Which is worse: getting your eyeballs blown out of your head by a magical orb or third-wheeling on an away mission made up of three different couples? Thus is the dilemma of poor Ensign Gamble (hey, he's finally got a name!), who starts this episode as a chipper newbie and eventually winds up with the lethal end of the lollipop.
It turns out Strange New Worlds apparently has two main themes it wants to explore this season: horror and romance. And after four episodes that mostly chose one or the other, "Through The Lens Of Time" is here to combine them both. Unfortunately, that leads to an episode that bites off more than it can chew. Plotwise, this is one of the most exciting, complex sci-fi episodes of the season (if not the series). But character wise, I found a lot of its choices really frustrating. Your mileage may vary as to whether the former outweighs the latter. For me, at least, the balance isn't quite there.
The biggest problem is "Through The Lens Of Time" feels like two episodes stuck together. On the one hand, we've got the tragic tale of Ensign Gamble, who represents the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed crew members who wind up giving their lives for Starfleet far too young. And on the other hand, we've got an away-team mission that begins as a cringe-comedy rom-com only to end up in an Indiana Jones-themed escape room. But while the two storylines are linked by the fact that they start light and zippy and then become very serious very quickly, they've got drastically different emotional stakes in a way the episode never quite manages to rectify.
That all starts with the return of Dr. Korby, who's enlisted the Enterprise to help him on a research mission. It turns out Korby is specifically studying "molecular memory and corporeal transference," a.k.a. the idea that there may have been ancient alien societies who developed reincarnation technology. Five years ago, he found a ring with a royal insignia on Polaris Twelve hundreds of light years away. That led him and Chapel to discover templates with similar markings on the planet Pletorian. And now they've traced those markings back to an ancient temple buried beneath the surface of Vadia Nine, home to the reclusive non-Federation race the Ma'Cruins.
Korby and Chapel theorize the Ma'Cruins are the descendants of an advanced civilization that could travel across multiple galaxies and achieved immortality by "creating quantum instability at a molecular level" -- a history that's been lost to time. One rock wall blast from the Enterprise and a blood offering later, an away team made up of Korby, Chapel, Spock, La'An, Uhura, Gamble, local representative N'Jal (Ish Morris), and Ortegas' documentarian little brother Beto venture inside the temple to see what's there. What they find are some mummified graverobbers, a mysterious orb that blasts out Gamble's eyes/gets him evacuated back to the Enterprise, a security forcefield that turns N'Jal to dust, and the third act of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade spread across multiple planes of existence.
While the Last Crusade homages are perhaps a little overly cute, "Through The Lens Of Time" jazzes up its A-plot with some clever sci-fi twists. It's always nice when a show called Strange New Worlds manages to come up with a truly strange new world, and this one definitely delivers on that front. Chapel's initial blood sample becomes key to how the rules of the temple operate. The cavernous, endlessly shifting background is a cool visual design. And it's a clever idea to split the team into pairs (Chapel/La'An, Spock/Korby, Uhura/Beto) and let them each discover strange mysteries at play, some of which get resolved and some of which don't.
La'An spots Chinese writing on a sort-of living statue called a "Beholder." Spock sees a well full of thousands more glowing orbs containing the same terrifying parasitic creatures that attacked Gamble (and that Spock previously saw when he mind-melded with Captain Batel back in "Shuttle To Kenfori"). Beto's camera footage helps Uhura realize the team members are all still in the same room, just in different layers of dimensional space that need to be united using ancient artifacts. And Spock discovers that cause and effect don't happen in order in the temple -- which allows the team to escape on a bridge that doesn't yet exist.