Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 5

Star Trek Strange New Worlds

Season 4 Reaction: Episode 5

Level-Five Transporter Accident

Scotty wants to carry out the longest distance transport ever, and use it to get back at his academy rival.  Pike has a new captains chair, which becomes a plot point later.  Spock contacts T'Pring and invites her to Enterprise.  Spock takes a shuttle to deploy transporter buoys.  Scotty attempts his transport, an accident seemingly beams away every crewmember, then the Enterprise itself.  The Enterprise reappears, Spock goes aboard to find everyone turned into puppets.  After the crew try to determine what happened and after some overly done bickering they contact Admiral April and advise him of the situation.  Spock being the only one capable of running the ship is busy between the bridge, trying to restore the crew, and T'Pring, is overwhelmed.  An encounter with an Orion ship goes awry when the Orions see the crew in puppet form.  The Orions attack the Enterprise, Spock is forced to run every bridge station during the attack.  The Orions board the ship and stun Spock.  The restrain him and try to get control codes to take over the ship.  The puppet crew try to attack the Orions, comedically and futily.  Pike goes alone to try to rescue Spock.  Pike is captured by the Orions and thrown out the airlock.  Pike quotes the needs of the many while separated from Spock by glass, an obvious reference to Star Trek II.  Being a puppet Pike doesn't die.  After being let back in to the Enterprise pike rallies the crew to use their puppet qualities to fight back against the Orions.  T'Pring rescue Spock, the rest of the crew retake the bridge.  Spock enters the bridge but is overwhelmed by the chaos around him.  He throws pike at the Orion captain to retake the chair.  Spock turns off life support, incapacitating the Orions.  Waking up in sickbay Spock is informed that the Orions are in the brig and Scotty has figured out how to restore the crew.  Spock wakes up in his quarters to see a very Vulcan T'Pring.  The whole episode was Spocks dream after a transporter accident damaged the shuttle and the transporter buoys.  T'Pring invites Spock to tell her about his dream over tea.

I've secretly been-dare I say-dreading this episode since it was hyped and teased a season ago.  I'm not sure why this episode as necessary, especially at this point in the series with so many other gimmick episodes especially this season.  This one comes off as overly campy, but still somehow manages to tell a story.  The characters in puppet forms seem a bit like caricatures of themselves.  Overall, "muppet trek" does not impress.  The Newhart-esque "it was all a dream" ending helps, but is a bit cliche.  The underlying story, Spock leaning to use logic to deal with the chaos of serving around humans is a good one for the character, but is unfortunately overwhelmed by muppets and goofiness.  That all said, not as bad as I expected, not nearly as bad as the crew turned into vulcan episode in season 3, but a mehh episode at best.