Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass and Everything We Leave Unsaid

I knew we were in trouble when the Enterprise started looking like daytime television.

Not Star Trek trouble. Nobody had accidentally awakened an ancient weapon. There was no mysterious energy cloud heading toward Earth. The Enterprise had not even found a new and exciting way to nearly destroy herself.

This was worse.

Everyone had feelings.

Big feelings. Dramatic feelings. Feelings requiring soft focus, suspiciously meaningful glances, impossible family revelations, medical emergencies, romantic complications, and the kind of pauses where you half expect someone to turn toward the camera before the commercial break.

Welcome to Days of the Enterprise.

“Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” is risky in exactly the way Strange New Worlds seems increasingly comfortable being risky. It commits to the soap-opera language completely. The emotions are huge. The circumstances are ridiculous. Reality has apparently decided subtlety is optional, and then Deidre Hall walks onto the Enterprise as counselor Dr. Eleanor Chivers.

Of course she does. If Star Trek is going to do a soap opera, casting someone so deeply associated with Days of Our Lives as the person trying to help this crew untangle their feelings is almost aggressively perfect. I appreciate that the episode does not stop at the casting joke either. Dr. Chivers becomes useful to understanding what is happening around her, especially when she observes that space adventures leave very little time for people to deal with their inner struggles.

At first, I laughed because, well, yes. There are Klingons. There are Gorn. There are temporal anomalies and exploding consoles and wormholes and apparently occasional weeks when everyone becomes a puppet. Therapy has competition.

But that line stayed with me.

The longer Days of the Enterprise continued, the more I realized the soap opera was doing something very specific to these characters. Trelane had created the ridiculous circumstances, but the emotional material underneath them did not feel particularly invented.

That is when the episode became much more interesting to me.

Soap operas are not known for letting things remain buried. They take whatever someone has been carefully avoiding, drag it into the middle of the room, turn on three additional lights, cue the music, and make everybody deal with it before the next commercial break.

This crew has been avoiding quite a lot.

La’an is a good place to begin because what comes out of her does not exactly arrive from nowhere. Her relationship with Spock has ended, but that does not mean the feelings inside it disappeared simply because the relationship changed. What this exaggerated reality forces her to admit is that she still cares, she still misses something about what they shared, and some part of her is still looking toward a person who is no longer standing in the same emotional place.

Spock has been moving increasingly toward logic, especially after everything that happened during “The Griffin Incident.” La’an can see what has changed in him even if he cannot fully see what remains in her. It hurts, not because the episode suddenly tells us these two belong together, but because ending something and being finished with it are not always the same thing.

Then Sybok appears, because apparently Trelane looked at the emotional complexity already in progress and decided the situation required additional Vulcan family drama.

Naturally.

His presence makes La’an’s situation even stranger because Sybok represents almost the opposite of the direction Spock has been moving. Spock is trying to contain emotion. Sybok embraces it. La’an is stuck somewhere between the Spock she knew, the Spock standing in front of her now, and whatever version of him she may still be carrying in her head.

That made me wonder what else Trelane’s ridiculous reality was dragging into the light.

Una gave me an answer I was not expecting.

I did not have “Una has feelings for M’Benga” on my Season Four bingo card, but apparently the soap opera portion of the universe decided my card was incomplete. What interests me is less whether this becomes a romance and more what the revelation says about Una.

We have spent years watching someone whose control is almost part of her uniform. Una compartmentalizes. She carries responsibility. She understands how to keep moving even when something deeply personal is sitting quietly underneath the surface.

Apparently what sits underneath the surface has opinions.

For M’Benga and Ortegas, what gets exposed looks different. Their so-called space madness becomes a way to explore how fiercely both of them protect the parts of themselves shaped by trauma. They have each learned how to function after experiences that changed them, but functioning and opening yourself back up to other people are not necessarily the same skill.

Sometimes surviving something makes you more willing to talk about it. Sometimes it makes you exceptionally good at making sure nobody gets close enough to ask.

Then Trelane sticks you in a soap opera.

Good luck with that.

And then Uhura says something that is both deeply meaningful and, once she says it, almost completely unsurprising.

She sees Pike as a father.

Uhura arrived on this Enterprise unsure whether Starfleet was even where she belonged. Pike gave her room to figure that out without demanding she already have the answer. She has lost people, found her confidence, discovered how essential she is to this crew, and has now reached the point where she can mentor others herself. Naming Pike as a paternal figure does not rewrite that journey. It simply puts words around something that has been quietly forming inside it.

And the moment Uhura says it, the episode turns toward Pike.

That transition hit me harder than I expected because we have just been asked to think about Pike as a father figure when suddenly he is confronted with the daughter he might actually have had.

Juliet.

That is where the soap opera stopped being primarily funny for me.

Christopher Pike has spent most of Strange New Worlds living with a future almost no one else has to contemplate in the same way. He knows what is waiting for him. He has seen the accident. He knows what it will take from him, and he has already learned that trying to escape it can create consequences for people he loves.

So Pike keeps moving. He cooks. He captains. He jokes. He explores. He falls in love. He keeps choosing today despite knowing something terrible about tomorrow.

