Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” Review
This week’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds gimmick is a soap opera homage, complete with the hazy, overlit visuals of daytime television and a note-perfect cameo from Deidre Hall – Days of Our Lives royalty, having played the same character since 1976 – as the Enterprise’s previously unseen counselor. The mechanism, revealed early on, is the returning Trelane, the impish Q Continuum prankster who will eventually go on to harass Captain Kirk in the original series. He has constructed an elaborate soap opera scenario aboard the ship with all of the genre staples – including amnesia, a shocking paternity reveal, an evil twin, and a medical emergency – as what he calls his “great human experiment,” an attempt to study the raw emotional processing that soap operas, for all their absurdity, attempt to depict.
What makes the conceit work rather than merely amuse is that Trelane’s experiment inadvertently succeeds. The soap opera plot forces Pike, and eventually the rest of the crew, to confront feelings they have been too busy or too frightened to address directly. Uhura’s fabricated paternity storyline with Pike becomes a vehicle for real grief about her actual lost parents. La’An’s encounter with an illusory Sybok – Spock’s half-brother, previously seen only fleetingly in the first season and eventually destined to play a pivotal role in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – forces her to articulate unresolved feelings about her breakup with Spock that the show has been circling for multiple episodes.
But the episode belongs to Anson Mount, whose performance across this hour does the genuine heavy lifting that makes the soap opera mechanics land as more than parody. Pike’s question to Dr. Chivers – “How can something be both real and not real?” – is the episode’s emotional center, and Mount plays the answer not as philosophical abstraction but as a man working through actual grief for a daughter who never existed and yet did, in every way that matters to him, articulating the episode’s idea that pain that may seem unearned to others may be devastating to the one experiencing it. When Juliet appears and tells him, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” the show earns a sentiment that could easily have felt cheap in less careful hands.
Six episodes into a season that has now attempted noir, Muppet-style puppetry, disaster movie mechanics, and daytime soap opera without a single misstep, “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” confirms something remarkable about this stretch of Strange New Worlds: that the show’s willingness to change its entire formal register week to week has not once come at the expense of genuine emotional substance.