Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass (SNW)

Podcast: Download

SST430: Trelane turns the Enterprise into a soap opera for a school project — and Captain Pike is the only person aboard who notices.

Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 7, “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass,” pushes the season’s genre-of-the-week experiment as far as it will go: soft-focus lighting, dramatic organ stings, an evil twin, a long-lost daughter, and a crew with no idea any of it is happening. Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler come away united and unhappy.

Jimmy puts it in the lower third of Star Trek — a 2 out of 10 — and his objection is structural rather than a matter of taste. Nothing explains why Pike alone is aware. Nothing gives him a problem he can solve. And the hour spends most of its running time on side plots involving characters who are, in his phrase, “dancing on the strings”: mind-controlled, stripped of agency, doing things they would never do. Watching puppets is worse here than in the actual puppet episode two weeks ago, he argues, because these puppets have no will at all.

Dom’s diagnosis is the Saturday Night Live problem — a genuinely funny bit that goes on far too long. Pike hearing the music stings, calling out the soft focus, asking the computer whether he’s in a simulation, cutting Trelane off mid-introduction with “really don’t care”: all of it lands. Fifteen minutes would have made a terrific convention sketch or a Short Trek. Sixty is something else. Jimmy, a former Ryan’s Hope devotee, adds that the episode isn’t even doing the genre properly: the rushed zooms and broad readings are a cartoon of a soap opera, not a soap opera.

The sharpest argument is about where the real emotion went. Under the farce sits a genuine thread: Pike is still grieving Juliet, the daughter from the life he never got to live with Captain Batel, and the hour closes with him breaking down in front of the ship’s counselor — played, in the episode’s best casting joke, by Days of Our Lives legend Deidre Hall. The panel doesn’t object to Pike in therapy. They object to staging a real emotional climax right after sixty minutes of deliberately fake emotion, where a tearful performance reads as one more punchline. And they raise the question the episode never does: if Trelane builds these plots out of the crew’s own grief, why is Pike aware and Uhura not?

Also under discussion: whether the show is squandering Sybok by introducing him as a soap-opera evil twin, the Trelane continuity problem going back to “The Squire of Gothos,” and listener mail on Strange New Worlds‘ oddly fragile technology, the Joss Whedon fingerprints all over modern Trek, and whether “The Trouble with Tribbles” could survive today’s fan discourse.

Get all new episodes automatically and for free:


Follow by Email | Listen to this episode and subscribe on YouTube.

Help us continue to offer the Secrets of Star Trek. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

The Secrets of Star Trek is brought to you in part by Robert Young’s novel In Time. If you enjoy stories that explore the intersection of faith, mystery, and the unseen forces shaping our lives, you’ll want to check out this gripping speculative thriller. In Time follows a troubled pilot drawn into a secret project that challenges everything he thought he knew about science, reality, and even God. Blending high-stakes adventure with spiritual themes like repentance, providence, and the battle between despair and hope, it’s a story about second chances—and the consequences of the choices we make. Get your copy now at sqpn.com/intime.

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

by
Secrets of Star Trek Star Trek 301-500