But knowing the future you will have does not mean you have finished grieving the futures you will not.

Patel’s ascension left Pike with more than the loss of someone he loved. It left behind the possibility of an entire life that can no longer exist for him. Juliet gives that possibility a face, and because she actually exists in another reality, Pike cannot simply dismiss her as something Trelane invented to torment him. He is being confronted with evidence that the life he is grieving was possible.

He just does not get to have it.

Pike has spent years learning how to live with a future he cannot outrun. I am not sure he ever learned how to grieve the past he cannot have.

That is the emotional center of the episode for me, and I think Anson Mount is especially effective because Pike does not suddenly become a different character to sell the pain. The warmth, humor, and control remain there, but you can feel how much effort it takes to hold them in place once Juliet becomes real to him.

That is when Dr. Chivers’ comment came back to me.

Space adventures leave very little time for inner struggles.

Maybe that is not simply a funny observation about life in Starfleet. Maybe it is Season Four explaining itself.

This season has spent a lot of time wearing costumes. Horror. Comedy. Film noir. Puppets. Disaster. Now soap opera. Strange New Worlds keeps changing the genre so dramatically that it would be easy to treat the season as a collection of experiments.

I do not think that is what is happening anymore.

“The Griffin Incident” made fears impossible to ignore. “Human Best Friend” stripped away inhibition. “A Case of Chiaroscuro” used shadows and incomplete information to complicate people we thought we understood. “Level-Five Transporter Accident” turned Spock’s struggle with control into literal puppet chaos, and “Off-Hour” pushed relationships and trust toward their breaking points.

Now the soap opera makes everyone say the quiet parts out loud.

The genres may look wildly different, but they keep doing remarkably similar work. They remove the characters’ usual escape routes.

There is always another mission aboard the Enterprise. Another anomaly. Another unexplored planet. Another person who needs saving. Keep moving and you do not necessarily have to sit still long enough to ask what all of those experiences have done to you.

Season Four keeps finding ways to make them sit still.

Sometimes with intoxicating planets. Sometimes through black-and-white intrigue. Sometimes with puppets. And apparently sometimes through a cosmic being with absolutely no respect for emotional privacy.

That brings me back to Trelane.

He is studying these people, fascinated by humanity and all of its contradictions, and what he discovers is not exactly a species operating with impressive emotional efficiency.

These people are messy. They love people they cannot quite admit they love. They miss relationships that have ended. They turn commanders into parental figures. They hide behind logic, duty, work, control, jokes, and occasionally space madness. They know things about themselves and then behave as though they do not.

Trelane lands on “imperfectly perfect.”

After forty-five minutes of watching this crew emotionally implode under soap-opera lighting, that tracks.

I also think Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff deserve credit for understanding that the genre only works if the emotional revelations survive the joke. It would have been very easy for Days of the Enterprise to become forty-five minutes of parody. Instead, the exaggerated format keeps uncovering things that matter beyond the conceit of this particular episode.

Anna Dokoza commits to that heightened world visually without making every moment feel like the same joke. The dramatic framing, pauses, reactions, and deliberate excess create the soap-opera language, but when the episode reaches Pike and Juliet, there is still enough emotional room for the story to become sincere.

Deidre Hall may be the clearest example of that balance. Her presence is obviously part of the fun, but Dr. Chivers does not exist merely so Star Trek can point at daytime television history. She gives us the observation that helped me understand what this episode, and possibly this whole season, has been doing.

Space adventures leave very little time for inner struggles.

The more I think about that, the more I like it because this franchise is built around movement outward. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilizations. Boldly going somewhere nobody has gone before.

Season Four seems increasingly interested in what happens when the characters are forced to go the other direction.

Inside.

That might be the riskier journey.

You cannot phaser your way through grief. Logic does not automatically remove longing. Command cannot make regret disappear. Trauma does not stop mattering because there is another mission tomorrow. And no amount of exploring the galaxy changes what Pike sees when Juliet is standing in front of him.

Maybe that is why the soap opera works.

Soap operas exaggerate life until nobody can pretend not to see what is happening. Trelane turns the emotional volume all the way up, but the feelings themselves were already there.

That is what stayed with me after the exaggerated lighting, dramatic revelations, Sybok appearances, and cosmic meddling settled down.

Maybe Strange New Worlds has not spent this season bouncing randomly between genres after all.

Maybe the genres were the way inside.

Because apparently this crew needed to survive dinosaurs, get intoxicated on shore leave, wander through film noir, become puppets, nearly lose the Enterprise, and get trapped inside a soap opera before some of them were finally willing to deal with their feelings.

Honestly, relatable.

Dr. Chivers was right. Space adventures really do leave very little time for inner struggles.

Unless Trelane gets involved.

Then apparently everybody is going to therapy whether they like it or not.

I remain disappointed, however, that Scotty and Pelia somehow escaped Days of the Enterprise. I have no idea what their secret soap-opera storyline would have been, which is precisely why I desperately wanted to see it.

And yes, I watched after the credits.

Trelane.

A cereal commercial.

A shakey box.

I said this episode helped me understand Season Four.

I did not say I understood everything.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.