'Star Trek' Just Turned Into a Horror Movie, and Fans Are Divided

Star Trek has spent nearly 60 years promising that the universe makes sense, that no darkness is so deep that reason and a tricorder cannot eventually light it. “The Griffin Incident” might just break that promise, and for many longtime fans, that is the most unsettling thing about it.

The second episode of Strange New Worlds Season 4, which aired on Paramount+ on July 30, sends a landing party of La’an (Christina Chong), Spock (Ethan Peck) and a visiting Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) onto the wreck of a lost Starfleet vessel called the Griffin. What they find is a floating nightmare. The crew has vanished, the logs of a woman named Rose Harper hint at something unspeakable, and the away team soon cannot trust the ship, one another, or their own eyes. Spock in particular is forced to confront his deepest fears about his half-human, half-Vulcan nature.

Critics reached fast for horror-movie touchstones. Den of Geek placed the hour alongside classic haunted-vessel stories and the real 1872 mystery of the Mary Celeste, the merchant ship found adrift with everything intact and no soul aboard. Fangirlish saw it as a direct homage to the 1997 space-horror film Event Horizon, down to a derelict ship that seems to prey on the minds of anyone who steps aboard. Reviewers at AIPT noted the episode is far more brutal than the franchise usually allows, with red and green blood spilled across a sickbay like a slasher set.

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SPOILER ALERT: The real divide, though, is over the ending. The episode never reveals what killed the Griffin, handing the case instead to a shadowy new Starfleet outfit called Division 12. For some critics at TrekCore, that refusal cuts against what Star Trek has always represented, a franchise built on the belief that the unknown can be explained by science. For others, the ambiguity is the point, and leaving the horror unresolved is exactly why it works.

Not every reaction was glowing. Trek Central praised the craft of the violence but argued the story pushed La’an into cruelty that felt out of character, and that Spock’s fears retraced ground the show has covered before.

The episode fits a deliberate Season 4 design in which each installment adopts a different genre and tone, a run that also includes a Western, a black-hole story and an hour staged entirely with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop puppets. Strange New Worlds is now in its second-to-last season, with a shortened final year expected in 2027, and the experiment is unfolding during Star Trek’s 60th anniversary.

As a long-time Trek fan, I’m intrigued. “The Griffin Incident” shows a series willing to keep stretching the definition of a Star Trek episode right up to the end of its run, even when that means closing an hour without a single answer.

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