'Under the Cloak of War' provides another strength, and a greater challenge, for Strange New Worlds' approach to Trek storytelling.
Those characters in particular this week are Dr. M’Benga and Nurse Chapel—both frontline medics during the war who first met, as we see in flashbacks, on the battlefields of the Klingon moon J’Gal, the site of a devastating theater of war.
of not directly serving on the war’s front lines, and Ortegas, M’Benga, and Chapel tackle the resurgent feelings of their own war experience—these flashbacks letget tonally and visually messy in a way it rarely has been, even in high stakes moments of conflict.The pace is relentless in these moments, one tragedy or ethical compromise for Chapel and M’Benga following another with little time for them to deal with or even acknowledge it.
. When Pike follows up with M’Benga, the doctor is hesistant to either defend himself or provide detail even when Pike tries to speak to him not as a cah’s dead, and ponder on a perpetually broken biobed as to whether or not some things can ever truly be fixed—or just managed forever. Did Dak’Rah really start the fight? Are M’Benga and Chapel covering for each other as a way to avenge the trauma they endured on J’Gal? There is no real clear answer by the end of the episode, only a sense of unease. It’s a compelling, morally ambiguous ending for the episode to end on, and much like the flashbacks to the war here echoing “Siege of AR-558,
” it feels like one that wants to echo the similarly dark, complicated mood Ben Sisko takes at the conclusion of “In the Pale Moonlight.” But, for as much aswants to play with this “in the moment” storytelling in such a dark way, you cannot really look at “Under the Cloak of War” and what it wants to do with these characters without the context of where this episode sits in the wider season’s structure.
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