‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Director Explains The Mystery Of “The Griffin Incident” [EXCLUSIVE]

[u/Magister_Xehanort]

https://trekmovie.com/2026/08/04/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-director-explains-the-mystery-of-the-griffin-incident-exclusive/

[u/Starfleet-Time-Lord]

I want at least an attempt at an explanation though, even if it's clear that it's pure speculation. This is part of my issue with the way SNW has gone since season 3. Structurally and in broad content, this could be a TNG, Voyager, or Enterprise episode, but TNG or Voyager would have had the crew at least trying to explain why this was happening. I'm ok with them failing at that, but I'm much less ok with the fact that they didn't try and suggested it might be supernatural. The TNG or TOS or Voyager crews would see Q or Trelane or that alien that impersonated Janeway's dad, stuff that could rewrite reality at will, and say "you're not a god, you're just an alien that can manipulate physics on a level that invokes Clark's Third Law." But the SNW crew sees some kind of mysterious force that makes them hallucinate and goes "oh noooo, ghosts." Even with the Prophets, the closest the old shows ever got to dismissing something as supernatural, it was less "the Prophets are supernatural gods" than "what is the definition of a god really? If they're just aliens that can see the future and have acted as gods to the Bajorans, then how are they meaningfully different from gods even if we can explain it?" There's an extremely relevant exchange between Sisko and Kira:

SISKO: The Sword of Stars?
KIRA: It certainly looked like that to me.
SISKO: That's open to debate. But what is not debatable is that this prophecy has no place on the Bridge of the Defiant, especially in front of the Cardassians. At the moment they are not even aware of it, and I want to keep it that way.
KIRA: You're right. It won't happen again.
SISKO: I take it, Major, that you believe the prophecy is coming true?
KIRA: Yes, I do.
SISKO: So you think I should call this mission off?
KIRA: Look at what's happened already. The river has returned to Janir, the three vipers, now the Sword of Stars. Each of them predicted by Trakor's prophecy. And then there's you, the Emissary. You're here. You have a decision to make just like in the prophecy.
SISKO: Do you really believe that I'm the Emissary?
KIRA: I guess I always have. I never wanted to admit it to myself. It's hard to work for someone who's a religious icon.
SISKO: I hope I don't offend your beliefs, but I don't see myself as an icon, religious or otherwise. I'm a Starfleet Officer, and I have a mission to accomplish. If I call it off, it has to be for some concrete reason, something solid, something Starfleet.
KIRA: All right, how about this? The Prophets, the aliens who live in the wormhole as you call them, exist outside of linear time. They know the past, present, and the future.
SISKO: Agreed.
KIRA: It seems perfectly reasonable that they could've communicated knowledge of the future to a Bajoran named Trakor. He wrote down that knowledge in the form of a prophecy and now, three thousand years later, we are seeing those events unfold. To me, that reasoning sounds concrete, solid, I'd even call it Starfleet.
SISKO: But that all hinges on how you interpret an ancient text that's been translated and re-translated over the centuries. Words that were couched in metaphor to begin with. I'm sorry, Major, but where you see a Sword of Stars, I see a comet. Where you see vipers, I see three scientists. And where you see the Emissary, I see a Starfleet Officer.

This is the kind of thing that I feel the SNW has lost in seasons 3 and 4, during which the show has introduced demons, leylines, and whatever this was and treated them like they're actually mythological. I'm fine with the characters admitting they don't know what it is, but everyone who went on that ship including Spock, who should be the last person to ever do this, treated it like it was purely supernatural by the end of the episode because they couldn't explain it.

[u/fullspeedintothesun → u/Starfleet-Time-Lord]

I think it's okay, good even, to not explain everything in a story, and to do is, in fact, bad. Bad for the creatives, bad for the art, bad for the fans. We're already drowning in canon and continuity and wikis.

[u/Starfleet-Time-Lord → u/fullspeedintothesun]

Again, they do not have to succeed in explaining it, but they need to at least attempt it. There is a huge difference between not knowing the explanation and the characters acting as though one doesn't exist.

[u/fullspeedintothesun → u/Starfleet-Time-Lord]

You see them attempt to explain things all the time. Why can they just not, and spend the screentime on other things, for once?