Near the end of a season that’s paid homage to Muppet movies, soap operas, and film noir, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finally settles on a genre riff that hits a little closer to home. “Orders Of Magnitude” may be styled like a classic submarine thriller, but more than anything, it reminded me of the ’90s Next Generation movies like First Contact and Insurrection. It’s bigger, broader, and more action-packed than your average Star Trek episode, but not in a turn-off-your-brain way like the J.J. Abrams films. Instead, “Order Of Magnitude” is also bold and provocative in what it’s trying to do thematically. While I’m not sure every choice it makes completely holds up under scrutiny, it’s thrilling to watch the show embrace a new tone without moving away from the fundamentals of what Star Trek is at its core.
There are two main factors that help this episode achieve that effect. The first is a stellar guest turn from Joe Morton as a roguish admiral who takes command of the Enterprise. The second is some absolute standout direction from Sharon Lewis. Her only other Strange New Worlds credit is last season’s faux-documentary, “What Is Starfleet?,” which was so beholden to its style you couldn’t really tell what Lewis was bringing to the table specifically. But her work this week is phenomenal. A huge reason this episode evokes those TNG movies is because it looks so cinematic.
Strange New Worlds uses that big-screen sheen to deliver a spiritual sequel to “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” the first time the series handed itself over to Paul Wesley’s James T. Kirk for a week. My big complaint about that episode was that it was in way too much of a rush to put Kirk in the captain’s chair with the Original Series cast around him, rather than taking advantage of this show’s prequel setting to explore a different dynamic. “Orders Of Magnitude” takes the note as it specifically explores what Kirk was like as a first officer.
Admittedly, there’s some slightly convoluted plotting to get us there. Pike, Una, Uhura, Chapel, and A’Sha follow a distress signal to a cave that leaves them out of communication just as highly respected Klingon War vet Admiral Simon Reeger (Morton) shows up to commandeer Enterprise. He’s spotted the rare chance to track down a mysterious cloaked ship responsible for the “Vardan Massacre,” an unprovoked attack on a Federation colony that killed 5 million civilians. Though Spock is the highest-ranking Enterprise crew member onboard, Kirk—who has stopped by the ship to flirt with La’An—technically outranks him overall, so Reeger pulls him in as his first officer. It’s a slightly clunky choice the episode just about gets away with by lampshading it and then revealing that Reeger is working through a personal grudge against Kirk’s dad, his former first officer.
While Strange New Worlds has had some fun guest stars before, none have popped quite as much as Morton does. Playing a self-described “wily old war dog,” he brings a swaggering, off-the-cuff confidence that’s somehow charming and unnerving at the same time. Pike and Kirk may get called space cowboys occasionally, but Morton embodies that energy to the fullest. A huge part of the ’90s Trek flavor comes from his performance, which lands somewhere between Jonathan Frakes and Avery Brooks and made me realize just how mannered a lot of the acting on Strange New Worlds can be.
The strength of the performance is key because there are times when the moral dilemma at the center of “Orders Of Magnitude” threatens to become a little too simplistic. By the time Reeger is ordering Enterprise to destroy the evil ship by wiping out the small, non-Federation planet it’s landed on, it’s pretty clear we’re meant to see him as the bad guy and Kirk as the good one without too many shades of gray in between. (Even if it’s then somewhat confusingly revealed that the entire planet somehow only has 5,000 people on it.) In fact, it’s a little distracting that everyone else on the Enterprise is so willing to go along with Reeger’s commands while only Kirk raises any true ethical concerns.
On a conceptual level, the military critique lands. We’ve seen governments commit atrocities against “colluding” civilians in response to terrorist attacks everywhere from the United States’ response to 9/11 to Israel’s response to October 7. It just feels like the “Orders Of Magnitude” script takes the slight cheat of making our main players a little more placid than usual in order to make Kirk look more interesting by comparison. Then again, this season did open with Pike allowing the genocide of an entire bug planet while the crew stood by and watched, so maybe this is in character for them.
