SNW 405: Level-Five Transporter Accident

The writers of Strange New Worlds just can't help themselves. They get a nutso idea in their heads and go at it with no hesitation, no filters, no pesky need to respect what came before. In a way, that's admirable—take chances; "risk is our business," and so on. In another, it's frustrating as hell—know your subject matter, keep its values, don't throw it all out for a gimmick. In the case of this week's episode, it's both admirable and frustrating.

The nutso idea this time is "what if the crew of the Enterprise were muppets?"

This season alone we've seen Enterprise crew fights dinosaurs, Enterprise crew boards a haunted ghost ship, Enterprise crew gets high and loses their shuttlecraft, and Enterprise crew does black-and-white film noir, so why not Enterprise crew does The Muppet Show?

One reason why not is that it's so much more absurd than anything else they've done, but it ... kind of works? And when it works it's mostly for non-puppet reasons?

Let's get into it.

Episode 405: “Level-Five Transporter Accident” | Written by Henry Alonso Myers & Dana Horgan | Directed by Jordan Canning

★½

This episode is brought to you by the same writer/director combo responsible for last season's highly problematic attempt at comedy, "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans," so you might expect this one to be similarly cringey. Depending on your sensibilities, it's either cringe start-to-finish or it successfully avoids all the cringiest elements of "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" because there's nothing overtly bigoted in it. It does emulate that prior episode by trying too hard to be silly and thinking things are funny when they're not, or perhaps only mildly so.

On course for Vulcan, the Enterprise detours to patrol an area plagued by piracy. This is inconvenient for Spock, who was planning on taking some leave time to address some PTSD-like issues stemming from his experience on the ghost-ship Griffin a couple of episodes back. Meanwhile, Scotty has a personal project going, an attempt to best the longest-distance transport record set by his Academy nemesis, Declan Milder. Enlisting Spock to assist, he explains that he intends to beam his childhood stuffed puppet, "Little Ricky," into Declan's quarters on a ship 30,000 kilometers away.

Despite finding this absurd, Spock agrees to assist, but later—right now he has a dance-and-perhaps-romance session scheduled with La'an, so he returns to his room.

When La'an shows up, though, she cancels the session...and puts an end to their couplehood. Spock is, understandably, a bit thrown; he understands that both of them have been struggling since the Griffin and that they both retreated into themselves rather than share or assist with each other's traumas, but he didn't see this coming. He makes some attempt to acknowledge his shortfalls, but La'an's mind is made up. Now Spock has even more preoccupying his mind, and since he will not be able to go to Vulcan in short order, he places a call to...T'Pring.

On the one hand, this is a curious choice for Spock; T'Pring is who he hallucinated on the Griffin, after all, and he can't be her favorite person right now given how their engagement fell apart. On the other hand, he's really got no one else—the issues he needs to address are emotional, so he's turning to his Vulcan heritage to quiet them and find a less volatile sense of clarity, and he has no other Vulcan friends. (I mean, I guess he could call Doug, but Doug thinks Spock's humanity is awesome, so he's probably not the guy.) Against her better judgment, T'Pring agrees to help in Spock's quest to emphasize logic and suppress emotion, provided Spock can save her some logistical hassles and give her a ride to Vulcan since the Enterprise is headed there after pirate patrol. Scott pages him while he's still on the call with T'Pring, saying  he's ready to go with Little Ricky, which prompts T'Pring to request assurances that there will be no hijinks while she is aboard ship. Yeah, fat chance, T'Pring, did you see who wrote this episode?

Spock goes out in a shuttle to deploy some relay devices that are supposed to give Scott's transporter experiment extra range. Once these are deployed, Scott energizes the transporter and things immediately go sideways.

Up to now, things are as we perceive them to be. As we'll learn later, what follows is not.

Scott's experiment begins spiraling out of control and everyone on the ship is transported, then the ship itself is beamed away. Then it rematerializes. Spock reenters the hangar deck, on his guard for whatever weirdness just occurred, exits his shuttle and heads to the bridge, where he finds Captain Pike and the bridge crew have all become stuffed puppets.

