Who you gonna call?… The negatively charged ion-busters! Directed by Axelle Carolyn, she’s probably the best director for this type of episode, with a history of low-stakes horror TV and shorts, most notably doing “Blood Buffet” with Macaulay Culkin and “The Future Perfect,” i.e the Nixon episode, both from American Horror Story. One of those is highly rated. Meanwhile, our writer this week probably wishes he had Kripke’s power to get the world’s most boring double act together. Writer and producer for later seasons of Supernatural (2011- 2016) and creator, writer, and showrunner of a sad little show called The Winchesters, Robbie Thompson

In the search for a distress signal in an asteroid field, the Scooby Gang of La’an, Spock, and Captain Shaggy-a-lot-of-aliens find the long-lost and dead ship of the USS Family Guy with no life signs, no clear indications of what happened to it, and why it is here. Actually called the USS Griffin (the Enterprise redressed), it is a ship reported missing almost a decade ago that disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Finding it now, James Kirk, his boyfriend, and his boyfriend’s beard try to figure out what’s going on as there are no corpses, no blood, and no escape pods.

There is a reason I think Axelle Carolyn is perfect for this one: it is a horror episode with somewhat low stakes and a lot of character work. Plus she doesn’t bring her tumble-dryer to the set to film spinny shots. As you might guess with that setup, absolutely nothing is as it in fact seems: The ship constantly falling through space with a crew that disappeared as if it is an old Earth ghost ship; it’s going to reveal more about our characters than they are willing to plainly say.

Now, typically I’m not a fan of doing horror every week; I’m not a fan of ghost stories in a bit of sci-fi unless it can be pulled off well (good morning, Mrs), and to do horror in Star Trek you need to do almost everything right. Of course, hand up to Spock, and I have to admit that one of the best episodes of Star Trek, “Best of Both Worlds, Pt 1,” is itself a horror episode. A few in DS9 are horror in theme, but not graphic: “The Quickening,” “The Adversary,” and the obligatory O’Brien episode, “Whispers.”

The point is, I don’t seek them out. “The Griffin Incident” was immediately on my radar as horror when our crew this week beamed into engineering and, in the corner, a reflection of the shimmer from the crew being beamed aboard was a shadowy figure. Admittedly, I was also told this second outing was better than “Valles Marineris,” which wouldn’t be too hard but also not impossible to fail at. Happily, I can say I won’t be as catty this week about writing.

As I say, the three-person away crew comes aboard the Griffin to inspect the long-thought-dead ship with its distress call, which, with a gentle wave over the beacon, fires up the ship’s auxiliary power to give life support for an hour. It isn’t Chris Chibnall, I’ll take the timer with precaution. With that launching us into exploration and discovery (not that one) of the ship, the adventure and mystery begin proper: Finding security command logs, ship records, and finding the escape pods missing without record of them being jettisoned.

Culminating in the jumping-off point of a person with marks on their face who isn’t a life sign but is a collection of negatively charged ions. Ghosts? No, negatively charged ions. As it turns out, the ship’s security officer isn’t still around but is appearing and disappearing occasionally. If you say ghosts one more time, I will go back to reviewing the other Rebecca Romijn show we’ve reviewed. Eventually breaking their way into the Bridge, the three “just roommates” found logs telling the… truth?

I’m not going to go all the way to the end with the summation this time, but there is enough to suggest early on that you shouldn’t believe everything you see. Filled in by the logs left behind by Chief Security Officer Rose Harper (Sorika Wolf), many of the crew were stabbed, strangled, or even transported out of the ship into the nondescript suction device of space. There is a reason I am trying to be funny; it is not the lightest of episodes.

As it appears from Harper’s video logs, she was the only one who could see problems with the crew, and she was the one who could activate the transporter to eject the crew into space. The implication is that she was the only one who could see problems and that “something” (underlined and emboldened) drove people mad, but she’s also the one who stabbed, strangled, and killed the entire crew. Or did she? The ending of her log seemed to address La’An directly; the two never met before.

As I say, a very character-heavy episode. So with the help of thinking like adults and not randomly punching dinosaurs, the group heads to sick bay to see where the dead are. I can tell you where they aren’t, kind of. After removing a barrier put in there by Starfleet officers, Klingons, and Vulcans, the group finds that sick bay is clean, and not just hospital clean but actually empty of anything. Not entirely true, though, is it? There are body bags folded and piled up on one of the beds, but that’s it. So I guess it’s time to split up, leave Spock here and let La’An and Captain mental breakdown go search the ship.

While the other two were opening the door though, James T Kirk was hearing a baby crying for attention in the darkness. The detail from last season being that this James T Kirk isn’t spaffing his load in the beehive hairdos of alien women every third minute. No, he’s a family man who is loyal to his wife and cares for his son. Ah yes, well-known “straight” monogamist, James T Kirk. The point is, he’s hearing his son (later Dr. David Marcus) and feeling guilty, something we’ll return to in a minute.

