TL;DR: A genuinely unsettling haunted-ship episode that digs deep into Spock, Kirk, and La’an’s private fears. Messy, sometimes gory, and deliberately unfinished, but the character work and atmosphere more than carry it.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching Star Trek lean hard into pure, unfiltered dread. Not the polite philosophical unease of a Prime Directive debate, but the kind of creeping, skin-crawling tension that makes you check the shadows in your own living room after the credits roll. Season 4 of Strange New Worlds decided the second episode was the perfect moment to turn a Constitution-class starship into a floating nightmare, and the result is an experience that feels less like classic Trek and more like someone slipped a bottle of pure horror into the dilithium chamber and waited for the lights to flicker.

The setup is deceptively simple. Three officers heading home from what sounds like the most corporate-sounding Starfleet retreat imaginable stumble across a ghost ship that has no business still existing. The USS Griffin should be empty, cold, and silent. Instead it has atmosphere, gravity, and the kind of wrongness that settles into your bones the moment the transporter beam solidifies. What follows is less an investigation and more a slow psychological dismantling of three very different people who suddenly find their private fears given form and teeth.

What makes the episode land is how personal the terror becomes. Each member of the away team is handed a tailored nightmare that digs into the exact soft tissue they would rather keep buried. Spock’s confrontation with a version of T’Pring who both comforts and mutilates him is the kind of emotional ambush that only works when the actors are this locked in. Ethan Peck continues to make the half-Vulcan’s internal war feel like a living, breathing conflict rather than a neat character note. Watching him face the idea that his humanity is not a flaw to be corrected but the very thing that keeps him whole carries real weight, even if the timing of that revelation sits a little early in the larger Spock arc we already know.

Paul Wesley’s Kirk gets the most heartbreaking treatment. The writers keep feeding us pieces of the Carol Marcus story, and this time they bring the son into the frame as well. There is something almost cruel about watching a younger Kirk wrestle with the same gravitational pull between duty and family that will eventually define and destroy so much of his future. The episode does not soft-pedal the tragedy. It lets the knowledge we already carry about David Marcus hang in the air like radiation, turning every small gesture of affection into something quietly devastating. When the illusions start predicting lonely deaths among the stars, it stops feeling like fiction and starts feeling like prophecy.

La’an’s thread is the one that refuses to stay contained inside a single episode. Christina Chong has been building this character’s quiet terror about her own bloodline for seasons, and here that fear finally breaks containment. Watching her slide toward the very monstrosity she has spent her life running from is both thrilling and uncomfortable. The moment she starts identifying with the ship’s residual presence, the story stops being about a haunted vessel and becomes about a woman fighting not to become the thing the galaxy already half-expects her to be. It is messy, violent, and deliberately unfinished, which is exactly the right choice for a character this complicated.

Strange New Worlds has never been afraid of a little blood, but this episode leans harder into visceral horror than the series usually allows. There are moments of genuine shock that feel closer to early Discovery’s more extreme impulses than to the brightly lit optimism of the classic Enterprise. Some of those moments work. Others feel like the writers decided the atmosphere needed a louder soundtrack and reached for the nearest sharp object. The scariest sequences are still the ones that rely on suggestion and character rather than explicit damage. When the ship itself seems to breathe wrong and the lights refuse to stay honest, the tension is higher than any close-up of severed fingers.

The decision to leave the nature of the Griffin’s “haunting” deliberately unresolved is the episode’s most interesting and most frustrating choice. In classic Trek fashion, the mystery could have been explained away with some clever spatial anomaly or leftover alien tech. Instead the show simply walks away, leaving La’an staring at a figure that may or may not still be there. It is the kind of ending that either feels like a bold refusal to tidy everything up or like a story that ran out of time before it finished thinking. Either way, it plants a seed that is clearly meant to grow across the rest of the season.

There are smaller pleasures scattered throughout. The easy chemistry between the three leads carries scenes that might otherwise collapse under the weight of the horror. The quiet references to old Trek continuity land with the satisfaction of a well-placed callback rather than a desperate Easter egg hunt. Even the transporter effects carry a faint echo of The Cage that feels intentional and affectionate. These details keep the episode grounded in the larger franchise even while it is busy trying to scare the hell out of you.

Verdict

“The Griffin Incident” is Strange New Worlds at its most willing to get its hands dirty. It prioritizes character over clean answers and atmosphere over neat resolutions. The result is uneven in places, occasionally overcommitted to shock, and yet still more memorable than a safer episode would have been. When the lights finally come back up and the Enterprise warps away, you are left with the uncomfortable feeling that something followed them home. That lingering unease is the best compliment a horror story can receive.