Which is worse: getting your eyeballs blown out of your head by a magical orb or third-wheeling on an away mission made up of three different couples? Thus is the dilemma of poor Ensign Gamble (hey, he’s finally got a name!), who starts this episode as a chipper newbie and eventually winds up with the lethal end of the lollipop.
It turns out Strange New Worlds apparently has two main themes it wants to explore this season: horror and romance. And after four episodes that mostly chose one or the other, “Through The Lens Of Time” is here to combine them both. Unfortunately, that leads to an episode that bites off more than it can chew. Plotwise, this is one of the most exciting, complex sci-fi episodes of the season (if not the series). But character wise, I found a lot of its choices really frustrating. Your mileage may vary as to whether the former outweighs the latter. For me, at least, the balance isn’t quite there.
The biggest problem is “Through The Lens Of Time” feels like two episodes stuck together. On the one hand, we’ve got the tragic tale of Ensign Gamble, who represents the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed crew members who wind up giving their lives for Starfleet far too young. And on the other hand, we’ve got an away-team mission that begins as a cringe-comedy rom-com only to end up in an Indiana Jones-themed escape room. But while the two storylines are linked by the fact that they start light and zippy and then become very serious very quickly, they’ve got drastically different emotional stakes in a way the episode never quite manages to rectify.
That all starts with the return of Dr. Korby, who’s enlisted the Enterprise to help him on a research mission. It turns out Korby is specifically studying “molecular memory and corporeal transference,” a.k.a. the idea that there may have been ancient alien societies who developed reincarnation technology. Five years ago, he found a ring with a royal insignia on Polaris Twelve hundreds of light years away. That led him and Chapel to discover templates with similar markings on the planet Pletorian. And now they’ve traced those markings back to an ancient temple buried beneath the surface of Vadia Nine, home to the reclusive non-Federation race the Ma’Cruins.
Korby and Chapel theorize the Ma’Cruins are the descendants of an advanced civilization that could travel across multiple galaxies and achieved immortality by “creating quantum instability at a molecular level”—a history that’s been lost to time. One rock wall blast from the Enterprise and a blood offering later, an away team made up of Korby, Chapel, Spock, La’An, Uhura, Gamble, local representative N’Jal (Ish Morris), and Ortegas’ documentarian little brother Beto venture inside the temple to see what’s there. What they find are some mummified graverobbers, a mysterious orb that blasts out Gamble’s eyes/gets him evacuated back to the Enterprise, a security forcefield that turns N’Jal to dust, and the third act of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade spread across multiple planes of existence.
While the Last Crusade homages are perhaps a little overly cute, “Through The Lens Of Time” jazzes up its A-plot with some clever sci-fi twists. It’s always nice when a show called Strange New Worlds manages to come up with a truly strange new world, and this one definitely delivers on that front. Chapel’s initial blood sample becomes key to how the rules of the temple operate. The cavernous, endlessly shifting background is a cool visual design. And it’s a clever idea to split the team into pairs (Chapel/La’An, Spock/Korby, Uhura/Beto) and let them each discover strange mysteries at play, some of which get resolved and some of which don’t.
La’An spots Chinese writing on a sort-of living statue called a “Beholder.” Spock sees a well full of thousands more glowing orbs containing the same terrifying parasitic creatures that attacked Gamble (and that Spock previously saw when he mind-melded with Captain Batel back in “Shuttle To Kenfori”). Beto’s camera footage helps Uhura realize the team members are all still in the same room, just in different layers of dimensional space that need to be united using ancient artifacts. And Spock discovers that cause and effect don’t happen in order in the temple—which allows the team to escape on a bridge that doesn’t yet exist.
There’s enough going on that the writers easily could’ve fleshed out the away mission into its own hour-long episode, with more room to explore character beats like the moment Korby seems tempted to go back for the Holy Grail, er, ancient-alien relic. (Chapel doesn’t quite say “Indiana, let it go,” but she might as well.) For some reason, however, the writers decide to pair their adventurous A-plot with a horror movie B-plot that also seems like it could be its own hour-long episode. And that winds up hurting both stories in the process.
In fact, the biggest weakness of the Gamble storyline is also its greatest strength: Chris Myers is a wildly charismatic performer who’s really made Ensign Gamble feel like a winning new presence across these past few episodes. And his truly terrifying work as Eyeless Demon Gamble proves he’s also an actor who could bring a lot of dimensions to the series too. In that way, losing him feels like a real loss. Yet, for some reason, the show treats his death like a minor inconvenience for sickbay and not a major tragedy for this “we’re a family!” starship.
