Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 Review — The Griffin Incident 

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4, episode 2

Star Trek isn’t necessarily the first franchise you think of when it comes to scary stories to tell in the dark. But while horror is not necessarily a well that its series go to all that often, when Trek embraces the genre, it does so in fairly memorable fashion. From Star Trek: The Next Generation classics like “Night Terrors” and “Genesis” to Star Trek: Voyager’s “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “Empok Nor,” the franchise has repeatedly proven that space can be a uniquely dark and frightening place. Rarely has that been more true than in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ “The Griffin Incident,” an hour that features everything from jump scares and steadily creeping madness to disturbing hallucinations and (a lot of) body horror. It is not an episode for the faint of heart, but it’s another shining example of the fearless way that this show plays with genre and tone on a week-by-week basis.

To be clear, this hour isn’t Strange New Worlds’s foray into horror. Season 1 episode “All Those Who Wander” is a sort of Alien vs. Predator-themed bottle episode, with literal monsters (a.k.a. The Gorn) lurking in dark corners. “The Griffin Incident” is more old-fashioned nightmare fuel, as our protagonists find themselves trapped in a familiar yet completely alien location where they ultimately can’t trust each other or their own minds. The episode’s many twists mean viewers can never entirely believe what they’re seeing either, and the fact that it’s so willing not to offer any concrete answers is just part of its overall charm. 

“The Griffin Incident” is something of a genre spin on the real-life mystery of the infamous ghost ship, the Mary Celeste, which was discovered adrift near the Azores in 1872 with all the crew’s personal belongings, cargo, and provisions intact, but not a soul aboard and no sign of what happened to them. Here, the U.S.S. Griffin, a starship that was presumed lost for nearly a decade, is rediscovered in an uncharted region of space by La’an, Spock, and James Kirk on the way home from a leadership retreat. The gang notifies the Enterprise but boards the ship themselves to look for signs of what happened to the ship’s 300+ crew members, only to discover that almost everything is, as La’an puts it, “as if they’d all stepped out for a coffee break.” It’s precisely the kind of eerie setting in which strange things are almost guaranteed to happen. Which, of course, they do. Fairly immediately. 

The ghost — or something like a ghost, at any rate — of the ship’s Chief Security Officer roams the Griffin’s halls. A locked and barricaded door bears mysterious phaser scorches. Did the CSO Rose Harper go crazy and murder her shipmates by transporting them straight into the vacuum of space? Or did the Griffin’s crew somehow succumb to a kind of spiraling madness as the ship’s reports of increasingly bizarre behavior — violent outbursts, incidents of self-harm — indicate? Your guess is as good as mine.

The episode’s uber-creepy atmosphere is top-notch throughout: Every scene is claustrophobic, dimly lit, and suffocating, full of strange sounds and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shadowy figures that drift in and out of a character’s periphery. Inexplicable events keep happening: a mayday beacon that seems to have launched out of nowhere, the ship’s power impossibly working once again even though it shouldn’t, computers and communications equipment that glitch in and out at random. And that’s before everyone seems to start hallucinating. 

“The Griffin Incident” is full of striking and disturbing imagery. Spock, trapped in the ship’s med bay and surrounded by body bags that ooze and drip with blood, once again wrestles with his conflicting human and Vulcan sides in an extremely visceral and violent way. (Reader, I gasped when I realized he wasn’t imagining the self-mutilation and body horror of it all.) La’an begins to see herself in the ship’s video logs in Rose Harper’s place. And Kirk is trailed by haunting sounds of a seemingly lost child crying, even within the very bowels of the ship. This is all another example of the smart way that Strange New Worlds uses its frequently outlandish adventures to explore complicated character issues, from Kirk’s fear that he’s doomed to be a deadbeat dad to Spock’s continued inner turmoil about his own identity.

The series has been hinting that La’an’s recessive augment DNA might have somehow been activated by that episode last season that saw her get turned into a Vulcan, and it’s a theory that’s backed up by her increasing distance from those around her and her constantly simmering rage. (She did punch a dinosaur in the face.) And her time on the Griffin certainly seems to be further activating that tenaciously furious aspect of herself, which, let’s face it, is probably why she managed to survive at all, but is also why Kirk got stabbed. (We just won’t talk about how her dark prediction of the way his son David will one day die is actually true. Yikes.) 

Smartly, “The Griffin Incident” doesn’t attempt to provide concrete answers to the questions it raises. It’s up to the viewer to decide whether ghosts are real, if the Griffin is possessed or haunted, if the Enterprise crew is hallucinating because of madness or external forces, or if everything Rose claimed happened the way she said it did. In the end, these are the kind of questions best left to the mysterious folks of Division 12, which may or may not be the closest thing the Federation has to The X-Files. Unlike the black-ops teams of Section 31, Division 12 seems to exist to investigate the unexplainable — or at least sequester the unexplainable away from the regular world. And maybe we’re all better off for it. (Even if that is, in fact, a spinoff I would watch immediately. Pay attention, Paramount.)

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+ through September 24.