Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Haunted — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “The Griffin Incident” We’re getting haunted again this week… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on July 30, 2026 Comment 5 Share New Share Star Trek and the horror genre have a very bizarre history, and not a particularly good one. The original series foisted “Catspaw” on us for reasons passing understanding, and TNG’s stabs at horror range from the boring (“Conspiracy,” “Schisms”) to the ridiculous (“Sub Rosa,” “Genesis”). DS9 (“Empok Nor”) and Voyager (“The Haunting of Deck Twelve,” which managed to have no haunting and no scenes on deck 12) both failed at it, while Enterprise managed to both hit (“Impulse,” which was actually quite good) and miss (“Strange New World,” which was very much not). And here we are with SNW now taking it’s third (!) stab at horror, following the truly dreadful “All Those Who Wander,” the low point of season one, and “Shuttle to Kenfori,” one of the better episodes of season three. “The Griffin Incident” starts off giving me “The Slaver Weapon” vibes. Like that animated episode, the action focuses on three crewmembers: Spock, a guy in gold, and a woman in red. It was Sulu and Uhura in the Larry Niven-penned episode, and it’s Jim Kirk and La’an in this one. The premise is that our trio of intrepid heroes were at a Future Leaders of Starfleet conference. They’re on their way home when they pick up a distress call only to find a ship that’s been missing with no explanation for years: the U.S.S. Griffin. Thrilled at getting to solve the mystery, they board the ship only to find that it has artificial gravity working and a breathable atmosphere despite a complete lack of power. And that’s only the start of the weirdness. Unlike “The Slaver Weapon,” the rest of the cast does actually appear in the episode, but the focus truly is on Spock, La’an, and Kirk. All three of them experience intense hallucinations that play on their fears. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ One thing I neglected to mention in my review of “Valles Marineris” last week is that, after punching the raptor in the head, La’an felt no pain, even though the force of her punch broke her hand. She’s concerned that her Augment genes are altering her body chemistry in some way (last week, M’Benga asked if she was planning to enslave humanity, and he was only half-kidding, especially since La’an’s answer was that she wasn’t sure). By the episode’s end, she’s so far gone that she stabs Kirk, nearly fatally. That, however, isn’t the only fear that La’an has to deal with—there’s also the omnipresent fear that, truth be told, most security chiefs would have. They find logs made by the Griffin’s security chief expressing dismay with the fact that the entire crew was being affected by all sorts of weirdness and they were all doing harm to each other, and there was nothing she could do about it. The security chief’s job is to keep the crew safe, and so that sense of helplessness is something that La’an understands. Adding to the confusion is the lack of any remains of the crew.  In Spock’s case, he encounters a hallucination of T’Pring. What’s especially fun about this one in particular is that the hallucination acts like T’Pring would if she was unexpectedly transported to the Griffin against her will. It distracts Spock, making him think that this might be the actual T’Pring—there’s been enough unexplained and unexplainable weirdness going on that he has some doubts—so that when the fake T’Pring straps Spock to a biobed and clips the points on his ears, it rather catches him off-guard… One of the things SNW has done really well with Ethan Peck’s younger Spock is taking advantage of the fact that we saw Spock grinning in “The Cage” when he played with the singing flowers, yet when we see Spock on the original series eleven years of story time later, he’s embraced the logic of his Vulcan half to a significant degree. SNW has done a nice job of showing Spock’s progression from the one to the other, and they’re taking their time with it. The hallucinatory T’Pring’s declaration that Spock should just cut the tapers off his ears and be done with it is another step toward it, a bucket of metaphorical ice water in Spock’s face that could very easily drive him in the opposite direction from the fake T’Pring’s declaration. Kirk’s odyssey on the Griffin, however, is my favorite part, for a number of reasons. On the face of it, it’s ridiculous how often Paul Wesley has appeared on this show. (There was a delightful fake Star Trek novel cover, done in the style of the old 1980s-era covers painted by Keith Birdsong, that showed Anson Mount as Pike and Paul Wesley as Kirk and the title was, Star Trek: Why Are You Always on My Ship?) I feel like I’m the only person who likes Wesley’s performance, as he’s mostly riffing on the way William Shatner played the role in the early first season as an easygoing friendly person. (Though he did do a good job of channeling third-season Shatner in “A Space Adventure Hour.”) Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ But as time has gone on, SNW has done a good job of tying together a lot of bits of Kirk’s backstory into a more coherent narrative than 1960s television and a series of movies that only happened once every couple years could manage. The fact that Kirk even had a brother really only came up in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and was technically a plot point in “Operation—Annihilate!” when Sam Kirk was killed. Here’s the thing—that Kirk’s brother Sam and sister-in-law Aurelan were killed barely seems to have any impact on the captain in the latter episode. And if you read James Blish’s prose adaptation in Star Trek 2, you’ll see that Aurelan was just some random person from Deneva, and there was no mention of Sam or their son Peter. And here’s the thing—the story that Blish wrote is not all that different from what was aired. The biggest difference is the lack of artificial suspense with Spock being temporary blinded. On top of that, back in “Subspace Rhapsody” it was established that Kirk was, in season two, seeing Carol Marcus and was pregnant with their son David, both characters established in The Wrath of Khan. That’s another relationship that really only got significant play in that movie, though Kirk’s relationship with his son got dealt with in The Search for Spock and The Undiscovered Country (with Carol never even mentioned in those two films).  “The Griffin Incident” establishes that, by this time, Kirk and Carol have broken up, but Kirk is attempting—and failing—to be part of David’s life. In fact, he was supposed to meet up with Carol and David after the Future Leaders of Starfleet conference, but because of the detour to the Griffin he winds up missing her. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ One of the high points of this episode is when the landing party thinks that Enterprise has received their distress call. Pike, Number One, Ortegas, Uhura, and Sam Kirk all beam over. The Kirk brothers have a really lovely conversation, with Jim asking Sam how he manages to have a family while serving in Starfleet, and Sam says, “I don’t.” They have a really good talk about how Sam struggles with balancing his Starfleet career with his family, and they also take some shots at their father.  It turns out that that isn’t really Sam, which is disappointing as that conversation really is wonderful. (At the episode’s conclusion, we find out that Sam’s on leave visiting his family, which is a nice bit of irony.) We find this out slowly, as Uhura reacts with an uncharacteristic lack of understanding when La’an accidentally nearly kills Ortegas with the transporter, and when Pike and Number One join T’Pring in trying to mutilate Spock. At no point do we get any kind of explanation of what happened to, and what’s happening on, the Griffin, exactly, and I gotta say I’m of two minds about that. On the one hand, why and how it’s happening isn’t really relevant—what the episode is about is exploring these three characters’ fears, and it does so very effectively. But there’s also a sense of betrayal, of copping out, on the part of the script, credited to Robbie Thompson, one of the show’s executive producers (and who previously worked on Supernatural, a show that this episode shares a lot of DNA with). Star Trek has almost always had a scientific explanation for even the most far-out phenomenon. One time when they didn’t—Voyager’s “Sacred Ground”—it actively pissed me off. They dance around it, at least, by saying that the ship will be sent to Division 12, which is the Federation’s version of Area 51, the place where weird stuff is sent that nobody can figure out. (In Lower Decks’s “Much Ado About Boimler,” it was Division 14, but hey, division numbers change after a century, I guess?) Pike mentions to M’Benga that he previously sent six items to D12—four of them turned out to have a rational explanation behind them. He’s still waiting to hear about the other two.  All of which is a decent fig leaf over the lack of explanation, but it still rankles a bit. But only a bit, because it is an effective horror piece.[end-mark] The post Haunted — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “The Griffin Incident” appeared first on Reactor.