Orders of Magnitude and the Stories We Inherit

There are certain things I have learned after sixty years of Star Trek.

Never assume the abandoned ship is actually abandoned. If someone says a temporal anomaly is perfectly safe, start making alternate dinner plans. And if the Enterprise landing party walks into a cave after following a mysterious distress signal, perhaps someone should remain outside.

I am not telling Starfleet how to do its job. I am merely suggesting that the caves have established a pattern.

So when “Orders of Magnitude” gave us caves, Andorians, a distress signal, a cloaked ship, and a highly decorated admiral whose decision-making became increasingly concerning, there was something almost comforting about the whole thing. Classic Trek, and I mean that affectionately.

At some point Starfleet really should create a checklist. Caves? Check. Suspicious distress signal? Check. Unexpected admiral taking command of the Enterprise? Maybe call Pike.

Except Pike was in the caves.

See? Checklist.

The funny thing is that none of those things were what I wrote down after the episode ended. I wrote one word.

Redemption.

And I have been trying to figure out exactly whose redemption I meant ever since.

My first thought was Kirk, which is interesting because James Kirk is not supposed to be aboard the Enterprise learning a lesson about command in this episode. He happens to be there, officially for a medical follow-up with M’Benga.

La’an also happens to be there. Completely unrelated, I am sure.

There is still enough awkwardness between those two to make me want to hand both of them coffee and slowly leave the room, and enough familiarity mixed with tension between Kirk and Spock to remind us that all of these relationships are still becoming something.

Then Admiral Simon Reeger walks onto the bridge and Kirk gets a much bigger problem.

Joe Morton is excellent here because Reeger could have been easy. We Trek fans know the Badmiral. Someone arrives with a lot of rank, an impressive reputation, and questionable intentions, and somewhere in the audience thousands of us collectively narrow our eyes.

Not this time, Admiral. We know your ways.

But Reeger is harder to dismiss than that. His grief is real. His family was killed in the Vaardan Massacre, and his anger comes from something we can understand even when his choices become impossible to defend. Morton lets enough of that pain through that I never saw Reeger simply as a villain waiting for Kirk to expose him.

What interested me more was how much power Reeger already had before he ever stepped onto the Enterprise. Not just his rank, but his story.

Starfleet knows Simon Reeger as a war hero. Everyone around him has inherited that version of him, which means his reputation has done some of the work of earning their trust before he says a word.

Kirk inherits that story too. Then he starts noticing things.

This may be the part of “Orders of Magnitude” I like most about Paul Wesley’s Kirk. He does not suddenly transform into the Captain Kirk we know because the plot needs someone to challenge Reeger. He watches. He listens. Something does not feel right, so he keeps pulling at the thread.

That feels much more like Kirk to me than simply breaking the rules. We talk so much about Kirk trusting his gut that sometimes I think we forget what actually feeds that instinct.

He pays attention, and General Order 24 certainly gets his attention. Mine too.

There are some bits of Trek lore you hear and immediately sit a little straighter, and an order capable of wiping out an inhabited planet qualifies. But what stayed with me was not the order itself. It was Kirk deciding that the authority of the person giving it was no longer enough.

That is an interesting moment for someone who will eventually become one of Starfleet’s most famous captains. Kirk is learning that loyalty to Starfleet and obedience to Starfleet are not always the same thing. Sometimes believing in an institution means expecting it to live up to its own ideals, even when that means questioning the person with more pips than you.

Kirk follows that discomfort and discovers that the story surrounding Reeger is not the whole story.

Which brings us to George Kirk, and suddenly I wondered whether this was why I had written down redemption.

Jim has carried a complicated story about his father for a long time. He and Sam know the decisions George made and the ways those decisions affected their family. What Jim does not know is everything George chose not to tell them.

The revelation about the Battle of Zeta Reticuli does not magically make George Kirk a perfect father. I would have liked it considerably less if it had. Instead, Jim gets another piece.

George had taken command of the Constitution after Reeger was injured. The victory that helped build Reeger’s reputation actually belonged to George, and George asked the people who knew the truth to let the other version stand.

Jim never knew why.

I kept thinking about how often we do this with people. We take the pieces we have and build the story we can. Of course we do. What else are we supposed to build it with?

The problem is that we rarely know which pieces are missing.

Jim has spent years understanding his father through the information available to him. Now someone hands him another piece, and the picture changes. Not completely. Just enough.

Maybe that is redemption.

Except then I started thinking about Uhura, and that complicated my nice little theory.

While Kirk is questioning a story he inherited, Uhura is down in those extremely suspicious caves demonstrating just how far she has traveled from the cadet we first met.

I have loved watching Uhura’s growth on Strange New Worlds because the show has never treated the woman we know she becomes as inevitable. We have watched her earn it.

