Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 8 Review – Orders of Magnitude

Joe Morton delivers an excellent, delightfully unhinged guest turn as Admiral Simon Reeger, a legendary Klingon War-era Starfleet captain who immediately dazzles half the crew and whom anyone watching at home likely realized we couldn't exactly trust. He boards while Captain Pike is off-ship investigating a distress signal on an M-class planet below with Una, Chapel, Uhura, and Ensign A'Sha, who is on her first away mission. (And being, predictably, prickly about it).

Even though Pike and his team are out of comms range, Reeger uses his rank and immediately takes command of the Enterprise to help him pursue a mysterious ship he claims is responsible for the infamous Vaardan Massacre, an attack on a Federation colony that claimed five million lives. This ship remains unidentified throughout the episode and is never shown on screen. But references to a new type of cloaking device, as well as the attack's proximity to the Romulan Star Empire, presented on a map full of gloriously nerdy Easter eggs, certainly seem to point toward a specific culprit. Though the show obviously has to tread carefully when it comes to confirming it one way or the other, as the first "official" interaction between Starfleet and the Romulans takes place in The Original Series episode "Balance of Terror."

Kirk falls into all of this almost by accident, having beamed aboard the Enterprise to see La'an after the unfortunate stabbing incident a few episodes back. But as he's the highest-ranking person left aboard, he becomes Reeger's first officer, which, in case it wasn't clear, turns out to be a frankly terrible job. The two almost immediately begin to clash over nearly everything, a situation that escalates exponentially when the crew tracks the ship to Argus 2, a small, non-Federation planet, which he immediately assumes is the enemy's base. Determined to eliminate the threat at all costs, he invokes General Order 24, which translates to "destroy all surface life and all living beings on it." There are at least 5,000 inhabitants, maybe more. And it's not even entirely clear that the ship they're chasing has landed on the planet. Reeger doesn't care. The possibility that it *might have* apparently is enough.

A lot of Star Trek stories (and the ensuing debates about them) revolve around Spock's famous quote that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." It's true that many of those stories also deal with people finding ways to subvert that conventional wisdom, including this one. But the debate is worth holding onto: if a ship that killed five million people can be destroyed by sacrificing five thousand? Whose lives are worth more in this scenario, the people living on the planet they are about to level, or an anonymous future group who may or may not be endangered by this death ship? Kirk’s position is simple: "Killing an entire planet is wrong." But is it always? This is precisely the kind of stories that sci-fi Star Trek is meant to explore.

By removing Pike from the equation (we all know how he would have reacted), Strange New Worlds gives Kirk a real test and an opportunity to advance in a new and intriguing way. After all, Reeger is seen as a hero across all of Starfleet. How much does it cost him to be the man who tries to say no to that? (Is this the source of his love for defying Federation authority? Perhaps.)

It’s unfortunate that, in the end, "Orders of Magnitude" takes a slightly easy way out. Sure, Kirk's largely one-man mutiny is compelling television and allows the show to explore how his father, George Kirk, knew of Reeger’s problems but kept them to himself for the good of Starfleet. (There’s always something touching about a young man realizing most of his unpleasant assumptions about his father were probably wrong.)