Joe Morton is excellent in a delightfully unbalanced guest turn as Admiral Simon Reeger, a legendary Starfleet captain from the Klingon War that half the crew is immediately starstruck by, and that everyone watching at home probably immediately realized that we couldn’t exactly trust. He arrives on board while Captain Pike is off-ship, investigating a distress signal on an M-class planet below with Una, Chapel, Uhura, and Ensign A’Sha, who’s on her very first away mission. (And being predictably unpleasant about it.)
Though Pike and team are out of comms range, Reegar pulls rank and immediately commandeers the Enterprise to help him chase down a mysterious ship he claims is responsible for the infamous Vaardan Massacre, an attack on a Federation colony that led to five million casualties. This ship remains unidentified throughout the episode and is not shown onscreen. But references to a new type of cloaking device—as well as the attack’s proximity to the Romulan Star Empire, laid out in a map full of gloriously nerdy Easter eggs—certainly seem to point toward a specific culprit. Though the show obviously has to tread carefully when it comes to confirming it one way or the other, since the “official” first interaction between Starfleet and the Romulans takes place in The Original Series episode “Balance of Terror.”
Kirk falls into all of this almost by accident, having come aboard the Enterprise to see La’an after the whole unfortunate stabbing incident from a few episodes back. But since he’s the highest-ranking person remaining onboard, he becomes Reeger’s first officer, which, in case it wasn’t clear, ends up being a frankly terrible job. The two almost immediately start butting heads about almost everything, a situation that is made exponentially worse when the crew tracks the ship to Argus 2, a small non-Federation planet, which he immediately assumes is the enemy’s home base. Determined to eliminate the threat at all costs, he invokes General Order 24, which translates to “destroy the entire surface of the planet and every living thing on it”. That’s at least 5,000 inhabitants, maybe more. And it’s not even entirely clear that the ship they’re chasing has even landed on the planet at all. Reeger doesn’t care. The possibility that it might have is apparently enough.
Lots of Star Trek stories (and subsequent debates about them) revolve around Spock’s famous quote that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. True, many of those stories are also about people finding ways to flout that conventional wisdom, including this one. But the debate is worth having: if a ship that killed five million people can be destroyed by sacrificing five thousand? Whose lives are worth more in this scenario, the people living on the planet they’re about to raze, or an unnamed future group who may or may not be endangered by this deadly ship? Kirk’s position is simple: “Killing an entire planet is wrong.” But is it always? Those are precisely the kind of stories that science fiction like Star Trek is meant to explore.
By removing Pike from the equation (we all know how he would have reacted), Strange New Worlds gives Kirk a real test and a chance to step up in an intriguing new way. After all, Reegar is seen as a hero throughout Starfleet. What does it cost him to be the man who tries to say no to that? (Is this the source of his love for challenging Federation authority? Maybe.)
It’s unfortunate that “Orders of Magnitude” takes a bit of an easy way out, in the end. Sure, Kirk’s largely one-man mutiny makes for compelling TV, and allows the show to explore how his father, George Kirk, knew of Reeger’s issues, but kept them to himself for the good of Starfleet. (There’s always something moving about a young man realizing that most of his unkind assumptions about his father were probably wrong.)
