Is Off-hour the strongest episode of Strange New Worlds season 4 so far? It just might be
This week it’s disaster movie time for the Enterprise
What is Off-hour about
A brief trailer might help:
If we get the nonsense psuedo-scientific babble about slipstream wormholes out of the way, the shop suddenly finds itself less than one hour from “random effect meaning the destruction of the ship” and the episode stresses the drama with a real-time chronometer popping up. A lot of bad things happen and various people get hurt. In the case of Dr M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) this means badly hurt. To save him, Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) comes up with some more nonsense involving “strong neutrinos”. Scotty (Martin Quinn) believes if these exist, they can also regenerate the ship’s depleted dilithium.
Nonsense out of the way, let’s get to the heart of the episode.
An overdue time for Nurse Chapel to take centre stage
A recurring theme in our reviews of the recent episodes (we get to the other on a moment) is how Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) has had little of consequence to do. It’s fair to say in a lot of ways this is her episode. We start with her and M’enga arguing — he is considering moving on from the Enterprise, she is angry at only just finding out, he then accuses her of still technically being on temporary assignment so not in a position to judge. Cue the slipstream wormhole and massive system failures all over the ship. M’Benga gets fatally injured, Chapel refuses to accept reality and “finds” an impossible solution involving freezing him (the room is leaking) to death, using the magic power of strong neutrinos and restarting his heart (thawing and frost damage being entirely overlooked — maybe the magic neutrinos again). This involves Scotty and his Bussard ramjets, Spock taking a trip on the hull in warp and a few more intense moments.
Meantime we see Scotty also facing challenges and the beginnings of the emergence of the chief engineer he would become. Speaking of emerging, Chapel ends the episodes asking to be made a permanent crew member.
What about the disaster
As we said last week, a key problem with the show is we know the Original Series comes next. The ship and many of the crew have plot armour (they can’t die permanently). While we did get a good sense of how fragile star travel actually would be (numerous systems have to work with a high degree of reliability) we know it will end well. There are several characters whose fate is less protected and will be (we assume) presented before the end of season 5. This episode set the ball rolling in that direction, with credible threat to M’Benga and as we mention above the sense core characters are expanding into their future roles. We also see Scotty start to take the mantle from Pelia (Carol Kane) who could well choose to move on perhaps this season?
The pacing was good, secondary characters still had credible activities even if not directly saving the ship and it all came together nicely thanks to the writing / cast / direction / production / edit. Not perfect in our perfectionist view, but probably the strongest of this run.
