This Week's ‘Strange New Worlds' Is a Little Too Cute for Its Own Good

Gizmodo

4 days ago

Strange New Worlds loves being Star Trek. That's different from, say, Lower Decks, a series that loved being about Star Trek and the metatextual acknowledgement of that to the nerdiest of degrees. Strange New Worlds knows that it is Star Trek and enjoys that: its connection to the original, the warts-and-all embrace of episodic storytelling, its desire to poke and prod at itself endlessly, and its willingness to vacillate its tone from high drama to high camp on a dime. Sometimes, that can make for incredibly good fun. But sometimes, when it's just a little too much, the show can lose itself, not seeing the forest for the trees.
Unfortunately, this week's episode leans a bit too much into the latter.'A Space Adventure Hour' is a Star Trek holodeck episode. Well, really, it's an extended excuse to do a Dixon Hill-esque riff and do a holodeck episode despite the fact that shipboard holodeck technology wasn't common in Star Trek until the time of The Next Generation, a century beyond when Strange New Worlds is set. 'A Space Adventure Hour' acquiesces to that—it frames La'an as its primary perspective and the person in charge of testing an experimental holodeck system aboard Enterprise because of her history with holographic battle simulators, seen in Discovery, and even Pike nods to the eventual existence of the Rec Room seen in Star Trek: The Animated Series. It ultimately concludes that the technology isn't there to be used aboard starships yet, setting the stage for its eventual refinement and arrival by the time of TNG.
But that's all excuses. 'A Space Adventure Hour' exists because the Strange New World team thought, 'We're a Star Trek show, and you know what Star Trek does? Holodeck episodes.' And it is, for the most part, a perfectly fine one of those. 'A Space Adventure Hour' fits into the milieu of that Trek trope well enough and doesn't really add much along the way: La'an is tasked with testing the system's power draw while the Enterprise is at full operational capacity examining a dying neutron star; she does so by getting it to replicate a 1960s murder mystery whodunit inspired by a series of novels she read as a child, populating her cast of holographic characters with the likenesses of the main crew. It's a holodeck episode, so things go wrong, safety protocols go offline, and suddenly La'an finds out that to get out of the holodeck alive, she must solve a mystery designed specifically to challenge her.
That's all stuff that we've seen from holodeck episodes before, from Dixon Hill stories like 'The Big Goodbye' to things like Voyager's 'The Killing Game' or, perhaps most inspirationally, Deep Space Nine's 'Our Man Bashir.' And 'A Space Adventure Hour' does a mostly decent job at hitting those beats, letting the regular cast loosen up and play very different characters from their usual selves, but it doesn't really build on the holodeck stories that come before it so much as it does just point at the expected beats of those stories, going through the motions. At least, until the climax of the murder mystery fizzles out with a 'twist' reveal—more on that later.
So it's perhaps better than worse, then, that 'A Space Adventure Hour' isn't really about being a holodeck murder mystery. At least, it's not interested in being a particularly good one: what 'A Space Adventure Hour' is actually about is telling you that the original Star Trek, the show this show is a prequel to, is the greatest television show of all time, one that changed the whole world, and one that should've lasted forever and ever, and any plan to cancel it, or anything like it, is an act of profound hubris and misjudgment. Very funny for that message to come now, in Strange New World's third season, weeks after Paramount announced that it would conclude with a truncated fifth. But anyway!
Strange New Worlds is not a particularly subtle TV show, but it's not telling you all this by literally just having characters in Star Trek turn to the camera and go, 'Star Trek is great!' Instead, it is a step removed: the titular 'Space Adventure Hour' and the key connecting conceit of La'an's murder mystery setting is a fictional 1960s sci-fi TV show called The Last Frontier, which has just been cancelled after its first season by a studio executive whose murder sets off the whole whodunnit. Anson Mount plays T.K. Bellows, the shy writer and Last Frontier creator who believes sci-fi shows are a social good and the future of the industry but longs for more, in the vein of a Gene Roddenberry. Rebecca Romijn plays Sunny Lupino, a former model and starlet turned Hollywood producer who backs The Last Frontier because she believes in its potential, our stand-in for Lucille Ball. Paul Wesley is Last Frontier's leading man, Maxwell Saint, a pompous actor playing the ship's machismo-fueled captain, pulling off the most tortured William Shatner impersonation yet committed to screen. Seriously, the pauses are interminable.
