The Griffin Incident takes Kirk, La’an and Spock to a Strange (and horrifying) New World

With a note this episode is probably not for younger viewers, we take a look at the at times chilling second story in Strange New Worlds season 4. Ware spoilers.

The Griffin Incident — a dark, dark tale

There’s a wafer thin setup. Kirk, La’an and Spock are sharing a shuttle having all been to a conference somewhere. This allows them to be in a field of asteroids (for some reason) when they encounter a signal. Following it down, they come the almost mythical lost starship The Griffin. Cue lots of reuse of the Enterprise set with different or minimal lighting. It first, the story is a riff on the legend of the Marie Celeste — where are the crew, why does it look as though they just stepped out… but as the three explore, they learn something is not quite right.

As an aside, La’an, now in a relationship with Spock, was previously in one with Kirk in a time travel episode. She later asked Kirk out, but he had a girlfriend, the mother of his child David who gets name checked in this story. While not a large part of the plot, it does provide one or two moments dialogue on topics other than the creeping doom threatening to claim all their lives. Here’s where the story gets much darker. With simple tricks of lighting and music, we follow each character as they descend into madness. Kirk obsessed with finding his child, seemingly lost inside the Bridge systems; La’an obsessing with the former Security Chief who seems to have transported most of the previous crew into open space; Spock has his former fiancée T’Pring arrive, bombarding him with logic then deciding he needs to be free of his Vulcan heritage via some improvised surgery. It’s all rather unpleasant.

Then the Enterprise arrives. Several of the crew beam across to rescue them… or do they? What is real? What is the solution.

In the end there’s a Vulcan twist and the heroes live to boldly go another day. The Federation’s answer to the X-File, Division 12 arrives to take the Griffin “somewhere” and we move in with more insight into several of the crew.

It’s a well made, if bloody and rather grim tale of horror sitting uncomfortably in a portfolio that gives us many musical, whimsical and light weight stories. After last week’s hard core classic science fiction, we wonder what next week has in store.