By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is halfway done with its third season and just delivered its first good episode. It’s called “Through the Lens of Time,” and it’s good partly because it lifts ideas and aesthetics from one of the most underrated and freakiest space sci-fi movies of the 1990s.
The movie is 1997’s Event Horizon, and if you’re wondering what business Star Trek has meddling in the world of a ’90s horror movie with hell dimensions, hold on. The show’s most recent episode got weird.
The fifth episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is titled “Through the Lens of Time,” and it begins with one of those “hey, let’s beam down to a planet and investigate some ancient ruins” plots. In the movie Event Horizon, something similar happens. A crew goes over to investigate a mysterious (and scary) ship.
The Star Trek episode briefly gets lost in technobabble, then someone goes crazy and starts screaming that there’s an evil before being disintegrated. In Event Horizon, there’s no disintegration; that would be too bloodless for that movie, but there’s plenty of evil.
In “Through the Lens of Time,” Spock soon discovers hell aliens imprisoned in an alternate dimensional space, hidden in these ruins. Ruins which vaguely resemble a baroque cathedral, like the ship Event Horizon does.
One of the ancient hell aliens possesses the body of a young ensign (Chris Myers) and gouges his eyes out, causing him to look exactly like Sam Neill when an ancient hell alien in Event Horizon possessed him.
The young ensign then runs around the ship murdering people and spouting terrifying nonsense, just like Sam Neill does in Event Horizon.
The episode ends with the hell alien being captured and imprisoned, so the Enterprise never actually enters a hell dimension. Lawrence Fishburne and his crew weren’t so lucky in their 90s horror movie.
But should that alien ever get out, I hope Captain Pike has a copy of Event Horizon on one of those colored square cartridges they use in the future. He should probably study up.
