Review – Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Through the Lens of Time”

Sometimes the search for eternal life leads you to something far darker.

“Through the Lens of Time” is Strange New Worlds at its boldest—a sprawling, unsettling episode that lures the crew (and the audience) with the promise of scientific wonder, only to reveal a terrifying truth: this wasn’t a path to immortality. It was a prison housing a legion of ancient evils—and someone almost opened the door.

What begins as a classic Trek setup—an archaeological mission to a Macronian planet—quickly becomes a layered, genre-bending mystery involving dimensional rifts, sentient structures, and a long-lost alien intelligence that wants out. At the center of it all? Nurse Chapel, Dr. Roger Korby, and Spock—locked in a triangle not just of romantic tension, but philosophical divide.

Christine Chapel is once again the emotional core of the story. As the "key" to the alien structure, her DNA grants access to secrets no one’s prepared for. Korby, idealistic and reckless, believes this is a lost road to immortality—proof that advanced life once conquered death. Spock, by contrast, sees only instability and danger. And Christine? She’s caught in the middle—between her past with Korby and her unresolved present with Spock. Their scenes crackle with tension, a triangle forged not just in emotion, but in ideology. What do we risk in the pursuit of knowledge? Who gets to decide when to stop?

That question echoes in a parallel storyline with Captain Pike and Captain Batel. Their relationship—still fraught with the fallout of her Gorn infection—gets pulled into sharp focus when the alien entity inside Ensign Gamble awakens something dormant in Batel. She doesn't just recognize the entity—she becomes something else entirely. The Gorn influence still clings to her, and her violent reaction raises chilling questions about what Starfleet may have buried rather than healed.

This duality—between love and danger, trust and transformation—runs throughout the episode. Where Christine and Spock struggle with what’s unspoken, Pike and Batel face something primal, a reminder that love cannot always protect us from what we carry inside.

And then there’s Ensign Gamble. Full of idealism, eager for his first away mission—he becomes the episode’s sacrificial lamb. After an orb explodes in his hands, blinding him, something ancient takes root in his mind. His transformation is harrowing. One moment, he's joking with Dr. M’Benga. The next, he’s a host to something unknowable. That his brain is clinically dead but still “awake” is one of the creepiest and most tragic Trek twists in recent memory.

Dr. M’Benga, already burdened by past losses, is crushed by guilt. His quiet anguish gives the episode some of its most human moments—and in the end, it’s he and Pelia who must make the impossible choice. The moment Pelia fires the phaser and Scotty captures the entity in a containment orb is a desperate act of mercy. But it raises the most disturbing question of the episode:

Did they trap the alien… or did they trap Gamble?

The final shot—M’Benga informing Gamble’s parents of their son’s death while the transporter buffer flickers between human and alien biosignatures—is haunting. The line between man and monster, between explorer and prisoner, has never felt thinner.

And quietly, behind the chaos, sits Pelia. Watching. Knowing more than she says. Throughout the episode, her unease hints at a deeper awareness—an intuition born of age and experience. She doesn’t name what the entity is. But she knows enough to call it evil. Not “dangerous,” not “misunderstood.” Evil. And that declaration, rare for Trek, lands like a thunderclap.

This episode walks a tightrope between ancient sci-fi mystique and modern-day horror. It challenges our assumptions about exploration. About immortality. About whether every door deserves to be opened just because we can.

Because maybe the greatest threat isn’t that we don’t find immortality.
It’s that we mistake something ancient, malevolent, and trapped… for a gift.

“Through the Lens of Time” asks what happens when curiosity becomes hubris—and when our own reflection shows us something terrifying. It reminds us that in the vast unknown, not everything we uncover is meant to be understood. Some things are meant to stay buried.

And if they ever escape?
May the Prophets help us all.