Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1x03 "Ghosts of Illyria" (2022) TV Episode Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? Happy Friday! I am back with my review of this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, called "Ghosts of Illyria". There will be spoilers, because I just can't talk about these episodes week to week without spoilers, so if you haven't watched the episode yet (if you're even watching the show), then beware of Spoilers. Let's get into it!

I'm pretty sure you can all tell that I loved this episode. I wasn't actually sure about it from the episode preview as that made it seem like they were just going for the more horror elements that were employed in certain episodes of Short Treks as well as in the early seasons of Star Trek: Discovery and that had me a bit worried that SNW was just going to devolve into a mess of a show like season 2 of Star Trek: Picard did. Surprisingly it didn't though. The tone of the episode remained consistent with that of the previous two episodes, and we got more character details about three characters. The main one being the focus of the episode, Una Chin-Riley, who I will simply be referring to as Number One for the rest of this review.

What fascinates me so much about this show is that it's making things that originated in other media, such as comic books and novels, officially canon for the first time. For example, the fact that Number One is an Illyrian originated in the 1989 TOS novel, Vulcan's Glory, which was written by TOS writer and TAS showrunner, Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana. But because it was never mentioned in the original pilot, "The Cage", and this is the first time we've really seen Number One as a character, besides her appearance in season 2 of Discovery and in her episodes of Short Treks, it was never made canon until now, so that's pretty cool. I do hope that in future episodes, where it comes to the legacy characters, the writers come up with completely new ideas for them and don't just take character background from the novels or comics. As cool as that is that they chose to take parts of Number One's background from the novels, specifically the novel written by the legendary D.C. Fontana, They also need to come up with their own stuff as well.

Number One was the focus of this episode, and I really like what they gave her to do in this episode. Not only did she have to command the ship while Pike was stuck on the planet with Spock, but she had to cure the crew of the virus that inflicted them. It's somewhat similar to the numerous virus episodes that we got in TOS, TNG, and DS9. Like on those shows there's always one crew member who doesn't get affected, or doesn't get severely affected, and saves the day. On TNG is was usually Data, except for "The Naked Now", but I won't talk about that here. Here it was Number One who saved the day.

What intrigued me the most about Number One's story is that, like Worf's ongoing struggle with his Klingon heritage on both TNG and DS9, Number One secretly being an Illyrian is something that won't go away. Generally the crew doesn't know, but Pike, M'Benga, Chapel, and La'an know.

Speaking of La'an, I felt a real connection to her because her problems with the Illyrians and with Number One being an Illyrian, come from the fact that she's a descendent of Khan Noonien Singh, a notorious Augment dictator (this is pre-TOS afterall), and that she was bullied for it when she was a kid. That's so relatable to me, being that I was bullied in school, primarily middle school and high school, because I'm disabled, which is something I have no control over. So that'll be an interesting new dynamic between La'an and Una in the rest of the season that's for sure.

Also, M'Benga gets some personal stuff to take care of in this episode. It appears that he's been keeping his daughter, who has a rare disease (it's Star Trek folks, there's no story to tell about common diseases), in the pattern buffer of the medical transporter as the only way to prevent her disease from progressing. Man those pattern buffers have really come a long way since the days of TOS (ironic since this is a prequel to TOS). I do find it interesting that M'Benga has to rematerialize his daughter periodically to prevent her pattern from decaying, so he can keep her in there indefinitely. Back in TNG, Scotty was stored in the pattern buffer of the Jenolan for about 75 years, without a problem. Though his friend didn't survive for whatever reason. But again, I'll talk about "Relics" another time. 

Pike was in the background in this episode, as were Spock, Uhura, Ortegas, Hemmer, who I absolutely love as a character by the way, and Chapel, with Sam Kirk not even appearing at all in the episode. But I mean it's a pretty decent sized cast, and the way they're structuring this series, it's like TNG, in that one character will have a storyline with the usual A-Plot/B-Plot structure and the occasional C-Plot, and those secondary plots will involve another character, or multiple characters, depending on the story being told. So that's really cool.

One thing I'm oddly wondering about is why La'an was able to turn off the Antimatter Containment Field so easily? I mean I don't know how they do it in the other Star Trek shows, because nobody is dumb enough to do it since you'd blow up the ship that way, but I'm pretty sure it would require authorization from the Chief Engineer, and the Captain to do so, and neither Pike nor Hemmer were available. I guess, maybe La'an might be able to do it because she's the Chief of Security on the ship, but still, I don't think it should be THAT easy. But maybe it is? Like I said, there haven't been any characters in the previous Star Trek shows who have been dumb enough to simply shut down a ship's Antimatter Containment Field. 

Overall though this was another fantastic episode of SNW. There's only seven episodes left now, but man it has been so good so far and I am truly excited to see where this series takes us. And in two weeks I'll be on overload with season 3 of The Orville starting, SNW continuing, AND Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi being on. 

I think that's gonna be it for me for now. I'll be back tomorrow for a movie review as Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) came out on Disney+ today and I'm going to be watching it tonight. So until then have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.