Strange New Worlds Showrunners Unpack How ‘The Griffin Incident’ Deepens Star Trek Canon

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “The Griffin Incident.”]

The Star Trek franchise has enjoyed a long flirtation with horror, going all the way back to The Original Series episodes like “Catspaw” and “Wolf in the Fold.” Subsequent series continued the tradition. In the spine-tingling episodes “Schisms” and “Night Terrors,” The Next Generation reinterpreted zombie relentlessness with the Borg, while Voyager practically had horror in its DNA, devoting many episodes to spins on the spookiest genre.

Now the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds warps back into the frightful realm with “The Griffin Incident.” Set aboard an abandoned, seemingly perfectly preserved Federation starship, the Griffin, the crew appears to have inexplicably vanished. As Spock (Ethan Peck), Kirk (Paul Wesley), and La’an (Christina Chong) attempt to unravel the mystery of the missing crew, the derelict vessel becomes the setting for a chilling ghost story that probes uncomfortably into each of the three Enterprise officers’ deepest fears, exposing their innermost vulnerabilities and, in La’an’s case, leaving lingering, disturbing emotional aftereffects that may alter the course of her path forward.

Indeed, “The Griffin Incident” proves to be an ideal fusion of a compelling, classic horror story, swapping out a traditional haunted house for a Starfleet starship, and the durable episodic framework of Star Trek that SNW has revived to great effect for four seasons, all while plumbing new, unexplored depths of recurring characters, providing prime showcases for its actors, and even working in canonical references designed to delight long-term Trek fans.

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“I love that episode,” executive producer and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman, who oversaw the episode with his counterpart Henry Alonso Myers, tells TVGuide.com as both joined to lift the veil on how it came to life. “I have, as my partner has had to put up with for years, this sort of belief in science fiction-horror in the context of Star Trek.”

“I like science fiction-horror — I’m not actually a science fiction and horror fan per se. I love classic science fiction and horror, I love Alien,” explained Goldsman. “But I’m actually squeamish in my old age now and so it has to really fire on all cylinders. And this particular idea, this particular director [Axelle Carolyn], this particular writer [Robbie Thompson] coalesced into creating something that I think is what we want in Star Trek horror, which is the optimism of Star Trek in the face of the reality of the unknown and how horrific it can be.”

“Because part of what we do in Star Trek often is make the unknown known,” he continued. “So it’s really interesting to come up against that which cannot be understood conventionally and how that challenges our characters. It is certainly singular and one of my most favorite episodes we’ve done.”

Myers said the episode explored horror in a unique way from SNW‘s prior efforts. “The thing that I think is really fantastic about it is that we’ve done a lot of monster horror throughout multiple seasons, [but] this is the first time we really do a ghost story. And I feel like the thing that’s great about a ghost story is you don’t totally always learn what caused it,” he said.

“But the thing that holds it all together is the emotion at the core of it, and the three emotional stories are really solid,” Myers said. “And I want to give very special notice to Axelle and to Robbie Thompson. We’ve had many people work up to the task of satisfying my partner [Goldsman] in doing horror and Robbie, I think, had just unique, specific strengths that really helped take it on the journey that it needed to go on in order to work.”

The storyline sets up three unique ways to explore Kirk, Spock, and La’an that are tied directly to the characters’ backstories, both as established within the series and with deep ties to longtime canon. In Kirk’s case, he is quite literally haunted by the plaintive cries of a child — his child with scientist Carol Marcus, David, to whom he wishes to be a good father though his Starfleet duties compel him to stray from their side to explore the galaxy, elements of Kirk’s history that weren’t unveiled until 15 years after TOS in what’s largely considered the best of the follow-up theatrical films, 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. SNW has toe-dipped into Kirk’s conflicted commitments, but never plunged this deep.

“When you watched the original series, like most shows have done in the past, they had no idea what the future would hold or what the future would set up,” Myers reflected. “And Wrath of Khan told us a whole new history of Kirk: that is that he had a child, that he had a family. And what we have tried really hard to do is just try to imagine what the life would be like that we never really heard about, which was that if he was having a child in this era, this is something that he would be thinking about. It doesn’t mean that [David] would just disappear and only mention it when The Wrath of Khan happened, that it was probably a part of his life. And so we got to imagine that and deepen the character by showing that.”

