“They were more cautious. Didn’t want to make waves. The cowards!”
Jean-Luc Picard had Dixon Hill. Data had Sherlock Holmes. And La’an Noonien-Singh has Amelia Moon. The hard-boiled detective whodunit genre appears to be as ubiquitous in the 23rd and 24th Centuries as superhero movies are in our time. This week, Star Trek takes a break from exploring strange new worlds and turns its lens back on itself in a Holodeck episode that just might be the most meta installment of the entire franchise.
While Enterprise is studying a neutron star, Pike and Una task La’an with beta testing an experimental entertainment system designed to help relieve stress on crews who will soon be journeying out into deep space for longer than the typical 5-year mission. These “Holodecks” have already cropped up on Starbases but consume enough power to make their full-time installation on starships trickier.
Just making the holographic characters look like real people takes up so much energy that they borrow the likenesses of real people saved in the Transporter buffer to fill the roles within the simulation. La’an chooses to play out an original mystery based on an old book series she loved and finds herself trying to solve the murder of the 1960s TV Studio head responsible for the fate of a Star Trek analog called “The Final Frontier.”
Once again, Strange New Worlds is resurrecting a familiar trope from Trek past. This time it’s the Holodeck malfunction episode introduced in The Next Generation (TNG). These episodes were often employed by that show’s writers to have some fun, genre-hop, and give the cast a chance to play dress-up and ham it up even more than usual.
Holodeck stories resulted in more misses than hits but along the way, writers started using the Holodeck as a tool for exploring existential questions. If a character in a Holodeck simulation is capable of gaining self-awareness and act towards its own self-preservation, can that simulation be accepted as an independent lifeform deserving of human rights?
“A Space Adventure Hour” is less interested in that question or any other philosophical musings and more interested in having fun, genre-hopping, and letting the cast play dress up and ham it up more than usual. And no one gets to go more over the top this week than Strange New World‘s James Kirk portrayer Paul Wesley, who finally goes full Shatner in a slightly exaggerated take on a Kirk-like character within the kitschy, 60s era space adventure TV show that exists within the world of this Amelia Moon mystery story playing out in the Holodeck.
Photo: Marni Grossman Paramount+
Unfortunately, the occasional clever moments in this episode don’t save it from its flaws, problems that are becoming more and more common to modern Trek. One error this episode shares with the far worse Section 31 movie is relying on its breezy tone to blow past obvious plot-holes and leaps of logic.
Even long before our current era of Deep Fakes and AI-generated images, Star Trek has more than once addressed the potential ethical violations of casting real people in Holodeck simulations without consent. This was first raised in TNG‘s “Hollow Pursuits,” the episode that debuted the Reginald Barclay character.
In another TNG episode, “Galaxy’s Child,” a visiting engineer, Leah Brahms, expresses outrage when she discovers a Holodeck version of herself created by Geordi La Forge without her permission. And in a subplot in Deep Space Nine‘s “Meridian,” Quark schemes to illicitly capture Kira Nerys’ image for a creepy customer who intends to use it for his own private Holodeck porn collection.
At a time when this issue is very much in the zeitgeist with regards to deep fake and generative AI technology, it’s disappointing these questions aren’t even remarked upon, and it feels like a missed opportunity to say something substantive about our contemporary world. This frustration is only compounded by the fact that the episode itself prominently pays lip service to Star Trek‘s great legacy of giving “audiences a digestible reflection of their own world through the lens of fantasy.”
The Joanie Gloss Holodeck character in the likeness of Celia Rose Gooding’s Nyota Uhura continues, in the quote I began this piece with, to even chastise the cowardly studio behind the Star Trek-like “The Last Frontier” series for failing to see its vision and underestimating its value as tool for social commentary.
Another recent Trek meta story, Star Trek: Prodigy‘s “All the World’s a Stage,” explored a civilization unintentionally influenced by an accidental encounter with Captain Kirk’s Enterprise that now continues an ongoing stage play superficially based on that crew and getting it all wrong. Similarly, modern Trek is starting to feel a bit more like theater kids playing at Star Trek — a simulation of it, if you will — than doing the very social commentary this episode’s writers Dana Horgan and Kathryn Lyn acknowledge — as Deep Space Nine‘s meta episode “Far Beyond the Stars” also acknowledged — is the key ingredient of Star Trek.
Strange New Worlds embraces Trek’s fundamental humanism and has occasionally touched on deeper politics but like most of the modern iterations of this franchise, it avoids the substantive, systemic critique. And it’s not hard to see why. New Star Trek projects are being mass produced on assembly lines because of the underlying political economy behind the show. It plays it safe, appearing to shy away from taking positions on current politics because that’s how the corporate studio in charge likes it.
Star Trek is a brand name that generates huge profits for Paramount, which owns CBS, the network that just unceremoniously fired late night host Stephen Colbert, presumably as part of a quid pro quo with the president to get a lucrative merger to go through. I can’t help but think the real life intrigue happening behind the scenes at CBS with its inherent indictment of the studio system would have made for a more compelling scenario for this mystery plot, but Joanie Gloss’ condemnation of the “cowards” who fail to make waves may just be the most meta element of this whole episode.
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds release Thursdays on Paramount+.
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