In fact, everyone except Spock is now a puppet, explained by "something about [Little Ricky's] quantum particulates" causing the transporter beam to engulf the ship and reconfigure everyone in puppet form. Ridiculous, but then so is this entire premise. The crew finds that in puppet form they can't operate anything on the ship; their felt fingers can't affect the touchpads on consoles, they're no longer proportionate enough to handle most mechanical controls, even the doors won't open for them. "Scotty really screwed the pooch on this one," says Pelia, unhelpfully.

Spock is the only one that can manage controls anywhere on board, so he is constantly being called upon for help from all corners of the ship, making him more stressed that ever, and oh, by the way, T'Pring is quite displeased with these new hijinks.

They somehow contact Admiral April, who takes things in stride after he's convinced that the puppets aren't being puppeteered by anyone and orders them to sit tight until a ship is dispatched to assist. Meanwhile, a decidedly not-friendly vessel approaches—an Orion interceptor. The Orions have scanned the Enterprise and determined there is only one person aboard, making it a fine candidate for seizure. Pike warns them off, but thanks to Uhura's inability to properly operate her console, visual transmission cuts in and the Orions discover Pike and company are defenseless puppets.

Help me steer the ship before you help Uhura with her earpiece, help in the engine room, open the door for Number One, and do basically every job on board, would you, Spock?

The Orions damage and then board the ship, capture Spock, and take control of the bridge as much as they can; they need the command codes to be able to do anything significant, though, so Spock is held in the rec room/mess hall for interrogation while the puppets retreat to quarters. A flaw in the Orions' thinking is that Spock is the only one who can provide command codes; they don't yet realize that they have no leverage against the puppet crew. But whatever, the Orion second in command engages Spock in conversation rather than strict interrogation, sussing out much of Spock's distress, because he's just keeping Spock occupied while the commander abducts puppet-Pike as a means of coercion: They bring Spock to an airlock, where Pike is jettisoned into space when Spock again refuses to divulge the codes. Spock's day just keeps getting worse.

Meanwhile, back in quarters, Pelia is being sewn back together (she'd been sliced in half by the Orion commander earlier) and explains to all that being puppets has some advantages—like not dying when being sliced in half, or, you know, not needing to breathe. They realize Pike is alive outside the viewport and (somehow) get him back inside. Our puppet crew (plus puppet T'Pring) fashions a plan to lean into their puppetness and retake the ship by means of chaos.

A barrage of silliness ensues and the Orions are defeated by puppet antics and coordinated puppet attacks (even though earlier on we saw Una and La'an try to take down an Orion by force only to find that foam limbs and felt fists are rather feeble) that enable Spock to shut off life support long enough for all non-puppets aboard to pass out from lack of oxygen. Spock awakens in sickbay, told that they slapped an oxygen mask on him and rolled him onto a dolly in order to get him there. Scott comes up with a reversal procedure with the transporter that will restore everyone to normal, but before that happens, much of the crew wants to experience what Pike did and float in space sans spacesuits. (They also talk to each other while outside, which puppet Pelia at least remarks makes no sense.) Meantime, T'Pring visits Spock to aid in some meditation and admits to him that the Enterprise folks, despite being (mostly) humans, are noble and worthwhile despite all the hijinks, and Spock seems to be rethinking their relationship.

Fade out/smash cut to Spock waking abruptly in his quarters. T'Pring is there, in her normal form, and Spock confusedly asks her when she switched back from being a puppet. "I have never been a puppet," she says, wondering what the hell he's on about. She explains that after Scott energized the transporter in his long-distance experiment, something happened with the relays Spock had deployed (they overloaded? Blew up? Something, anyway) and he was knocked unconscious while his shuttle sustained damage. He had been conked out for several hours. So all the puppet stuff actually happened only in Spock's head as his subconscious tried to process everything that's been on his mind in a dream.

So...

Part of me hates this episode. It's overly silly, makes no sense, and takes the boundaries of what Star Trek is to a new extreme. On the other hand, the fact that it makes no sense doesn't matter since it was a dream, the fact that it was a dream is actually informative to Spock's development, and from a technical production standpoint it is exceptionally well done. The puppets look great. They each manage to capture the actors and their characters very well, they are (mostly) puppeteered very well, and some of the humor lands. 

I think most of my negativity stems from the totality of the season rather than this episode specifically. We've only got ten episodes to work with—16 including next season—and so far not one has been good. "Valles Marineris" (the high-water mark so far, at three out of five stars in my ratings) has its strengths, and none of the five are terrible in the way that "New Life and New Civilizations" was to close last season. But here is yet another gimmick episode that spends its time on the gimmick rather than exploring any ideas or big themes.