Spock alone, kind of, in the sick bay, starts searching computers after one of the body bags falls off the table. To quote some Russians in New York, “must’ve been the wind.” One camera pan later, the bags are laid out on the tables with bodies, another camera pan, and blood is draining from the bodies. Another pan has a body sitting up and unzipping the bag to reveal… T’Pring? Indeed, what a strange set of circumstances where I am glad to see a Vulcan instead of a ghoul of some kind.

Taking an aside for a moment, I’ve seen a thing while doing research positing “the episode wasn’t scary,” and of course I am not going to click on it because it is someone else’s views on the episode and I want to keep mine as “pure” as I can. Here is the thing: Is “The Griffin Incident” scary? No. Is it still horror? Yes. In fact, it is the type of horror that I love. There are those moments where things get a bit graphic, which I’ll avoid spoiling too much, though I’ve already mentioned the blood pulling in the body bags.

“The Griffin Incident” isn’t that type of horror, but instead, more of a psychological piece about our characters. Why is James hearing a child? Why is Spock seeing T’Pring? Is it real? Is there something else there? As an episode, it is playing with the character’s psychology and yours, which I think works really well. It is also why I keep saying that Axelle’s direction here is perfect for the type of episode. She’s not overcomplicating it, the shots aren’t distracting, and when there is something complicated going on (bags appearing full), it is kept very simple.

In the hallway, as La’An and Kirk head to the bridge after leaving Spock to be locked in the sick bay with his ex-fiancée, it is just the two of them in a darkened hallway, and a figure walks by in the background. Or you have the aforementioned shot of the crew beaming aboard with a shadowy figure only showing up in the glow. There is nothing in the episode you can say actually happened or didn’t happen. That’s what I love. Before you get to the third act, you’re left questioning all of it because it almost feels like the episode itself doesn’t know.

Somewhat of a spoiler: You don’t get to fully know either, but that’s besides the point. This is one of the things I was moaning about last week, telling the audience that the planet’s debris is the asteroid belt and was the thing that wiped out the dinosaurs. With “The Griffin Incident,” there are answers, but they aren’t as definitive as (meant in a derogatory way) certain people would want. I think it goes into an idea I’m working on now (maybe out by now) where we’ve lost the ability as an audience to let those unanswered questions be something we can fill in with our theories, thoughts, and discussions.

That media literacy thing where we were effectively given the go-ahead to write fan-fiction. Not the kind where James and Spock are shagging in sick bay behind La’An’s back; I just mean filling in gaps with theories or expanding on things. “The Griffin Incident” is that type of episode where you get those gaps to fill in, and unlike those certain people, I’ll say that this is a good thing.

To draw it back to something else that started airing at the same time: If Ted Lasso season 4 was just with the Men’s team again, it would prolong the story for “those people” who only want the story to continue because they can’t think of that character doing anything else. Whereas starting with a Women’s team gives a reason for the story after giving it time to breathe. Trying to explain this ghost ship story would do one of two things: It would feel rushed and underwhelming to the rest of the plot, or it would do too much to devalue the plot before it, taking away the suspense and horror of it all.

The fact that we have our crew (Pike, Una, and Sam) show up later on, especially after James sees a hand coming out of the disassembled bridge console and hears a child, then La’An finds the Griffin’s crew in engineering. Those two little scenes are exactly what this episode’s horror is all about; it is unsettling in a good way. It isn’t just us who are unsettled, but it is the characters too, and their unease in the situation exposes a bit more of who they are. I’m not trying to drag “Valles Marineris” through the mud, but we desperately didn’t get that last time out.

I’ve said for long enough that I really dislike this propensity for flag-shagging the Vulcans; I also don’t like a focus on romantic relationships, and I’ve given a “hint” that I am not the biggest fan of The Original Series. Yet for an episode with James T Kirk, Spock, and La’An Noonien-Singh at its very center, I not only enjoyed it, but from memory it is one of the better stories we’ve had since season 2. It’s not perfect. There are certainly bits like Kirk’s line “let’s boldly go…” which could have been down the barrel of the camera with a wink.

Yet I could have spent 2000 words explaining my love for that scene about six minutes in where James, Spock, and La’An start exploring the ship. Especially the torches over the center of the camera and the edit between them, with the lines continuing what was said in the room before it. That’s one of the few fun and creative bits of filmmaking that I enjoy when someone uses it. It is a creative thing that’s flashy but not gaudy.

Ultimately, “The Griffin Incident” is a wonderfully crafted, simply told psychological horror that explores two characters I typically don’t care for and a third stoic mystery box with maybe two bits of her personality revealed. Does it feel like Star Trek? Kind of, but not exploration and discovery kind, just the odd little episode that does something different. The biggest complaint you could have with an episode like “The Griffin Incident” is that you could have written this for any number of sci-fi space shows. Yet despite that, its use of character in a series that’s rarely doing that is refreshing.

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Strange New Worlds "The Griffin Incident"

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Psychological horror, done well.
• Made me actually care about Kirk and Spock independently.

Cons

• "Let's boldly go" and wink down the camera.
• Honestly, it could have been an episode of any sci-fi show.