All the motivations for potential suspects in the executive's murder hinge on the fact that practically everyone involved in The Last Frontier believes in the show as a force for good, even beyond being great television. As more bodies begin to drop and finger-pointing pokes and prods at individual paranoias, as far as pretty much anyone in the holoprogram's cast is concerned, Last Frontier (and through its thin veneer, the original Trek) is unimpeachable. The climax of the murder mystery narrative is even paused so Celica Rose Gooding, playing talent agent Joni Gloss, can give that 'turn to camera and say how good this show is' speech to La'an, evangelizing over a dead body right in front of her that The Last Frontier can, and should be given the opportunity to, change television and the lives of the American people for good. Again: not a subtle show, but the remove from what it's actually saying to what it wants to say to its audience might as well be glass, to the point you're almost a little insulted that Strange New Worlds didn't commit fully and have a holoprogram about a fictional murder on the set of actual Star Trek.
Which is odd because we do actually get to see Last Frontier for what it is—the episode is bookended by an extended scene from the faux-show as a cold open, and its credits close out over a 'blooper reel' behind the scenes. And despite what the rest of the episode goes on to do to evangelize its worth, as a parody of the original Star Trek, it's oddly mean. The sets are significantly cheaper-looking than much of what classic Trek ever did, and the script feels like an extended 'Spock's Brain' gag but somehow even more convoluted. The acting (Wesley's Saint is joined by Jess Bush/Chapel and Melissa Navia/Ortegas as actresses Adelaide Shaw and Lee Woods, respectively) is intentionally clunky and ham-fisted, right down to Wesley's exaggerated Shatnerisms. The show all these characters go on to laud as a huge hit and a cultural game changer isn't even close to the original Star Trek's quality; it just kind of sucks. Strange New Worlds has done a much better job of loving homages to the look and direction of Star Trek before—the 'Balance of Terror' homages in season one's 'A Quality of Mercy' remain one of the show's finest hours—so The Last Frontier ends up feeling less like the show being in on a joke and more like the show just laughing at what came before it. It's an especially odd contrast with what the rest of the episode wants to say.
But once it's got that unsubtle message out regardless, 'A Space Adventure Hour' remembers that it's technically a holodeck episode and needs to wrap fast, which is where the aforementioned 'twist' comes in. La'an's murder mystery ultimately doesn't really matter, because the mystery plot was an entire misdirect: none of the holoprograms in its setting committed the crime, but instead a holographic rendering of Spock, who was inserted into the program to act as if the real Spock had come to help La'an out with her test. A murderer she never would've expected, she gasps as she figures it out, less because of her personal relationship to Spock but more because the possibility of him being the suspect is thrown from so far out of left field that it doesn't feel set up by the episode itself and more of a gotcha once 'A Space Adventure Hour' remembered that it needed to stop telling you that Star Trek is good and finish its original plot.
It's made even more thorny by the fact that this revelation climaxes back aboard Enterprise in reality with La'an going to Spock's quarters to resume dance lessons with him (a thing we're reminded of this episode that he's kept up with her since 'Wedding Bell Blues') and recount her experiences testing the holodeck out and his role in the twist… culminating in the two revealing their romantic interest in each other, sealing it with a kiss.
It feels like an odd choice, wherever Strange New Worlds takes this over the course of the rest of the season. Spock's barely moved on from his romance with Nurse Chapel, narratively speaking—a plot that was given a ton of build-up and then all fell apart relatively quickly once they got together. La'an herself was already given a will-they-won't-they romantic arc with a legacy Trek character last season with Kirk, even if it ended unrequited. Especially given how 'Wedding Bell Blues' already used its three-month timeskip to justify La'an immediately compartmentalizing her traumatic history with the Gorn, it feels bizarre to just thrust her into a second romantic arc so quickly, like these are the only two options available to her as a character.
It's a peculiar end to a peculiar episode, one that never quite manages to extend its charms long enough to effectively communicate what it wants. Strange New Worlds has gotten by on its charms an awful lot over its past seasons, but perhaps it's becoming increasingly visible that those charms have a limit.
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