Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ third season has had a bit of an awkward tone issue. Across four episodes already, we’ve switched episode-to-episode from pretty grim circumstances (a Gorn attack here, a zombie outbreak there) to lighthearted silliness (an encounter with Trelane here, a holodeck murder mystery there). Even as those individual episodes haven’t all entirely worked to varying degrees, this back-and-forth has only really helped to make the show feel a bit aimless. So while this week’s episode is indeed another lurch from light to dark, the way it handles that darkness feels like a much keener reminder for this season: that there can be a real cost to what the crew of the Enterprise does.
Initially, “Through the Lens of Time” sets itself up almost as if it’s going to juke from the season’s episodic tonal switch—taking a bit of a jump from last week’s sudden flourishing of romance between Spock and La’an, the initial premise seems ripe for an awkward meet cute. The Enterprise has offered its services to Doctor Korby in aid of his latest archaeological discovery: a series of artifacts that have led him to the location of an ancient ruin that he believes holds the key to unlocking immortality. With Nurse Chapel naturally coming along to assist her partner, alongside young medical ensign Gamble (irregular season 3 guest star Chris Myers) eager to go on his very first away mission—hey, does anyone hear an alarm bell ringing in their heads?—the awkwardness comes in the fact that, of course, security chief La’an and senior science officer Spock are going to be advising the landing party, which also includes the potentially-closening Uhura and Beto Ortegas, officially assigned to begin recording a Starfleet propaganda documentary about life aboard the ship.
Initially, our main quartet is in a perpetual state of “this is fine, this is fine, we’re all fine” as they try to dance around the fact that Christine, La’an, and Spock have all barely spoken to each other since the latter two became casually entangled. Spock makes a very specific point that he’s keeping away from Chapel and Korby’s mission, managing it from aboard Enterprise with La’an while they, alongside Gamble, Uhura, and Beto go down to the digsite, and while it’s clear there’s an awkward tension in the air, it’s again largely played lightly. Everyone involved knows this is awkward and weird, they just kind of don’t want to say it, especially while Korby has a lot riding on his mission (especially so, as he makes a point of talking to Chapel about being willing to ask Starfleet for assistance).
While not as broadly hijinks-based as “Wedding Bell Blues” and “A Space Adventure Hour”, it all feels like, even with the broader seriousness of the mission at hand here—Star Trek does love it an ancient ruin of an old civilization with potentially wildly advanced technology even beyond what the Federation has at hand—we’re in for an episode that is about Spock, Chapel, Korby, and La’an, and the first two in particular, learning to work with each other professionally in spite of what’s going on between them all personally.
But “Through the Lens of Time” twists the knife into something almost the moment the landing party gets inside the ancient ruins, when ensign Gamble goes over to a strange group of desiccated corpses in the otherwise untouched ruins (there’s that alarm bell ringing again) while the rest of the group investigates their surroundings, opens up their belongings (it’s getting louder), finds a glowing orb within (seriously, does no one else hear that?) and holds it up… and it explodes, shattering and violently exploding Gamble’s eyes with it.
It’s immediate horror. Poor Gamble’s screaming, the white of his medical uniform stained with his own blood. They’re not just burned or blinded or damaged; his eyes are gone, and we get to see the gruesome extent of the holes left in his head. Suddenly, whatever frustrations or friction is going on with the romances involved in the away team are out the window: everyone locks in step to transport Gamble back to sickbay, and La’an and Spock come down to the planet to at least pause, if not put a wrap, on Korby’s mission due to the sudden danger. Everything is put aside: these are Starfleet officers, dealing with a situation that has gone sideways real fast.
Well… mostly. Things naturally immediately go from bad to worse: the rest of the landing party, now with Spock and La’an along, find themselves locked inside the ancient ruins, a defense system violently eliminating anyone who attempts to leave as they learn when their alien guide is vaporized. Aboard Enterprise, it also quickly becomes clear that this is not going to be a case of replicating Gamble a new pair of eyes and dealing with a traumatic injury: something has sneaked itself inside his body, and whether or not Gamble is even alive anymore to be saved from it is an altogether different question M’Benga, Pike, and the rest of the crew find themselves dealing with (Captain Batel too, who was back aboard Enterprise for her ongoing treatment—more on that later).
