SNW 4.4 We'll Always Have Tom Paris

Strange New Worlds season four has been a season of pastiche: the dinosaur episode, the horror episode, The Hangover episode, and now the Casablanca episode. Borrowing from Dune: Part Two the notion of a planet whose physical properties create a black-and-white visual spectrum, “A Case of Chiaoscuro” sees Una, M’Benga, and Uhura stranded on a Klingon-occupied planet whose apparently human population has, for reasons the episode does not even pretend to explain, collectively embraced a 1940s film noir aesthetic. The crew’s attempt to hide out without incident is stymied by the fact that Una is improbably an exact dopplegänger of a local resistance leader; this rather massive narrative ask is justified by a quick exchange between Uhura and M’Benga, who breathlessly explains that in a universe this vast we should actually be surprised it doesn’t have happen more often. (Huh?)

Like all of the episodes this season, “A Case of Chiaoscuro” has trouble translating incident into story. There are no character or worldbuilding stakes to these proceedings. The point of the episode is to make visual and dialogue references to Casablanca, but there the ambition ends: there isn’t even a perfunctory attempt to play out a love triangle plot or to give us the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The overall effect of the homage might be well be described, like the artistic technique of chiaoscuro from which it takes its name, as a strategy to bring the illusion of depth to a flat object.

The shipboard plot is even more threadbare: episode five of the La’an Takes Over the Galaxy Mini-Arc traces her attempt to run down an anomaly on the probe Una and team recovered before they became stranded and to see whether or not there’s a real anomaly or if she’s just growing twisted and paranoid as a result of her Augment genes being activated. It turns out she’s fine: Christine secretly deleted data from the probe in order to protect sensitive details of an off-the-books medical mission within Klingon territory. It’s not clear how Chapel found out this had to be done, or under whose authority she was acting under, or if Spock and Pike are supposed to have been in on it or not. It doesn’t seem to matter. In any event, having admitted what she did, she asks La’an to drop it, which she does, and all is well.

The last shot of the episode, bizarrely, is a visual reference to the end of “Far Beyond the Stars,” of all things, suggesting that the creators of this episode believe they have crafted an episode worthy of being likened to one of Trek’s greatest and most timeless creative triumphs. Allow me to suggest this is an unflattering comparison! That said, “A Case of Chiaoscuro” is a more or less inoffensive, by-the-numbers Star Trek episode, which by the standards of Strange New Worlds season four is a blessing. Bring on the puppet episode. I no longer fear death.