Strange New Worlds S4E5: Level-Five Transporter Accident

We’ll be honest, we’ve been dreading this one. Strange New Worlds has taken big swings with gimmick episodes before and connected: the partially-animated Lower Decks crossover was a delight, and the show surpassed expectations by pulling off a musical episode with aplomb. The self-referential holodeck episode was inessential, but fine.

But that was then. The show’s writing has taken a serious nosedive around the middle of last season, and this week’s gimmick is sillier — and potentially dumber — than anything the show has attempted. After some very clunky exposition about Scotty trying to push the limits of the transporter, there’s a mishap, which turns everyone into puppets, apart from Spock, who’s off the ship when it happens.

We also introduce some additional stakes, as T’Pring, Spock’s Vulcan ex, pays a visit, demanding “no hijinx.” (If only we the viewer could make the same demands.) There’s also a looming threat from Orion pirates, which Pike ignores… because he’s super excited to get a new captain’s chair. It’s very stupid, and it’s clumsy characterization. Anson Mount has consistently played Pike as a chummy dad figure, but this episode treats him like an overeager 8-year-old even before he turns into a puppet. (Rachael Harris at least has fun chewing the scenery as the Orion pirate captain.)

While there is some potential in a bunch of serious-minded scientist-adventurers dealing with an absurd situation, that’s not what the episode gives us. The crux of the story is that Spock, as the only one unaffected, needs to run the ship himself, and everyone else needs him for every little thing and is whiny about it. It isn’t terribly funny, and much like Pike, everyone acts like a TV writer’s idea of what children (or Muppets) are like instead of their well-established characters.

We’ve complained earlier this season about La’an going from a richly-drawn character to fairly one-dimensional, but one seems like a generous amount of dimensions to give all of the characters this week. They mostly just shout exposition at each other. We know they can’t do their job as puppets because they tell each other that over and over. We know this is an absurd, crazy situation, because they tell each other that over and over. Being a puppet does have the advantage of being basically indestructible, which we know because they tell each other that over and over. They’ve taken the classic writer’s rule, “show, don’t tell,” and flipped it to “tell and then tell again and then tell some more just in case the audience is currently in a coma.”

By the end of it, they’re lampshading the lazy writing, the worst hallmark of lazy writing. And then lazier still, we finish on our second “it was all a dream… or was it?!?” ending for Spock in three weeks. At this point, it’s presuming a lot to assume we care one way or the other.

Stray tachyons:
• The classic Muppet Show Trek spoof “Pigs In Space” managed to be both funnier and more character-driven than this episode. And honestly, Muppet Star Trek could be a lot of fun in the right hands. The current SNW writers are not those hands.

• In the brief moments before they turn into puppets, La’an breaks up with Spock, saying they’ve been growing apart. However, the show never actually did the work of showing us any of that, they way they did with the Spock-Chapel relationship. And this breakup only happens because T’Pring shows up for no real reason and the episode wants to dangle the possibility of a reconciliation. 

• The episode can’t resist a quick Star Trek II reference. It’s completely gratuitous and adds nothing, and yet it’s still an improvement on the feature-length Star Trek II reference Star Trek Into Darkness. (We swear that, despite everything you’ve read in this review, we do really like a lot of Star Trek. Just not lately.)