Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 6, “Off-Hour.”
Now that’s more like it. After the past several weeks of high-concept/low-impact Strange New Worlds episodes, the show finally gets back on track with a good old space adventure. Sure, it’s still a concept episode in its way (or two, I suppose, doing The Poseidon Adventure in space alongside an hour of Jack Bauer-style, real-time 24 action), but it’s one that works in spades and is never overshadowed by its concepts.
“Off-Hour” certainly benefits from its focus on two of the show’s best characters, Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), and the relationship that has been established between the two over the course of the past three and a half seasons. But beyond that, the episode also gives us some nice Scotty (Martin Quinn)/Pelia (Carol Kane) interplay. And it’s also just a cracking good hour of drama, action, and sci-fi spectacle.
When the Enterprise gets stuck in a slipstream wormhole, the devastation wreaked on the ship is abrupt – and fatal for some. Then there’s the crewmembers like M’Benga, who survives the initial blast but is mortally wounded; the doctor specifically is trapped behind a medical bay table, which has crashed into him and essentially severed his body at the midsection. Once the table is moved, he’ll be dead. But that’s where Chapel comes in…
I just mentioned in my interview with Olusanmokun a couple of weeks ago that the thing about Dr. M’Benga is we know he’s going to survive the show, because his character shows up on The Original Series. But somehow that knowledge doesn’t take the tension out of his predicament this week, perhaps because Strange New Worlds plays so fast and loose with continuity that I was actually thinking while watching, “Maybe that’s a different M’Benga on The Original Series!” But also because the relationship between M’Benga and Chapel is so well-realized that just seeing them deal with this situation, and the emotion between them, is gripping in and of itself.
It’s also magnified by the fact that we learn here that M’Benga is thinking about leaving the Enterprise, and has even called in Dr. Boyce (Brian Markinson, who has previously appeared on TNG, DS9, and Voyager!) – the former (interim) chief medical officer of the Enterprise – to presumably replace him when he leaves. This is intriguing because we at home know that Strange New Worlds only has a handful of episodes left (including the abbreviated next and final season), and so characters like M’Benga and La’an who aren’t on The Original Series are going to have to start to depart the show at some point – and will be doing so one way or another, for better or worse.
Episode writer Bill Wolkoff, director Dan Liu, and the production team manage to depict space-travel danger here in a way that we have rarely seen in the franchise, as when the gravity controls onboard begin to malfunction, crushing pianos and whatnot, or when Spock and La’an have to climb onto the exterior of the ship during a pyrotechnic neutrino storm. And Scotty learning to “feel” the Enterprise and interpret its status like some kind of starship whisperer is also a nice touch, a call back (call forward?) to the Scotty who will someday say that he could tell the speed his ship was traveling “by the feel of the deck plates.”
I’m actually surprised at how much I’ve come to enjoy this version of Scotty, even as the frequent focus on him has meant that Kane’s Pelia usually takes a back seat. But here the mentor/mentee interplay between the two really works, as we see how she is helping to mold him into the man we all know he’s becoming. That all the problems the crew are facing end with a technobabble solution was perhaps inevitable, but it doesn’t make what has come before any less exciting or moving, and if anything, “Off-Hour” is a reminder that when Strange New Worlds cooks, it really cooks.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- Of course, this isn’t the first time Star Trek has done a “disaster in space” episode. Just look at TNG’s appropriately named “Disaster” for starters.
- Pour one out for all those poor, irradiated bastards in Engineering who didn’t make it out after the blast doors shut. Red Shirts galore!
- Dr. Phil Boyce was the original doctor on the Enterprise, first (and only, until now) seen in the unaired pilot of The Original Series, “The Cage.” There he was played by John Hoyt and depicted as a kindly and wise friend to Jeffrey Hunter’s Captain Pike – who also had a talent for making martinis. But interestingly, by the time of the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (where William Shatner made his debut), neither M’Benga nor Boyce was the chief medical officer onboard. Rather, Dr. Mark Piper (Paul Fix) served in that capacity for a one-episode stint before DeForest Kelley’s Dr. Leonard McCoy finally showed up. So how this will all work out remains to be seen.
- Again with the gore! M’Benga being cut in half I get, and the episode is pretty restrained in how it depicts it. But then they just had to show us Una’s compound fracture and Chapel’s finger breaking off. How many fingers have we lost this season now?
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