8.2/10
93%
62%
77%
78%
In this episode we can see why you don’t send both the Captain and first officer off the ship on an away mission, I mean who will be there to stop an admiral who wants to borrow your ship for a quick little jaunt to planetary annihilation?
Pike, Una, Uhuru, Chapel and a Red Shirt… sorry, I mean Cadet A’Sha are on an away mission to track down an SOS signal. It’s coming from a moon that, luckily for them, has a breathable atmosphere but, unluckily for them, the signal is coming from a cave system meaning they will lose contact with the Enterprise. The landing party (not called an “Away Team” just yet) will check in within the hour to notify the ship of their findings.
Meanwhile, back on Enterprise, Lieutenant Commander Kirk has arrived to get a quick check-up from Dr. M’Benga following the injuries he sustained on The Griffin. I don’t know why he can’t get medical treatment on his own ship, or why he seems to spend more time on the Enterprise than he does the ship he’s First Officer of but PLOT! I guess.
There’s a bit of unnecessary exposition about the treatment Kirk’s receiving which is rather heavy-handed but does become important later so I will let them off on this occasion.
The routine of orbiting the moon waiting for the Captain to report in is broken when a shuttle arrives carrying Admiral Simon Reeger. I had to pause for a minute here as I was in “Oh! It’s that guy from that thing!” mode and to save you the confusion, Reeger is played by Joe Morton who was Miles Dyson (Skynet’s Daddy) in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991).
Reeger was on his way to Starbase 1 for a conference when he came across some gamma radiation that Starfleet has been looking for — it’s the wake of a new “invisible ship”, a ship that they suspect was responsible for the genocide (they don’t use that word mind you) of 5 million people on Vaardan.
Reeger needs a ship to follow the gamma trail so they can hopefully find its base and therefore who was responsible for the massacre, and of course the Enterprise is the nearest ship.
Taking command, Reeger appoints Kirk as his executive officer as, with the rank of Lieutenant Commander, he’s the highest ranking officer but if he thought his XO would follow his orders with no questions, he’s sorely mistaken.
While Reeger’s hunt for the ship makes sense, his subsequent orders belie something far deeper and darker. Will the crew follow along with his orders, or will Kirk be the lone dissenting voice?
Back on the moon, Pike starts to suspect that something isn’t quite right. Will he and the away team make it out of the caves? And more importantly, given Admiral Reeger’s questionable actions, will there even be a ship left for them to return to?
Bad Admiral, Great Episode
🚨Red Alert! Spoilers for Orders Of Magnitude ahead!🚨
This has to be the best episode of the season so far. It really gets to the core of what Star Trek is: Doing what’s right over doing your duty and questioning orders that don’t quite make sense.
As Reeger’s true motives start to become clearer, you do feel sorry for him. He’s a man who has an entire illustrious career that has been built on a lie — celebrated for a battle he took no part in as he was injured and yet was able to take credit for thanks to changing computer records and a complacent crew.
There’s tension between James Kirk and Reeger from the outset as, unbeknownst to him, Kirk’s father George was actually the architect of the win in the Klingon war that Reeger took credit for.
The acting between Paul Wesley and Joe Morton is absolutely fantastic as Kirk starts to uncover Reeger’s true background and Reeger’s unravelling (thanks to having his coffee spiked with Cortisol) is extremely well done.
My one complaint would be how unwilling the rest of the crew are to stand up and query Reeger when he orders the planet the “invisible ship” landed on destroyed. I know he uses Spock as a sort of “logical foil”, but I would have expected more than just Kirk to question what Reeger is demanding of them — especially as M’Benga is fully aware of the lie that is Reeger’s past.
And we need to address the elephant in the room: The “Badmiral” Trope.
We’ve seen plenty of Bad Admiral’s in Star Trek before used as a plot device to show how the crew of the ship are pure at heart and uphold Starfleet values whereas the Admiral embodies everything Starfleet is not. At this point I have to ask whether there’s a single Admiral in Starfleet (excluding Picard and Janeway) that aren’t evil in some way.
Of course, the Badmiral is a way to drive the story forward, you couldn’t have another Captain convicting a crew to leave their own Captain behind to follow a gamma trail and commit a genocide, only an Admiral could take a crew away from their commanding officer and put them in a place where they might destroy an entire planet.
So trope aside, this was a great watch. Both Sam and James Kirk got some closure over their father not being around when they were children, Kirk and La’An got closure over what happened aboard The Griffin and Uhuru got closure when it came to Cadet A’Sha.
However, This Is Just Getting Embarrassing
I know I keep on going on about this but I really think it bears repeating as what’s happened to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is indicative of how the writers and producers see the show, and by extension the viewers.
Of 8 episodes, every single one of them has been directly lifted from a film.
It’s happened so often that it’s no longer clever, it’s no longer homage, it’s no longer stretching the show into new genres.
It’s pure laziness on the Writer’s part and shows distain for the viewer on the Producer’s part.
They’ve been trying to hide this copycat behaviour by actively acknowledging the “inspiration” for the episodes (perhaps to avoid legal issues) but in my opinion they’re not being completely honest.
With Orders of Magnitude, according to Slash Film Paul Wesley and director Sharon Lewis said that their inspiration was the 1992 film A Few Good Men.
And yes, while I can see that Wesley took inspiration from the film in that Kirk was going against the system, I think they are hiding the episode’s true inspiration, a film that the episode follows almost beat-for-beat and even copies a key scene from completely. Whether this is an omission, an accident or outright idea theft I don’t know — you can make up your own mind.
So what have they copied this week? Crimson Tide from 1995, directed by Tony Scott.
If you’re not familiar, the film is set aboard a nuclear submarine, the U.S.S Alabama, during a period of civil unrest in Russia. A breakaway group have gained access to some nuclear weapons and several attack submarines and it’s up to the Alabama to prepare to launch strikes on Russia if ordered to do so.
During an attack by a Russian sub, the Alabama‘s communications systems are damaged meaning they only received half a communique that may or may not command them to fire their nuclear payload. The crew are split and the First Officer takes command in order to stop the launch, and the Captain wants to go ahead regardless.
This leads to a showdown on the bridge, with the First Officer holding the launch key and the Captain demanding it from him.
Sound familiar?
It should. Take a look:
There is no way you cannot tell me that Orders Of Magnitude was not directly lifted from Crimson Tide.
While there may be some comparisons to be made with A Few Good Men, barring the backstory of Reeger’s career, the entire episode is Crimson Tide but set on the Enterprise.
Do they think the audience is stupid and we won’t notice? Or maybe they think that a younger audience will have never even heard of Crimson Tide so they can get away with it?
I really don’t get what they were trying to achieve by being so blatantly obvious with all of the copying this season. I guess I could have accepted a few episodes in a 20 episode season, but EVERY episode so far in a 10-episode season? And without proper acknowledgement of the source material?
I really don’t know how they are able to get away with this level of copy and paste at this point.
Shame on the Writers and shame on the Producers for taking what was a great addition to the franchise and reducing it to a series of imitations which, no matter how well they are directed, edited, scored and acted, are still just copies of another (often superior) work.
Two episodes left and, despite how reasonably good this season was, I can’t wait for the season to be over to get out of this genre-cloning hell that we’ve been transported to in Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
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