Boarding as a hero and legend, Admiral Joe Reeger arrives, take command and leaves Pike stranded as he leads the remaining Enterprise crew on an urgent mission. With a visiting (again!) James Kirk picked out as first officer, Reegers mission and motivations come into question and puts Kirk’s leadership to task…
Writers: Alan B McElroy
Director: Sharon Lewis
One thing about season four that’s been a highlight through some uneven episodes is how it’s guiding it’s characters form our first contact with them in this series, and how we originally met them sixty years earlier. While it’s been more obvious with Spock’s pivot towards being closer to his logical side, we’ve had Chapel make the choice to become a permanent part of the Enterprise and Scotty’s move towards being the ‘miracle worker’. Even Pike seems to be on the verge of accepting he can’t run from his fate forever…
This time round we’re seeing another nudge towards the Captains chair for James Kirk as he gets a taste of being in a tough spot as the first officer of a genuinely awful commander.
Having gained himself a huge reputation from the Klingon War, Admiral Reeger was a legendary captain who’s been bumped up to the Admirals ranks. The crew are all in awe of him as he swans in and takes command almost instantly for an emergency mission. A cloaked ships been found, linked to a massacre, and Reeger wants it eliminated before it can do more harm. With both Pike and Chin-Reilly leading an away mission, and Kirk on board specifically to have a word with La’an after she had a menty and stabbed him during the Griffin Incident, Reeger picks Kirk as his first officer because he’s got the most stripes and technically thats his job on his own ship – if ever he actually spends time there.
That however turns out to be the worst job ever. Reeger is hyperfocused on the loose outline of the mission, and Kirk doing his due diligence of questioning the nature of both the mission and the methods just infuriate the Admiral at every step. The mission is clearly not operational, but personal, a score Reeger wants to settle and when things come to a head with Reeger deciding to melt down a planet that the ship might have landed on, it’s mutiny time.
Taking a heavy dose of inspiration from the Doomsday Machine, Orders of Magnitide is another nice episode to focus on how Kirk became the legendary captain he’ll eventually become. Building on Season 3’s The Sehlat Who Ate It’s Tail, which focused on Kirk’s first command scenario, this time we see Kirk find his comfort zone as executive officer to an Admiral who acts more like the Mad King than anything else.
Where in Doomsday Machine it was Spock who’d found himself against the rogue Commodore Decker, this time round there’s a more personal edge as the Kirk family dynamic comes into play. James T isn’t Reeger’s first Kirk encounter. George Kirk was his first officer on the USS Constellation, and since those days George’s career stalled making him less of a hero in his sons eyes and more passive. Thanks to M’Benga also serving on the Constitution, we get to see James Kirk poke around for answers and learn Reeger’s heroic acts were all lies. He was in Command of the Constitution during a pivotal battle, but out of action with George Kirk being the hero who was not only never given credit, but buried by Reeger out of shame after the fact.
Throw in Reegers real motivation, that the cloaked ship’s infamous massacre had killed Reeger’s family, and we have a nice rounded episode with Kirk probing what really happened on the Constitution, realising his old mans not quite the failure he’d always assumed, and in the middle of it all, learning where his hard line was in taking orders that he didn’t believe in.
Taking Pike of of the equation was a nice move for this. We know how Pike would react and that the crew would instinctively follow their Captain more than the Admiral regardless of legend. That would be just as true with Una, so having them stuck out of comms range fighting Andorian smugglers with Uhura and A’Sha helped to both break up the story while taking away the easy out that wouldn’t have the same challenge as a less confident Kirk in second seat.
There’s also a nice tension watching Kirk and Reeger first butt heads, then slowly escalate into a full on mutiny where Kirk manufacturers a scenario to have Reeger declared medically unfit while bringing people silently together in the background. The tensions even more fun with guest star Joe Morton embrace the rapidly destabilising ‘Badmiral’ trope.
Interspersed with a ridiculously simple B plot that ends with Uhura just going full action mode to save an injured Cadet A’Sha it was a nice straight forward episode of watching Kirk in another scenario where he’s building beyond his father, learning when to refuse to back down and leading through morality. It delivered, not just another landmark moment for the character on his path to ?the big chair, but a lot of classic tension in a simple and straight forward story.
With it’s inspiration being obvious, it might not be the most original story in the series so far, but with it’s core theme, compelling character moments and personal threads throughout – particularly for the brothers Kirk and M’Benga – it all comes together as one of the high points of the season.
EPISODE DISCUSSION & SPOILERS
Highlights
- Cloaked ship, Romulan border. We all know what thats about. But the Romulans won't re-emerge until TOS episode Balance of Terror so it was all left intentionally unknown here.
- Scotty's uniform marks the first time a male primary character has opted for the skant variant of their uniform following Jay-Den in Academy opting for the skirt variant.
- General Order 24 was introduced in original series episode A Taste of Armageddon.
All Connected...
In the original series episode The Doomsday Machine, we see another flag officer go a bit loopy and take command. After his ship was damaged beyond repair by a mysterious alien planet killer – the titular Doomsday Machine – Commodore Decker took command of the Enterprise while Kirk was stranded on the damaged USS Constellation. Traumatised by the death of his crew at the hands of the machine, Decker goes on a mad rampage of revenge with Spock trying to balance the Commodore’s orders with logoc and good old fashioned mutiny.
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