Whose justice will emerge from ‘Under the Cloak of War’?

This week’s main episode of Strange New Worlds, which was moved up to accommodate the surprise early launch of a crossover episode on July 22, enters difficult territory. On the surface, “Under the Cloak of War” bears some resemblance to facets of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which grappled with Klingon-Federation peace and what that would mean for Klingon culture. Mostly, though, the episode addresses a fraught conversation that has cropped up time and again in the universe: how to live with war trauma.

Deep Space Nine wrestled with this theme often. There, trauma played out through the pseudo-Holocaust metaphor of Bajoran occupation by Cardassians, whose station thereafter fell into Federation hands. This is also the series where we get “what-if” stories imagining an alt-universe where our resident German/Nazi stand-ins, the Cardassians, win World War II/the Occupation. The series is also home to the Dominion War, the highly controversial introduction of Section 31 black ops, and young Nog’s experiences as a Starfleet officer coping with PTSD as a disabled veteran (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”, S7E10).

But that last reference also speaks to a pressing challenge Star Trek has always had, in trying to approach trauma responsibly and well. Despite having a counselor aboard the Enterprise, Captain Picard needed the healing that only “Family” (S4E02) could provide after his assimilation by the Borg and complicity in the Battle of Wolf 359. Even then, Commander Sisko, who lost his wife in that massacre, can barely stand to be in the same room with him in “Emissary” (S1E01). Sisko’s trauma emerges on the fourth anniversary of Wolf 359, and is an ongoing part of his anger.

It’s a bit funny, then, that Discovery gained a reputation as the “feelings” Trek. Granted, it has lengthy therapeutic dialogues between characters, and season-long plots that center on coping with grief, finding self-confidence, and/or apologizing for being mean to crewmates in the past. But many Trek outings grapple with the emotional aftermath of terrible events. For all of Disco‘s problems, its interest in the sheer fact of trauma is by no means unique.

One episode I haven’t seen discussed much in relation to “Under the Cloak of War”, though, is Voyager‘s “Jetrel” (S1E15). There, Neelix is thrust into the proximity of a scientist who committed an atomic-bomb-esque atrocity fifteen years before series events. While the rest of the crew is sympathetic to his trauma, they also try to coax him to make space for the possibility that Jetrel has changed, and genuinely wants to atone through peacetime research now. This was a very challenging episode, because when Jetrel is dying, Neelix decides to forgive him for his war crimes, which amounted to the deaths of 300,000 and the suffering of many more. It’s on this note, of Neelix’s forgiveness, that the episode’s moral crisis ends.

Was this the “correct” choice? Well, here’s another complicating factor for you: Neelix’s character operates in a role echoing the Japanese position after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did the story really do enough to justify its Japanese stand-in forgiving its Oppenheimer stand-in, on a series shaped for a US audience?

Such context matters when thinking about SNW‘s “Under the Cloak of War”, because the latter was released in the same month as Oppenheimer: a film about the most infamous scientist behind the atomic bomb, and a media event that has raised questions about how we choose to represent atrocity. Irrespective of the film’s quality, the director still made a choice to frame our attention around a participant in atrocity, while victims are left on the margins if mentioned at all.

Are poor framing decisions part of the point in “Under the Cloak of War”? Perhaps. In this episode, we’re given an immature Federation, and a Starfleet that doesn’t seem fully adjusted to the task of peacemaking (See: Quotes of note). A lot of the trauma here is caused by the choice to put still-traumatized war veterans in the same room as a past enemy combatant, with very little mental health support. In the previous episode, this crew was called “old scientists”, but in this story the Enterprise has a long way to go before being a ship of good “diplomats”, too.

It’s also important to remember that, although the Federation was supposed to represent a “united” Earth, Klingons served as a figurative stand-in for the Soviet Union on The Original Series.

If we carry that reference forward to the Russia of today, the themes addressed in this latest episode become even more pressing. Imagine being asked to sit down with a Russian general directly involved in, say, the atrocities at Bucha early in the invasion of Ukraine, or any number of war crimes against civilians since.

Imagine being told that someone who oversaw such war crimes has changed: that he’s now an ambassador of peace who wants very much to help the healing begin, and that it’s really your reluctance to sit down with him that’s holding peace back.

Now imagine, further, that you weren’t just experiencing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through news reports. Imagine that you were a field medic who had to deal firsthand with the fallout of what this Russian general had wrought. Imagine, a few years out from today’s ongoing violence, being asked to engage in a friendly training session with him, and to otherwise move forward with his campaign of peace.

