Synopsis: In “Off-Hour,” the Enterprise falls into a slipstream that pushes the ship towards a catastrophic warp threshold. Can the crew escape before they’re all turned into salamanders?
The Story
We get some really strong performances in this episode as the Enterprise crew is thrown into a state of emergency in which every decision becomes a matter of life and death. Jess Bush is brilliant as Nurse Chapel, who battles against both time and extreme cold to save M’Benga’s life, even though she knows his condition is likely a lost cause. Equally good is Babs Olusanmokun as M’Benga, who knows pretty much everything that Chapel isn’t telling him. Chapel is so desperate to save his life that she turns to the research he conducted while trying to save his daughter, which provides her with a potential solution.
Also great in this episode is Martin Quinn as Scotty, who suffers a crisis of confidence as every problem he fixes seems to create another. He shares some lovely scenes with Carol Kane as Pelia, who tells him to listen to the ship. This begins to establish Scotty’s bond with the Enterprise, which we see play out throughout the original-series era, while also laying the foundations for his reputation as a legendary miracle worker.
Overall
“Off-Hour” is a huge improvement over last week’s horrendous travesty and is probably the first proper Star Trek episode we have had this season. However, it is obvious that the writers are still relying heavily on big swings into other genres. This disaster story riffs on the series 24, with a ticking clock indicating that events are playing out in real time. Frankly, the episode would have worked perfectly well without it.
The science is admittedly a little shaky when it comes to freezing a human to death and then reviving them, but we can overlook that because the solution used to save the ship, its crew and M’Benga is entirely speculative. The acting is superb throughout, although I feel the story is somewhat cheapened by allowing M’Benga to survive. The episode might have been much stronger had the crew faced a genuinely difficult choice between saving M’Benga and saving the Enterprise. Added to which, M’Benga had already been talking about leaving anyway.
For me, it is Scotty’s journey throughout this story that truly makes it feel like a Star Trek episode. Seeing him up a Jefferies tube is a lovely callback to the original series, while the moment in which he places his hand against the ship’s wall to feel the power coursing through her beautifully evokes everything we know about Scotty from the original series and beyond.
The sequence in which Spock uses magnetised gloves and boots to crawl along the ship’s exterior and gather information about the neutrinos is also genuinely exciting. Let’s hope this episode marks a turning point and that we can now get more proper Star Trek and fewer of the big swings into other genres that the writers have been making all season.
And if this episode is eventually released on Blu-ray, I suggest including two versions: one with the ticking clock and one without it. The episode stands up perfectly well on its own without the bloody clock.
- Story9.3
- Acting10
- CGI & Stunts9.8
- Incidental Music9.8
