Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 3

I was there when Happy Days jumped the shark. A little grade-school kid watching from a parsonage living room in Nebraska, via a signal captured by an aerial antenna that could be disrupted by as little as an air popper making popcorn in the next room – I almost said a microwave oven, but we didn't have one of those until the next parsonage – and when my little brother and I hung on everything the Fonz did. And later, the Duke boys and the Knight Rider. If you get what I'm saying, you know what kind of boys we were. But even we weren't so oblivious that we didn't recognize, when the Fonz literally jumped a shark (on water skis), what kind of proverb was in the making. And now I have lived to see a Star Trek series that I thought was very promising, in the first season or two, jumping so many sharks it was like skipping rocks. It could be argued that the selachid vaulting started in earnest with the penultimate episode of S2, "Subspace Rhapsody," where technobabble turned the Enterprise crew into the cast of a musical revue with plot and character points underscored by song and dance numbers.

And yet the show goes on, and the jumping of sharks continues regularly throughout this third season, and there are still two seasons of this series to come. Considered alongside the direction Picard and Discovery took in their final seasons, and the notoriously bad Star Trek: Section 31 TV movie, and the dismal failure of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy in one season flat (though a second season is still being produced at exorbitant expense), this almost suggests that somebody hates Star Trek with a holy passion and is purposefully augering it into the ground. Exhibits follow.

The season opens with "Hegemony, Part II," concluding the cliffhanger from the end of Season 2, in which several principal characters and a whole bunch of colonists were taken prisoner by the Gorn. This is actually one of the season's stronger episodes, with the Enterprises skirting the edge of violating a treaty with the Gorn to rescue the captives, while back in sickbay, Capt. Pike's girlfriend, Capt. Batel, receives an infusion of Number One's genetically modified Illyrian blood to help her combat the growth of Gorn eggs inside her body. This sets up a story arc that continues throughout the season.

"Wedding Bell Blues" features Rhys Darby of Flight of the Conchords as a version of the original series' capricious god-child, Trelane ("The Squire of Gothos"), and a voice cameo by John de Lancie suggesting that he might be a Q. It also introduces Cillian O'Sullivan as Roger Korby (TOS's "What Are Little Girls Made Of?") as Christine Chapel's new squeeze, a medical archaeologist. In this adventure, which definitely revs the speed boat engine if not actually jumping a shark, Spock is the first person who notices when Trelane, disguised as a bartender, changes reality to allow him and Christine to be a couple, then gets mad (like, threatening-people's-lives mad) when Spock and later others resist being played with like toys. It's kind of a fun episode, but it sets a pattern for this season of tampering with the show's characters, tone and genre every second or third episode – the kind of thing that can be a highlight of a season when it happens once every 26 episodes, but that destroys series continuity when it happens three or four times out of 10.

"Shuttle to Kenfori" is a "Star Trek does The Evil Dead" episode, in which Pike and M'Benga encounter zombies, basically, while searching an abandoned science lab for a flower that is supposed to help Batel with her Gorn problem. Of course the zombie outbreak has something to do with the flower, which does some kind of genetic jiggery-pokery, which rather paints M'Benga as a bit of a mad scientist and also, thanks to a Klingon character who hunts him down for revenge, reveals that he really did murder that Klingon ambassador in S2. He's a really morally compromised dude, and as Dr. Bashir's Little Sickbay or Horrors in DS9 so frequently demonstrates, the cure can be worse than the disease.

"A Space Adventure Hour" hits the ramp so hard that the water skier escapes from orbit, with La'An trying out a prototype of what (in the TNG era) will become standard equipment on a long-range starship: the holodeck. Why isn't it a thing before then? Behold: in trying to solve a pulp mystery, La'An gets stuck in the holodeck with no exit and no safety protocols. Meanwhile, characters in the whodunit wear faces of Star Trek principals, playing an over-the-top parody of TOS cast members and creatives. It's a surprisingly on-the-nose and not very kind parody of original Trek.

"Through the Lens of Time" is another horror episode, in which a young nurse named Gamble (recurring throughout the previous episodes of the season) takes it on the chin in a truly ghastly way while other characters, including Korby and Ortegas' younger, documentary filmmaker brother Beto, become trapped in what at first seems like an ancient, alien temple, but that might actually be something much more dangerous. Just thinking of Gamble getting his eyeballs fried out, then walking and talking like a living man even after his life signs cease, gives me the heebie-jeebies the way certain episodes of Doctor Who did. (Remember the one where you had to check whether somebody had a shadow or not?)

"The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail" finds Lt. James Kirk thrust into his first command when the U.S.S. Farragut gets attacked by a huge vessel that has the terrifying ability to open its jaws and, like, eat the Enterprise. Like, "Star Trek meets Mortal Engines." Assisted by some Enterprises who had beamed across to help before the chomp went down, Kirk struggles to find his footing in this crisis, but maybe the most memorable thing about the episode is who the scavengers turn out to be. It's kind of disturbing.

