Nightmare Fuel / Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

"We are prey."

Just because this show is Lighter and Softer than Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard doesn't mean that it doesn't have its moments of real terror.

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Season 1

Episode 1: Strange New Worlds

• Throughout the episode, Pike is haunted by the image of his burned future self—that is to say, it's what he sees in every reflective surface, be it a bottle, a control panel, anything. It ends up giving the effect that the vision is actively chasing him down.
• Pike's presentation to the Kiley includes a lengthy description of the near-destruction of Earth in the show's version of The New '20s. During his speech, footage is shown of scenes of unrest and violence, including real footage of the 2021 US Capitol riot (notably, the first time any Trek series has directly referenced current events) and ending with images of New York, Washington D.C., and Paris ^note Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you realize all three had been victims of acts of terrorism in recent years being destroyed by nuclear bombs. Given the explicit references to the time period, and real-world events at the time of the show's production and airing, it comes off as a bone-chilling Humans Are Bastards speech both in-universe and out.

Episode 3: Ghosts of Illryia

• The virus that invades the Enterprise starts out as a silly nod towards the infamous polywater intoxication incidents seen in TOS, TNG and Lower Decks as everyone just feels starved for sunlight and to warm up. Even Una's actions when she's initially infected seems sensual in nature. However, things turn from goofy to serious almost quickly: Ensign Lance shoves his head through a window to get to some light, then some crew members create a simulation of a sun in their quarters so intense that it gives them severe sunburn. Hemmer nearly teleports a piece of the planet's mantle and La'an nearly causes a warp core failure. Spock even theorizes that the Energy Beings that saved him and Pike were Illyrians who were driven so mad they ran into one of the planet's frequent ion storms just to get the light they needed.

Episode 4: Memento Mori

• The Gorn. Making their first major appearance since "Arena" over 55 years ago^note Not counting their cameos in Enterprise and Lower Decks and these aren't the lumbering monsters that took Kirk's best. Instead, they are presented as essentially a species of hunters who view all species, but especially humans, as simply food to eat while their ships feature Alien Geometries. By all accounts, this episode establishes the Gorn as this era's equivalent to the Borg.
  • The state of the colony when the Enterprise first arrives, the place is deserted, there's barely any power, leaving the place in total darkness. Then there's the scene where the landing party finds an empty room with a massive blood stain on the floor with signs that all the killed colonists were gathered in that one location; worse the bodies are gone and we never find out what happened to them...
  • La'an notes that the Gorn have never come out this far from their territory. The notion that the Gorn might be entering an expansionist phase so soon in the wake of the UFP/Klingon War doesn't bode well for the Federation.

Episode 6: Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach

• Pike discovers the ultimate fate of the First Servant: mind-jacked into the Majalan supercomputer, suffering, unable to move (or possibly even think), face frozen in terror, until their drained body is reduced to a desiccated corpse. The sight of a child-sized object hidden under a shroud on a stretcher is already ominous, but the true horror comes when Pike then tears the shroud away. And to make it worse, he has to watch the boy he's been protecting suffer the same fate, despite his attempts to save him.
• When taking his vows, the First Servant is initially joyful... until he sees his predecessor's body being carried away and softly exclaims a horrified 'Oh my god'.
• The lead-in makes it even worse. The First Servant is dressed up like a prince and walks through throngs of cheering admirers, making the ceremony look like an actual coronation — and then comes The Reveal that he's being led like a lamb to the slaughter.
• The First Servant's father went against everything he ever believed because his son was the one called to be the First Servant. He effectively worked as a spy to save his son from that fate, and he failed.
• Alora - Pike seemed to really connect with her and the two of them had a wonderful rapport, maybe even better than his with Capt. Batel, until she stopped Pike from saving the life of the First Servant and did not tell him until the last possible second what the First Servant was meant to do. It was clear that she knew he wouldn't approve, and even her reasoning that the Federation has always had starving and suffering children that people ignore while her culture at least acknowledges the suffering inflicted on this child, seemed flimsily delivered. She knew that whether or not she thought it was wrong, Pike would definitely not understand. And he didn't, the look Pike gave Alora afterwards was one of absolute betrayal and horror. Someone he really cared about, and she thought the death and effective torture of a child to save their whole planet was justifiable.

