Star Trek Just Remade A Perfect Movie Into A Sci-Fi Parable

Since its inception in 1964 and its first airing in 1966, Star Trek has always been a blend of genres and influences. While Strange New Worlds has become known for its genre-hopping antics — Season 4 alone has dropped a horror episode and a comedic Hangover-style romp — this version of Trek did not invent the homage episode. However, with Episode 4 of Strange New Worlds, Star Trek does something a little more ambitious. In a sense, this episode, “A Case of Chiaroscuro,” is a sci-fi remake of aspects of the 1942 classic Casablanca, with several twists.

And the best part of this episode is that, unlike some other old-timey, genre-bending episodes of Star Trek, nothing in the script or story of “A Case of Chiaroscuro” winks at what it's homaging. Instead, the strength of the episode is that it’s not kidding around at all.

Mild spoilers ahead.

Strange New Worlds resists the urge to be silly — with great results

If you were to just look at a still photograph from “A Case of Chiaroscuro,” you might assume SNW is going into one of its sillier, dress-up episodes, like Season 1’s fairy tale “The Elysian Kingdom,” or Season 3’s “A Space Adventure Hour.” Certainly, The Next Generation did its fair share of 1940s hard-boiled action, like the famous Picard-as-Dixon Hill episode “The Big Goodbye.”

But “A Case of Chiaroscuro” is a somber, smart episode that immerses the characters in a black-and-white world without kidding around. The plot requires a bit of shoulder-shrugging lampshading; the reason everything is in black-and-white is literal: it’s a weird planet in a weird region of space. Earlier on, when Una (Rebecca Romijn) turns out to be a dead ringer for a resistance leader named Yvette, M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) admits the likelihood of this scenario is “slim” but also notes that because the universe is so big, it’s surprising that everybody doesn’t “run into our doppelgangers” more often.

The point is, “A Case of Chiaroscuro” confidently hand-waves away any of the credulity-stretching aspects of the premise, and unlike so much of SNW, does so without making light of the situation.

Instead, like a noir film, or the classic from which it homages the most, Casablanca, “A Case of Chiaroscuro” plays it all straight, giving Romijn an incredible episode that might be her best turn in Star Trek yet.

Star Trek fused with Casablanca is somehow perfect

The story of “A Case of Chiaroscuro” basically drops Number One, Dr. M’Benga, and Uhura onto a planet full of human-looking people, but occupied by the Klingons. As in a TOS episode, the fact that everyone on this planet dresses like it’s the 1940s, and they’re in the movie Casablanca, is not really commented on. Which is perfect. In The Original Series, Gene Roddenberry encouraged writers to explore the notion of parallel Earths, which is why we casually get a Roman planet or a gangster planet in the classic series; the allegorical subtext of classic Trek was also just the straight-up text.

In “A Case of Chiaroscuro,” the planet of Mat’aar becomes the city of Casablanca, and the Klingons are stand-ins for the Nazis. A glittering nightclub/bar run by Yvette, Una’s doppelganger, is just like Rick's Café, where innocent people, trying to escape the occupation, are trying to find their way out.

The plot, of course, is very different in both stories; the premise and the tensions are the same. The script from Skylar Ojeda and Dana Horgan is, as mentioned, very reminiscent of classic TOS episodes, but the tone is 100 percent 1942.

Strange New Worlds doesn’t linger in this world and setting for too long, which is a shame. One wonders what a miniseries set on this planet would feel like, with humans trying to deal with Klingon enforcers in a dieselpunk sci-fi world bathed in rain and fog.

Contemporary Star Trek has rarely been so compelling or so beautiful to watch.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+.