Strange New Worlds S4E4: A Case of Chiascuro
Writing should be the easy part.
Not that writing is easy. Anyone who’s ever stared at a blank page or a blank screen can tell you coming up with a compelling story, rich characters, emotional resonance, and everything else you need to make a narrative work is tricky.
But in the world of TV and film, it’s still the easy part. Deleting a few pages and reworking them is a heck of a lot easier than building new sets or getting the cast and crew back together for reshoots. And if an actor on a long-running season is wooden, you’re stuck with them; you can have a dozen writers working on a dozen scripts and pick the best one! Then you can bring in yet more writers to punch up the script and make it better! Writers are cheap! Trust me on that one.
So why don’t big-budget productions like Star Trek, or the recent Marvel movies, or basically all of Star Wars‘ non-Andor output of the last few years, take more time to get the writing down? Strange New Worlds has completely collapsed in quality since its outstanding first two seasons, and it’s not the cast, who are as winsome as ever. It’s episodes like this one.
Una leads her first mission as a newly-minted Commander, with Uhura and M’Benga in tow. They’re on a stealth mission to repair a satellite monitoring a Klingon-occupied planet, and for some reason, the planet’s sun blocks out colors, so the episode is shot in black and white. The real reason, of course, is that SNW wanted to a film noir homage, so when the shuttle inevitably crashes onto the planet, everyone who isn’t a Klingon is wearing 1930s garb, and while they’re not shouting, “you’ll never take me alive, coppers! Nyah!!!” it’s only one small notch less subtle than that.
Our trio determines to stay inconspicuous, so naturally the literal first person they meet recognizes Una. Our Number One just happens to be a dead ringer for not only someone on this planet, but the most important person on this planet. She’s the exact mirror image of the leader of the anti-Klingon resistance, and for reasons that are unclear, immediately decides to impersonate her instead of just saying, “you must have me confused with someone else” and continuing to lay low. A certain amount of narrative convenience can be excused on a TV show, especially a sci-fi one, but an unlikely-bordering-on-impossible coincidence needs a lot of justification, and the episode can barely muster a “just go with it, okay?”
Most of the rest of the episode is a thudding Casablanca homage, but because Una is leading a resistance she doesn’t actually know anything about, we get a lot of dialogue like, “did your contact get you the information about that facility?”, which means nothing to Una, but also means nothing to the audience. The dialogue may as well be in Klingon, it wouldn’t hurt the episode any.
So the game-as-always cast walks through a by-the-numbers plot, but just like the black-and-white visuales, nothing really happens for any reason other than, “we wanted to do a noir homage.” There are no real stakes (we know they’re not going to kill Uhura, and we don’t get to know any of the noir planet locals enough to care much about them), no surprises, just a little cosplay and stylish camera work that should have been a lot more fun than whatever this was.
Stray tachyons:
• La’an gets a subplot where she suspects the satellite they were supposed to repair has been tampered with. Spock thinks she’s being paranoid. The reveal (it has been tampered with, but for good reasons) doesn’t make much more sense than anything else in this episode.
• Uhura’s pissy Vulcan intern we briefly met in the season premiere is back, for just long enough to hit that same one note.
• We do get a fun moment of Ortegas and Scotty hanging out, after the two bonded in last week’s episode.
• On one hand, it’s nice to see Number One take center stage for an episode. But on the other, Una’s a stiff character, which works when she’s the straightlaced authority figure playing straight woman to her more colorful castmates. But she’s kind of a drag to have in the lead.
• “Chiascuro” is an artistic technique that uses stark contrast between light and dark. Which means more thought was put into the title than anything else in this episode.
