WHY WE LIKE IT: Character development.
WHY WE DON'T: The case for supernatural horror.
REVIEW: One of my main complaints about Season 3 of Strange New Worlds was that it had too many horror episodes, and well, here we go again. Body horror, at that, and no, I didn't much care for it on Voyager either. The mention of Division 12 as an X-Files unit, to the point of almost serving as a backdoor pilot for something that will never see the light of day, does not bode well for this season either. I just don't think you should be writing Trek if what you really want to do is a horror series. ESPECIALLY if you're going to go out of your way to leave the phenomenon unexplained and "supernatural" (which is what Division 12 opens us up to). I would definitely be okay of this were a change of page episode, but it's not, and worse, it's not even original. A hallucinating crew goes on a rampage as our heroes become a danger even to themselves here first evoked TNG's Night Terrors (there's even a callback to the morgue scene), and Strange New Worlds has done all this before, most notably in Lost in Translation, but one could also mention Ghosts of Illyria and Shuttle to Kenfori as having very similar vibes. The big difference is that in each of those cases, a scientific explanation was offered. It could easily have been here, too - there's obviously a non-corporeal entity at work - but no, let's have Starfleet officers choose to believe in ghosts.
The real value of an episode where everything that happens is an illusion and you can't trust anything (and the reason I blame an entity is that it follows its own storytelling rules, like having an actual away team split up and appear "correctly" to various characters, as if the audience were hallucinating, plus having Rose Harper appear BEFORE she's identified from logs) is to give the featured characters a way to access their own psychologies in their rawest form. La'an is already going through something this season, her Augment DNA perhaps coming to the fore, which she fears will lead to a more fascist attitude. And so, in the hallucinations, she's a killer and loves it. With her, we're left with an uneasy feeling that no matter what catharsis she went through, she still doesn't know if she can be trusted. In fact, doubt is pretty much the theme. Just look at Kirk, whose relationship with Carol has already fallen apart, unsure of whether he can keep his date with his baby son, remembering his father abandoned the family, and imagining that his brother Sam is doing a better job of it. (This is one of the reasons I resent the unreality of the episode - the scene between the brothers is great, except it didn't happen.) So he hears his baby crying behind a console, gets a prophecy about how David will die, and sees his brother expelled into space, so we're getting closer to the basically unattached Kirk of TOS. Another downer ending, where he tries to call David and nobody answers.
And then there's Spock. His vision brings back T'Pring as a symbol of the Vulcanness he has lost. She's rounding his ears with rusty scissors (there's rust in this environment, with this technology?) and telling him to be human. He'll be the one who snaps out of it (not that it's integral to the solution since Enterprise will come to the rescue anyway) by invoking logic and returning to it. Here, we're bringing the character closer to what he must be at the top of the original series, but to call it character development is to say that the emotional Spock of the past couple seasons was a good idea. The fact it needs to be walked back makes this a corrective, or even regressive, maneuver. If Spock had doubts about this more human path, so did we, buddy. And with 14 episodes to go in total, even the production can't continue with it. When these three characters were dropped alone on the Mary Celeste in Space, I thought the episode might be about romantic awkwardness. It wasn't, but these events might provoke some in the near future.
LESSON: Never trust your lying eyes.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Mileage may vary, but I've been here before and wasn't too stoked about it even then.
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