“The Griffin Incident”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds gets spooky when a long-lost ship is discovered.

Horror has been part of Star Trek since the 1960s. The franchise celebrates the thrill of exploring the unknown, but the unknown often hides terrors. Many episodes use familiar sets to create fear by plunging them into darkness and stripping characters of control. Deep Space Nine’s “Empok Nor” and this show’s “All Those Who Wander” both use that approach to build atmosphere. This episode follows the same template with a ghost ship that defies logic and forces the characters to confront their inner anxieties.

Kirk, Spock and La’an discover the long‑lost Griffin on their way back from a future Federation leaders retreat. The dialogue quickly establishes the mystery surrounding the ship and the theories that emerged after it vanished. It’s an effective setup, inviting viewers to liken the Griffin to real ghost ship legends such as the Mary Celeste. The episode draws the audience in by reminding them that space travel has produced its share of unexplained disappearances. The speculation that formed around the Griffin reinforces that sense of intrigue because it reflects how people respond when a mystery captures their imagination.

Boarding the ship provides no answers. A distress beacon is still powered after years of abandonment and there is residual energy that should have faded long ago. The mystery builds through simple questions the characters can’t resolve, such as why the ship still has power and where the crew went. Kirk soon begins hearing noises that the others don’t and the three encounter a woman who doesn’t appear on Spock’s tricorder. By the time the opening titles arrive, the episode has fully committed to its ghost ship atmosphere.

The episode unfolds in a way that feels natural for the characters. Spock immediately looks for a scientific explanation and rejects the idea of a ghost because, to him, they don’t exist. Kirk is more open to the fantastical and even suggests they saw a ghost vanish into thin air. La’an focuses on safety, making it clear that her priority is getting off the ship before their limited life support runs out. Setting up these instincts highlights what the Griffin will erode as they spend more time aboard.

Kirk is confronted with his effectiveness as a father. Before boarding the Griffin, he talks about bringing his young son David a trinket as a memento of where he’s been. He also mentions that he was supposed to see David but missed his window because his return was delayed, so the tension between family and career is already on his mind. The ship preys on this by haunting him with the sound of a crying baby echoing through the corridors. He opens up to La’an about envying Sam’s ability to balance work and family and about being on the outs with David’s mother, Carol, who worries he’ll die alone in some distant part of space. The crying child keeps tormenting him until he’s convinced David is on the ship and trapped inside the communications console, leading him to tear it apart and sabotage their best hope for rescue.

A manifestation of his brother Sam pushes Kirk to confront his anxiety about being a father. He talks about their own father, a career Starfleet officer who was absent for much of their childhood. The trinket established earlier is revealed to be something their father used to bring home after long stretches away. The Sam manifestation says he has more of those trinkets than memories of quality time with their father. It isn’t the real Sam, but the sentiment is one Kirk shares because they grew up the same way and have the same collection. They even speak in unison when they recall that the last time they heard from their father was on their birthday. The manifestation isn’t telling Kirk anything new, only reinforcing the experiences they both had with an absent parent. When Kirk asks how Sam balances career and family, the manifestation admits he hasn’t found the answer but calls his sons every night so their father is at least a distant but present figure in their lives. Kirk pledges to adopt that habit once the crisis is over.

Kirk’s fear of becoming his father is a compelling insight. The episode reminds us that their father was an overbearing presence with high expectations for both sons, and Kirk seems to be repeating those patterns without realising it. Sam has made a conscious choice not to be that kind of parent and has found ways to be better. The manifestation isn’t the real Sam, but what it says reflects either past conversations or assumptions Kirk has already made. It’s unfortunate that the episode doesn’t include a real conversation between the brothers to explore this directly, but the exchange with the manifestation still reveals a lot about Kirk’s current mindset.

His anxiety intensifies when he starts to believe the Kirk name is cursed. He worries he’s doomed to be a terrible father and to die alone. La’an tells him, after stabbing him, that his son will die at the end of a blade just like him. Anyone who has seen Star Trek III: The Search for Spock knows how accurate that prediction is, but even without that context it’s a chilling attack on Kirk’s belief that a father’s role is to protect his child. Invoking David makes the moment even harsher because it suggests he’ll fail in the one duty he values most. La’an reinforces the idea of a curse by saying, “Who better to command a ship of the damned than a Kirk?” It’s a direct strike at his identity, as if the name itself is poisoned and he can’t escape it. The ship preys on his sense of self and his effectiveness as a father, two things he defines himself by, while tempting him with the idea of abandoning balance altogether and letting his career consume everything else.

