Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 SPOILER Recap: “The Griffin Incident”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 continues to boldly go forward with the second episode, “The Griffin Incident.” How will the show follow up last week’s dinosaur escapades? What sort of problem will the crew have to solve? And exactly what sort of griffin and what kind of incident is at play here? All this and more will be explored in our full spoiler breakdown of “The Griffin Incident.” This is your final warning if you haven’t seen the episode yet, so let’s get right into it.

What happens in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 “The Griffin Incident”?

Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

We open on James T. Kirk, Spock, and La’an heading home from the “Future Leaders of the Federation” retreat via shuttle when they detect a mysterious distress signal. They soon discover that the signal is coming from a lost Federation ship called the USS Griffin, which disappeared nine years ago for unknown reasons with a 300-person crew, but now shows no signs of life. Against their better judgement, they head onboard to investigate, and the mystery only gets more disturbing and confusing from there.

The ship shows no signs of life, but also no bodies. The power has been down for quite some time, but they have artificial gravity and oxygen. They see a potential survivor of the Griffin, a woman named Harper, only for her to disappear almost as quickly as she appeared. She leaves behind a trail of negatively charged ions, which Kirk suspects might mean she’s actually a ghost, that the team follows to a charred door. They determine that two different boarding parties were on the abandoned Griffin before them, one that tried to get something out and one that tried to seal something in.

Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

The trio is then slowly but surely divided, starting with Kirk being lured off by the sounds of a crying baby he believes to be his son, David. Meanwhile, La’an and Spock try to figure out what happened and walk away with very different conclusions. La’an finds multiple video logs of Harper claiming that her crew has been “infected” by something that she can’t let reach the rest of Starfleet. Video logs that, over time, start addressing La’an directly. Whereas Spock goes over the ship’s medical logs and discovers that none of the crew died from illnesses or afflictions, but rather stabbings, strangulations, and being thrown out of the airlock.

He then sees a hallucination of his ex-girlfriend T’Pring, who last appeared in the Strange New Worlds Season 2 episode “Charades,” played again by Gia Sandhu. T’Pring insists that she’s not a hallucination and simply ended up in the same unfortunate circumstances as Spock by coincidence and then proceeds to strap him to a medical bed and forcibly cut off one of his ears because she now believes his Vulcan side was why their relationship ended.

Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

While this has been happening, the baby’s cries have led Kirk right into engineering, and he rips the ship’s fuel cell open and apart, fully convinced that his son is trapped inside. Obviously, there was no baby in there, and now the Griffin is more stranded than before, just as Pike, Una, Uhura, Ortegas, and Sam Kirk, James’ brother, arrive in an attempted rescue mission. Uhura and Ortegas go with La’an to try and get the ship’s transporters back online, only for La’an to accidentally trap Ortegas in a transport buffer by setting the transporter to beam Ortegas into herself.

Uhura naturally scolds her for this and La’an, having not meant to do it and already experiencing emotional angst from the video logs reminding her of her own past as a descendant of Khan, has a particularly bad time. Though perhaps not as bad as Sam Kirk, who starts hearing the cries of his own newborn son while he and James try to find a way out. James insists that it’s not real, but Sam follows the cries anyway and throws himself out of the airlock, dying in deep space.

Meanwhile, Pike and Una initially seem to rescue Spock from T’Pring’s torture, only for them to bring him right back to her and join in. Una states that the Griffin can finally free her from the Illyrian blood that prevents her from being promoted to captain by Starfleet, cutting herself open to prove her point. While Pike believes that the Griffin can free him from his responsibilities as captain, and he could be the “head chef” instead, calmly cutting off his fingers with a large chopping knife. Through this, Spock realizes that this whole thing is completely illogical, reciting a traditional Vulcan chant to bring himself back to reality.

Before Spock has to go through the trouble of teaching this chant to the rest of the crew, the onboard team on the Enterprise is able to successfully beam him, Kirk, and La’an back to the ship; revealing that the horrific events they witnessed, as well as the versions of Pike, Una, Uhura, Ortegas, and Sam that were there with them, were all hallucinations created by…… something onboard the Griffin. Even Pike doesn’t believe that what happened has a scientific explanation, telling La’an about a potential encounter he had with a ghost as a child as part of a private debriefing.

As we wrap things up, Chapel helps Spock heal in somewhere that thankfully isn’t the medical bay, and Kirk makes a long-overdue call to his wife Carol and son David to check in. Meanwhile, La’an looks out the Enterprise’s window and sees a haunting vision of the Griffin floating by and an even more haunting vision of Harper waving back at her.

Is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 “The Griffin Incident” worth watching?

Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+

Horror isn’t entirely uncharted territory for Star Trek, but it mostly is for Strange New Worlds, so seeing the show’s take on a horror story is a lot of fun. The atmosphere is chilling, the kills are creative, and I appreciate that there isn’t a definitive explanation at the end, since horror is often most effective when you don’t fully understand it. I will say that it runs a little too long for its own good and the whole thing being not real feels way too telegraphed, but this is still a very solid and unique episode that keeps up the positive momentum of Strange New Worlds Season 4.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 is now streaming on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 2 SPOILER Recap: “The Griffin Incident”