Star Trek: Ranking The Short Treks From Worst To Best
To boldly go through the 10 shortest Star Treks ever.
Star Trek: Short Treks is the Star Trek series you may not have actually seen. The series includes stories set aboard the USS Discovery, the Enterprise, on Earth, and in Star Trek: Picard's 24th century, expanding the universe in 8 to 15-minute increments. The format even grew in the show's second season (yes there are two seasons) to include two animated installments.
The episodes were released inconsistently across regions, so there may be a good reason for why you haven't seen them. But if it was a choice, we recommend you reconsider. These aren't just supplementary material, they're required viewing for Star Trek fans that both expand the universe and expand the kind of stories the brand can tell.
Short Treks' short film format has allowed some of the most innovative, interesting stories to be told in the Star Trek Universe. And one Short Trek is arguably among of the best installments of the franchise ever.
10. Ask Not
To be clear, there aren't really any straight up bad Short Treks, but "Ask Not" is the least ambitious of the bunch.
While the other nine Short Treks have used their limited scope to find new approaches to Star Trek storytelling, "Ask Not" is a straight forward story about Anson Mount's Captain Pike being held captive by Starfleet and placed in the custody of a young cadet... for reasons.
The interplay between Pike and Cadet Sidhu (Amrit Kaur) isn't nearly as interesting as it should be, especially given the power dynamic between a towering captain like Pike and young recruit. Like the far superior "Q&A", this is mostly a two-actor piece, but the material itself isn't allowed to build enough tension before the conflict simply ends and the installment moves on to a happy conclusion.
Star Trek has a long history of torturing underlings (see TNG's "Coming of Age") before they get the big promotion and this is consistent with that trope. But the lengths to which Pike goes along with this whole situation feels a little hard to believe. Especially since Discovery spent so much time showing what a standup guy Pike is.
This is the final live action, Enterprise-centric Short Trek produced so far and there's a cute scene with Ethan Peck's Spock and Rebecca Romjin's Number One that caps off the season, but overall "Ask Not" feels like half a Short Trek and that's saying something.