As much as I love Strange New Worlds, there are times where it does kind of feel like fanfic for the original Star Trek series. And I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that more than in an episode that manages to shoehorn in an (ostensibly) non-canon-breaking excuse to do a holodeck episode in the 23rd century. (Trekkies, of course, know that Starfleet didn’t introduce holodecks on starships until The Next Generation in the 24th century.) Here the workaround is that La’An has been charged with testing an early holodeck prototype—which means we know something is going to go so wrong it puts this tech on ice for 100 years.
It’s the sort of stretch that only really works if the episode is fun enough to justify it. And, in this case, putting the always delightful Christina Chong front and center and delving into some deeply meta Star Trek history just about does the trick! The trouble is, this episode also uses its holodeck mystery to launch a brand-new intra-crew romance. And that’s the part of the equation I’m not so sure about.
I’ll save my romance-related concerns for the end, though, because I don’t want that to overshadow what’s ultimately a pretty charming episode. And that starts with perhaps the wackiest cold open in all of Trek history. Apparently, the Strange New Worlds team heard the complaints that Paul Wesley doesn’t evoke the classic James T. Kirk vibe, so they have him prove his credentials by going full Shatner as the captain of the USS Adventure. He honestly nails it—as do Jess Bush and Melissa Navia as the female leads of the fictional 1960s sci-fi series The Last Frontier a.k.a. what Strange New Worlds would look like if it were actually trying to stick to the aesthetic of The Original Series.
It’s a hilarious (and hilariously disorienting) way to start the episode, a teasing but also loving send-up of the Trek that started it all. While the strings on The Original Series aliens were never quite that obvious, you get what they’re parodying. And I love the glamorous close-up lighting and riffs on technobabble like, “We can’t give them our braincells. We need it for many science reasons!”
As we’ll eventually learn, this is a TV show within the Amelia Moon detective novels that La’An loved as a kid—the ones she decides to re-enact when tasked with a mission to test the holodeck “under rigorous circumstances.” Naturally, the only way Scotty can give her realistic supporting characters to interact with is to use the transporter patterns of all her Enterprise friends as avatars, which raises a whole host of ethical questions the episode chooses to ignore. (To be fair, so has every other Star Trek series.) But I’ll forgive it because it really is fun to see the cast mix it up as the melodramatic creatives of The Last Frontier.
Star Trek historians will recognize the parallels here: Rebecca Romijn’s Sunny Lupino is Lucille Ball, the red-haired former actress who took a risk producing a thinky sci-fi series. Anson Mount’s TK Bellows (yes, that’s the character’s name) comes off like creator Gene Roddenberry. Paul Wesley’s Maxwell Saint is the egotistical William Shatner. Melissa Navia’s Lee Woods represents the better written TOS female characters (“You know I’m an actor, not a doctor, right?”), while Jess Bush’s Adelaide Shaw stands in for the TOS women who were often reduced to eye candy. Plus, Babs Olusanmokun’s Anthony MacBeau is around as her current squeeze, which is either just an excuse to get him in ’60s gear or perhaps a nod to Trek’s history with interracial romance. The victim, meanwhile, is Tony Hart, head of “Lomond Picture Studios.” And Celia Rose Gooding’s snappy agent Joni Gloss wrangles the group while giving voice to why Trek matters.
The parallels aren’t always that precise. While Wesley is clearly parodying Shatner, Mount is doing less of a direct Roddenberry impression than just a general 20th century sci-fi writer pastiche. (There’s some Isaac Asimov in there too.) Plus, his name seems more like a reference to famed Star Trek writer-producer D.C. Fontana, who also has a bit in common with the Lee character (a woman whose desire to claim credit for her own work puts her in conflict with male writers and studio heads who don’t like that idea).
There are probably even more details to unpack for the true Trek historians out there. But even casual fans can enjoy watching the cast ham it up in gorgeous costuming as various 1960s Hollywood archetypes. Mount, in particular, always seems to have a blast going full character actor in these kinds of goofy one-offs, and I’m sure Bush enjoyed getting to use her actual Australian accent for once. For her part, Chong makes a delightful lead for our lightest La’An episode yet. It’s especially fun to watch her slip into her gumshoe Amelia Moon persona with a baffled Spock in tow.
As in so many holodeck episodes, the program goes wrong and leaves our heroes stuck inside with the safety protocols off, forced to solve the mystery to escape. But because this is mostly a comedy episode, the stakes never actually feel all that high. Instead, the point is really to get to Joni’s passionately delivered monologue about why Star Trek matters: “TK wanted to give audiences a digestible reflection of their own world through the lens of fantasy. Social commentary with rubber masks and buried metaphors.” Lest things become too self-congratulatory, the episode even celebrates the power of art more broadly too. La’An is clearly thinking about how the Amelia Moon novels inspired her to become a security officer as Joni talks about how stories can show people “parts of themselves they’ve never even seen before” and “give them hope.”