When he’s rescued by the Enterprise, Kirk is clearly shaken. His hesitation before answering “yes” when Uhura asks if he’s okay makes that obvious. Their conversation is a neat callback to their interactions in season 2’s “Lost in Translation”. The cookies represent comfort and sanity just as they did then, signalling to Kirk that he’s safe now and with someone he trusts. His decision to call Carol and David shows how deeply the experience affected him and marks a choice to prioritise family over career. Using Uhura to offer that comfort works because it builds on their established relationship, but the episode misses an important beat by not giving Kirk a real conversation with Sam. Since the story explicitly explores their relationship and their father’s influence, hearing Sam’s actual perspective feels necessary.

Spock is met with a manifestation of T’Pring who challenges his grasp on reality. She insists she’s real, and Spock keeps resisting that idea while trying to find a rational explanation for the hallucination. She tries to convince him by sharing something from her life that only he knows, but Spock points out that his subconscious could easily draw on that memory. She then offers to help him open the locked door and tells him there’s no harm in letting a hallucination assist him. That weakens his resolve, shifting his focus away from proving she isn’t real and toward the task at hand. As they work, they talk about the breakdown of their relationship. Spock says it was his fault, but the manifestation blames herself, which suggests that on some level he believes she couldn’t accept his Human side and that this led to the impasse that drove them apart.

This is another example of Spock wrestling with the Vulcan and Human parts of himself, as if his DNA is split into two opposing forces and he has to choose one over the other. Strange New Worlds often frames his identity this way, reducing a complex personal struggle to a simple binary. The problem is made worse by how shallowly Vulcans are portrayed. “Four and a Half Vulcans” last season was the clearest example of that, reducing the species to caricature.

A more nuanced reading of Spock’s experience is that he fears the binary might be real. His anxiety about T’Pring is rooted in the idea that she didn’t accept him for who he is, and dividing himself into Vulcan and Human parts gives him a way to parse what she might have rejected. In reality, being raised by a Human and a Vulcan has made him less traditional than the Vulcans she knows. Their upbringings were vastly different, so the issue is more of a cultural disconnect than a rejection of half his DNA, despite how the episode frames it. If Spock doesn’t fully understand that, it makes sense that the manifestation of T’Pring would oversimplify it.

The horror for Spock comes from the manifestation of T’Pring tying him down and trying to cut the Vulcan out of him, insisting he’ll be a more complete person once it’s gone. The manifestation of Una reinforces that idea by saying she’ll never be a Captain as long as she’s an Illyrian, then cutting herself and reacting with unsettling euphoria before collapsing. For Spock, the horror goes beyond the mutilation. He’s being told what he needs to be and having his identity forced on him instead of choosing it for himself. He breaks free of the illusion by invoking the mantra the T’Pring manifestation reminded him of earlier, something she said helped her stay centred during a difficult moment. It does the same for Spock, causing the illusions to disappear and allowing him to regain control.

At the end of the episode, Spock tells Chapel that the illusion brought him back to logic, a stabilising force in his life. It’s unclear whether this hints at him choosing to lean more heavily on his Vulcan upbringing and embrace logic more completely. He has been consciously exploring his Humanity, so it’s possible this experience marks the end of that phase and strengthens his resolve to be more Vulcan because he sees logic as a source of stability he can’t get elsewhere. That’s a problem because it reinforces the show’s misunderstanding of what Spock’s inner conflict should be. His identity struggles should feel far more personal than the show allows, and if he really is resolving to be more Vulcan, then the story needs to examine how misguided it is for him to define himself by the two species that make up his DNA.

Spock’s conversation with Chapel is a strong moment. They connect over their shared discomfort with certain spaces because of the memories tied to them. Spock is reluctant to go to sickbay after what he experienced on the Griffin, and Chapel feels the same way about the mess hall because it reminds her of the Klingon war and things she’d rather not revisit. It’s a meaningful moment of vulnerability between them, and Ethan Peck’s portrayal of Spock as visibly shaken gives it real weight.

