Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 sends Rebecca Romijn’s Una Chin-Riley into black-and-white territory in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 4, “A Case of Chiaroscuro.” The episode pushes a newly promoted Commander, Dr. M'Benga, and Ensign Uhura onto Mat'aar XII after a probe strays into Klingon space, then traps them inside a noir setup that leans hard on style.
Mat'aar XII in black and white
The episode begins in black and white, with the system’s infrared radiation giving the away team that look once they arrive on Mat'aar XII. The visual idea is not just a filter; it puts the characters inside a world built to resemble film noir, with Casablanca-style framing, high-contrast shadows, and the kind of dress code that turns them into knock-off Humphrey Bogarts and Carmen Sandiegos in order to move through it.
Una Chin-Riley drives that setup. Her role as a newly promoted Commander gives her the authority to lead the team, but the story also puts her between two pressures at once: helping local resistance fighters and carrying the weight of a childhood shaped by occupation politics, when the Federation were seen as occupiers by some of her fellow Illyrians. That conflict gives the episode a sharper edge than a simple genre exercise would have on its own.
Goldsman and Myers on gimmicks
Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have leaned into gimmick episodes before, and Season 2 already delivered two of them: Those Old Scientists, a crossover with Lower Decks, and Subspace Rhapsody, a musical episode. Strange New Worlds has moved farther away from its first-season adventure-of-the-week structure, and this episode shows the cost of that shift. The show keeps reaching for a format switch, but the review argues that a gimmick still has to carry an hour of TV, not just decorate it.
Dr. M'Benga is less the center of the action here than an advisor to Una and Uhura, which fits the episode’s narrower focus on the away team’s problem-solving. He remains the kind of figure the series has already established: a kindly physician who is also a skilled warrior and an adept spy, useful in a story where infiltrating a hostile setting matters as much as treating injuries.
Occupied space, local rules
The noir machinery around Mat'aar XII is built from familiar parts: doppelgängers, a central bar or cafe where conspirators and enemies can gather, and corrupt local authorities. Those pieces give the hour a clear structure, but they also expose the episode’s weakness. Style can buy attention for a scene or two; it does not automatically solve the problem of whether the plot has enough weight once the novelty of the black-and-white presentation fades.
That is the tradeoff Star Trek: Strange New Worlds keeps making in Season 4. “A Case of Chiaroscuro” has a crisp premise, a tightly defined away mission, and a look that does real work in the frame. The unresolved part is how far that look can carry Una’s split loyalties once the probe mission and the standoff on Mat'aar XII start forcing a choice.
