4 Ups And 5 Downs For Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.4 — A Space Adventure Hour

7. DOWN — Meta Data

It was La'An's task this week to "put [the holodeck] through its paces […] [To show] it could work under genuine, rigorous circumstances". Surely this was the chance for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to throw the holographic kitchen sink at the multi-genre approach for more than just a murder mystery? Instead, the same causes produced the same effects. The same ideas caused the same ideas.

After the rush to name things, the hurry to paint the walls yellow. As if the aped design of the prototype holodeck grid weren't enough, La'An's instruction to the computer was more than just familiar. "Create a new mystery that I will find challenging to solve" sounds rather similar to "create an adversary capable of defeating Data".

Holo-Spock was hardly holo-Moriarty, but, compounding things, "the game [was] afoot," as a certain "ancestor" would write. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not, in fact, coin the phrase for his detective. The first recorded use of "the game is afoot" and "the game's afoot" is in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I and Henry V respectively. In Star Trek, the less than Holmesian General Chang uttered the phrase in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. More to the point, so did Data in Elementary, Dear Data.

Plot points and episodes also converged outside of the holodeck. For holo-Moriarty's second appearance in Ship in a Bottle, the Enterprise-D was at the Detrian system "to observe […] the collision of two planets" into a star. In A Space Adventure Hour, the Enterprise 1701 was at the "Kitolian Belt" to study the collapse of a neutron star.