Very quickly, this becomes an episode that isn’t asking, “Oh ho, will it be awkward between all these characters because of them dating each other?” and suddenly becomes one that asks, “Can these characters put that aside to get out of this alive?” The answer to that is yes, of course, because two-thirds of the characters involved all need to go on to appear in the original Star Trek. But that doesn’t stop “Through the Lens of Time” from having some remarkably delectable tension as things keep deteriorating both on and off the planet. In the ruins, the dwindled party is separated further thanks to some timey-wimey planar protections, forcing La’an and Chapel to steady each other, Spock and Korby to set aside the latter’s distrust of Starfleet and their own personal hangups with each other, and then Uhura trying to ensure Beto—adjacent to Starfleet but essentially a civilian member of the media—doesn’t completely freak out.
On and off the Enterprise, everyone locks in. The away team puzzle their way back to each other and discover the reason behind the ruins’ existence in the first place, aboard the ship, while dealing with the spirit—an ancient noncorporeal entity from a sinister species called the Vezda—making it clear that it’s puppeting Gamble’s corpse to try and take over the Enterprise and a suddenly feral Batel, who appears to have been given a latent Gorn-rage by her experimental treatment. Doctor M’Benga manages to diffuse the situation with the Vezda (with a little gunplay from Pelia), freeing Gamble’s body and containing the malevolent spirit. It’s all tense, even as the episode ping-pongs between the ruins and the Enterprise, but it’s arguably Star Trek doing the competence porn it does best: a group of people who can, at one moment, be friendly and clunkily navigating the social faux pas of workplace relationship fallout, and the very next, when confronted with an unspeakable danger, put that aside to do their jobs and do them to the best of their ability.
It speaks, as Spock says to Chapel as they figure out she is their key to getting out of the ruins by a Last Crusade-ian invisible bridge walk of faith, about trust going two ways between people. All these Starfleet officers know, implicitly, regardless of what is going on in their lives and even between them, that at the end of the day, when their backs are up against the hull of their starship, they can trust each other to face a problem and deal with it. Which in and of itself is a nice message to remind viewers of when it comes to this universe and a much better alternative to having this episode be consumed by drama between Korby, Chapel, Spock, and La’an.
But it’s also a secondary point to the real heart of “Through the Lens of Time”: that no matter how locked in our Starfleet heroes are in these crisis moments, there is a cost to what they do every day, and even with the shenanigans being as frequent as they have been on Strange New Worlds lately, they live incredibly dangerous lives. Lives that can, as Gamble learned far too soon, be brutally snuffed out in an instant.
Just how much the young ensign’s death impacts you is down to personal reaction—he’s only been around for a few episodes, and if there is a major weakness to “Through the Lens of Time”, it’s that it’s clunkily unsubtle about indicating that something extremely bad is going to happen to this character from almost the second it opens on him recording a personal log. Strange New Worlds doesn’t particularly try to mine his death for dramatic pathos or have the characters act like they’ve known him for years and years—part of the shock of his death, beyond the posthumous ghost puppetry of it all, is that he is still such a relatively new member of the crew, and now he’s, very violently, not.
But his death is important for a series that has, so far this season, leaned perhaps a little too far into a tonal flippancy where, even in rough situations, the Enterprise has gotten out of things largely unscathed. Gamble’s death is a necessary punctuation point to Star Trek‘s love of stunning people performing their jobs extremely well: sometimes even doing that will not be enough when faced with the dangers of boldly going and pushing the frontiers of your understanding. Sometimes you might uncover wonders unlike anything seen in millennia; other times you might get your shit rocked by an explicitly evil spirit. That they carry on regardless of that potential is what makes Star Trek the series it is.
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