Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Recap: Choose Your Disaster Day

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Off-Hour
Season 4 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Not that they’re likely to return, but it doesn’t take long for this episode to make clear that this will be puppet-free. Though it’s not entirely without humor, “Off-Hour” plays like a Star Trek disaster movie. One thing goes wrong, then another, then another, all while some pretty serious personal dramas play out in the background. And it all unfolds while a clock counts down from 48 hours to zero while creating a mounting sense that zero might truly be the end for the Enterprise, or at least some of its crew members.

It all begins peacefully enough. As a distracted bridge crew waits for the weekend and a long-overdue break, Chapel and M’Benga tidy up sick bay for Dr. Boyce (Brian Markinson), the fastidious beta shift medical officer who’s recently returned to the Enterprise. Though Chapel half-jokingly suggests that Boyce might be after M’Benga’s job, M’Benga knows the real reason he’s returned: M’Benga wants to make sure the Enterprise is in good hands should he decide to leave. Chapel does not greet this possibility warmly, telling her longtime friend and co-worker that she might not want to stay if he leaves. As a rejoinder, he reminds her that she’s never signed on for permanent Enterprise duty despite having “a good situation” in which she’s liked and respected. He sees her as having “one foot out the door,” however offended Chapel might be at the prospect of his departure.

The first sign that something might be wrong pops up in engineering, where Scotty notices a computer glitch as he prepares to clock out. Then, as Pike prepares to hand over the bridge to Lieutenant Rahda (Abinaya Sivakumaran), his replacement notices a slight shift in the ship’s trajectory. No big deal, right? Well, actually, yes. In the lift, Scotty gets news of a wormhole moving at warp speed and calls for an emergency shutdown to avoid getting caught in a slipstream, if it’s not too late to avoid it. Unfortunately, it’s too late, and an out-of-control Enterprise flies into it with shields down, compelling Pike to manually raise them himself even though this means touching an electrified control panel. Elsewhere, Scotty’s stuck on the lift, a radiation leak requires engineering to evacuate, and a heavy medical table pins M’Benga against a heavy medical bed, nearly bisecting him after he pushes Chapel out of harm’s way. Things look really bad even before the credits have rolled!

What’s going on? Erica puts it in the simplest possible terms when she asks, “So we get yanked off course by a giant vacuum cleaner?” Spock doesn’t disagree, adding, “Imagine one that spans countless light-years and flows with lethally radioactive dust.” Getting out of this vacuum cleaner will require rapid action on multiple fronts. 

After A’Sha frees Scotty from the lift, the two attempt to get Scotty to engineering via the transporter. This only sounds easy. “Whatever affects one problem causes another, worse problem,” Scotty says of a situation he’s now dubbed “Choose Your Disaster Day.” A’Sha offers one possible solution, albeit one with some serious drawbacks: shut down life support in any spot without crew members, including the corridors. It’s the Starfleet equivalent of a shelter-in-place warning, though who knows when this storm will pass? 

In the lounge, Una, Spock, and La’an try to assist the best they can, but a massive uptick in the artificial gravity, which, among other things, collapses the bar’s piano, threatens to thwart these efforts. Their only hope is for someone to crawl across the room to the spot with the most intense g-forces and turn it off. Una succeeds, but only after the gravity breaks her leg (a moment depicted in horrifyingly graphic detail). 

In sick bay, Chapel quickly realizes that the chances of M’Benga making it aren’t great, even before the computer confirms it. He’s still conscious and able to assist Chapel, up to a point, but in shades of an old urban legend, he’ll die the moment they move the table. Saving M’Benga, if she can save him, will take everything she’s got. That makes it extra annoying when Boyce orders her to assist him in helping the injured in the bar. When Boyce sees how seemingly hopeless M’Benga’s case is he orders Chapel to leave him to his fate for the greater good of the ship, an order she declines to follow, a decision that does not endear her to the man who might soon be her new boss.

M’Benga’s case might be hopeless, but Chapel refuses to give up, just as Scotty and A’Sha work on deploying a probe that could help them get a better sense of where they are and what’s going on. But maybe they’re better off not knowing? Because the truth is scary: the slipstream acts as, in Scotty’s words, a warm slingshot that will, before long, push them over the warp threshold, destroying the Enterprise in the process. And they have just 24 minutes left to stop it.

We’re now halfway through a crisis that just keeps getting worse. In sick bay, M’Benga tries to remove the table and end his life so Chapel can give up on him, an effort that proves futile. Then again, simply staying in sick bay is starting to look dangerous after the atmospheric seal, threatening to lower the temperature to deadly levels. The only possible solution is for both nurse and patient to wrap themselves in mylar and wait it out. 