"What Is Starfleet?" is Beto's documentary, which at first seems very negative about the space force his sister serves in. It doesn't help Starfleet's optics that the Enterprise has been conned into assisting some alien scientists in what turns out to be an act of aggression against a neighboring planet and, also, involves the enslavement of a magnificent space creature. The remarkable thing about this episode is how much deleted material is preserved on the DVD; it could have been a feature-length installment.

"Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" is the episode teased before Season 3 debuted, in which Pike, Uhura, Chapel and La'An take a modified version of the alien serum that restored Spocks' Vulcan half in the S2 episode that most egregiously pissed me off ("Charades"). This allows them to temporarily become full-blooded Vulcans, which somehow magically alters their entire personalities (to say nothing of their hairstyles) despite none of them having ever undertaken the years of meditation, philosophical indoctrination and mental discipline that makes Vulcans the ice-cold SOBs they are. As ludicrous as it is, the episode makes a tiny, feeble attempt to explain this – something about how their Vulcanness really reflects Spock's perception of Vulcans – so it should come as no surprise to him that they are absolute, racist jerks who constantly remind Spock that he isn't even fully Vulcan. They basically become all of his childhood bullies. And then they just refuse to change back into humans at the end of the mission which, itself, isn't all that important for this story. Also oddly, La'An kind of becomes a Romulan. This is the kind of nonsense that Star Trek indulges in from time to time and that never fails to make me furious. As funny as this episode is in some of its details, it's built on a science fiction concept so stupid that it's unbearable to think about. In terms of shark jumping, this is the ski jump that launches the Fonz straight past the heliopause, into the interstellar void.

"Terrarium" is the episode that strands Ortegas on a moon, orbiting a gas giant on the wrong side of a wormhole, with a Gorn. There, despite her Gorn-related trauma (cf. "Hegemony, Part II"), she has to learn to make friends with the enemy in order to survive, while back on the Enterprise, it's a close-run thing whether the crew will be able to rescue her before either the wormhole collapses or they have to leave on a crucial mission. The Metrons (cf. TOS's "Arena") play a role in this, which I think is the biggest flaw in an otherwise all-right episode.

"New Life and New Civilizations" ties up the season as a whole, and particularly the plot threads regarding what Batel has become since she became fused with Gorn young'uns, Illyrian blood and that chimera flower from Kenfori, and what Gamble became on that planet with the temple-that-wasn't-really-a-temple. Before she commits herself to an eternity standing guard over a galactic demon prison, Batel and Pike share a lifetime together a la TNG's "The Inner Light," in what is maybe the most moving passage in this entire series to-date.

So, as I said, this show pulled increasingly steep shark jumps at least three times, and yet it goes on. I hear Season 4 will have an episode where the main cast gets turned into Muppets. So they're not done shooting the shark tank. Nevertheless, here are Three Highlights of This Season for Me – I won't say they "made it for me" because in the overall balance, I don't particularly care for this season of Trek, despite a couple of bright spots – (1) Patton Oswalt, as "Doug," a Vulcan who has embraced human behavior and who has somehow become irresistable to Number One, riffs with Spock in a series of hilarious outtakes. (2) "Terrarium" with its "infinite diversity in infinite combinations" theme of coming to a mutual understanding with your enemy, really represents what Star Trek has always been about. (3) The season finale's "Inner Light" interlude, which gives Batel and Pike the gift of a lifetime together that they can never really share. It hits emotionally, really hard.

Star Trek: Prodigy, Season 2

I've fallen way behind on my reviews of TV seasons that I watched on DVD. So here's a quick catch-up, starting with my favorite: Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2.

The second and, alas, last season of the animated series Prodigy is a breathtaking document of the Trek establishment's mixed-up priorities. This show should have been the one that kept going for years and years. It is, in my opinion, the best recent Star Trek series – my dad, who's been a Trekkie since the original series first aired, is of the same opinion. And it's definitely, hands down, the best animated Trek show ever. But it got canceled after only one season, and Season 2 only exists because it was in post-production at the time and there were contractual commitments, etc., etc. So, at least we got this. It's not perfect, but it's darn close.

The show continues the adventures of a group of misfit kids who, in Season 1, escaped from a slave planet on board a time-displaced Starfleet ship that they found deep in the mines. You may recall how they ended up becoming Starfleet cadets after saving the Federation from a disaster partly of their inadvertent making. Now we find cocky would-be captain Dal, science genius Rok Tahk, "percussive maintenance" specialist Jankom Pog, noncorporeal alien in a mechanical suit Zero and indestructible, verbally incomprehensible but increasingly anthropomorphic blob Murf joining a mission on Admiral Janeway's crew on a souped-up Starship Voyager, on a secret mission to find the missing Chakotay, while Gwyn tries to convince her people, the xenophobic Vau N'Akat of the planet Solum, to be open to first contact with aliens.