We do get some Spock character stuff, which is good in theory, but a mixed bag in practice. I've generally thought SNW has done well with young Spock, and though I'm displeased to see how La'an rather unceremoniously dumps him, it does add to his trajectory toward embracing Vulcanness and away from his unique makeup. Seeing Spock make choices that from a human point of view are unhealthy, though, I'm not sure how I feel about that.

It does fit. Spock's whole evolution in SNW provides some really nice extra context for the character and adds a bit of tragedy and sadness to his arc. When he fails his Kohlinahr and encounters V'Ger in Star Trek—The Motion Picture, he finally gets it—the Vulcan way isn't for him, he's not Vulcan or human, he's Spock and can merge them both uniquely—but here in SNW season four is where he really starts down what he ultimately will decide is a misguided path. The break-up with La'an is really not good for either of them, it's a retreat into unhealthy isolation on her part and prompts the same for him. We see throughout this series that Spock wants company, he's not inclined to go it solo; yet—as with plenty of humans—getting dumped makes him cynical in that respect.

Most of that's interpretation, though, not explicitly part of the Enterprise Muppet Show. We'll see how the writers follow up in the second half of the season.

Loose threads:

• I find it interesting how SNW has made T'Pring into a sympathetic character. Credit to Gia Sandhu for her portrayal.
• On the subject of actor praise, Ethan Peck delivers here, again, as he always does but with such an extra level of difficulty. I can't imagine the practicalities involved in playing against muppet scene partners.
• Before things go all wonky, we see Pike inordinately excited about a new command chair. This gag was already done in an episode of Enterprise that had Captain Archer and Trip obsessing about a new captain's chair as part of a plot that had characters hyperfocused on trivial or counterproductive things, but I'm presuming that behind the scenes the new chair was to enable some of the puppetry somehow? It's in the dream sequence that we see Pike decide the old chair was really just fine, so we'll have to head-canon the real reason the new chair is gone next week (I'm assuming it will be).
• Spock's subconscious is trying to clue him into things he screwed up on before, such as in his exchange with puppet-La'an that tells us he was aware of much of what La'an has been struggling with but didn't offer any support for her. From a human standpoint, that would be a message to emphasize rather than avoid/neglect his emotional relationships, but his subconscious also presumes La'an would reject his help. Much as La'an seems to presume people won't support or help her. These two really could have done a lot for each other if they'd just gotten out of their own way.
• I did love the bit where puppet-T'Pring (T'Puppet?) slaps Spock when he says he's grateful to her, as gratitude is illogical. It works given puppets/dream.
• Spock's subconscious creates an Orion interrogator who advises him that the Orion way is just to listen to the women and do what they say. Am I reading too much into it to think this means he's considering that he should have just deferred to La'an at all times, and that would have saved the relationship? I probably am.
• When the Orions throw puppet Pike out the airlock, he and Spock each put their hands against either side of the glass ala Spock's death scene in Wrath of Khan, complete with Pike starting to utter "the needs of the many..." I found it too cute by half. Another reference for reference's sake and no other reason.
• The fact that puppet-T'Pring tells Spock that the situation with the Orions cannot be solved with logic and that the "hijinks are the solution" would seem to be another point where Spock's subconscious is trying to tell him to embrace his uniqueness and not rely wholly on Vulcan ways, but, as most of us do from time to time, he ends up ignoring the lesson once the dream is over.
• The dream revelation also lets us know just how annoying Spock found Scotty's dumb rivalry with his classmate—several times during the story puppet-Pelia mentions Declan as being more capable than Scott (though once, near the end, she dismisses Declan as a spoiled and fragile "legacy student").
• Scott's attempt to break a transport distance record is to beam something 30,000 kilometers away. That's actually not so far in planetary type distances; the circumference of Earth is more than 40,000 km. So if the target ship is 30,000 km from the Enterprise, it's pretty much in the neighborhood. On the other hand, 30,000 km does seem like a solid limit for beaming; J.J. Abrams doesn't think so, but he's wrong.

I've avoided all spoilers regarding next week's episode, so I'm going in cold. Will it be another gimmick? Will there be more gratuitous Kirk? We'll find out soon enough.