Could you do it?

Would you do it?

Star Trek has a long history of tying its stories into real-world events. This one has been filtered through multiple phases of Klingon in-world history, but the questions it raises could not be more relevant in light of the world today.

The trauma here is not easy. It is not pat.

And that’s the point. We’re meant to sit with the mess of war, and its consequences.

So let’s do just that.

Establishing the stakes (Spoiler-free zone)

The USS Enterprise is in the Prospero system to escort the Klingon ambassador Dak’Rah (Robert Wisdom) to Starbase 12. Rah has just negotiated a ceasefire between three warring worlds, as part of a longer campaign for peace that began in the middle of the Klingon War with his defection. His diplomatic achievements, as a former enemy now speaking for the Federation, are significant: the Summit of Scorpi X, the Klingon Free-Trade Agreement, and the Perez Accords.

This explains the respectful reception he receives from some aboard the Enterprise, including Captain Pike’s use of the boatswain’s whistle to “roll out the red carpet” and Spock’s insistence on learning how to synthesize a Klingon beverage.

But others are not amused.

Lieutenant Erica Ortegas, Nurse Chapel, and Dr. M’Benga all served in the war, and do not trust Rah. Ortegas lists his many other “achievements”: the Slaughter at Lembetta V, the Siege of Starbase Zetta, and his actions on the Athos Colony. Also, he gained the moniker “The Butcher of J’Gal” for murdering his own men (so the story goes) while withdrawing from that final field of combat.

Rah himself seems an affable, gracious guest, even when Spock’s attempt at a raktijino burns his hand. But when he’s taken to sickbay, his presence immediately causes M’Benga physical distress, while Chapel quickly steps in to help.

Chapel knows how much Rah’s presence pains M’Benga, because she and the good doctor served together on J’Gal. Through flashbacks over the episode, we follow their intertwined experiences in the chaos of a field hospital with very strong M*A*S*H overtones (especially when we later get to the announcements of incoming wounded). In “Tent City”, Chapel is suddenly lead nurse, and she and M’Benga become a crack team doing whatever it takes to help the wounded.

(This would also explain her interest in archaeological medicine, because what she had to do on the field was often low-tech, including pumping a heart by hand.)

But the work takes its toll.

On J’Gal, M’Benga and Chapel helped an ensign who’d been brutally tortured by Rah’s forces. Later, M’Benga would be approached with a proposal, care of a black ops Andorian. Rah had issued orders calling for the slaughter of anyone who wasn’t a Klingon warrior: Klingon and human civilians alike. Children included. But with M’Benga’s history as a fighter, maybe he’d be perfect for an undercover operation to take Rah out? Here, we’re also introduced to the serum M’Benga had developed, Protocol 12, which was used in the Season 2 opener.

Interwoven with these flashbacks is a present-day challenge for M’Benga, Chapel, and Ortegas, who are struggling to keep their composure in Rah’s presence. This is an artificial crisis: Pike has apparently received orders from high up that the war veterans on the ship need to mingle with Rah. Apparently there was a protest on the last escort mission? And apparently Starfleet thinks there will be… less drama from compelling Enterprise vets to spend more time with the ambassador?

Sometimes one has to resign oneself to a lousy plot device. The point of this one is clear: without pressure for the vets to attend, we don’t get the escalating tension of Rah wanting to spend even more time with M’Benga, especially after learning that he was at J’Gal, and after Ortegas won’t let Rah soften stories of conflict there.

M’Benga is in a lot of pain from all this resurfacing history.

Chapel is, too, but it’s different: M’Benga once helped her put an injured man in a transport buffer, before a massive influx of new patients required her to wipe the pattern stored there, effectively killing that first patient with M’Benga’s help. When these terrible memories resurface, Spock tries to support her, but Chapel needs time alone, and her request is respected.

Not so with M’Benga, who also just wants to be left alone. Instead, with all the pressure that Rah keeps putting on him through proximity and a desire to help him heal, how is M’Benga supposed to process this trauma on his own terms?

The question isn’t “would you or wouldn’t you?”
The question is:
How do we build a world where everyone else feels like they have choices again, too?

Challenging expectations (Spoiler zone)

The problem is that M’Benga and Rah have even deeper history, though Rah doesn’t realize this yet, and neither does Pike. Only Una seems to grasp that this cruel experiment in diplomacy at cost to war vets aboard the Enterprise has run its course. Eventually, she urges Pike to get Rah off the ship before things get worse. By then, though, it will be too late.

