Pike, Una, Uhura, Chapel, and A'Sha form a landing party to seek out a distress signal in a deep cave of a planet, falling out of contact with Enterprise. In their absence, Admiral Simon Reeger arrives and commandeers the ship for an urgent mission to pursue a mysteriously cloaked enemy that has just carried out a vicious attack on a Federation colony. With key command personnel not aboard, Reeger makes the highest-ranking officer present his first officer: the visiting James T. Kirk. Soon, the two are at odds with each other about the lengths worth going to to catch their prey. Meanwhile, on the planet, an ambush by Andorian smugglers puts the landing party in danger -- and it may be up to Uhura to save them all.
So much for season four of Strange New Worlds being "oops, all genre episodes." Even "Off-Hour," the former trophy holder for this season's "most normal" episode, was a visual homage to 24. "Orders of Magnitude" is straight-down-the-middle Star Trek... so much so, in fact, that some fans have a nickname for this kind of episode: "Badmiral." The Star Trek franchise has seen plenty of episodes about some misguided admiral (or commissioner, or otherwise ranking officer) coming aboard and messing everything up with their malicious/incompetent/just-plain-different mission.
This particular incarnation of the Badmiral conceit is lifting a lot of plot points from the movie Crimson Tide -- but by no means to the degree that it becomes anything like an homage or send-up of that film. (I'd hardly call Crimson Tide a movie that everyone knows super well anyway. It's not even in the same league as "Star Trek does Muppets" or "Star Trek does Jurassic Park.") And the thing is... even I, who have basically loved and defended this wild Strange New Worlds season of tonal potpourri, have to admit that was pretty clearly the best episode so far. I can certainly point out that classic Trek did widely-loved episodes with gangsters and Tribbles, Next Generation turned the crew into children, Deep Space Nine played baseball for a whole episode, and more. But at the end of the day, if Strange New Worlds is going to be at its best when it's not taking crazy genre swings? Maybe it shouldn't take so many crazy genre swings.
There are a lot of reasons this episode works so well, but the performance of guest star Joe Morton as the Badmiral is a a big one. He exudes authority and mixes it up with the cast very well. Every confrontation with Paul Wesley as Kirk crackles; it feels like Reeger could do something wild at any moment. (And so it really feels earned at the end, when he really does lose it.)
This episode is a big step toward positioning characters where they're "supposed to be" at the end of this prequel. I didn't necessary need an explanation for why Dr. M'Benga would wind up essentially demoted to serve under McCoy by the time of the original series, but this episode gives a good one that's strongly rooted in character. This series has established M'Benga as a person who acknowledges the horrible things he's done, and who isn't above grand gestures to atone for them. Taking the fall for Kirk is exactly the sort of thing the character we've come to know would do.
In the original series, so many episodes turn on Kirk disagreeing with the orders of some leader above him that it feels only natural for a prequel series to give us the chronologically first time that happened. And the heavy implication here (though technically it's never confirmed) is that this is a Romulan ship out on a "Balance of Terror" style bombing run. (Maybe it's even the same ship, under the same captain?!) I feel like that particular detail might play better if Strange New Worlds hadn't already done an episode tying into that classic, but it still plays. Indeed, the tie-in actually shores up the arguments of both Kirk and Admiral Reeger. Twice now, we've seen that a "Balance of Terror" situation with anyone other than Kirk in the captain's chair doesn't end well. But also, Reeger is absolutely right that by not dealing with this problem today, it will happen again in the future.
Uhura also gets a promotion -- but more importantly, a key story for her character. Star Trek has offered up the lesson that "you can make no mistakes and still lose" a few times before, but I feel like Uhura's emotional investment in the cadet she's been mentoring was a new take on that. Having the baddies she's up against be Andorian, calling to mind her mentor, was an inspired detail. And getting to see her save the day was simply delightful.
Throw in some great visual effects (as always) and a soundtrack that seemed deliberately evocative of James Horner's work on Star Trek II, and... well, like I said, it was clearly the best episode of the season so far. I give "Orders of Magnitude" an A-.
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