4 Ups And 5 Downs For Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.4 — A Space Adventure Hour
A Space Adventure Hour is some kind of murder mystery on another kind of Star Trek.
Oh how we wanted to love it, hyped as it was in the months before in interviews, in trailers, by pop-up, and even with a full showing at San Diego Comic-Con. This was the 'murder mystery'. This was the 'holodeck episode,' both before and after there were holodeck episodes.
A Space Adventure Hour should at least be praised for trying to do something innovative with the old as new again. In the end, it wastes both of its promising premises, preferring instead to become an ill-advised, at times uncomfortable, parody of Star Trek itself. A Space Adventure Hour feels more like a comedy skit made into an episode, interspersed with enough 1960s kitsch to restock Carnaby Street.
The episode can't seem to decide whether to lambast or to sing the franchise's praises. Amongst the meta-critiques and pursed lips, we're treated to a lengthy speech about how inspiring 'The Last Frontier' (i.e., Star Trek) is. All the while, the episode fails to realise that commentary on social commentary is not social commentary, and that Star Trek about Star Trek is also not Strange New Worlds.
10. DOWN — Cold Open, Thin Ice
A good Star Trek cold open can shock, even baffle, its viewers in anticipation of a little explanation. The start of Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy was memorable for its reworded rendition of 'La Donna è mobile'. In A Mirror, Darkly surprised from the beginning with a shotgun at First Contact. In the first few minutes of its previous episodes, Strange New Worlds itself has dared to crossover with animation and turn the page on a subspace songbook.
The cold open to A Space Adventure Hour defies classification. Rarely, if ever, has anything in Star Trek been quite so metatextual without providing an ounce of context until later in the episode. 'The Last Frontier' (a television space adventure hour) is the TV show within the TV show. A parallel to that kind of mise en abyme worked brilliantly in Far Beyond the Stars. Here, it is so eerily self-referential as to be self-evidently for the sake of it.
The opener to A Space Adventure Hour is not subtle. Just how the holodeck managed to know the production history of Star Trek quite so well throughout, along with the mannerisms and proclivities of its actors and producers, is a mystery bigger than 'who killed Tony Hart'. The 'simulation hypothesis,' or even the writer's dream, doesn't quite cut it in this case as a form of internal consistency. And besides, there is already one way to talk about Star Trek in Star Trek: make an episode of Star Trek.
All in all, A Space Adventure Hour would have done far better without its opener (and ending, moreover). The introduction narrated by La'An in her log post-opening credits would have sufficed.