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!
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-season-4-episode-8-recap-and-review
