Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 3 - "Ghosts of Illyria"
Along with returning to Star Trek's classic episodic style, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode 3, "Ghosts of Illyria," continues another tradition as well. The USS Enterprise commanded by Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) launched a new five-year mission of galactic exploration in Strange New Worlds. In "Ghosts of Illyria," not only does the backstory of Number One AKA Lt. Commander Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) come to light, but the crew of the Enterprise is infected by a mysterious virus that causes Strange New Worlds' first horror episode.
Although Star Trek is science fiction, it incorporated many horror elements from the very start of The Orginal Series. The transformation of Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood) into a fearsome superpowered being in Star Trek's second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," incorporated horror tropes, as did "The Man Trap," which was about an alien salt vampire. In Star Trek: TOS, characters were often brutally killed by the alien threat of the week. Another early example of Star Trek horror was the episode "The Naked Time," when the Psi 2000 virus infected the crew, lowered their inhibitions, and nearly lead to the Enterprise being destroyed. Star Trek: The Next Generation season 1 remade "The Naked Time" into "The Naked Now" when the crew of the USS Enterprise-D was also afflicted by the Psi 2000 virus. Every other Star Trek series has delved into the horror genre as well, including Star Trek: Picard season 2, where Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) dreamed he was chased through the tunnels beneath Chateau Picard by "a monster" when he was a boy.
Strange New Worlds episode 3, "Ghosts of Illyria," brought its own unique version of the Enterprise infected by an alien virus. When a contagion that seemingly killed off a group of Illyrians is brought aboard Captain Pike's Starship Enterprise, infected crew members begin doing anything to curb their insatiable attraction to sources of light. This included Ensign Lance (Daniel Gravelle) bashing his head through a window to get to the light beyond and Chief Engineer Hemmer (Bruce Horak) insanely beaming a piece of a planet's molten core into the Enterprise until Number One stopped him and saved the ship. Meanwhile, Pike and Spock (Ethan Peck) were trapped in an abandoned Illyrian base and attacked by ghostly apparitions while a lethal ion storm approached.
Of course, there was a fascinating twist that allowed the Starfleet heroes to overcome the contagion. Spock researched what happened to the Illyrians and, "armed with knowledge," he deduced that the Illyrians actually became the light ghosts who ended up saving Pike and the Vulcan from the deadly ion storm. Meanwhile, Number One's secret that she's also Illyrian, a genetically-engineered species like Khan (Ricardo Montalbán), came to light as Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) managed to synthesize an antidote to save the infected crew. But there were plenty of scary moments along the way before the Enterprise was set right in "Ghosts of Illyria."
Strange New Worlds' restoration of Star Trek's episodic style is rightly ballyhooed as a return to form for the franchise. But "Ghosts of Illyria" also proves that within its episodic format, Strange New Worlds can also deftly handle Star Trek's classic ability to incorporate horror elements. "Ghosts of Illyria" is a positive sign that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be able to tell any sort of sci-fi story as the Starship Enterprise visits a new planet and solves a new, unpredictable problem in each episode.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams Thursdays on Paramount+.