The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 episode 7. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has gleefully played around in lots of different genres and movements. This season alone it’s tackled film noir, horror, and whatever you call it when the bulk of the main cast turns into puppets. (Do The Muppets technically count as a genre?) At this point, it’s probably more of a surprise that the show hasn’t done a soap opera episode yet. But “Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass” is here to correct that obvious error, and the result is an installment that not only embraces many of the genre’s most outlandish tropes, but finally forces its characters to confront some of the very real emotions this season’s pinball-style narrative has managed to avoid.Here’s the thing about soap operas: they’re actually extremely well done character stories. Yes, they’re ridiculous in a lot of ways, full of unnecessarily tight close-ups, melodramatic pauses, and repetitive dialogue. There’s way too much close talking, most dire medical conditions (and their cures) aren’t what anyone would call technically accurate, and pretty much every character has a long-lost twin or secret child waiting in the wings. But what keeps people coming back to these kinds of stories week after week isn’t the insane plot twists, but the characters. Soaps shine at depicting relationships, both romantic and otherwise, and their stories put raw feeling center stage in a way that a show like Strange New Worlds doesn’t often get the chance to do. cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass” is almost certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea in terms of storytelling, if only because the concept of something like “Days of the Enterprise” is deeply over the top. From Pike waking up with cosmic amnesia after a shuttle accident to casting Deidre Hall—who’s played psychiatrist Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives for 50 years—as the ship’s counselor meant to help treat him, it’s an hour that pokes affectionate fun at a genre that someone in the writers’ room clearly loves. (See also: the reference to an “Abbott-Chancellor collision” that name-checks two of the major families from The Young and the Restless. I see you, soap fan on the writing staff. And I appreciate you.) Like most ridiculous things on Star Trek, the Enterprise crew finds itself in this predicament thanks to unexpected interference from an unseen alien force. This time around, it’s once again the still-unnamed onscreen Trelane, who appeared in season 3’s “Wedding Bell Blues.” The Q-esque figure has commandeered Pike and his crew as part of what is essentially a school project about humans and their emotions, attempting to use what he calls “body cleaning theater” to impress his Proctor with humanity’s potential. (Said Proctor, it should be noted, is also wearing an elaborate, extremely Q-coded set of robes. Bring on the cosplay.) But also like many ridiculous things on Star Trek, the soapy setting is an elaborate framing device that serves an emotional purpose. “Space adventures leave little time for humans to deal with their inner struggles,” Trelane tells Pike when he’s called out about his latest trick. And, to be fair, he’s not wrong. This season has been a nonstop romp through very different kinds of genres and stories—Pike himself admits in the premiere that he’s been signing the crew up for constant missions ever since Batel “ascended”—and hasn’t devoted a lot of time to much in the way of introspective character work. This hour doesn’t completely fix that problem—whatever is going on with La’an is still kind of a mess—but it’s a welcome step in the right direction. That it’s Pike who is unaffected by Trelane’s soap opera reality makes sense. He’s already lived through multiple alternate realities and timelines, including a future where he wasn’t disfigured and the better part of a lifetime spent with Batel. (Maybe he’s becoming immune to it at this point!) That it’s this wacky setting that finally forces him to confront the grief he’s been running away from all season is a well-played emotional twist. Much of this hour relies on Anson Mount playing the snarky and disbelieving straight man to the increasingly soapy chaos unfolding around him. (“Computer, am I in a simulation?”) Truly, this show should let him be funny more often. He has great comedic instincts as an actor and one hell of an eye roll. But it’s Pike’s unexplored sense of loss about a life not lived that provides the true emotional engine of the hour, pushing their way through Trelane’s false reality thanks to a subplot in which Uhura is led to believe she’s somehow the captain’s long-lost daughter. It’s played for laughs initially, given that we know quite a bit about Uhura’s tragic backstory involving her very real and sadly very dead parents. But the story ultimately forces Pike to face (quite literally) the daughter (Anna Mirodin) he had Batel shared, a girl who never really existed but lives in his heart as though she did. Star Trek has poked at these kinds of themes of before, most notably in The Next Generation’s “The Inner Light,” but Strange New Worlds puts its own spin on the theme as Pike is forced to reckon with the idea that just because the daughter he remembers having wasn’t real, it doesn’t make his love for her any less genuine or her loss any less painful. It’s heartbreaking stuff, made even more so because it’s taken so long for him to acknowledge this pain he’s been carrying. We’re seven episodes into this season, and this is the first time his grief has even really been directly addressed. Part of the reason it’s so painful to witness is that it’s gone generally unseen for so long. (Apparently I can witness many heavy things in this franchise with relative equanimity, but an ugly crying Christopher Pike is not one of them.)Pike’s heartbreak isn’t the only real emotion “Like Chronitons Through The Hourglass” forces its characters to face. It touches on M’Benga’s professional anxiety, Ortegas’ post-Gorn PTSD, La’an’s complicated feelings about Spock, and Uhura’s longing to grow into the next phase of her adulthood. This isn’t an hour that necessarily offers any concrete answers to any of these issues, but maybe it doesn’t need to. After all, as any good soap opera will tell you, it’s the feelings that matter.The post Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 7 Review — Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass appeared first on Den of Geek.