Rob Reviews Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 4.4 “A Case of Chiaroscuro”

According to TrekMovie.com and a few other sites, this week’s episode was heavily billed as the franchise’s big “noir episode,” with most—if not all—of it shot in stunning black-and-white.

Courtesy of the Google machine

I like that Strange New Worlds is willing to take chances and attempt riffs on different genres, truly keeping the “strange” present in Strange New Worlds. But so far this season, it almost feels like a continuous series of “genre-bending episodes of the week.” Let’s see how this one actually played out…

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t watched Season 4, Episode 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds yet, turn back now! This review breaks down the entire episode, plot twists, double-crosses, and major spoilers from start to finish.

The Review

From jump street, the episode is shot entirely in black-and-white. Naturally, we get a signature Star Trek technobabble explanation for it: the monochromatic effect is caused by local stellar radiation that alters how people perceive color. For a minute there, I thought we were just getting a classic sci-fi contrivance where a localized anomaly flips everything into grayscale.

The city where the Enterprise shuttle lands instantly lends itself to the whole noir motif. It almost looks like something straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Right off the bat, Una is mistakenly identified by a local as Nevette, a known Klingon collaborator. (And honestly, would it really be too much of a budgetary constraint to render the episode’s opening credits in black-and-white, too?)

The landing party is taken to a captured rebel. It’s explained that the locals haven’t been able to extract information from her, so Una steps up and says she’ll handle it herself.

Meanwhile, up in orbit, Spock and La’An are investigating the data probe the Enterprise was sent to retrieve, making sure the Klingons didn’t get to it first or sabotage it. La’An suspects that there might actually be a Klingon sympathizer aboard the ship who wiped the data chip clean. Could this rising paranoia be another symptom of those enhanced genetic augmentations manifesting themselves in La’An? (This might be a good time to note that I saw someone on social media speculating that La’An might eventually go full Khan and become the big bad for Season 5!)

Down on the planet, Una continues questioning the prisoner. The prisoner mutters, “I have secured the reading,” revealing that the person Una is impersonating—Nevette—is actually a sympathizer herself.

Then comes a great moment: Whoa! It’s Kor! And he’s portrayed as a direct descendant of Kahless.

The prisoner abruptly poisons herself, but not before slipping Una a crucial frequency. As things escalate, Uhura gets taken prisoner at a checkpoint. Dr. M’Benga and Una try to tail her, eventually linking up with a local bartender who turns out to be a key political dissident. The big twist? Nevette isn’t a collaborator at all—she is actually the secret leader of the underground resistance, using her fake collaboration as deep-cover camouflage.

Uhura is brought before Kor for interrogation. Insisting she knows nothing about the resistance, Kor prepares to use a mind scanner. Back at the “bar,” it turns out the entire establishment is a resistance stronghold hiding in plain sight—very Rick’s Place from Casablanca.

Up on the Enterprise, La’An approaches a Vulcan cadet about analyzing a transmission to see if it has bounced, before checking in with Scotty and Ortegas. Scotty has built a navigational buoy, and working alongside Ortegas brings some fun fallout from last week’s episode. Scotty makes a sly nod to his future fate stuck in a transporter buffer in the classic TOS episode “Relics.”

Back on the ground, Una and M’Benga stumble upon Nevette’s office, only to find resistance plans to blow up a Klingon munitions camp—and Nevette herself, dead and literally kept on ice. The dead woman bears a striking, uncanny resemblance to Una.

Following her session with the mind scanner, Uhura’s boosted identification card checks out clean, and she is released. She reunites with Una and M’Benga, warning them that the Klingons are planning a full military takeover of the planet within 24 hours, complete with a powerful planetary barrier designed to vaporize any incoming starships.

Later, a group of Klingons enters the bar, and for reasons known only to the locals, all the patrons begin rhythmically stomping and clapping in unison. Una decides she must help the colonists, going so far as to meet with Kor, who still believes she is the “clean” collaborator Nevette rather than a resistance asset.

Things get complicated when Una is stopped by Roman—the very guy they first met upon arrival. Roman killed the real Nevette and realizes Una is an imposter. However, Una turns the tables by planting the detonator for an EMP pulse on him just before he’s stopped at a security checkpoint. The device triggers, wiping out the Klingon grid, and Una tells the bartender that he must now step up as the new leader of the resistance.

Up on the Enterprise, La’An makes her report to Captain Pike, stating she found nothing amiss. On the shuttle ride back, Una and M’Benga share a quiet heart-to-heart. M’Benga opens up about his own rugged past, contrasting sharply with his current life dedicated to medicine. Una reflects on how she understood Nevette, noting what it’s like to have to pretend to be someone you aren’t—a feeling she knows all too well from her own history earlier in the series. She notes how she used to view everything strictly by the book, only to learn that rules aren’t always simply “black-and-white.”

As the ship warps away from the M’Tar system, the screen gradually bleeds back into full color.

My Take

The plotting, conniving, and double-agent (and triple-agent) layers among the characters could feel a bit convoluted at times, but that sort of intricate shell game was the entire point of the episode. Despite the title and the monochromatic solar system, the core message of the episode is that the world is not black-and-white. It isn’t a binary option of good or bad, right or wrong. In life, there are countless shades of gray, a theme reinforced beautifully through M’Benga’s character arc.

I’m glad they provided a concrete Star Trek scientific explanation for the grayscale visuals rather than just dropping the crew into a weird zone where everyone magically turned into old-timey movie stars for no reason. It was a clever execution of the showrunners’ attempt at a noir-style thriller.

Even with all the narrative overthinking required for a spy story like this, it’s refreshing to see Strange New Worlds deliver a fairly straightforward “planet of the week” adventure. I’m always amazed by the costumes the Klingons wear on SNW, too—they evoke the exact tone of The Original Series with metallic, outlandish designs, while still feeling modern. It feels like SNW is steadily marching closer to the technicolor dreamworld of classic TOS.

On the other hand, I’m getting the sense that the “La’An is paranoid” subplot might have been a bit of a false start. Is it a real sign that she’s destined to turn into her infamous ancestor, Khan? That remains to be seen, but throwing out a red herring like this is classic misdirection so the writers can catch us off guard later in the series.

Overall, I would easily recommend this episode for the Star Trek completists. It’s a solid story—nothing groundbreaking or spectacular, but certainly nothing bad by any stretch of the imagination. And honestly, while I love a good straightforward planet-of-the-week story, a 60-year-old franchise has to take big, creative chances every now and then to stay fresh. That’s why wild swings like the musical episode “Subspace Rhapsody” totally work when they lean into them, and it makes me even more excited for that teased “puppet episode” coming up later this season!

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