Scotty and Ortegas find unexpected common ground during the Enterprise crew’s spectacularly messy shore leave. “Human Best Friend” is often genuinely funny, but its best comedy works because the characters remain themselves.

A haunted starship, disturbing body horror, and Paul Wesley’s strongest performance as Kirk make “The Griffin Incident” compelling viewing. But beneath the atmosphere lies a mystery that seems strangely uninterested in being understood.

Strange New Worlds returns with dinosaurs, ancient Martians, and an impossible moral choice. “Valles Marineris” is ambitious, funny, visually impressive, and far too eager to explain the entire history of the Solar System in one hour.

Christine Chapel leads a rescue mission into an ancient prison hidden beneath the frozen world of Poilant in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — The Seeds of Salvation. Robbie Thompson delivers a thoughtful horror-flavoured Star Trek adventure with strong character work, impressive artwork, and a satisfying Trek conclusion, even if a mid-book art change and a few familiar tropes stop it short of greatness.

The tricorder is more than a handheld scanner. Through its design, use, and storytelling economy, it represents Star Trek’s faith in evidence before action.

Star Trek takes its rejected pilot, a broken Christopher Pike, and Spock’s extraordinary loyalty, then turns them into something far more uncomfortable: a story about when reality stops being enough.

A single tear forms at the corner of Sarek’s eye during a chamber recital. It should be almost nothing. By the time it reaches his cheek, the Enterprise is beginning to come apart. That is “Sarek”, and it might be the most devastating hour Star Trek ever built around a Vulcan. Ambassador Sarek, two hundred and two years old, arrives aboard the Enterprise-D for one last diplomatic triumph. He has spent ninety-three years preparing for negotiations with the Legarans, a species willing to deal with nobody else, and Picard greets him with the respect due to one of the Federation’s greatest living figures.

There’s a small moment early on that tells you more about this episode than the plot ever does. Spock looks at Balok’s face on the viewscreen, a snarling oversized puppet built to terrify, and instead of flinching he says one word: fascinating. Leonard Nimoy was still refining Spock at this point, and director Joseph Sargent reportedly told him to be different, be the scientist, be detached. That single word is where the Spock we all recognise really starts to emerge. It’s a quiet decision, and it tells you everything about what this episode is doing underneath the space bluff and the countdown clock.

Show someone who has never seen a minute of Star Trek a picture of the original Enterprise, and they will still know what they are looking at. A ship. Something built to go a long way from home. The wide saucer, the slim neck slung beneath it, the two engines held out on struts well clear of the body. That outline has been printed on lunchboxes, flown on parade floats, and rebooted on cinema screens for the better part of sixty years, and it is still the first thing a great many people picture when someone says the words science fiction.

A man stands in the Great Hall on Qo’noS, accused of a treason his father never committed, and the most powerful Klingon in the room knows he is innocent. Chancellor K’mpec has the truth in front of him. The defence codes that allowed the Romulans to destroy Khitomer, four thousand dead in a single night, were not transmitted by Worf’s father Mogh. They were sent by Ja’rod, father of Duras, whose house carries too much weight on the Council to be touched without splitting the Empire. So the Council does the arithmetic and lets an innocent name carry the guilt. K’mpec asks Worf to swallow it, to accept discommendation and a lifetime of public shame, so that the Empire does not crack along the fault line the truth would open. And Worf does. He turns, and a hall full of warriors crosses their wrists and turns their backs on him, one by one, for a crime that did not happen. That is the most honour-obsessed culture in Star Trek, transacting in a lie, in the one building where honour is supposed to mean something. Remember that image. Everything else here pulls against it.

A bridge belongs to neither shore. Its purpose is to connect two places without ever becoming either of them. No character in Star Trek embodies that better than Spock. Look at the moment in “Amok Time” when he turns and sees Kirk alive. Seconds earlier he believed he had killed his captain with his own hands, in ritual combat, on the soil of his homeworld. Then Kirk walks back into the room, and the most disciplined officer in Starfleet breaks into a grin and shouts his name before he can stop himself. “Jim!” Then comes the recovery, the face reassembling itself. The grin is the man. The recovery is the officer he has trained himself to be.

A plastic dome hangs from the ceiling of a treatment room, a small light turning inside it. That is the entire neural neutraliser, the device the whole episode is built around, and on paper it is nothing. A prop the art department could have thrown together in an afternoon. By the closing minutes it is one of the most frightening objects the original series ever put on screen, and the distance between the first impression and the last is most of what makes “Dagger of the Mind” worth talking about.