Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4's Most Exciting Episode Is A First For The Franchise

This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 Episode 6 "Off-Hour."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 is over halfway done now, and the main criticism of the season is that each episode feels like a gimmick or a joke. On one hand, the promise of "Strange New Worlds" is that it would embrace the episodic storytelling of classic "Star Trek." Instead of the seemingly-mandatory serialization of the streaming era, "Strange New Worlds" would follow the Enterprise crew getting into a new adventure every week.

Now, it feels more as if "Strange New Worlds" is like a dart game, throwing the Enterprise crew into whatever genre or goofy situation said dart lands on. The previous episode, "Level-Five Transporter Accident," where the Enterprise crew was turned into puppets, is the nadir of diminishing returns from "Strange New Worlds" Season 3 doubling up on comedy. But Trekkies can breathe a sigh of relief about "Off-Hour," which is the most purely "Star Trek" that Season 4 has felt since the premiere, "Valles Marineris."

The episode premise is simple: the Enterprise is caught in a "slipstream wormhole" (described as effectively a giant, light-speed vacuum cleaner) that knocks power offline. If the ship doesn't escape soon, the wormhole will push the Enterprise past the speed where it can hold together. There is little humor, the life-threatening stakes are palpable, and "Off-Hour" hits the old school "Star Trek" thrills of a competent starship crew working through a problem.

But the episode also adds something new to the franchise: it unfolds in real time. It employs both a literal countdown clock (which starts at roughly 48 minutes) occasionally flashing on the screen, as well as a ticking sound into the music score, to underline that.

"Off-Hour" resembles an underrated "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode: Season 5's "Disaster," when the Enterprise-D is hit by a "quantum filament" that drains the ship's power. Like in "Disaster," the crew in "Off-Hour" is broken up into small groups scattered throughout the ship, each one having to navigate difficult circumstances to save lives and the ship itself.

While there is a ticking clock in "Disaster" (the warp core threatens to explode), "Off-Hour" makes that more literal. The episode advertises its theme of a compact timeframe with its title, and another wrinkle in the premise; the disaster hits when the Enterprise duty shifts are about to rotate. No-one likes having to stay at work an hour late, especially when lives hang in the balance.

Like how the "Strange New Worlds" musical episode "Subspace Rhapsody" conjured memories of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" musical "Once More, with Feeling," let's compare "Off-Hour" to other told-in-real-time television. The most famous example of that is the long-running action thriller "24," where every episode was presented as one hour in a single day, told across a 24-episode season.

Part of the "24" visual language was splitscreen framing, used to show characters in separate locations talking to each other without cutting back and forth between them. "Off-Hour" mimics this and also puts the characters in split screens since, again, they're scattered across the ship. But other details show how much TV has changed since the early 2000s heyday of "24."

"24" would begin and end each commercial break with an elapsed clock. Being designed as a streaming show without commercial breaks, "Off-Hour" has no equivalent. Note even that the onscreen clock starts at 48 minutes, not one full hour.

It's worth noting that "Strange New Worlds" isn't the first recent show to revive the ticking clock storytelling of "24." Acclaimed medical drama "The Pitt" borrowed the "one episode is a real-time hour" formula to chronicle a 15-hour hospital shift. It's hard to believe that the knockout success of "The Pitt" didn't influence "Strange New Worlds" to try its own real-time episode. Remember, the episode begins with the crew preparing for a shift turnover, and there's even a medical emergency once things go wrong.

In the Enterprise sickbay, Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) works tirelessly to save Doctor M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun). When the ship shakes out of control, M'Benga's midsection is crushed when he's pinned against a wall by a table. M'Benga himself tells Chapel he's a lost cause, but she perseveres and saves him (with help from makeshift cryogenics).

"Star Trek" mirroring "The Pitt" makes a surprising amount of sense. As /Film's Witney Seibold has often said, "Star Trek" is basically a workplace drama where the workplace just happens to be a starship. In that way, the cast dynamics and sense of urgency isn't far off from "The Pitt."

"24," "The Pitt," and "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" all understand that a real-time storytelling gimmick works best when the characters face life or death, or situations where every minute truly counts. Whether the central question is whether Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) will defuse a bomb, whether a patient will live, or how the Enterprise will make it out a jam in one piece, a real-time story feels incomplete without an internal ticking clock.

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