Strange New Worlds S4E6: Off-Hour
Everything in space wants to kill you.
Recent sci-fi has focused heavily on this idea, as actual scientists (and overreaching hype men like Elon Musk) discuss the daunting prospect of a real-life trip to another planet. There isn’t a single square mile on Earth as inhospitable to life as the best possible location on Mars, and Mars has nothing on the empty vacuum of space. No air, no heat, no food, no water — The Martian, For All Mankind, even Guardians of the Galaxy touched on how space itself is a more fearsome, deadly villain than any tentacled alien monster could hope to be.
Star Trek largely treats those problems as solved. Our heroes comfortably sip tea, earl grey, hot, and play 3D chess while dealing with bigger philosophical problems than how to breathe and not freeze to death. (And, of course, fight the occasional tentacled alien monster.)
But not this week.
We start with the rare sight of the crew taking a break, as the little-seen second shift takes over. The ship still has a few nagging problems — a few red lights in engineering, the ship tacking slightly off-course — but nothing the B-team can’t handle. Except those problems very quickly cascade into far more serious problems. The bridge gets electrified, with exploding control panels galore, injuring Pike and leaving Ortegas in command. Scotty’s trapped in the turbolift and Pelia’s stuck in her quarters. The ship’s gravity goes haywire, and M’Benga’s crushed by a sliding table, and any attempt to move it will kill him.
At the heart of it all is some kind of wormhole that’s sucking the Enterprise closer, making it more difficult to escape with each passing moment. But the real problems the crew has to deal with are the very fundamental ones: Oxygen. Heat. Gravity. Radiation. Facing down death and turning it into a fighting chance to live.
Which is to say, after an uneven mess of a season, Strange New Worlds finally gets its act together and gives us a thrilling, smart, well-written episode that uses its cast well and hits all the right notes. (Even that can be frustrating to watch, because where was this show while we were suffering through the past few episodes?)
More than that, “Off-Hour” understands how to give urgency to life-and-death stakes on a show where we know most of the characters will survive long enough to serve on Kirk’s Enterprise. M’Benga’s mortal injury serves as a reason to put his relationship with Nurse Chapel into a pressure cooker — before everything goes haywire, he suggests he might leave the ship at some point (as we already know he must, to make way for Dr. McCoy), she feels betrayed, but when disaster strikes, we get to see how devoted the two are to each other. We know M’Benga’s going to be okay in the end, but the journey there gives us some terrific acting moments from Jess Bush and Babs Olusanmokun, both of whom have been under-served this season.
The same applies, to varying degrees, for the rest of the cast. We get some serious drama from risks taken, frantic improvisations, jury-rigged solutions, and attempts at noble sacrifice — the stuff great sci-fi drama is made from. Now why can’t we just do this every week?
Stray tachyons:
• The episode unfolds in real time, with a countdown timer before and after the commercial breaks the show includes despite not having commercials. It’s a very mild gimmick, as this season of SNW goes, and while it doesn’t add much apart from a slight underline to the urgency the episode already establishes on its own, it also doesn’t slow the proceedings down at all.
• There are memes online about how, no matter what goes wrong with ships in sci-fi, the artificial gravity never fails, largely because it’s difficult and expensive to simulate zero gravity on film. “Off-Hour” takes the different tack of too much gravity, and having parts of the ship get crushed or unexpectedly collapse is just as effective while being much easier for a special effects department to pull off.
• While this episode is refreshingly serious, we do get a great bit where Scotty tries to fake an American accent to get the computer to understand him better. The actors tasked with inhabiting the original series’ characters have a tougher job than most, and Martin Quinn pulls it off his own take on Scotty with aplomb.
• Even the Vulcan ensign introduced in the season premiere gets more than her requisite one scene, and gets to be logical and helpful instead of just being pissy to everyone. Along similar lines, Pelia, who’s silly comic relief has been increasingy at odds with the tone of the show, gets to give Scotty an inspiring speech (and gives Carol Kane more to do than spout non sequiters).