She arrived uncertain whether Starfleet was even where she belonged. She was brilliant, but brilliance and confidence are not the same thing. Experience has been closing that distance ever since, and this season something has changed.

We have already seen it with Cadet A’Sha. Uhura is no longer simply the young officer looking around the room for someone with more experience. She is becoming the experienced person in the room.

“Orders of Magnitude” lets her realize it.

There is no grand announcement when things go sideways and Uhura begins taking control. She uses what she knows, reads the people around her, and draws from experiences we have watched her accumulate. She just starts leading, and oh, does she.

I think that may be why her promotion to lieutenant junior grade feels so satisfying. The pip is almost beside the point. Uhura has already become the officer someone else can depend upon. Starfleet is simply catching up.

And I would like the record to reflect that Nyota Uhura is an absolute badass under pressure. There are moments for thoughtful commentary. There are also moments when we simply acknowledge the obvious.

Somewhere around there, another connection clicked for me.

Kirk and Uhura are having the same episode. Not the same plot, but the same moment.

Kirk has authority standing directly in front of him telling him what is right, and he has to trust himself enough to question it. Uhura has to trust her own judgment when the people around her need her to act.

That difference is small enough that I almost missed it. I am glad I didn’t.

We know who these people become. That is one of the strange pleasures of Strange New Worlds. Kirk becomes Captain Kirk. Uhura becomes Lieutenant Uhura. Their names are already written into Starfleet history before this series ever begins.

But legends have a way of making the becoming disappear.

Once we know where someone ends up, it is easy to imagine they were always headed there with complete confidence. They weren’t. There had to be a first time Kirk trusted the voice telling him the admiral was wrong and a first time Uhura realized she was the person everyone else could look toward.

We get to watch both.

Then there is M’Benga, because apparently this man has not carried enough this season.

His decision to protect Kirk is quieter than everything happening around it, but I noticed it because of what “Off-Hour” already showed us. M’Benga has been wondering what his future aboard the Enterprise looks like, and now he makes a choice that could affect that future.

Maybe this becomes part of why M’Benga eventually leaves the Enterprise. Maybe it does not. I am not sure I need the answer yet.

I am more interested in why he makes the choice now.

M’Benga knows what war does to people. More importantly, he knows what pain can convince a person to do. He recognizes something in Reeger because he has stood close enough to that edge himself, and when the moment comes, M’Benga chooses differently.

There was that word again.

Redemption.

By this point I had stopped trying to assign it to one character. Maybe that was my mistake.

Kirk gets back a piece of his father he did not know he was missing. George gets part of his story returned to him, even if he is not there to receive it. M’Benga gets an opportunity to respond to another veteran’s pain with the wisdom of his own experience.

Uhura gets something different.

She gets herself.

Or maybe she finally sees the version of herself the rest of us have been watching emerge for a while now.

None of that rewrites what came before. Jim still has a complicated relationship with his father. M’Benga still carries his history. Uhura still had to become the officer standing in those caves.

Maybe redemption does not always mean rewriting the story. Maybe sometimes it means finally having enough of the story to look at it again.

That is what I keep coming back to with “Orders of Magnitude.”

Starfleet inherited a story about Simon Reeger. Jim inherited one about George Kirk. We inherited stories about Kirk and Uhura long before Strange New Worlds started showing us how they became those people.

Then the episode starts pulling pieces out and turning them over.

Some hold up better than others.

Looking at you, Admiral.

And somewhere in all of this is one of the things I continue to love about Star Trek. The Federation is not interesting to me because it has somehow created institutions that are never wrong. It is interesting because its ideals give people something to measure those institutions against.

Kirk does exactly that. He does not protect Starfleet by blindly following an admiral. He protects what Starfleet is supposed to be by questioning him.

Although if we are talking about unresolved questions, I still have one.

Where in the galaxy is Pelia?

A celebrated admiral arrives aboard her Enterprise, takes control of the ship, abandons Pike’s landing party, and eventually decides destroying an entire planet is a reasonable next step.

And Pelia misses all of it?

No. I refuse.

Pelia would have looked at Reeger for approximately twelve seconds, tilted her head, remembered something he did decades ago that nobody else knows about, and ruined this man’s entire afternoon.

Actually, maybe that explains her absence. The episode needed to be sixty-two minutes. Pelia would have wrapped this up before lunch.

And Scotty’s uniform? That is a conversation for another day because I have already been through enough.

I started “Orders of Magnitude” amused that Star Trek was once again sending people into caves and putting an admiral with questionable judgment on the bridge.

I finished it with one word written in my notes.

Redemption.

I thought I knew what I meant when I wrote it. I am less certain now, and I think I like that too.

Sometimes you need another piece of the story before you understand what you were looking at.

Although I am still recommending a moratorium on caves.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

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