Regardless, Kirk’s arc is exciting enough to make up for the deficit. He gets to star in what amounts to a tense spy thriller once Reeger dismisses him for questioning his orders. He pieces together the fact that Reeger’s wife and two daughters were killed in the Vardan Massacre and discovers Starfleet may have made him an admiral just to get his wartime sensibilities away from a bridge. From there Kirk gets to go full action hero as he tries to sneak a message to Starfleet, shoots La’An to escape custody (“Sorry, but you did stab me”), ropes in Sam as a decoy, and bluffs his way into stopping a vengeful Reeger from blowing up the planet.
In fact, this would have been a compelling hour if it had simply stopped with Kirk as an unquestioned hero, but “Orders Of Magnitude” elevates itself with a twist. It turns out Kirk spiked Reeger’s coffee in order to bring out his aggression to a point of violence that would let M’Benga declare him medically unfit. (A move M’Benga takes the fall for.) What felt like Reeger revealing his true villainous nature was actually an ethically dubious manipulation on Kirk’s part. It’s a clever, genuinely unexpected way to inject some of that morally gray energy back into the story.
For as much as “Orders Of Magnitude” is a sequel to “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” it’s also an attempt to revisit the clear-eyed examination of Starfleet that didn’t quite land in that aforementioned documentary episode. The honor-bound, science-minded, neatly hierarchical nature of Starfleet still depends on imperfect, emotional people to run it. There can be strength in that, as Uhura demonstrates when she follows her training and gets the away team out of a hostage situation by pretending to turn on her crew in favor of helping some Andorian pirates. Yet there can be danger in it too, like when one man has the power to order the death of thousands with no checks and balances to stop him.
The end of this episode is meant to emphasize that multiple things can be true at once. Reeger tells Kirk the blood of future victims will be on his head; A’Sha quits Starfleet altogether; M’Benga reveals George Kirk asked the crew to lie about Reeger being a hero in order to keep up Starfleet morale during the war; and Uhura excitedly accepts a promotion to lieutenant junior grade. Unfortunately, some of that ambiguity is undercut by how much this episode reclaims George Kirk as a perfect Klingon War hero, right down to the reveal that he did want to spend more time with his family, Reeger just didn’t let him. I suppose lying to your sons about how great Starfleet is in order to encourage them to join could be seen as morally gray in its own way, but this episode mostly seems to take a boringly sunny view of Kirk Sr.
Indeed, the final swell of happy music under a shot of Uhura excitedly strolling the halls is a bit of an incongruous note to end on here. (Even just her looking excited while more somber music plays would have been a more intriguing contrast.) Still, the dangling threads about M’Benga’s career, the fact that the evil cloaked ship gets away, and the potential for Reeger to return are welcome signs that Strange New Worlds might finally be ready to put down the gimmicks and take itself a little more seriously.
Stray observations
- • Alan B. McElroy also wrote last season’s standout hour, “Terrarium,” so he’s really on a roll!
- • As for M’Benga’s future, he is technically an Original Series character, where he was played by Booker Bradshaw in two episodes. But there’s a lot of wiggle room as to how he winds up handing over chief medical officer duties to McCoy.
- • Uhura gets to be quite the badass in her big fight scene and Celia Rose Gooding handles the action very well. I also love how much her old mentor Hemmer is referenced this week. It’s sweet that he’s still influencing Uhura, even all these seasons after his death.
- • While we’ve maybe seen background male crewmembers wear the dress version of the Starfleet uniform before, I think Scotty might be our first main male cast member to don one? He looks great!
- • Moving “The Griffin Incident” to the second episode of the season helped kick things off on a stronger note, but I do see how it messed with some of the season’s flow. If it had aired as the fourth episode as originally intended, Kirk’s appearances would have been more evenly spaced out, his relationship with Sam would be fresher in our minds, and the Kirk/La’An/Spock/T’Pring relationship drama would have unfolded a little more naturally.
- • Kirk and Spock share some very cute banter about who deserves to be acting first officer. That’s the energy I want from them, rather than the wacky comedy shortcuts of “Human Best Friend.”
- • I missed it on a first watch, but you can see the moment Kirk sneaks the medicine into Reeger’s coffee while he’s pretending to be too weak to stand up straight.
- • While I like the idea of someone getting stabbed and immediately realizing Starfleet isn’t for them, if this is actually the last we see of A’Sha, she’ll have had an even weirder arc than poor Ensign Gamble did last season.
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