Why Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 4 Is In Black And White

Spoilers ahead for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4, Episode 4, "A Case of Chiaroscuro."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" loves to do genre homages, from horror ("All Those Who Wander," "Through the Lens of Time," Season 4's own "The Griffin Incident" and all its shocking violence) to murder mysteries ("A Space Adventure Hour") and musicals ("Subspace Rhapsody"). In its latest episode, "A Case of Chiaroscuro," the show even does film noir. 

"Film noir" is a term that sprung from 20th century French film critics; "noir" means "black" in French, and the term applied to this genre in two ways. One, noirs often explored lurid subject matter with cynical eyes. The archetypal film noir plot is a down on his luck private detective stumbling into a conspiracy, usually because a femme fatale lured him in. Then there's the more literal meaning that Old Hollywood film noirs were shot in black-and-white. To complete the homage, so is "A Case of Chiaroscuro."

Much like"Subspace Rhapsody" offered a pseudo-scientific explanation for why everyone was bursting into song and dance, "A Case of Chiaroscuro" does the same for its greyscale color palette. The episode takes place in an "unusual" solar system where the sun emits black-body radiation, which changes how humanoid eyes perceive color.

The noir mood picks up once Una (Rebecca Romijn), Dr. M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) get down to the local planet, currently under Klingon occupation. (That's why they have to blend in, because Starfleet being discovered in Klingon territory could ignite a war.) The inhabitants all look human, and the city resembles an art deco metropolis, with blimps patrolling the skies like it's Gotham City in "Batman: The Animated Series" (a famously noir-influenced cartoon).

Watching "A Case of Chiaroscuro," the first comparison Trekkies might make is "A Piece of the Action," one of the most beloved but absurd episodes of "Star Trek: The Original Series." This episode sees the Enterprise visiting Sigma Iotia II, a planet resembling urban gangland in the 1920s U.S. It mostly functions as an excuse to have Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) act like they're in a gangster movie, but "A Piece of the Action" does have an explanation for the setting.

An Earth starship had once visited Sigma Iotia II and accidentally left behind the (fictional) book "Chicago Mobs of the Twenties." That book then became the foundational text of the Sigma Iotia II's civilization. "Star Trek: The Next Generation" did something similar, using the holodeck to place the Enterprise-D crew in an old-fashioned detective story in the episode "The Big Goodbye."

"Strange New Worlds" used a holodeck for "A Space Adventure Hour," but "A Case of Chiaroscuro" offers no such pretense for why this planet resembles Earth. The truly cosmic coincidence that might break audience's buy-in is when it turns out Una looks identical to, and is mistaken for, a native resistance leader who had been posing as a Klingon collaborator before going missing.

It's a tad easier to accept this when you know that doppelgängers are a go-to plot device in film noir. Take Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," where a man (James Stewart) tries to mold a young woman (Kim Novak) into a duplicate of his lost love (Novak as well), unaware both women are actually the same person. (Long story, but if you need the answers, go watch "Vertigo," which is widely considered one of the greatest movies of all time.)

But if there's one particular film noir that jumps out as the main influence for "A Case of Chiaroscuro," it's "Casablanca." Set during World War II, "Casablanca" takes place in the eponymous Moroccan city, which at the time was under the control of France and, by extension, the France-occupying Nazi Germany. "Casablanca" depicts the city as a waystation for refugees looking to flee Nazi encroachment across Europe. "A Case of Chiaroscuro" places the Klingons in the role of the Nazis, and many of the planet's natives likewise want to flee their new colonizers.

Several scenes in "A Case of Chiaroscuro" take place in a local saloon, much like the one Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) operates in "Casablanca." As Una, M'Benga, and Uhura are not native citizens, they do not have the identification needed to get past Klingon checkpoints, and getting appropriate ID is one of their main goals. In "Casablanca," the central MacGuffin is a set of letters of transit that Rick's ex Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and her husband, a French resistance member named Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), need to get to the U.S.

One of the most famous scenes in "Casablanca" features German soldiers' singing being drowned out by bar patrons singing the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise." An almost identical scene happens here. Klingon soldiers walk to the bar singing to themselves, the bar's self-playing piano begins playing a local anthem, and several of the patrons begin thumping their hands on their table in rhythm, much to the annoyance of Commander Kor (Demore Barnes).

If you're going to steal, steal from the best, and "Casablanca" is absolutely the best film noir has to offer.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+.