This Week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Is a Tale of the Once and Future Captain Kirk... and It's a Good One!

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 8, “Orders of Magnitude.”

And now we’re back to regular Star Trek again with this episode, after weeks of “concept” stories . “Orders of Magnitude” isn’t doing any gimmicks, even if it is trading on a tried-and-true set-up that Trek itself has tackled itself many times before – that of the increasingly erratic and dangerous commander whose questionable decisions put his crew into a moral quandary.

While Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his away team are planet-bound and out of communications range, the legendary Admiral Simon Reeger (Terminator 2’s Joe Morton!) shows up in a shuttlecraft and announces that he’s taking command of the Enterprise. He’s uncovered a way to track a mysterious, cloaked enemy vessel that is believed to be responsible for something known as the Vardan Massacre, which resulted in 5 million civilian casualties. (The way he’s tracking it? The gamma ray burn-off from the ship’s impulse engines, obvs.) But time is of the essence, and so he takes command of the Enterprise while the trail is still hot.

Coincidentally – or not really, since this guy stops by the Enterprise all the freaking time – Lt. Commander James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) not only happens to be onboard, but his oft-mentioned/never-seen (in this universe anyway) father George Kirk used to be Admiral Reeger’s First Officer during the Klingon War, back when Reeger was the captain of the USS Constitution. It was in that conflict, during the Battle of Zeta Reticuli, that Reeger gained fame as a war hero, while the elder Kirk’s career apparently hit a roadblock. And wouldn't you know it, but as the ranking officer onboard after Reeger, Lt. Commander Kirk must take the temporary post of First Officer for this emergency mission.

Morton is good as Reeger, a guy who immediately commands respect and awe as soon as he walks into a room. The crew of the Enterprise hero-worship this guy, so much so that even as his plan to take out the enemy ship becomes increasingly questionable, they’re willing to follow his orders. (Well, most of them are.) Morton gestures with his hands and puts emphasis on certain words in such a way as to both make his character seem like he knows his shit , but also have us wondering if maybe he’s a little… well, cracked?

And that becomes the question at the heart of this episode. As I noted earlier, we’ve seen variations of this story on Star Trek before – in some of the best Star Trek, in fact. Who can forget Commodore Decker’s doomed face-off against the planet killer in TOS’ “The Doomsday Machine,” or the tragedy in TNG’s “The Wounded” of Captain Ben Maxwell, who never got over the loss of his family in the Cardassian War and almost brought the Federation into another war as a result? Indeed, we eventually learn here that Reeger’s family were among those 5 million lost in the Vardan Massacre.

But does that justify the Admiral wanting to take out the 5,000 people on the planet where the mystery ship is hiding? A ship capable of killing millions? Kirk can’t get his head around it, and this puts him on the outs with Reeger, just as his father fell out with the man all those years earlier on the Constitution. We eventually learn that even though George Kirk was the one who actually stepped up in that battle, it was Reeger who got all the glory. And that’s just how history played out, like it or not, fair or not.

Wesley has grown into the Jim Kirk role, or I’ve grown into accepting him as this version of Kirk at least, and here his unwillingness to just roll over and pull the trigger feels very in line with the character. It also has the unfortunate result of painting the rest of the crew in something of a poor light, as they’re apparently so blinded by their devotion to the Great Admiral Reeger that, sure, they might not love the idea of wiping out 5,000 potentially innocent souls, but they are willing to do it – even Spock!

This leads to the biggest disappointment of the episode, which is the cordrazine cop-out, as I’ll call it. That Doctor M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) claims he drugged his old captain (turns out he was on the Constitution back in the day too!) only for us to then find out that actually it was Kirk who drugged him – thereby driving him to the point of paranoia and aggression so that the rest of the crew were finally willing to relieve him of command – means that we never really get a straight answer as to whether or not the attack should’ve proceeded as Reeger had planned. The Enterprise crew took the easy way out on this one, alas.

Meanwhile, over on what is as close to a Planet Hell set that we get on this show (and I love it), Pike and his away team have a decent little adventure with some Orion pirates that gives Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) the chance to spread her action wings. She also gets a promotion and learns a valuable lesson when the cadet she’s been mentoring, the Vulcan A'Sha (Bianca Nugara), decides to leave Starfleet. As Pike tells Uhura, you can do everything right and sometimes things still don’t work out in the end. That’s the same thing that happened to Kirk’s father, but somehow it feels like the storyline with Reeger might’ve had a more interesting resolution if that lesson was more cleanly applied there as well.

Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:

The Vardan Massacre, eh? Who could the villains be who were behind such a terrible act? And will we learn more about them this season?

Cordrazine, lest we forget, was the drug that Doctor McCoy got all amped up on in the classic Star Trek: TOS episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” where he went back in time and inadvertently caused Hitler to conquer the world. (Long story.)

The USS Constitution as flagship of the fleet has long been posited and assumed in books, comics, and technical manuals, but this is the first onscreen confirmation of that fact.

Not to get too nerdy here [pushes up glasses], but the D7 Klingon cruisers mentioned here as having faced off with the USS Constitution in the war is a continuity error, since we know that class of ship wasn’t introduced until after the war (as seen in Star Trek: Discovery’s second season ).

And speaking of the war, I may have said this before, but I appreciate how Strange New Worlds is willing to delve into the specifics of the Klingon War in a way that Star Trek: Discovery – which freaking started the war! – stopped doing pretty early on. Of course this would’ve been a key part of many of these characters' early lives and it absolutely should not be ignored.

Whatever happened to Lt. Jenna Mitchell (Rong Fu), who would sit next to Ortegas at the helm console? I don’t think we’ve seen her once this season.

The relationship between Jim and Sam Kirk, on the other hand? I do like it.

La’an likes caves but doesn’t love caves.