Paul Wesley was intrigued to be able to delve into the failed family man aspect of Kirk that’s only been briefly explored before. “Forget Star Trek even in general: [Kirk’s] a father, it’s my only son and he is this young boy that I’m unable to be there for — that is deeply embedded in my soul, which is to become this great captain of this ship and to be there for my crew,” said the actor. “I think that grappling with that decision and making the conscious decision to choose your mission over your family can wreck a man. And I think that deeply affects Kirk. It’s something we don’t really see in TOS, and it’s something that I really wanted audiences to experience in this prequel.”

Longtime Trek aficionados are also aware that David ultimately meets an untimely fate in the next film, 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and “The Griffin Incident” plants an eerie bit of foreshadowing about his doomed future. “We get to take something that we know to be true and make it prophetic in the mouth of evil, which is ‘Your son will die alone instead,'” said Goldsman. “We’ve seen it now. So for those of us who make that connection because we’re deeper fans than the casual viewer, that’s a rare treat — and a dark one!”

“It also allows you to state the horror of it, which is a fear that all parents have, but we just happen to be able to tie it into what we all as fans know to be the future history of this,” said Myers.

The episode also finds Spock struggling with his definitive identity crisis — the combative cultural divide between his logic-driven Vulcan heritage and his emotional human side, which fueled so many TOS episodes and established the character, first portrayed by Leonard Nimoy, as the franchise’s most iconic outsider. In this case, his conflict is expressed literally, as his estranged Vulcan fiancée T’Pring — introduced in the all-timer TOS episode “Amok Time” and a recurring presence in the prequel series — appears and attempts to physically sever his two halves — including slicing the pointed tips off his ears and leaving them spattered with green blood.

The producers explained that T’Pring — in hallucinogenic form, played by Gia Sandhu — provided an ideal vehicle to probe Spock’s central division, which has sundered their engagement and, as Trek lifers know, left her embittered toward him (logically and dispassionately, of course) by the time of their reunion in TOS.

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“We talk about, graciously, the obligations we have, which is we know that by the time we get to ‘Amok Time,’ their relationship is not where we had left it before this episode,” said Goldsman. “So we are journeying to a place where we can evolve their relationship realistically based on the characters that they have inhabited, that we’ve helped create, or recreate. And, at the same time, platform a known future. Every coloring book has lines. The lines of our coloring book are where we end up.”

As an original character introduced in Strange New Worlds, La’an’s future is, unlike Kirk and Spock’s, entirely unexplored — but her past is tied intrinsically to that of her ancestor, the genetically engineered superhuman and charismatic tyrant Khan Noonien Singh, the exiled villain of the TOS episode “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan so memorably portrayed by Ricardo Montalbán.

“The Griffin Incident” puts La’an through an even more harrowing emotional wringer than Kirk and Spock, one that finds her faced with the aggressive, conquering, brutal — even murderous — side of her heritage that possibly lurks within her — and as this episode, much like Season 3’s “Four and a Half Vulcans,” suggests, may be about to come bursting out at great peril to her crewmates.

“This is all Wrath of Khan-based, in the sense that we thought a lot about Khan and we tried to imagine him not just as a bad guy, but as a person who comes from a culture and how does this culture express itself?” said Myers. “And that La’an was in many ways someone who, like the audience, is experiencing many different emotional things. And how could we take the thing that led to a bad guy in another context and turn it into a genuine, interesting human experience?”

The show’s blood-curdling ending — in which La’an remains haunted by how closely she came to killing Kirk after being prodded into an unhinged rampage by the Griffin‘s mad, maybe-spectral crewmate, who in the last shot La’an sees in a window of the derelict starship, raising a finger to her lips as if the two share a dangerous secret — works both as a perfect stinger of a close to the future-Gothic horror story and, in SNW‘s vein of episodic storylines that also push forward bigger, overarching narratives, poses the promise that the story of La’an’s struggle with her inner Khan is far from over.

Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds airs new episodes on Thursdays on Paramount+.