Naturally, everything goes disastrously wrong. In the season's two-part premiere, "Into the Breach," the meddling cadets prematurely take a ship through a time wormhole, inserting themselves into the wrong page of history. And though Gwyn connects with a kinder, gentler version of her Diviner dad, named Ilthuran, she faces a relentless enemy in the treacherous Ascentia, who is willing to mess with the fabric of reality to achieve her fanatic aims.

The season continues with "Who Saves the Saviors," in which Gwyn faces Ascencia in a ritual contest while the other cadets meet Chakotay in the Diviner's jail, inadvertently letting him escape in the Protostar in a way that disrupts the whole timeline and threatens Gwyn's very existence. "Temporal Mechanics 101" is about the cadets' efforts to rescue Gwyn, turning their ship into a time machine and taking her back to the Voyager. "Observer's Paradox" finds the kids struggling to understand mysterious messages telling them to stay together and "find me." In "Imposter Syndrome," they create holographic copies of themselves to cover for them while they sneak off on another ill-advised mission. Hilarity ensues. In "The Fast and the Curious," the kids are taken captive by a sentient computer that forces them to compete in a dangerous race, an encounter that leads to Zero's containment suit being disabled.

"Is There in Beauty No Truth?" introduces a planet of Medusans (Zero's people) who have found a way to assume bodily form. They offer Zero a chance to experience physical senses, but the gift comes with strings attached – like, his body will die if he ever leaves the planet. In the two-part episode "The Devourer of All Things," the kids learn that the sender of those mysterious messages was spacetime Traveler Wesley Crusher, and that their entire reality is threatened by terrifying monsters called the Loom who devour anything displaced in time. In another two-parter called "Last Flight of the Protostar," the kids find Chakotay marooned on a very strange planet with the Protostar, minus its warp core, and they work out a way to get it flying again.

"A Tribble Called Quest" finds the kids looking for a warp core ingredient on a planet infested with giant, carnivorous tribbles. In "Cracked Mirror," they find their way back to the Voyager, only to find it split between multiple, alternate timelines – including a Mirror Universe where Janeway and Chakotay are evil. In the two-parter "Ascension," Ascencia attacks Protostar and Voyager and is revealed to be holding Wesley captive, torturing temporal technology out of him to prepare a final attack on Starfleet. "Brink" is about a rescue mission to save both Wes and Ilthuran from Ascencia's clutches. "Touch of Grey" finds the kids threatened by a Loom that Ascencia has captured and enslaved. And the two-part episode "Ouroboros" ends the season, and the series, with the climactic struggle between Ascencia and everybody else, always with the Loom threatening to erase their entire reality.

That's super-oversimplified, but I highly recommend watching the whole season. There are frustrating bits where the characters, particularly Dal, seem to be letting you down, but bear in mind that in a half-hour episode format, all this is part of a larger, serialized story and the characters show real growth. Cast members include everybody from Season 1, plus (increasingly) Robert Beltran returning as Chakotay, Robert Picardo as the Doctor (from Voyager), Jason Alexander and Daveed Diggs as Janeway's bridge officers, Michaela Dietz as Vulcan cadet Maj'el, Ronny Cox as Admiral Jellico (reprising his Next Generation role), Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher, Billy Campbell as one-time TNG character Okona, Eric Menyuk as two-time TNG guest The Traveler, and real-life science educator Erin Macdonald as a holographic version of herself.

It's tragic, I say, that this show didn't get the recognition it deserved as the strongest of the past decade's crop of Trek series, and that it couldn't go on longer. The characters' growth and chemistry together is lovely to witness. The dialogue is good. The stories are excellent. It's top-quality science fiction, structured for a Nickelodeon, kids' network audience but, perhaps as a consequence of that, highly satisfying for viewers of all ages. It's full of the optimism for the future that glows through the classic era of Trek, from the original series through Enterprise, and it makes good use of legacy characters without taking away from the hero kids' role in the forefront of the cast.

It has terrifying monsters, fiendish villains, rogues, creepy-crawlies and breathtaking, alien vistas. The Loom! The eels and leviathans on that sand planet with the vapor seas! Those bitey tribbles! That good-for-nothing Okona! That sentient computer with its deadly race course! Not to mention the Kazon and of course, Ascencia. It has characters who come to a tragic end, characters who suffer unimaginable agony, characters seen at their worst (such as the Bizarro versions of Janeway and Chakotay) ... but it also has people of all colors (including purple), sexes (including none) and body shapes (including none) aspiring to make the universe a better place for everybody. It's funny. It's a bit mind-bending, with all that temporal mechanics stuff. And it's a thrill ride from start to finish.

To put a point on it, here are Three Things That Made It For Me: (1) Putting life back into Chakotay after he's spent years marooned on an eel-infested sandbar. (2) Zero's heartbreaking taste of corporeal existence and what it costs him to sacrifice it for his friends. (3) Hard as it may be to believe, Wesley Crusher's role, suggesting some pretty interesting adventures he must have had since becoming one of those nearly omnipotent Travelers. Once again, this two-season series has my full endorsement.