It’s a sweet idea and if this episode had just been a sort of non-traumatic version of Deep Space Nine’s “Far Beyond The Stars” with a touch of “Trials And Tribble-ations,” I think it would’ve worked quite well. (Hey, why not crib from the best!) I genuinely didn’t see the twist coming that La’An has actually been interacting with a holographic Spock the whole time—right from the moment she first sees him “running diagnostics” when she walks into the empty holodeck. And while that does sort of make the actual murder mystery moot just as it’s getting interesting, the idea that the computer’s generative AI takes it upon itself to challenge La’An beyond the parameters she gave it feels particularly topical. Plus, it’s a good excuse for La’An to recommend not moving forward with putting holodecks on ships at this time. (Scotty delivers a footnoted suggestion that Starfleet will apparently discover in 100 years.)
What I’m less sold on is the idea that this is all in service of a budding Spock/La’An romance (or at least rebound hookup). Apparently when they danced together at the Federation Day gala, it wasn’t just meant to be two broken hearted friends lifting each other’s spirits. But since last season was in many ways defined by La’An pining over Kirk and Spock pining over Chapel, switching to a La’An/Spock pairing honestly just gave me whiplash—especially since there’s so little history between the two.
Indeed, I’d argue romance has been a bit of an overall struggle for Strange New Worlds. Star Trek has done successful relationship stories in the past: Troi and Riker, Worf and Dax, B’Elanna and Paris, most of the Discovery romances. I was even kind of into Trip and T’Pol! But the difference is those relationships all felt like they had the potential to last. Strange New Worlds, however, is obsessed with doomed romances we know can’t last (even Pike and Batel fit that category), which makes it harder to get invested. And I’m just not sure what the show gains by adding yet another one into the mix rather than giving us a love story with the potential to turn into a true happily ever after. (Couldn’t Una or Ortegas date someone? Or even each other?)
There’s also the fact that La’An making out with both Kirk and Spock over the course of a season and a half is just…a lot, especially when she’s also a descendant of Khan and a survivor of the Gorn. How much Trek lore can one gal handle? Plus, it’s starting to feel a little silly that Spock’s life was apparently just a non-stop rom-com before he dropped dating altogether in The Original Series. (Although, hey, maybe it’s just Kirk’s arrival as captain that makes him lose interest in the ladies.)
Adelaide Shaw lampshades the potential critique by asking, “Is it wrong to want love and to be taken seriously in my career?” Which is fair enough for La’An since she’s mostly been defined by non-romantic storylines so far, brief alt-universe Kirk affair aside. But I actually think Ethan Peck is the performer who’s been most limited by the writers’ obsession with sticking Spock in endless romances rather than exploring other facets of his life too. Maybe the Spock ‘shippers out there will disagree. But, to me, if the holodeck stuff feels like fanfic at its best, this rushed new romance feels like fanfic at its worst. While a little relationship drama is fine, I hope Strange New Worlds has new frontiers to explore this season too. After all, it’s what TK Bellows would want.
Stray observations
- • Though Martin Quinn is a charming presence as Scotty (I love the way he says “Amelia Moon”), I found his entire storyline absolutely baffling. Hiding literal life-and-death facts from his superiors feels like a chain-of-command issue way beyond the “it’s okay to ask for help” resolution we get from Una. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Uhura would go along with the secrecy. If anything, she should have been the one to help him work through the trauma of losing everyone on his last ship while introducing him to the teamwork style of the Enterprise!
- • It also feels really weird that we don’t get any follow-up on Captain Batel’s Gorn treatment, right? And that we just get a dropped line to explain that Una had Pike reinstate Ortegas for their all-nighter mission around a collapsing star. I wonder if they reshuffled some episodes in production and had to write around it.
- • Between this and the Lower Decks crossover, I love that Strange New Worlds brings in Jonathan Frakes whenever they need a director for their deeply meta episodes. They even have Paul Wesley attempt The Riker Maneuver!
- • As in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock references Arthur Conan Doyle as one of his ancestors.
- • Unfortunately, they have to have La’An mention her experience with holographic battle simulators because Discovery pointlessly introduced one of those for a single episode.
- • I love the choice to have the show’s actual credits play out in ’60s-style font over fake bloopers from The Last Frontier show.
- • According to Spock, celluloid film was discontinued in the 22nd century to the detriment of cinema. So, uh, I guess we have that to look forward to.
- • “Detective Spock doesn’t watch television.” / “So he’s a communist?”
