The Griffin Incident and the Courage to Keep Exploring

I’ve never been especially good at watching horror movies.

Not because I mind being scared. I simply spend most of the running time offering what I believe are perfectly sensible advice to the people on screen.

“Maybe don’t open that door.”

“Perhaps we don’t investigate the abandoned ship.”

“I’m just saying, we have a perfectly good starship. We could stay on that.”

It has never once changed the outcome, but I remain committed to the effort.

So when Star Trek: Strange New Worlds opened “The Griffin Incident” by sending a small team aboard a long-lost Starfleet vessel, I immediately became very supportive of someone else leading that away mission.

The funny thing is that I genuinely love this about Star Trek.

For nearly sixty years, the franchise has been built on one beautifully stubborn idea. Someone encounters the unknown, takes a deep breath, and decides to move toward it instead of away from it. Every unexplored world, every impossible anomaly, and every mysterious signal begins because curiosity wins the argument over fear. Exploration has never depended on certainty. It has always depended on believing discovery is worth the risk of not knowing what waits on the other side.

That is one of the reasons “The Griffin Incident” stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

At first glance, it feels like Strange New Worlds has decided to tell a psychological horror story. The atmosphere immediately pulls us into that expectation. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. Silence becomes suspicious. Empty corridors somehow feel more threatening than monsters ever could. What impressed me most, however, was how confidently the episode understood that horror wasn’t the destination. It was simply the storytelling language Robbie Thompson chose to explore something much more interesting.

Identity.

One of the things I admire most about Thompson’s script is its patience. The episode never chases the next frightening image simply because it can. Instead, every unsettling moment grows naturally from the characters we’ve spent years getting to know. The emotional weight comes from history rather than surprise. The story trusts us to understand why each vision matters without stopping to explain it, and that confidence allows the episode to remain deeply character driven even while it embraces an entirely different genre.

That confidence is matched beautifully by director Axelle Carolyn.

Carolyn understands that uncertainty is often more frightening than certainty. She allows scenes to breathe. The camera lingers in quiet spaces just long enough for our own imagination to become part of the storytelling. Familiar corridors begin feeling unfamiliar. The audience slowly loses confidence in what is real at exactly the same pace as the characters. It is wonderfully restrained filmmaking, and it reminds us that the most effective horror rarely comes from what we see. It comes from what we begin convincing ourselves might be waiting just outside the frame.

Russo’s score quietly reinforces that same philosophy. Rather than announcing danger, the music gently erodes our confidence. It doesn’t tell us when to panic. It encourages us to question what we think we know. The writing, direction, performances, cinematography, and score never compete with one another. They move together, creating an emotional experience that feels cohesive from beginning to end.

What fascinated me most, though, wasn’t the mystery itself.

It was watching how differently each character responded when certainty disappeared.

The episode understands something that feels profoundly true to life. Fear is rarely generic. It almost always grows from something deeply personal. Two people can walk into the same room and leave carrying entirely different burdens because fear has an extraordinary ability to attach itself to the stories we already tell ourselves.

That is why the character work feels so compelling.

James Kirk isn’t simply confronted by danger. He’s confronted by the question of whether service to Starfleet can coexist with the kind of father he wants to become. Ethan Peck continues to build a wonderfully layered version of Spock, and I found myself thinking less about where Spock eventually ends up than about what it must have cost him to get there. The episode quietly suggests that logic isn’t simply a philosophy. It can also become a refuge when emotions become too painful to trust. That observation doesn’t rewrite the Spock we already know. It deepens our understanding of him.

Christina Chong delivers another remarkable performance as La’an. What stayed with me wasn’t fear in the traditional horror sense. It was recognition. Chong never overplays the emotion. Instead, she allows us to watch someone wrestling with the possibility that the harshest voice in her own mind might finally be right. After everything La’an has done to define herself beyond the history attached to her name, she finds herself confronting the oldest question of all.

Who gets to decide who we become?

Pike and Una are equally revealing. Neither is ultimately defined by what frightens them. They are defined by the burdens they have quietly carried for seasons. One wrestles with a future he cannot escape. The other continues searching for the freedom to be seen without qualification or suspicion. Different stories. Different experiences. Yet each one reminds us that our deepest struggles are often the ones no one else can see.

What I appreciate most is that the episode never treats those struggles as weaknesses.

It treats them as part of being human.

That has always been one of Star Trek’s greatest strengths.

The franchise has never been confined to a single genre. It has borrowed from courtroom dramas, political thrillers, mysteries, romances, comedies, and now psychological horror. The genre changes. The question never does.

What does it mean to be human?

Even the continued introduction of Division 12 feels like an extension of that spirit. After nearly six decades, Star Trek is still discovering new corners of its own universe. I love that. A franchise built on exploration should never stop finding places it hasn’t explored yet.

The moment that has stayed with me more than any other, however, comes near the end of the episode when Pike observes that space is filled with wonders and unspeakable horrors.

I think that may be one of the most Star Trek sentences Star Trek has ever written.

The more I have thought about it, the more I have realized it isn’t really describing space.

It’s describing life.

We sometimes talk about Star Trek’s optimism as though it asks us to ignore grief, fear, uncertainty, or loss. I don’t believe it has ever asked that of us. If anything, Star Trek has always acknowledged those realities with remarkable honesty. What makes it optimistic is not the absence of darkness. It is the refusal to believe darkness is the whole story.

Wonder and horror exist together.

Hope and uncertainty travel together.

Curiosity and fear often arrive in the very same moment.

Perhaps that is why Pike’s words lingered with me. They acknowledge the universe exactly as it is while quietly insisting that it is still worth exploring. To me, that has always been Gene Roddenberry’s most enduring vision. The future isn’t hopeful because difficult things disappear. The future is hopeful because people continue choosing cooperation over isolation, curiosity over cynicism, and possibility over fear.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since the episode ended.

The older I get, the more I realize that life leaves all of us with unanswered questions. There are conversations we still replay years later, seasons we don’t completely understand, and experiences that resist tidy explanations. We spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to make every mystery make sense when perhaps the greater wisdom is learning that not every mystery exists to be solved.

Sometimes it exists to change us.

By the end of “The Griffin Incident,” the unanswered questions remain, and I think the episode is stronger because of it. The story resists the temptation to explain everything away, trusting the audience to sit with uncertainty instead of rushing toward certainty. That feels surprisingly courageous in an age where we often expect every mystery to arrive with a neatly packaged answer.

The Enterprise doesn’t remain behind trying to force certainty from the unknown.

It turns toward its next mission.

I have always loved that image because it quietly captures everything Star Trek has been trying to say for nearly sixty years.

The universe will always contain wonders and unspeakable horrors.

The remarkable part has never been that both exist.

The remarkable part is that we keep choosing to explore anyway.

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

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