Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - “The Griffin Incident” Review
More than just a well-executed genre exercise, “The Griffin Incident” offers genuine consequence for where this season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is heading. The premise is elegant in its simplicity: a shuttle crew consisting of La’An, Spock, and James T. Kirk – making his first appearance of the season, played once again by Paul Wesley with an ease that makes his presence feel inevitable rather than intrusive – stumbles upon the Griffin, a Starfleet vessel that vanished years earlier under circumstances nobody has been able to explain. What follows is the darkest, most explicitly horror-inflected episode this series has produced, directed by Axelle Carolyn and written by Robbie Thompson, both of whom bring genuine genre pedigree to material that fully commits to dread rather than merely gesturing at it.
The episode’s structural cleverness lies in how precisely it calibrates its hauntings to each character’s specific psychology. Kirk is tormented by visions of his son David – a devastating touch for anyone who knows where this character’s story eventually leads, watching a man desperately trying to be present for his child when we know that he will ultimately fail. Spock is confronted by his former fiancée T’Pring, who insists his humanity is his greatest strength before methodically removing every physical marker of his Vulcan heritage – a horror sequence executed with a queasy specificity that earns its shock value rather than simply deploying it. And La’An is stalked by Rose Harper, the Griffin’s former chief security officer, who insists with escalating intimacy that La’An is “one of us.”
That La’An is the character most thoroughly unraveled by this experience is not incidental. Christina Chong has spent more than three seasons building a performance defined by controlled competence, and “The Griffin Incident” is the first time the show has fully cracked that control open. Her transformation over the episode’s back half – culminating in an attack on Kirk with the same dagger Harper wielded – is genuinely unsettling precisely because Chong has made La’An someone whose composure has always felt hard-won rather than natural. Watching that composure disintegrate carries real weight.
Pike’s response to La’An afterward – declining to include her breakdown in his official report – is the episode’s most humane gesture. “The only thing that matters,” he tells her, “is that you survived.” It is exactly the kind of leadership this show has built Pike’s character around.
The episode does not push past the boundaries of what Star Trek has traditionally been willing to show – this is recognizably still a ghost-ship story in a tradition the franchise has visited before. But the execution here is sharper, scarier, and more character-specific than the format typically allows.