A review of this week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "A Case of Chiaroscuro" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I love rules about lists...
Alan Sepinwall
"A Case of Chiaroscuro" is both a gimmick episode, since it's shot in black-and-white due to a technobabble-y solar phenomenon; and a pretty classic Mission of the Week adventure, where several crew members wind up on a planet with a strong resemblance to a past version of Earth, that also doubles as a pop culture pastiche. The original series did a gangster planet episode, so why can't Strange New Worlds do a Casablanca planet episode? But while I want this show to trend more towards regular episodes than Very Special Ones, "A Case of Chiaroscuro" is a lot stronger at its gimmick than it is at the basics. It looks great, but has a forgettable story.
Casablanca is in my Letterboxd top 4. It's one of the best, most rewatchable, most quotable movies ever made. But I also don't look at it as a sacred cow that other movies and TV shows aren't allowed to riff on. "A Case of Chiaroscuro" is more blatant about it than most, down to a Klingon-flavored recreation of my favorite scene from the movie, where Victor Laszlo drowns out the Nazis by getting all the French people in Rick's bar to sing "La Marseillaise." And, again, there's a tradition of Star Trek doing things like this, so the idea of a planet whose natives look human, who dress like it's Earth in the early 1940s, and who are enduring an occupation where the Klingons are acting very much like the Nazis in France, isn't that far afield. Hell, I could even probably accept the idea of Una looking exactly like the missing rebel leader, at the exact moment when Nivette's presence was needed the most to defeat the Klingons. It's a contrivance, but, again, Star Trek does silly stuff sometimes, and the dramatic ends can justify the flimsy means.