Orders of Magnitude (SNW)

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SST431: Admiral Simon Reeger walks onto the Enterprise knowing every officer by name, and within a day he’s ordering the surface of an inhabited planet sterilized to be certain one cloaked ship dies with it. “Orders of Magnitude,” the 8th episode of Strange New Worlds season 4, gives James Kirk his first badmiral and makes him earn the removal.

Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler call it a return to form. Jimmy puts it around a 6 or a 7, and says the one thing keeping it from an 8 is the cordrazine.

That’s the knot at the center of the hour. Kirk can’t get Reeger relieved on the record, so he drugs him and goads him into showing the obsession in front of witnesses. It works. It also means that to everyone aboard except Kirk and the audience, the case against Reeger was manufactured. Jimmy wanted the version where the sterilization order gets taken apart on its own terms.

Dom’s objection runs the other way. Wiping out 5,000 people to catch one ship is an illegal order, and you don’t have to obey those, so why does nobody on that bridge say it out loud? La’an tells Kirk privately that she has concerns, then follows orders anyway. Reeger’s counter, that we can’t know those 5,000 are civilians and that this is about protecting future innocents, is the best argument the script gives him, and the panel doesn’t buy it.

Then there’s George Kirk. The Battle of Zeta Reticuli was won by Reeger’s first officer while Reeger lay unconscious in sick bay with a traumatic brain injury, and George let the credit stand because a scandal would have gutted morale mid-war. Reeger repaid him by killing every family leave request he ever filed, which is where Sam’s resentment of an absentee father comes from. It’s fatherly sacrifice a son only finds out about later.

The episode seeds the original series without winking. Reeger tells Kirk the terror that ship causes will be on his head, which points straight at “Balance of Terror,” and Kirk’s own General Order 24 is waiting for him in “A Taste of Armageddon.” Spock refuses to pull a code out of Kirk’s head by force, and the panel reads that against what Star Trek VI does to Valeris.

Down on the planet, Pike’s away team gets taken by Andorian mercenaries, Cadet A’Sha is stabbed with a crystal that starts turning her to stone, and Uhura rewires the comm gear into a weapon and gets a battlefield promotion out of it. She also makes A’Sha’s decision to leave Starfleet about her own failure as a mentor, the panel’s sharpest complaint about the writing.

Plus the 41.4% call on the cargo ship, M’Benga taking the blame for the cordrazine, why shooting a control panel should make things worse, and an electrical engineer on the right way to touch something that might be live.

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