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SST425: A Federation starship missing for nine years turns up intact, powered, and empty — and the moment Kirk, Spock, and La’An step aboard, the Griffin begins using their own worst fears against them. Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 2, “The Griffin Incident,” is the series at its most openly horror, and it ends without telling you what happened. No monster of the week, no technobabble solution, no closing scene explaining the anomaly. Just a ship under tow to Division 12 and a security chief who still sees the dead.

Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler work through an hour of Trek that trades explanation for dread — and disagree about whether that’s a gift or a dodge. Fr. Jason, no fan of horror, still found the hallucinations worth thinking about. Dom draws a hard line at body horror. Jimmy, who investigates the paranormal for a living, notes that what happens aboard the Griffin fits no category in the real literature — which in an actual case report is a classic marker of fabrication.

That professional read gives the Griffin Incident ending an unusual angle. The panel walks the ship’s forensic record — strangulations, stabbings, hundreds of crew transported into vacuum — and asks what happened to the USS Griffin crew without pretending the episode answers it. Instead they look at Division 12, the Federation’s paranormal investigations bureau, and the detail that gives it teeth: Pike has referred six cases across his career, four with ordinary explanations and two still open. Jimmy argues it’s the healthiest thing Trek has done with the unexplained in years, against a franchise that has almost always insisted on a Scooby-Doo reveal.

Then there’s the family material. Strange New Worlds is quietly building the backstory The Wrath of Khan dropped on audiences from nowhere, and yes — the show gives us Kirk’s son David, as a cry over a comm channel and infant hands reaching out of a console. Kirk’s terror isn’t the ship. It’s that he’s becoming the father his own father was. The hallucination even prophesies David’s death “at the end of a knife in a cold, dark, nowhere part of space,” which lands differently if you know how The Search for Spock goes.

Each officer gets a fear built to fit: Spock’s human half and T’Pring; La’An‘s inheritance from Khan; Sam Kirk’s grim answer about how you stay a father from deep space. The panel also digs into Ortegas‘ transporter sequence, Spock’s ears, Pike’s haunted-barn story, and Paul Wesley’s read on a young Kirk that Dom still can’t quite square with Shatner or Pine.

Plus listener feedback on Peter David’s New Frontier novels, comic-book crossovers, the fragility of causality in time travel, and whether a Velociraptor belongs anywhere near a T. rex.

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