Episode 9: All Those Who Wander

• This episode is basically Star Trek meets Alien — our heroes are trapped with hostile creatures bursting out of people's bodies.
• Ever wonder why Vulcans repress their emotions? Spock shows us why — he displays some seriously un-Vulcan savagery when he decides to channel his anger against the Gorn, and even after he and the others have been rescued, he's still furious enough to punch a hole in a wall and nearly takes it out on Chapel as well.
• Gorn reproduction apparently entails spitting a venomous fluid onto a prospective host and allowing their offspring to incubate inside the host. Unlike the facehuggers of Alien the host has multiple Gorn hatchlings burst from their body, killing them instantly.
• The Gorn hatchlings themselves are also positively dripping with Nightmare Fuel all on their own, with being barely the size of a person's hand upon immediate gestation and yet able to kill two fully grown humans in just seconds, with two working in tandem to drag one such victim across a corridor so fast phasers can't even keep up with them... and then they grow bigger.

Episode 10: A Quality of Mercy

• Pike's future self shows him that any attempt to change their timeline has one major repercussion: the death of Spock. Pike sees this play out after their encounter with the Romulans, and it is gruesome. After a hull breach, he loses a leg, his spine is shattered, he suffers severe cranial trauma, and has radiation burns all over his body. A weeping Nurse Chapel says that even if he's saved, he'll never be the same.
  • And the fans know that even in the proper timeline that Pike chooses to preserve, Spock still suffers a terrible death aboard the Enterprise, it is simply pushed back a couple of decades. The saving grace is that, much as the fans know that Pike will be given a new life on Talos IV, they also know that Spock will be resurrected and reunited with his friends on Genesis.
• The fact that the "proper" timeline apparently requires both Al-Salah men to suffer violent deaths, with Hansen outliving Maat by only six months.
• We see what effect the Romulan plasma torpedo has on a Federation ship has at close-range — as opposed to in "Balance of Terror", where the Enterprise was able to exploit its Achilles' Heel of being much less effective at longer ranges — to graphic and devastating effect when the Farragut gets the forward half of its saucer section utterly atomized, with the remainder of the ship being reduced to a burning wreck, implicitly leaving only a couple of dozen or so survivors.

Season 2

Episode 1: The Broken Circle

• It seems the Khitomer Conspiracy isn't the first time Federation and Klingons worked together to re-ignite a war. Even worse, they were somehow able to steal an entire Crossfield-class starship piece by piece and reassemble it underground to do so.
  • And unlike the Khitomer conspirators, this time it isn't even about politics or ideology; they're just trying to make money from the war.
• At the end of the episode, when asked why he let Spock off so easy for stealing the Enterprise, Admiral April replies that Spock may have saved Starfleet from having to defend a second front. Then the camera pans to a star map, where we see a vessel approaching Federation space. It's a Gorn attack ship. The Klingons may soon become the least of Starfleet's worries.

Episode 4: Among the Lotus Eaters

• Rigel VII has become a planet where everyone save a select few have lost their memories. Every day, the radiation that permeates the planet erases the memories of those unprotected, all save certain learned skills. If someone died, they would forget about them the next day. Luc initially thinks this is all a good thing, but when he regains his memories, he’s horrified to realize what he lost and thanks Pike for returning them to him.
• Pike realizing to his horror that he left one of his crew behind the last time he visited the planet, believing Zac to have died in the confusion. For his part, Zac took the abandonment poorly, and used the superior Starfleet technology to place himself on the throne.
  • And on that note, Pike realizes that while the Forgetting erases people's memories, their core values survive and show who they truly are. Zac making himself a tyrant means that he was never a good Starfleeter; he was Evil All Along.
• When the Forgetting affects the Enterprise, we get the creepy scene of crewmembers wandering the corridors, utterly confused about who they are and what's going on. One guy is curled in a fetal position, too scared to do anything else. Ortegas, normally self-confident and easy-going, is succumbing to a panic attack. Even Spock, The Smart Guy himself, is as vulnerable as the rest and is left milling about on the bridge.
• The Enterprise crew come up with a patch solution of having critical crew carry around tablets with their personnel files on them to remind them who they are. When Spock looks at his tablet after forgetting, he can't read it, probably because of his having dyslexia (as we learned in Discovery). Ortegas just fails to look at the tablet sitting on her console while she's arguing with Spock, and by all appearances Nurse Chapel wasn't close to her tablet when the Forgetting affected her, as we also see her aimlessly wandering the corridors.

