STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS
Season 4, Episode 2

The Griffin Incident

Series: Strange New Worlds - (2022 - present)
Season: 4
Episode #: 2
Production #: SNW-402
Original Airdate: 07/30/2026

Writer(s): Robbie Thompson
Director(s): Axelle Carolyn

Special Guest Stars
Paul Wesley as Lt. Commander James T. Kirk

Guest Stars
Dan Jeannotte as Lt. George Samuel Kirk
Gia Sandhu as T'Pring
Sorika Wolf as Rose Harper

Co-Stars
Catherine Cavandini as the Voice of the U.S.S. Griffin Computer

Stardate: 2903.9

Synopsis

James T. Kirk, Spock, and La’an Noonien-Singh are sharing an awkward shuttle ride back to the Enterprise, burdened by their own personal baggage. Kirk is wrestling with guilt over neglecting his partner, Carol Marcus, and their new baby, David, while Spock and La’an are navigating the lingering tension of their strained romantic connection. Their tense journey is interrupted when they investigate a mysterious signal behind an asteroid and stumble upon the U.S.S. Griffin, a Constitution-class starship that vanished without a trace nine years ago.

Leaving their shuttle behind, the trio boards the Griffin to find an unsettlingly quiet, dusty vessel that suddenly springs to life with only one hour of life support remaining. They quickly realize that all escape pods and shuttles are missing, yet there is no record of them launching. The mystery deepens when they spot a spectral survivor who cryptically tells them she has been waiting for them before vanishing, leaving behind a negatively charged ion trail that leads the away team to a heavily barricaded Sickbay scarred by weapons fire.

The team splits up to investigate, with Spock remaining in Sickbay to access the medical computers while Kirk and La’an head to the Bridge. Working alone, Spock uncovers the gruesome truth of the Griffin’s demise: the ship's Chief Security Officer, Lieutenant Rose Harper, succumbed to intense paranoia and murdered the entire crew. According to the chilling logs, she stabbed and strangled several officers before beaming 287 living crew members directly into the vacuum of space.

Before Spock can warn his crewmates, the Sickbay doors lock, trapping him inside a personalized nightmare. The room's previously empty body bags suddenly become filled with bloodied corpses, and one of the bodies sits up and unzips itself from the inside. To his horror, the figure is his ex-fiancée, T'Pring; despite Spock's desperate attempts to logically dismiss her as a hallucination, she uses intimate memories of her past panic attacks to aggressively convince his Vulcan mind that she is real.

[ Complete Screencap Index ]

Meanwhile, psychological horrors are also taking hold on the Bridge. La’an dives into Lieutenant Harper’s personal logs and begins to feel a dangerous, empathetic connection to the murderous security officer's desperate need to protect her crew. At the same time, Kirk begins hearing the phantom cries of his infant son, a delusion that is compounded by the terrifying realization that their shuttlecraft has been destroyed outside the ship, leaving them completely stranded.

Desperate to send a distress call, La’an heads down to Engineering to reroute power while Kirk stays behind to repair the Bridge's communications console. Kirk’s hallucinations escalate as he frantically digs through a mess of live wires in search of his infant son, just as the familiar hum of a transporter beam fills the room. Captain Pike, Una, Sam Kirk, Ortegas, and Uhura materialize, but the relief is short-lived; the "rescue team" is quickly revealed to be yet another psychological weapon fabricated by the Griffin. The ship's sinister influence finally breaks La’an, plunging her into a violent, paranoid state that mirrors Lieutenant Harper's madness. She brutally turns on the illusory crewmates and, in the chaotic climax on the Bridge, actually stabs the real Kirk. Simultaneously in Sickbay, Spock is subjected to his own personalized torture as the hallucination of T'Pring violently attacks him with scissors to sever his pointed ears, symbolizing a horrific rejection of his Vulcan identity.

Before the away team can completely succumb to the ship's maddening influence, the true U.S.S. Enterprise manages to pierce the Griffin's interference and beams the deeply traumatized officers back to safety. In the grim aftermath, Kirk and La'an recover in the Enterprise Sickbay, grappling with the psychological scars of their ordeal. Spock, however, is so deeply traumatized by the horrors he endured in the Griffin's medical ward that he cannot bring himself to enter Sickbay; instead, he retreats to his quarters, where Nurse Chapel quietly works to heal his mutilated ears. Recognizing the extraordinary and manipulative nature of the alien influence, Captain Pike makes the quiet decision to omit La'an's stabbing of Kirk from his official Starfleet logs, protecting her from the consequences of actions she couldn't control. As the Enterprise prepares to depart, the underlying cause of the madness that infected the crew nine years ago remains unresolved, and the desolate Griffin is towed away by the shadowy operatives of Starfleet's Division 12 for classified investigation.

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