Strange New Worlds’ ‘The Griffin Incident’ Ditches Star Trek’s Problem-Solving Soul For A Haunted House Gimmick

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spent its fourth season’s second episode, “The Griffin Incident,” locking Kirk, Spock, and La’an aboard a derelict starship for an hour of jump scares that never gets explained. The episode barely squeaks a 5 out of 10. After a solid season premiere the week before, this is Strange New Worlds taking three steps back for every step forward, a pattern this show has repeated since its first season.

The setup borrows straight from “The Naked Time,” the classic 1966 episode where a landing party gets exposed to a substance that strips away inhibitions and sends the crew into a violent frenzy. “The Griffin Incident” runs the same play: Kirk, Spock, and La’an board the derelict USS Griffin, start hallucinating, and turn on each other. La’an stabs Kirk in the midsection during her episode of the madness and nearly kills him. Spock cuts off his own pointed ears while under the influence of a hallucinated T’Pring. None of it gets explained. The malevolent force haunting the Griffin is never named, never defined, and never resolved. A new organization called Division 12 shows up at the end to tow the ship away, presumably so a future episode can do the explaining this one refused to.

That refusal is the show’s real failing. Gene Roddenberry built Star Trek on the idea that Kirk and Spock solve the problem in front of them. He kept science consultants on staff specifically to keep the plausibility grounded, and he sent scripts back when the crew didn’t work the problem. “The Griffin Incident” throws that premise out entirely in favor of mood lighting and a droning score doing the work that plot resolution used to do.

The show also can’t keep its own dialogue straight with the original series. Spock will eventually encounter hallucinations and a crazed crew like this in “The Naked Time,” one of the early TOS episodes. In that episode he will say, "Unknown, Captain. It's like nothing we've dealt with before.” But with this, it will be like something they had dealt with before, so it creates a pointless continuity error.

Then there’s the Boy Scout line. Kirk tells La’an he was a Boy Scout before he was Starfleet, “be prepared, right?” That’s a direct callback to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Carol Marcus tells her son David that “Jim Kirk was many things, but he was never a Boy Scout.” Strange New Worlds wants the wink at longtime fans without noticing it just wrote Kirk into contradicting a line his own future ex-lover says about him on screen. That’s the kind of detail a show with any respect for its source material catches before it airs.

The one place “The Griffin Incident” gets right is the David Marcus material. Kirk hearing his infant son crying throughout the episode, while dreading a phone call to Carol that never gets answered, tracks with where the show has placed Kirk in his timeline this season: a father already failing at the balance between Starfleet and family, years before Wrath of Khan makes that failure permanent. Credit where it’s due, that thread does not break continuity.

Everything else does. La’an drove a knife into Kirk and nearly killed him, and the episode ends with Pike quietly leaving it out of his official report. No psychological evaluation, no stand-down, no consequence of any kind for a woman who just tried to murder a crewmate. That’s not tension being set up for later. That’s just the show forgetting its own stakes the moment the credits roll, the same trick “The Naked Time” pulled on McCoy’s sickbay sixty years ago, except that episode had the excuse of being made in 1966.

Strange New Worlds keeps proving it can produce technically effective television. It has yet to prove it remembers what made the original show more than atmosphere and jump scares. If Division 12 is going to explain the Griffin later this season, does that retroactively justify an hour that offered nothing but dread with no answers, or does it just confirm the show has stopped trusting its own episodes to stand on their own?

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