Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Level-Five Transporter Accident”
Overview:
A transporter accident turns everyone but Spock into puppets as pirates invade the ship.
Our Take(Spoilers):
I haven’t watched a Star Trek show in a long time, so this was a sort of reintroduction to the series for me. It took me a bit of googling to get caught up on who these characters are, other than Spock. Everyone knows who Spock is, right? But let’s get into what worked for this episode and what didn’t.
The main thing that worked was how relatable this was, despite everyone getting turned into puppets. Spock is going through some stuff on his human side of things. He’s dealing with some anxiety, and he’s finding it harder to view things logically. As you can imagine, that becomes harder to do once everyone becomes a puppet.
When everyone became a puppet, they weren’t able to do their jobs, so Spock had to do everything around the ship. You could tell he was stressing out and on the verge of a panic attack. As someone who has dealt with those before and had one recently, that was relatable.
One of my favorite things about this puppet episode was how much they leaned into everyone being puppets. One person got sliced in half, another got thrown out of the airlock, and one even got a hole blown through their chest. But none of that bothered them because, well… they’re puppets. Sew em back together, and they’re fine; plus they don’t need to breathe oxygen, so space isn’t a death sentence for them. I liked how they used the oxygen thing to solve their invader issue, especially.
A ship ran into the Enterprise, and once they discovered that it was manned by puppets, they decided to board the ship. With Spock being the only one able to control things, he was instrumental in the plan to win back the ship. To get the ship back, they had Spock turn off the life support, and once the invaders passed out, they turned it back on. I loved how they used the “puppet logic” for a lot of different things in the episode.
The only negative thing I have to say is that it turns out that all of the puppet stuff was a dream that Spock was having. It wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing. Before I watched the episode, I was wondering how they were going to explain everyone turning into puppets. I thought they did an okay enough job with that, but defaulting to it being a dream felt like a cop-out to me. Even still, I had a lot of fun watching this episode.
