“Under the Cloak of War” continues Star Trek tradition of exploring war trauma

“Under the Cloak of War” is a new story about old questions of war.

Star Trek fans seem divided over season two, episode eight of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Under the Cloak of War.” The episode revisits Dr. M’Benga’s experiences during the Klingon War (depicted in season one of Star Trek: Discovery). Both M’Benga and Nurse Chapel served on the Federation colony world of J’Gal, where then-Klingon General, now-Federation Ambassador Dak’Rah committed brutal acts of war, including killing the colony’s children. In response, M’Benga carried out a covert mission to kill the Klingon command on J’Gal. He killed the three Klingons for whose deaths Dak’Rah later took credit as “proof” of his new loyalty to Starfleet.

At the end of “Under the Cloak of War,” M’Benga and Dak’Rah (now going simply as Rah because “formal Klingon names are a mouthful”) fight in the Enterprise’s sickbay. Rah’s presence has been retraumatizing M’Benga (and other Enterprise crew members) throughout the episode. And though we don’t clearly see every moment of the fight—we watch it from Chapel’s perspective, through a semitransparent partition—the episode’s heavy insinuation if not outright assertion is that M’Benga kills Rah.

Captain Pike seems to suspect this truth, though he acknowledges a tribunal will likely clear M’Benga. After all, the d’k tahg knife with which Rah was killed, and which M’Benga possessed, still carries the DNA of the three Klingons Rah supposedly killed on J’Gal. In any event, M’Benga expresses no sorrow for Rah’s death. “I happen to know there are some things in this world that don’t deserve forgiveness . . . . I didn’t start the fight. But I’m glad he’s dead.”

Online, some fans, such as Admiral Funnest Frontier (@DecksLower), are voicing full support for M’Benga.

Others, such as La Girafe (@Lyrical_Girafe), are raising important and nuanced concerns about the episode’s ramifications:

“Under the Cloak of War” isn’t Star Trek’s first foray into war-related trauma

I’m still processing my feelings about “Under the Cloak of War.” I generally want Star Trek to show us striving to be our best possible selves. (It’s for this reason I usually find Section 31 stories so distressing—in the future, we still won’t have learned how to build a society without resorting to chicanery and skullduggery?) I might have preferred an ending in which M’Benga and Pike fully agree that “everyone deserves a second chance,” or one in which Rah faced the due process of Federation law.

On the other hand, one way Star Trek remains relevant is demanding we scrutinize the position from which we make our moral choices. M’Benga’s assertion that he doesn’t have Pike’s “privilege of believing in what’s best in people” is powerful testimony I can’t quickly dismiss. An ending in which Rah lived and M’Benga came to terms with his past might risk making too little of the trauma the episode so devastatingly depicts. I don’t sanction murder, but I also don’t want to blithely condemn the doctor for “failing to live up to Starfleet’s ideals.”

“Under the Cloak of War” is only the most recent time Star Trek has raised thorny questions about dealing with the trauma of war. As I watched it, I remembered many episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, for instance—especially “The Siege of AR-558” and “In the Pale Moonlight,” both episodes that showed the horrors of war and the moral quandaries facing those who fight it.

But so much of Deep Space Nine dealt with war, I’ve focused here on episodes from three other Star Trek series that also explore how, and to what extent, survivors can process warfare trauma.