planes at once and offering the crew repeated brain-bending puzzles to solve. (Paradoxes! Inverted causality! Blood-based DNA locks! Repeated appearances of alien words that translate to some version of “parasitic devil monster”!) While Chapel, La’an, Uhura, Spock, Korby, and Ortegas’s little brother Beto attempt to traverse layered realities that technically exist in the same room, M’Benga is facing his own medical impossibilty: The newly blinded Gamble is technically dead, but somehow also seemingly very much alive, and possibly carrying a malevolent force inside him.

These are all tropes we’ve seen throughout sci-fi: Dangerous alien parasites, unspeakable evil hidden in nightmare prisons that double as holy sites after enough time passes, impossible choices about who and what to save. Yet, “Through the Lens of Time” refuses to offer any easy answers about what the evil known as the “Vezda” truly is. That it remains distinctly and threateningly other is a big part of the reason it’s so simultaneously disturbing and fascinating. 

We know its really old—even to Pelia, whose species is incredibly long lived, it seems ancient. It’s manipulative, purposefully cruel, and capable of accessing the memories of those it possesses/infects. Plus, whatever the Vezda is also definitely has some sort of long-standing historical beef with the Gorn, if the unexpected sickbay face off between Gamble and Captain Batel is anything to go by, when both humans are seemingly taken over by the eldritch horrors currently sharing their bodies.But what it wants is murkier, outside of the freedom to destroy at its leisure. 

So much of the Strange New Worlds crew has some degree of plot armor that it can sometimes be difficult to give these stories real stakes. We know Pike’s future—but we also know it isn’t here yet. Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and Chapel all have The Original Series waiting for them. Even Korby has a predetermined future that means he’s going to get out of this mess just fine. No matter how anxious we may feel when we’re watching our faves face danger, we know that the bulk of them are going to make it out of whatever scrape they’re in unscathed. On some level, characters like the charmingly effusive Gamble are essentially introduced to be potential canon fodder. But it doesn’t mean that his death—which is particularly grisly and horrible—is any less emotionally devastating. (It also doesn’t help that M’Benga has been through it over the course of this show, and it really seems downright mean to punish him for caring about someone again.) 

Gamble’s death feels particularly murky and uncomfortable, because it’s not entirely clear when it occurred. Was the bubbly young man gone from the moment the Vezda entered his body or did some element of his consciousness remain until Pelia shot him? The tragedy of it all is, of course, that we’ll never know. (And the hint that similar questions could be asked of Batel, who is also carrying a similar ancient and malevolent force inside her, is almost equally unsettling, but that appears to be a story for another day.) Of course, the episode also leaves the door open for the Vezda to return—that transporter pattern buffer can surely only hold so much! 

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.