This is because, back on J’Gal, when M’Benga refused to help as a fighter, black ops went ahead with their next plan. They recruited the ensign that M’Benga and Chapel had just patched up, to join them in their meat-grinder mission to take out local Klingon generals. At the sight of the ensuing dead in the morgue, including the poor ensign, M’Benga took up a weapon to finish what they had started, with Chapel watching his back from afar while awaiting a long-overdue relief ship out.

In the present, Rah asks M’Benga to join him in a sparring session, and in close quarters the two exchange questions and appeals. Rah wants M’Benga to join him, for the powerful symbolism of two opposing fighters from J’Gal united in peace. But M’Benga asks Rah if he really killed his own men, as per the rumors about the Butcher of J’Gal. Rah claims that he had to, because it was the right thing to do. M’Benga asks which of his men fought the hardest, and after the sparring match gently demurs that maybe people do change.

M’Benga could have told Rah the truth then, but he just wants to be left alone, so it’s not until Rah visits him again, in sickbay, that M’Benga reaches his limit.

He tells Rah that it was a different man who fought the hardest: a fact he knows because he was there; because M’Benga killed all those Klingons, while Rah escaped. Rah is shocked, and wants to know why M’Benga didn’t reveal the lie in all these years. M’Benga, in pain as he speaks to this man he loathes, tries to get the ambassador to understand that Rah made him a monster that day. Rah had lied because he was ashamed of his cowardice, but M’Benga kept the truth hidden for all these years because he was ashamed of what he had become.

Rah’s appeals for collective healing become physical. M’Benga keeps asking to be left alone. There’s a d’k tahg present. We don’t see what happens next. We just see the bloody Klingon blade and Rah’s body after. Chapel shows up, the only other person who knows M’Benga’s secret, and later claims she saw Rah attack him.

Pike visits M’Benga after, to explain that there will be an inquiry. At the time, M’Benga’s working on a biobed that’s been damaged ever since a Gorn attack. The two have a conversation about justice, who gets to mete it out, and the nature of Rah as a child-killer, but the most important detail is the question of who did or did not “start” the final fight. M’Benga tells Pike that he didn’t start this last confrontation, but he also wants Pike to understand that the fight didn’t start on the Enterprise at all. M’Benga didn’t start the fight, but he is glad that Rah is dead.

Pike leaves troubled by these facts, while M’Benga reflects on the biobed’s repairs being finished for the moment. As he reminds us, though, it’s only a matter of time before it will break down again.

Even as he speaks, we see flickers of malfunction return.

Humanist storytelling structure?

This episode benefits from a lot of character work embedded over the last two seasons. M’Benga’s main story arc in Season 1 involved trying to find a cure for his daughter, who was being held in a transport buffer to delay the spread of her disease. Now we know where the idea came from: an emergency maneuver used in war scenarios.

We’ve also had M’Benga dreading every encounter that invokes his past as a highly proficient hand-to-hand fighter, including in Episodes 1 and 4 of this season. He has long been a man carefully holding back parts of himself from the rest of the crew. This makes many of his choices, including in his final conversation with Pike, less a betrayal of his uniform and more in keeping with his character throughout.

But the episode also did something quite challenging with its use of flashbacks. Non-linear storytelling can often feel gimmicky, because with flashbacks you get to choose when the big twist is going to show up. (This, in turn, can feel less “natural” if not done right.) If the aim were simply to give viewers all the info they needed to weigh M’Benga’s final encounter with Rah properly, we could just as easily have spent more of the episode all at once in the past, then experienced everything in the present with those details in mind.

However, I don’t think the twist was the primary reason for our flashbacks, because we’re given the war not just from M’Benga’s point of view but also from Chapel’s. Their trauma experiences were tightly bound up, and it’s that jumble we see relived in a messy patchwork throughout this episode. We’re not supposed to be gaining simple facts; we’re supposed to be experiencing even a fraction of the chaos, and confusing changed priorities, that war always leaves in its wake.

Trauma isn’t a puzzle to be solved, so much as a set of experiential imprints to be managed—however often the damage in them returns. With this in mind, what exactly are we supposed to take away from M’Benga and Rah’s final encounter?

‘Under the Cloak of War’: The thematic pay-off

As much as the internet has been hashing out whether M’Benga did the “right” thing, I don’t think this is the most useful question.