Episode 6: Lost in Translation

• Uhura has some seriously messed-up hallucinations, from Zombie Hemmer to the entire bridge crew being Thrown Out the Airlock.
• The fact that Starfleet has unknowingly been killing the aliens in a nebula trying to refine fuel for their ships. The above mentioned horrific hallucinations Uhura’s having? The aliens' only way of attempting to communicate what’s happening to their community in a total moment of And I Must Scream.

Episode 8: Under the Cloak of War

• M'Benga and Chapel's flashbacks to serving on the frontlines during the Federation-Klingon War, watching their fellow Starfleet officers die and trying to patch up their wounds without an organ regenerator.
• M'Benga has been established since the beginning as a kind-hearted, soft-spoken doctor — yet when he was in the war, he was capable of turning himself into a cold-blooded killer. And as Dak'Rah learns the painful way, he can still become a killer. One can never look at him the same way again ...
• The field hospital's "Incoming Transport" announcement goes off every time there are wounded inbound. At parts of the story, it can be heard sounding again and again whenever a flood of wounded are inundating the camp.
• The episode's flashback plot is basically Star Trek meets M*A*S*H, and playing up all the horror of medical staff doing the best they can to keep soldiers alive in an active war zone.

Episode 9: Subspace Rhapsody

• While it's mainly presented light-heartedly, La'an's reaction, as well as Pike, Chapel and Spock's songs show just how frightening the scenario is where you are forced to reveal your inner most thoughts and feelings uncontrollably to everyone within earshot.

Episode 10: Hegemony

• The Gorn have returned. They open the episode by blockading the planet — cutting off comms, transporters, and even scans — and then they destroy the Cayuga.
  • The gradual reveal of the Gorn attack: First Batel loses communications with Enterprise and Cayuga, and then we see a Starfleet shuttle falling out of the sky trailing smoke, followed soon after by the looming form of a Gorn mothership.
  • By the time Enterprise reaches Parnassus Beta, all that is left of Cayuga is part of her saucer and an extensive debris field. As Spock explores the wreckage, we find the entire front of the bridge was opened to space.
• Hearing the crew baying for the Gorn's blood is very disturbing. In quick succession we get Pike outright calling them monsters and Sam Kirk saying he wants to study them specifically to learn how best to kill them (which M'Benga, a DOCTOR enthusiastically agrees with).
  • Remember one of the first things we were told about Christopher Pike, and one of the most consistent parts of his character: he considers resorting to violence a failure. To the point that him being captain of the Enterprise for the events of "Balance of Terror" was the start of Bad Future, because he insisted on trying a diplomatic solution that the Romulans perceived as lack of will to fight. Now, Pike doesn't even consider a diplomatic solution, no thoughts of peaceful negotiation. The biggest pacifist in Starfleet is on the war path.
  • And with M'Benga, given what was revealed about him two episodes ago, it looks like the "Butcher of J'Gal" is preparing to resurface.
• When Pike mounts a rescue mission, he finds the survivors holed up in a diner. Keep in mind, there were 5,000 colonists on that planet, and now there are at best a few dozen.
• The episode ends with La'an, M'Benga, Sam Kirk, Ortegas, and the few remaining survivors of Parnassus captured by the Gorn; Batel infected with Gorn eggs; and Enterprise under heavy attack. The only two people on that list known not to be screwed are M'Benga and Sam; nobody else on that list appears in The Original Series. Batel in particular is a Love Interest of Pike's not named Vina, and Chapel's going into the treatment blind. And Admiral April has ordered Enterprise to withdraw, which may force Pike to abandon the captured crewmembers and colonists. To Be Continued...