Spock’s going through a bit of a personal crisis and Scotty’s become madly competitive with an old Academy rival. These two separate threads collide in the weirdest way when Spock finds himself as the only person who can control the ship as Scotty’s transporter antics turn everyone into puppets…
Writers: Henry Alonso Myers & Dana Horgan
Director: Jordan Canning
Spock’s not quite feeling himself and he hasn’t quite been himself since the Griffin Incident. And things are getting worse. Leaning heavily towards logic over his exploration of his human side, and in the wake of La’an deciding their relationship had reached it’s ‘natural conclusion’, he’s spiraling. Well, as much as a Vulcan would allow themselves to. Desperately trying to balance himself, he’s leaning into logic and reaching out to his scorned ex-fiancee for help in re-establishing his Vulcan side.
While thats happening, Scotty’s on a mission to win an old rivalry. His former classmate, who beat him to top of the class by the smallest of margins, has the record for the longest transport distance. Scott’s about to break it. With T’Pring making her way to the Enterprise, Spocks out in a shuttle launching transporter buoy’s for Scotty’s record breaking experiment and thats when it all hits the fan. While Spock watches from the shuttle, Scotty transports a somewhat terrifying puppet 300,000 kilometres to his old rivals ship which breaks absolutely everything.
Within minutes the transporter overloads, goes a bit mental and starts beaming everyone up into it’s new matrix which was decided means everyone on board should look like Scotty’s puppet, Little Ricky, and soon enough Spock gets back to the ship to find everyone made of fabric and stuffing.
Somewhat embarrassed by their predicament, the crew quickly realise their puppet hands can’t operate any on board equipment, leaving the already mentally drained Spock being chased to push every button that needs pushed, deal with the scorn of his hi-jinks hating ex being drawn into the madness and to make it all worse, Orion pirates find out what’s happening thanks to the push of a wrong button and decide to invade and steal the Enterprise.
If there’s one thing Star Trek has shown us, it’s that space is dangerous, awe inspiring and sometimes just downright weird. One day you’re shrunk down to the size of a pencil sharpener fending off a Jem’Hadar invasion, the next you’re trying to break the warp threshold and get transformed into a horny salamander. When you’ve accepted teenage Picard, Space Abraham Lincoln, and whatever Move Along Home was, puppets deserve a fair shot.
There’s a lot to like about the episode. From a comedic perspective, Spock as the one real person in Star Trek: The Muppet Movie makes a lot of sense. For all the options, it’s the perfect character to have both that silent exasperation as he realises the entire crew are rendered useless with immobile, stuffed fingers as well as in being that type of character that pressures themselves to take everything on by themselves because they feel they have to. It’s one of those episodes that blends a completely mad idea to blend in and mask the fact that Spock is essentially having one massive anxiety attack thanks to trying to logic his way out of PTSD.
On a technical level, it’s also incredibly impressive how well the Jim Henson Creature Shop created the puppet versions of the crew and filmed it all on sets that clearly weren’t designed for the kind of work they do. From the character design right down to the mannerisms, the work was incredible before even taking into account how troublesome it would have been for the puppeteers to work around those sets.
Taken as a single episode and story, it was fun and fine. Not great, not awful. Even if some of the jokes were hammered into the ground. And it all being Dallas’d away was both a blessing of not trying to make the illogical side of the story canon while also feeling a bit of a let down for the same reason people groaned at the reset button.
In larger context, however, whether fair or not to say, the episode does highlight the major drawback to the producers feeling they need to keep swinging through ideas, themes and genres (as if Star Trek hadn’t before…). In a traditional series block, an episode like this would blend in and people would forget. For a condensed series where it feels like every episode needs a gimmick, it just becomes a bit tiring now that there’s a need to write anything but a solid hour of television and just rely on some other thing to give it a theme.
Spock has a genuinely interesting arc at this stage. We might know where he’s going to end up, but in universe he’s at make or break point and for all they have done with him since Discovery, having all these hang-ups and issues that could make a deeply profound story coming down to an episode that just feels like it was made for poops and giggles just feels like a waste of an hour. Especially when we all know there’s so few hours left.
EPISODE DISCUSSION & SPOILERS
Highlights
- I Love Lucy, the flagship of original Trek production company Desilu, inspired Scotty's puupet name. Little Ricky was the son of leads Lucy and Ricky.
- While all the puppets were incredibly well crafted, the tubing they used to bring an extra dimension of madness to Pelia's hair was just incredible.
- The comedic timing of Uhura turning on visual comms was spot on perfect. The Henson team did an incredibly job!
All Connected...
Scotty’s experiments with transporter technology and trying to beam farther than anyone has before links nicely with the Kelvin Universe films. In those films, Spock travels back in time from the TNG era to become part of the reason the divergent timeline exists. Knowing things had went wrong, and that he had to try and fix it, he reveals that future Scotty kept himself busy by experimenting with ‘transwarp’ transporter technology. With knowledge of the late 24th century and Scotty’s plans, Spock gives the equations to the Kelvin Timeline Scotty to help lead Kirk to take his place in the Captains Chair.
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