It’s kind of baffling. It seems like the reason to introduce a likable new supporting character in the season premiere only to kill him off three episodes later is to make his death a major fulcrum point of the season, to explore how the loss of a young crew member affects the entire Enterprise and reflects on Starfleet as a whole, to essentially humanize the “red shirts” who used to die on The Original Series. Only, ironically, our main crew actually feel way more callous here than Kirk and co. used to when a day player got zapped.
Despite the fact that Gamble has been woven into their personal and professional lives for the past six months, we don’t even get to see the away team have any reaction to the fact that the young Ensign they took on his first ever landing party lost his life on the mission. Instead, Gamble is treated like M’Benga’s sidekick rather than a person in his own right. “I know you were fond of the boy” is such a reductive way to eulogize a Starfleet officer!
It’s a shame because before its whiffed ending, the Gamble stuff is effectively haunting. Myers excels at switching back and forth between Gamble’s panicked consciousness and his parasitic alter ego. His eye injury is also one of the more graphic images I can recall from a Star Trek series, which really ups the horror movie vibe of it all. And the moment he taunts M’Benga about his daughter joining that cloud consciousness back in season one is a great use of the show’s history. You really get the sense that the parasite is all-powerful in a terrifying way. But, again, it’s such a strong premise, I wish it could have gotten its own episode.
Of course, given that Gamble died while researching a culture steeped in immortality, this might not actually be the last we see of him. Now that the Gorn have gone back into hibernation, it seems like Strange New Worlds is setting up this ancient race and its enemies as a new ongoing through-line. The parasite that took over Gamble remains not-so-stuck in a transporter buffer pattern prison as the episode ends, so who knows where things go from here.
But that eerie teaser relies on too much short-changed character work to get there. And that sort of character-based wonkiness is reflected across this episode as a whole. M’Benga’s bedside manner seems notably terrible this week. (Maybe don’t just tell someone they’re brain dead and you don’t know why?) It feels really weird that after Captain Batel’s Gorn-hybrid instincts cause her to animalistically attack Gamble, she’s just allowed to sleep it off in Pike’s quarters (privileges of dating the captain, I guess). And, most notably, Chapel has truly gone off the deep end when it comes to how she approaches her interpersonal relationships. (“Hey La’An, is your new boyfriend hung up on the fact that my new boyfriend is here?”)
The return to the Spock/Chapel/Korby love triangle (or love square, if we count La’An) is especially odd when it felt like all of that got resolved quite nicely in “Wedding Bell Blues.” In fact, Chapel’s opening conversations with La’An and Spock read as if she’s actively trying to stir up drama in order to make everything about herself—which would actually be a pretty interesting character flaw if the episode were intentionally depicting her that way! But I think she’s supposed to come across as adorkably awkward instead.
The away-team mission ultimately anchors itself around the theme of trust and how the Enterprise crew still need to believe each other as co-workers despite all their recent romantic entanglements. Only that’s not a question I was really asking. And the storyline that would be an interesting interrogation of that idea (what happens when a young Ensign puts too much trust in his colleagues to protect him?) doesn’t engage with the theme at all.
Perhaps the best encapsulation of this episode’s tonal weirdness comes at the end, as Pelia’s big dramatic monologue about why these new parasitic entities are evil personified pivots into a joke about how she wants more screen time in Beto’s documentary. That’s a great button for the Indiana Jones romp, but a terrible one for a story about the tragic death of Ensign Gamble. And an episode that prioritizes in-the-moment fun over episodic cohesion is never going to be my favorite flavor of Trek—even if this one is pretty undeniably engaging along the way.
Stray observations
- • I’ve been calling Gamble a nurse, but it turns out he’s actually a “Junior Medical Officer.” So maybe the white jumpsuits are just a style preference rather than a role distinction? Although I’m pretty sure Una said something about him going to nursing school too.
- • It’s funny how much the away team are worried about starving to death because that’s how the graverobbers died. But, like, they just arrived and the Enterprise is right above them. It feels like starvation isn’t that much of an immediate threat.
- • Back in “Wedding Bell Blues,” Trelane accused Korby of “digging in the dirt on the old homeworld.” So is this ancient temple part of a Q Continuum origin story? Or is this a new ancient immortal race?
- • Not only does Ethan Peck honor the way Leonard Nimoy said “sensor,” he also extrapolates it to “dance instructor” too, which is cute.
- • We also get Spock making a “curiouser and curiouser” Alice In Wonderland reference—a callback to the book his mom used to read him and Michael as kids on Discovery.
- • Since Korby just makes a one-episode appearance in The Original Series, I’m considering his future more of a spoiler than I normally would with established Trek canon. But this episode certainly gains some extra resonance when paired with 1966’s “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”
