Every so often, “Star Trek” likes to put its brave interstellar adventurers through hell. You know the drill — a bunch of one-off crew members will probably be blown up and/or sucked into space, while set dressers get to have fun making starship bridges look like they’ve been through the wars. We all know that seeking out new life and new civilisations is the prime directive on that final frontier, but sometimes we just want to see how Starfleet officers respond when the chips are down.
The latest episode of “Strange New Worlds” season 4, “Off-Hour”, is one of “Trek”‘s semi-regular life-or-death outings. The Enterprise finds itself trapped in a bizarre slipstream wormhole that threatens to destroy the ship if Pike and co can’t find a solution before the “24”-style ticking clock (sorry, “Shipboard Chronometer”) counts down to zero. It also leaves the fates of several key characters (one in particular) hanging in the balance… or at least it would, if the show wasn’t a prequel, with most of its lead characters guaranteed to reappear in subsequent “Trek” canon.
Minor spoilers ahead for “Off-Hour”. If you haven’t seen the latest episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” yet, report to transporter room 3 and get out of here at once.
The likes of “The Wrath of Khan”, “Voyager “‘s two-parter “Year of Hell”, and “Strange New Worlds”‘ very own “Memento Mori” have all gone to extreme lengths to mess up the normally pristine interiors of Starfleet vessels. “The Search for Spock” went even further, leaving the Enterprise in such a bad state that Admiral James T Kirk had no choice but to deploy its in-built self-destruct system.
Unfolding in real-time, “Off-Hour” is built from similar blueprints, as the aforementioned anomaly turns the Enterprise into a nightmarish environment where pretty much anything can kill you. Pike getting an electric shock while turning on the shields is just the tip of the iceberg, as Una “Number One” Chin-Riley snaps her leg in a pocket of extreme gravity, Christine Chapel loses a finger to extreme cold, and an unfortunate group of redshirts finds themselves trapped on the wrong side of a barrier with some lethal neutrino radiation.
But it’s Dr Joseph M’Benga who has the worst day at the office, and by a distance. His quick and noble actions pushing Christine out of the way of an out-of-control medical table leave him pinned against a wall with a fatal trans-lumbar severance — the only thing keeping him alive is the table itself, his internal organs doomed as soon as it’s pulled out of the way. Like the clichéd movie cop starting his last day on the beat, he picked the wrong day to tell Christine he’s thinking of quitting the Enterprise — especially as his likely replacement, Boyce, is already on board.
There is no way M’Benga should survive this — Boyce even orders Chapel to make the patient comfortable when the inevitable happens — and in most other TV shows you’d think that actor Babs Olusanmokun was about to receive his final paycheck.
But “Star Trek” fans know that M’Benga (then played by Booker Bradshaw) filled in for Dr McCoy in two episodes of the Original Series, meaning that his deathbed chats with Chapel aren’t quite as deep and meaningful as they’d be in “ER” or even this episode’s biggest influence, “24”.
For the same reason, you never fear for Scotty when he beams into a Jefferies Tube, unsure whether there’ll be oxygen or heat waiting for him. Or wonder if Spock will survive the radiation burns he endures in a high-risk spacewalk on the Enterprise’s hull. In fact, the only lead character who could be in any danger at all is La’an. As one of the few regulars whose post-“Strange New Worlds” fate remains unknown, canon offers little protection when she steps out of the airlock to rescue Spock.
“Star Trek” isn’t “Game of Thrones”, and shouldn’t ever get into the habit of killing off characters for fun. Spock’s (albeit temporary) demise in “The Wrath of Khan” still resonates because it was so emotional, dramatic, and unprecedented, as does the death of Kirk’s son, David, in “The Search for Spock”. William Shatner’s performances in the aftermath of both are among the best of his career.
“Strange New Worlds” itself hasn’t been afraid to wield the grim reaper’s bat’leth when necessary, though it’s always been with characters — such as original chief engineer Hemmer — who have no existing legacy in the franchise.
The question facing any prequel, however, is whether you can play around with life-and-death stakes as you would in a story whose conclusion is open-ended. Surely an “anyone could die at any time” plot is redundant when canon has the same protective properties as the Super Stars that make Mario invincible.
The exception that proves the rule is “Andor”‘s majestic second season — Mon Mothma’s had-to-happen escape from the Galactic Senate turned out to be one of the most unbearably tense TV moments of last year. But that show mostly reserved its highest stakes for characters who didn’t have an appointment with the Original Trilogy.
Indeed, when you pretend that a beloved character might die even though they can’t, you risk cheapening the drama the same way “The Rise of Skywalker” did when it led us to believe Chewbacca had been blown up, before revealing he was on a different ship all along. You’re telling life-or-death stories, without ever having to deal with the messy death part — something that, as we all know from “The Wrath of Khan”, even the legendary James T Kirk was never much good at.
As a result, you spend the whole of “Off-Hour” waiting for the inevitable “magical” intervention to save the day. It’s certainly not a massive surprise when Chapel works out that using previously theoretical strong-force neutrinos might repair M’Benga’s broken body — and a not-at-all unexpected twist when Scotty reveals they could also fix the ship’s faltering engines. “Almost sounds too good to be true, I know,” Scotty admits.
Future events will always weigh heavy on any prequel, but surely stories have a responsibility to better acknowledge that viewers know what’s coming. Is “Off-Hour” a brilliant example of “Star Trek” at its most tense or a cheap play on our emotions? It’s probably a bit of both.
New episodes of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.