Star Trek: Strange New Worlds boldly finding out if "puppet episode" still feels like a creative gimmick

Although the Star Trek show's only in its third season, it greeted Comic-Con fans with a tease of a (slightly familiar) concept from its fourth.

By William Hughes | July 26, 2025 | 4:51pm

Anson Mount (puppet) in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Screenshot: YouTube

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Hey, friends. Can you join us over here for a second, away from the hubbub? We just wanted to touch base real fast, check in, and ask the question that’s the elephant in the room this afternoon: Are we all kind of over seeing TV characters getting turned into puppets? Or is it just us?

This question brought to you by the San Diego Comic-Con panel for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which opened with a clip showcasing that Anson Mount’s Captain Pike is going to get turned into a puppet for an episode of the show’s (still far-off) fourth season. And, yup: That’s a puppet that looks kind of like Mount, sitting in a Star Trek chair, saying Captain Pike stuff. Neat!

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(Feel free to accuse us of being joyless cynics here—after all, the show did bring in the Jim Henson Creature Shop to work on the episode, and the puppet certainly looks good—but this is the kind of trick that feels like it lost its impact several “recognizable characters as puppets!” ago. Angel‘s “Smile Time” is the obvious touchpoint, of course, but Doom Patrol, 30 Rock, Community, and Legends Of Tomorrow all also screwed around with this concept—and those are just the ones we can think of off the tops of our heads. Also, unlike a musical episode—which has the dual pleasures of hearing the cast sing, and seeing how the show can explore some of its themes through an alternative storytelling medium, the joke of a puppet bit usually starts and stops with “Hey, puppets!” Anyway, this has been our joyless discourse on the puppet episode as a concept.)

It’s not like Strange New Worlds hasn’t been steering into this kind of thing pretty hard already, having done musical episodes, hybrid-animation stuff, and, just recently, a zombie movie riff. The puppet adventures won’t be coming until the show’s fourth season (of what’ll ultimately be five), but fans at Comic-Con still got their fill of gimmick, as they were treated to a full showing of an upcoming episode from the currently running third season that hasn’t come out yet, featuring a holodeck murder mystery the crew has to solve.

Photo: Miller Mobley/Paramount+

The SDCC panel also served as a showcase for new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy; Paramount+ released preview images for the upcoming series earlier this week, including a shot of Paul Giamatti doing his favorite thing in the world and getting completely slathered in prosthetics.