'Strange New Worlds' latest episode wastes a lot of time pretending to kill off major 'Star Trek' characters

Every so often, "Star Trek" likes to put its brave interstellar adventurers through hell.

You know the drill — a bunch of one-off crew members will probably be blown up and/or sucked into space, while set dressers get to have fun making starship bridges look like they've been through the wars.

We all know that seeking out new life and new civilisations is the prime directive on that final frontier, but sometimes we just want to see how Starfleet officers respond when the chips are down.

The latest episode of "Strange New Worlds" season 4 , "Off-Hour", is one of "Trek"'s semi-regular life-or-death outings.

The Enterprise finds itself trapped in a bizarre slipstream wormhole that threatens to destroy the ship if Pike and co can't find a solution before the "24"-style ticking clock (sorry, "Shipboard Chronometer") counts down to zero.

It also leaves the fates of several key characters (one in particular) hanging in the balance… or at least it would, if the show wasn't a prequel, with most of its lead characters guaranteed to reappear in subsequent "Trek" canon.

Minor spoilers ahead for "Off-Hour".

If you haven't seen the latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" yet, report to transporter room 3 and get out of here at once.

The likes of "The Wrath of Khan", "Voyager "'s two-parter "Year of Hell", and "Strange New Worlds"' very own "Memento Mori" have all gone to extreme lengths to mess up the normally pristine interiors of Starfleet vessels.

"The Search for Spock" went even further, leaving the Enterprise in such a bad state that Admiral James T Kirk had no choice but to deploy its in-built self-destruct system.

Unfolding in real-time, "Off-Hour" is built from similar blueprints, as the aforementioned anomaly turns the Enterprise into a nightmarish environment where pretty much anything can kill you.

Pike getting an electric shock while turning on the shields is just the tip of the iceberg, as Una "Number One" Chin-Riley snaps her leg in a pocket of extreme gravity, Christine Chapel loses a finger to extreme cold, and an unfortunate group of redshirts finds themselves trapped on the wrong side of a barrier with some lethal neutrino radiation. (Image credit: Paramount) But it's Dr Joseph M'Benga who has the worst day at the office, and by a distance.

His quick and noble actions pushing Christine out of the way of an out-of-control medical table leave him pinned against a wall with a fatal trans-lumbar severance — the only thing keeping him alive is the table itself, his internal organs doomed as soon as it's pulled out of the way.

Like the clichéd movie cop starting his last day on the beat, he picked the wrong day to tell Christine he's thinking of quitting the Enterprise — especially as his likely replacement, Boyce, is already on board.