I’m watching this show from Colombia, a country with more experience in peace-work than most. When a peace treaty was signed with FARC in 2016, citizens actually voted against it, because many felt that the guerrilla group would be getting off too easily: that trying to reintegrate guerrilla fighters into peaceful society through political representation and transitional programming was unfair to the victims and their families. The push for retributive justice was strong.

In ensuing years, a tribunal called the JEP has been doing the painstaking work of gathering full reports of the trauma, giving victims space to speak and be heard, and pursuing restorative justice consequences for the perpetrators of past violence. These consequences involve public apologies for a fully accepted list of criminal charges (to spare victims further time in courts), and participation in veterans’ aid programs, de-mining projects, the rehabilitation of affected communities, and environmental labor, in lieu of traditional prison sentences.

But the work of the JEP did not come fast or fierce enough for many. Part of why we have dissident FARC even now in Colombia is that the safety of all combatants could not be guaranteed after the peace treaty, so some withdrew to their old way of life. While many gained access to transitional programming (key for populations who had often lived their whole lives at a remove from state institutions), others were murdered by fellow Colombians who did not think it right that guerrilla combatants should get to enjoy the fruits of peace.

SNW went to great lengths to carve out a complex story for Rah, as a Klingon war criminal turned ambassador who did many good deeds on the back of a lie. You can tell that the writers felt they needed this complex past to enrich the moral quandary not only for M’Benga but also for a fairly cozy Western viewership.

But Rah’s story needn’t have been quite so complex. Or M’Benga’s.

And that’s the deeper horror, really: how common M’Bengas and Rahs always are.

Every day in the real world, whether in Colombia, where paramilitary groups and cartels continue to pose challenges to peace; or Ethiopia and Tigray, where citizens are moving through painful peace phases following a brutal civil war; or Sudan, where the power vacuum continues to leave citizens tyrannized by corrupt competing militias; or Ukraine, where Russia’s invasion sows daily ruin with ripple effects felt the world over… we are left with the question of how to heal if we’re even lucky to live long enough for healing to begin.

So if you’re asking yourself whether M’Benga made the right decision: stop.

That’s not the point here.

Ask yourself, instead, what allows you the privilege of thinking this a choice at all.

The question isn’t “would you or wouldn’t you?”

The question is:

How do we build a world where everyone feels like they have choices again, too?

Quotes of note, and other Easter Eggs

• M’Benga, in the theater of war at J’Gal, explains to his patient: “We have to fight so the people we love have a chance to live in peace. That’s Starfleet.” This is such a painful reminder that Starfleet in this universe is never just a venture with scientific and diplomatic ends. It is also expressly a militia when called upon by circumstance. Pike makes a similar point later in the episode, when he notes that the Federation isn’t just the organization overseeing peace; it was also the organization that got citizens into and through the war first. How can the same institution do both without accruing moral damage along the way?
• Una also makes a salient point when she reminds Pike that, “Federation or not, everyone is on their own journey.” As much as the group may have its grand ideals, those ideals are still carried forward (or not) by individuals. Any policy that fails to accommodate for personal breaking points is doomed to fail.
• The “Prospero system”, huh? The Tempest is a pretty good Shakespearean reference for this story. In it, we have a family cast apart by violence and treachery. Prospero was driven from his home and title with his infant daughter to a remote island, and years later had a chance with his magic to wreak revenge upon the traitors. The play is rich with approaches to trauma: some through love and direct healing, some driven by anger, some driven by nonsense. Most potently, though, Prospero is still trapped on the “island” of his trauma until the closing lines, when he bids the audience to free him with applause, yet recognizes that more will be needed to mend everything broken up until that point, for
  • –my ending is despair,
    Unless I be relieved by prayer,
    Which pierces so that it assaults
    Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
    As you from crimes would pardoned be,
    Let your indulgence set me free.
• As Chapel notes, before asking for space from Spock: “War, it doesn’t leave you. It can bury itself but it’s always there.” I still can’t tell if her deep bond with M’Benga, and what she can share with him that she can’t with Spock, is being set up to soften the blow of her relationship with Spock perhaps having an early end date.
• Ortegas describes a Klingon war cry at the Captain’s Table (where they’re having jambalaya). tlhIngan maH taHjaj means “remain Klingon”, and speaks to the fear of losing Klingon culture by allying with the Federation. This is a deeply ironic statement for a species that has infamously undergone many physical transformations from series to series, with Dak’Rah’s ridges and hair in SNW achieving a blend of TNG and Discovery Klingon.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

“Under the Cloak of War”: Season 2, Episode 8

Season 2, Episode 7 | Season 2, Episode 9