The Griffin preys on La’an’s anxiety about losing her humanity and becoming like her despotic ancestor. She encounters Griffin crewmember, Rose Harper (Sorika Wolf), either real or a manifestation, who tries to tempt her into embracing the part of herself she wants to reject instead of changing to fit in. Rose offers her acceptance, telling her, “You are not a Khan, you are not a Romulan, you are not a monster, you are one of us.” The line directly targets the things La’an fears becoming, and Rose’s offer of unconditional acceptance becomes the hook the ship uses to draw her in.

This overrides her rational mind and she fully embraces the part of herself she’s afraid of, even sabotaging any attempt to pull her back from it. The manifestation of Uhura hugs her in a show of emotional support, which La’an accepts at first, but she quickly tries to eliminate any chance of being taken off the Griffin by beaming the manifestation of Ortegas into herself. It’s a blatant rejection of the companionship and support offered by the Enterprise crew in favour of embracing the despotic tendencies she fears are part of her.

Harper also preys on La’an’s recognition that Starfleet is her family, something she accepts and takes comfort in. She’s offered a literal family in the form of a crew who will embrace her without question, twisting something she relies on into a temptation. The image of the crowded engine room, showing her how large that family could be, hits her hard because it offers belonging without judgment and acceptance without effort. It’s a vision of a life where she doesn’t have to fear her ancestry or worry about fitting in, and that makes it dangerously seductive. It pushes her further down a path where she’s willing to harm her friends because the Griffin has convinced her that this new family is the one place where she can be her unfiltered self. The only real injury she causes is to Kirk, but the other horrors she inflicts feel real, and that’s what matters. It’s her willingness to cause harm that frightens her most and makes her worry about what she’s becoming.

She reflects on this with Pike at the end of the episode. He has omitted her violent attack on Kirk from his report, and La’an is unsettled by the censorship until Pike tells her a ghost story from his childhood to show that the universe is full of things beyond their current understanding and not everything has a logical explanation. He still has no answer for that possible supernatural encounter, and he understands that whatever affected the Griffin’s crew made them act out of character. La’an worries she was acting like her authentic self, but Pike has faith she isn’t that person and won’t damage her career by reporting what she did.

This may seem toothless from Pike, and it fits the pattern established when he chose not to report M’Benga’s real reason for killing the Klingon ambassador last season, but it’s consistent with his character. The problem is that there are never consequences. Pike doesn’t see M’Benga differently after learning the truth, even though M’Benga wasn’t influenced by any external force and made a fully conscious decision. That’s a key difference from La’an’s situation, and in this case it’s understandable that Pike’s faith in her wouldn’t waver. The issue is that Pike’s leniency has become so routine that it weakens the emotional fallout of moments like this. When the show refuses to confront the darker truths about its characters, it blunts the impact of stories that depend on moral uncertainty, and Pike’s choice here ends up feeling like another example of the series avoiding the harder conversation.

As a horror experience, this episode was excellent. The standing sets were made to feel claustrophobic and unwelcoming, and shrouding them in darkness stripped away the usual sense of safety they provide, letting the starship slip naturally into haunted‑house territory. The episode was restrained with jump scares, favouring atmosphere to build a pervasive sense of dread and leaning on psychological horror to create real terror. There’s a strong sense that the characters were personally affected by what they endured, confronted by their innermost anxieties in a primal way.

Using manifestations of familiar characters prompts those affected, and the audience, to question what’s real. When Kirk approaches La’an in the corridor and she stabs him, it’s unclear whether he’s another manifestation designed to confuse and influence her. Later, when the Enterprise beams them out, there’s a moment of doubt about whether the rescue is genuine and they’re actually safe. The uncertainty fades, but the Griffin’s influence lingers, leaving the viewer questioning reality alongside those trying to make sense of what they experienced.

The lack of explanation for what they experienced is a strong choice that adds to the horror. It prevents them from achieving real closure because they can’t put a label on what happened, and it simply joins the long list of things that can’t currently be explained. Pike mentions that there are events in his career that were handed over to Division 12 and remain unresolved, which reinforces the idea that the universe is full of terrors that defy understanding. It casts a dark shadow over their mission to explore and learn because some things are best not encountered. It attacks them on a fundamental level as the work they’ve chosen to do feels tainted. It leaves them with the uneasy truth that some mysteries don’t just resist explanation, they stain the very act of seeking it.

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Verdict

A harrowing episode that uses its horror to bring buried anxieties to the surface and forces its characters to confront them.

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