Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 Features The Most Shocking Violence In All Of Star Trek

The following contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 Episode 2 "The Griffin Incident." 

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 3 earned criticism for letting humor get in the way of exploration. Three of the season's 10 episodes were outright comedies (or at least a pastiche, re: "A Space Adventure Hour") and even the others tended to be rife with comic touches. 

The first two "Strange New Worlds" seasons' willingness to be goofy was commendable. Come Season 3, the limits were exposed as it felt like the writers started treating "Strange New Worlds" like a comedy first. Take "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans," when several of the Enterprise crew go from humans to Vulcans. It had some funny bits — especially La'an (Christina Chong) behaving more like a Romulan — but it overall felt like a much poorer repeat of Season 2's "Charades," when Spock (Ethan Peck) became fully human.

If Season 3 of "Strange New Worlds" felt like the praise for past comedy episodes going to the writers' heads, then Season 4 Episode 2 "The Griffin Incident" feels like them out to prove the show can thrive outside funny bits. This episode is a straight-up horror story, like "The Shining" on a starship, as Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley), Spock, and La'an are trapped on the Griffin, an abandoned ship that may be genuinely haunted. 

The episode isn't just the spookiest "Strange New Worlds" has gotten, it's also the most violent. It's hard to recall a "Star Trek" episode this gruesome since "Conspiracy" on "Next Generation," specifically the infamous scene when Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) used phasers to blow up Dexter Remmick's (Robert Schenkkan) torso and reveal an alien parasite living inside the viscera.

Spock gets the brunt of the horror this episode. In the Griffin's sick bay, he's held hostage by an apparition of T'Pring (Gia Sandhu), his estranged fiancée who last appeared in "Charades" (when their engagement turned into estrangement). Calling back to Spock's transformation in that episode, the ghostly T'Pring says she was wrong to try and make Spock more Vulcan. 

So, while Spock is tied down to an operating table, she uses surgical scissors to clip his ears, removing the Vulcan-pointed edges to make them look human. Spock's green Vulcan blood obscures the gore slightly, but you'll still be wincing at the close-up of T'Pring mutilating his ear.

About halfway through the episode, the Griffin trio hallucinates that the rest of the Enterprise bridge crew has come to save them. Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Una (Rebecca Romijn) show up in sick bay to "save" Spock... by tying him back down and telling him to "listen to the ship." 

The mutilation continues: Una slices open her own stomach to drain herself of her Illyrian blood, because her heritage is why Starfleet "will never promote [her]." Pike's cooking hobby is also twisted for gore; the false Pike on the Griffin slices off his own fingers, bit by bit, on a cutting board like they're carrots.

Now, any horror story set on a starship inevitably evokes comparisons to the greatest sci-fi horror film ever, 1979's "Alien." In that film, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) defeats the alien by flushing it out into the vacuum of space. "The Griffin Incident" draws on that ending for its most horrific bit of gore.

Jim is standing on the Griffin bridge and he believes his brother Sam Kirk (Dan Jeannotte), an Enterprise science officer, is standing there with him. Then the observation window cracks and the pull of the vacuum grabs Sam. Only, the hole isn't big enough to pull him through, so he's briefly stuck lodged in it like a cork inside a too tight bottle cap. But that doesn't stop the pull: Sam's intestines are pulled from his body before the glass shatters enough to pull him into space wholesale. The camera lingers on Sam's body drifting through space, blood floating around it (and some specks of it dropping on the camera lens).

Luckily for Jim, that was all the Griffin playing tricks on him; Sam was never there, and his brother is still alive. But he soon faces some real violence when La'an, driven out of her mind by the ship's influence, nearly stabs him to death. He's only saved when the Enterprise actually arrives, transports him and La'an on board, and breaks the Griffin's hold on them.

When Spock is rescued, his ears are genuinely mutilated, too. While a quick stop in sick bay and some wonderful 23rd century medicine gets them fixed quickly, that shows it wasn't all hallucinations. There was a presence on the Griffin that was harming them or pushing them to harm themselves. Its twisted imagination resulted in something rare on "Star Trek" — genuinely upsetting violence.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+.