Picking up a random assignment, La’an takes on the challenge of being the beta tester for a more domestic version of a training simulator to find out if the technology is viable for entertainment and training on board deep space assignments And of course, it all goes horrible wrong.
Writers: Dana Horgan & Kathryn Lyn
Director: Jonathan Frakes
Opening with guest star Paul Wesley doing a Saturday Night Live level of parody of William Shatner, from the start we know there’s nothing but shenanigans ahead. The setting is the USS Adventure, a not really starship thats home to a fictional 1960’s drama. Though it’s not the on screen performance that causes the problem. Behind the scene’s there’s conflict between unhappy cast members, producers struggling with their next career steps and of course some murder thrown into the mix that needs an expert investigator to solve.
How we get there is bv the recreation room; a commercialised version of a battle simulator used to train officers that they plan to expand to entertainment to help solve the boredom of being thrown into deep space without a Spaceflix subscription. The rec room is basically just the Holodeck in it’s infancy. It’s barely programmed, barely tested and the power balance it needs hasn’t came close to being refined, so much like nearly every holodeck episode since Dixon Hill’s first appearance, it’s a disaster in the making.
The rest of the crew is busy tinkering about with a star, so it’s up to La’an to test it out and see if it works while Scotty scrambles around trying to make sure it doesn’t explode. Deciding to play out one of her favourite authors, she does a Data and challenges the computer to beat her, prompting a murder mystery that draws so many resources that it breaks the ship enough that she has to solve the case to save the day.
Narratively, it’s just a generic Next Generation style holodeck plot that could have been a filler episode in the early 90’s which, for me personally, wasn’t exactly exciting and in a lot of ways felt a little misplaced. Using a story about a 1960’s production gave the writers plenty of time to use The Last Frontier series as a parallel to Star Trek, and it comes with a lot of cliche’s and narrative nods to that. Which is nice. But in a sense, we’ve seen that before with Benny Russell and this didn’t feel as compelling being thrown into a story which largely felt like it didn’t go anywhere.
For the main plot, it felt like things just happen and La’an solves it all by accident. But where a lot of the plot itself fell flat, it was held together by the performances. Anson Mount as a more soft spoken and flippant writer worked oddly well in contrast to his Pike, and you could tell some of the cast got their teeth into chewing the scenery with Rebecca Romjin’s overly dramatic death scene and Babs Olusanmokun getting to play the pretentious artsy type.
Character beats were also really nicely done outside the holodeck. Martin Quinn’s more Pegg-inspired version of Scotty is really growing with his need to control everything being an obvious link to the survivors guilt he came on board with. And for the leading La’an, it’s nice to actually have character beyond being the angry security officer. The seasons made a bit of an effort to expand her character a little and get beyond the clichés of the character and it all seems to be giving Christina Chong more of a spark on screen now they’re, quite literally, letting La’an’s hair down.
As an overall; I can see where some would enjoy it. But this one wasn’t for me. I think partly as the plot just didn’t feel like it went anywhere, and partly as in a ten episode season, we’ve already got 50% callback comedy and while it can be fun connecting all the dots, there are far too many good places we can go with the characters and setting to fall into the habit of playing on another shows greatest hits.
Highlights
- I was slightly amused that Christina Chong slipped into an American accent in her holodeck character while Jess Bush got to use her real Australian accent in the holodeck.
- Spock mentioning his ancestor, Arthur Conan Doyle was previously mentioned in The Undiscovered Country.
- Paul Wesley failing 'The Riker' marks the second time of the move being mocked in a Frakes directed episode.
All Connected...
Fitting the holodeck into the timeline is a bit awkward, but works out relatively well in linking things together. A holographic training simulator was used in Discovery, and a holographic rec room in the Animated Series.
The ‘prototype’ was marked as failed with suggestions by Scotty in the end which, while it seems mad that it took a century to rollout, does link into both Voyager and Picard in recommending it’s own server and power source if they want it to work.
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