Maybe Pelia can help? From her quarters, she advises Scotty to send someone out in the ion pod, a device she says they can recalibrate to suit their current purposes. It’s going to be dangerous for whoever’s in the pod, however, and a freshly recovered Pike quickly realizes who the duty will fall to due to proximity: Spock. It seems as if Spock’s recommitment to the study of logic has worked. Without a trace of emotion, he notes that “a Vulcan has the highest chances of survival.” He’s on the job. And soon Scotty’s got a new task, too, after A’Sha transports him to a Jeffries tube to get the pod ready. Maybe there’s hope after all? 

Maybe! And maybe the very neutrinos surrounding them, the ones that got them into this pickle in the first place, can save M’Benga if a fringe theory using “strong force neutrinos” that Chapel has unearthed might actually work by effectively winding back his injuries. Also, Scotty chimes in, he might be able to use them to create fuel by generating fresh deuterium. 

Of course, all this depends on Spock not dying in the process of entering and retrofitting the ion pod. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, the situation changes, forcing Spock to evacuate the pod so they can jettison it, lest it destroy the ship. It truly would be Choose Your Own Disaster Day were the disasters not choosing them. Because communication is iffy, it’s not clear if Spock got the message and was able to escape with the information they need, leading La’an to volunteer herself for the job of exiting the ship in an attempt to find him. 

After Pelia gives a despondent pep talk in which she informs him he’ll have to be a “miracle worker” (a nice nod to Scotty’s future reputation), Chapel attempts a miracle of her own, one that involves freezing M’Benga to death in the process of saving him. It’s a long shot, but so are the chances of finding Spock alive and in possession of the data the Enterprise so sorely needs. Ultimately, both pay off, but not without some complications and not until the last second. Spock’s suffering from severe radiation poisoning, but La’an is able to extract what he’s learned via a mind meld (presumably a lingering effect of her time as a Vulcan, another reminder that that storyline is still in play). When Scotty receives the information he needs, he devises a plan that will require them to cross the warp threshold before pulling back. Yet it all works, even Chapel’s unlikely procedure. The Enterprise has more than one miracle worker, it turns out.

Then, as she recovers, Chapel tells Pike that she’d like to stick around permanently, whether M’Benga leaves or not, before moving to M’Benga’s bedside and listening to the punchline of a joke he started before his death and resurrection. It doesn’t sound like a particularly good joke, but at this moment it’s probably the best joke she’s ever heard. 

That was one intense hour of Star Trek, and a well-executed one, too. We know M’Benga survives because he’s in the original series, but the severity of his situation, as reflected by Chapel’s reaction to it, makes that easy to forget. It’s also an episode in which the ship’s only enemies are astronomical. The slipstream means no more ill than a tornado does here on Earth, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous. We’re now past the halfway point of a season that’s, by my estimation, six for six, and one that’s offered a different variety of Star Trek with each outing. Hopefully the pattern will hold for the rest of the season.

Hit It!

• At some point or another, Dr. Boyce will become the Enterprise’s chief medical officer, as he was in both “The Cage,” the original Star Trek pilot, and “The Menagerie,” which used footage from “The Cage” as flashbacks to tell the story of Captain Pike. (M’Benga will either remain on or return to the Enterprise, as seen in the original series.) John Hoyt originated the role. Here he’s played by Brian Markinson, a character actor with a long career that dates back to the 1990s. He’s also previously appeared on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, playing different characters in each appearance. And, yeah, he seems like kind of a jerk here, but is he entirely wrong in asking Chapel to abandon a seemingly hopeless case to help others? The good of the many… (Also, his first name is “Phil.”)

• Bill Wolkoff provided the script. Dan Liu directed the episode. Both have been with the show since the first season, though I don’t think Liu has ever used neat split-screen effects like those seen in this episode before. 

• Pelia: “Life never gave us lemons. We demanded them.” It’s true. They’ve been around for millennia, but lemons originated as a cross between the citron and the bitter orange. 

• For all the subplots and scientific terminology being thrown around, “Off-Hour” is at heart about two relationships: The friendship of M’Benga and Chapel and the mentor/mentee dynamic between Pelia and Scotty. The first is more intense and gets more screen time and nicely confirms how deep their friendship goes, whatever restlessness they may be feeling. It’s a nice showcase for both Babs Olusanmokun and Jess Bush. The second is also nicely played, with Carol Kane again revealing the gravity beneath Pelia’s flighty exterior and Martin Quinn getting a chance to explore the character’s serious side. Scotty’s often served as comic relief, which works, but he’s also a man with a lot on his mind who’s carrying a lot of responsibilities on his shoulders.