Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 4 Review: Una Takes the Wheel

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has never met a genre costume it did not want to try on. Season 4, Episode 4 hands the show a film-noir hat, drains the color from the picture, and gives Commander Una Chin-Riley the keys. The fun part is that this is not just a visual party trick: the episode uses its heightened style to put Una in a situation where the legal answer and the right answer are no longer on speaking terms [S1][S2][S3].

That makes A Case of Chiaroscuro more interesting than a standard away mission with a fancy filter. Its main story has a clear center, Rebecca Romijn gets room to carry it, and the noir framing fits a character forced to navigate mistaken identity, occupation, and moral uncertainty. The episode is less convincing when it cuts back to a comparatively sleepy investigation aboard the Enterprise, but even that mismatch reveals why the Una story clicks [S1][S3][S4].

Spoiler warning: The following review discusses the plot of A Case of Chiaroscuro.

Una gets the keys

The mission begins simply enough by Starfleet standards: Una, Dr. M'Benga, and Uhura head into Klingon-occupied space to recover a lost Federation probe. Naturally, “simply enough” lasts about five minutes. On the planet, Una is mistaken for a resistance leader and pulled into a conflict that cannot be solved by locating the probe and politely beaming home [S5][S6].

That mix-up is the episode's smartest move because it turns Una from mission commander into an unwilling symbol. The story can then ask whether obeying the law is the same thing as doing the right thing under an occupation. It also gives Una's continuing questions about identity something concrete to push against instead of leaving them as dialogue floating around the bridge [S2][S3][S5].

Romijn is the reason the experiment holds together. Tell-Tale TV highlighted her performance as a strength, and the episode gives her a useful balancing act: Una must project command while working out how much of the role being forced on her she is willing to accept. The noir mood helps, but the character—not the monochrome photography—is the engine [S3].

Starfleet files a scientific excuse for noir

The episode is presented entirely in black and white, but Strange New Worlds cannot resist adding a science-fiction explanation. Radiation from the system's star affects the characters' color perception, turning the noir look into something happening inside the story rather than a flourish visible only to the audience [S4][S6].

It is a delightfully Trek-like bit of paperwork: yes, the show wants to make a noir episode, but somebody still has to explain the physics. More importantly, the explanation lets the style and story occupy the same world. The return of classic Klingon imagery and Kor then gives the monochrome presentation something suitably sharp-edged to photograph [S1][S5][S6].

The look would be empty without the moral problem underneath it. Noir works best when certainty is in short supply, and Una's accidental role in the resistance gives the episode exactly that. She is not solving a tidy puzzle; she is deciding how to act when rules, ethics, and other people's expectations point in different directions [S2][S3][S5].

The B-plot misses the transport window

Back on the Enterprise, La'an investigates missing data. The idea has the ingredients for a crisp little shipboard mystery, but reviewers at TrekCentral and Den of Geek found this material less compelling than the planetary story. The contrast is hard to miss: Una gets Klingons, resistance politics, mistaken identity, and full noir lighting; La'an gets a data problem [S1][S4].

That does not make the B-plot useless, but it does make it feel as though two episodes are sharing a time slot. The away mission keeps forcing Una to make choices, while the Enterprise investigation mostly supplies information. One story moves through pressure; the other moves through procedure. In an episode this visually confident, procedure was always going to have a tough night [S1][S4].

Why this experiment works

A Case of Chiaroscuro succeeds because its biggest swing has a character reason to exist. The black-and-white photography is the attention-grabber, but Una's dilemma gives the episode its shape, and Romijn keeps the homage from turning into dress-up. Reviewers broadly recognized the installment as another example of the series' appetite for new formats, while also noting that the secondary story does not match the main plot's energy [S1][S2][S3][S4].

The result is uneven in a useful way. When Strange New Worlds connects genre play to a character under pressure, it can make an old television language feel at home on the Enterprise. When it falls back on a routine data investigation, the color may be gone, but the beige somehow sneaks back in. Episode 4 is at its best when Una is in the driver's seat—and, happily, that is where most of it leaves her [S1][S3][S4].