A review of this week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "The Griffin Incident" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I pass your compliments onto the chef
Alan Sepinwall
After the season premiere delivered one familiar Star Trek tune with a time travel adventure, "The Griffin Incident" plays another of the franchise's greatest hits: a haunted house story. This one doubles as a bottle episode, as the hour plays out on another Starfleet ship (allowing production to just redress the Enterprise sets), with a few familiar recurring players and a non-famous guest star. All of this helps to keep the costs down for more ambitious episodes, like ones where, say, La'an punches a raptor in the nose and Pike allows multiple genocides to happen because he had a hunch.
As bottle adventures go, "The Griffin Incident" is pretty good. The atmosphere is suitably creepy throughout. There are some genuinely unnerving moments, particularly involving Spock being tortured in sick bay by hallucinatory versions of T'Pring and Pike. And the three questions our heroes are confronted with — Can Kirk ever be a good father to David? Will La'an give into her genetic nature and start killing everyone she cares about? Has Spock drifted too far from his Vulcan roots? — are ones the series has tracked off and on for a while, albeit some more consistently and successfully than others.