La’an Noonien Singh takes a trip into a prototype holodeck, and holodecks never go rogue and cause problems on a starship, right? Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 episode 4 “A Space Adventure Hour” is written by Dana Horgan & Kathryn Lyn, directed by Jonathan Frakes.
Matt Lazorwitz: Welcome to this crazy new technology, the Holodeck, Mark. This is going to be a fun romp that won’t at all endanger the life of everyone on the ship. That hasn’t happened in any of the previous series, has it? This is going to be a nice, low stakes episode.
Mark Turetsky: You can’t fool me, Matt! Last time I tried out an Oculus Quest, I got trapped in a game and had to act out a simulation of doing household chores.
A Most Meta Adventure
Matt: Is this possibly the most inside baseball set-up for a Star Trek episode ever? We’re dropping one of our characters into the behind the scenes of a Star Trek pastiche. If you know your Star Trek history, a lot of what the Holodeck character played by Rebecca Romijn says makes it clear she’s a take on Lucille Ball, and Anson Mount (more on him shortly) is a parody of Gene Rodenberry. And Paul Wesley’s take on both Shatner and Shatner’s version of Kirk is a wild, broad swing.
I am a sucker for Holodeck episodes. I know that there is a somewhat vocal contingent of fans who have found the returns on them diminishing, but I love multiple Datas, Chaotica and especially Vic Fontaine. Holodeck episodes let the actors stretch some muscles they normally don’t stretch, and I think some of them enjoy it more than others. Season 1’s “The Elysian Kingdom” wasn’t a Holodeck episode, but it followed most of the same beats, and you can tell who buys into them, and those same actors really buy into this one too: Anson Mount, Celia Rose Gooding and Melissa Navia all seem to love playing these other characters with their castmates/friends. Especially Mount. In both of these episodes, he has seemingly revelled in chewing the scenery as very un-Pike characters.
Mark: And let’s get this out of the way right up front: while the holodeck didn’t appear in The Original Series, the episode “The Practical Joker” from The Animated Series features “The Recreation Room,” which Roddenberry wanted to add to the third season of TOS, but it proved too expensive. That, and Roddenberry wasn’t quite so hands-on after the first season of TOS (see this episode for a dramatization of that!). With limited holo-emitters being used for combat target practice on Discovery from this same time period, the current era of Trek has been inching us toward having holodecks in the Kirk era. This episode explicitly equates the two concepts, holodeck and Recreation Room. Not to mention, they cleverly call it the “re-creation” room here.
Matt: Always important to get the pedantry out of the way so we can just get into theme and character!
Mark: La’an’s adventure in the holodeck makes for a fun romp, and it’s great to see the cast stretch their acting chops like this (is that Jess Bush’s native Australian accent here?), but when we get to Uhura as Joni Gloss talking up how great and world-changing Star Tre– err, The Last Frontier is, it reads as… a little preachy if you ask me.
Matt: Well, yes. Star Trek does at times like to lean into THE MESSAGE. It’s gotten a bit better about it from some of the more message-heavy episodes of The Original Series and Next Generation, but sometimes it does indeed revert to form.
I am trying to think how much the reveal of the killer in this episode plays fair. I’d have to watch it again to see if the clues are all there. I figured it out not long before the big reveal, and I don’t think it has to play fair necessarily, because that isn’t what this show is about, but I always like it when a mystery does. Too many years of Sherlock Holmes and Batman, I suppose (not that most, if even many, of the stories featuring either of those detectives play fair either).
I think you hit the nail on the head when you called this a fun romp. We get some more development of La’an and Spock’s relationship, but that’s really the only thing here aside from what we’re going to talk about next that affects the series overall. Like most Holodeck/Holosuite episodes, it’s just there for fun.
Mark: The thing that really gets me about this is that it’s pretty much the same prompt that was used to create Moriarty: create a villain capable of defeating Data. The holo-Spock is more rigid than our regular Spock, and I’m not sure, but I don’t think he ever blinks. It’s the sort of mystery you really need to be paying attention for, and it does require a certain amount of lateral thinking. I think it’s solvable, but you have to accept the holodeck’s unusual prompt on its own terms.
Not Quite A Miracle Worker
Matt: Outside of the Holodeck, while we get one scene on the bridge, and a couple La’an/Spock scenes, nearly everything is dedicated to Scotty. Since he appeared in last season’s finale, all our exposure to Scotty has been him solving engineering problems (well, and attending Spock’s bachelor party and wedding, but he doesn’t do much there). Here, we get to understand what drives him a little better. It’s more than just trauma, it’s a desire to make sure that work gets done and to make sure it’s done properly so no one else gets killed like the crew of his last ship, the Stardiver.
While I can’t exactly connect to the feeling of being partially responsible for the deaths of my friends, I have a little experience with feeling that if you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself to the detriment of your own well being. It’s a relatable character issue, and I like that we now see part of what drives Scotty to be “the miracle worker,” even though he will get better about this over the years.
Mark: And it just works out great that Scotty’s personal issue — not wanting to work with others — just happens to work out great for this episode’s budget (which was clearly shunted into the 60’s murder mystery costumes and sets) where he’s the only engineer working on this new technology that’s been so incorporated into the Enterprise’s systems that it begins disrupting the ship’s other systems.
Matt: Starfleet would do better to avoid that kind of thing, huh? Not the first time we’ve seen it over the years. It is absolutely convenient you don’t have to pay the probably expensive Carol Kane to appear as Pelia, although I would have loved to see her in that period garb.
I mentioned last time that Number One often has to come down as the hardass for the more friendly Pike. It seems like she might have to do that again here, and while she’s not exactly the warmest, she is sympathetic and understanding as he tells her about why he is the way he is. We don’t get a lot of views into the more — for want of a better word — human side of Una, but I like it when it happens.
Mark: Come to think of it, I think Una might be the most “first officer” of all Trek first officers. She’s done quite a lot of being a sounding board and advisor for the captain, as well as being the main conduit for dealing with the crew. She doesn’t do much else on the show, but I guess she’s married to her job, so to speak.
Stray New Words
- Spock references his ancestor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is a call back to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered County, where Spock also quotes a maxim from Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s most famous creation.
- So, diegetically, what exactly is La’an’s voice over in the holodeck?
- Who am I kidding, it’s Star Trek, they do that all the time with logs that we never see anyone recording (yes, yes, leaving aside Sisko’s in “In The Pale Moonlight”).
- [Ed. Note]: Maxwell Saint failing to perform “the Riker Maneuver” (and destroying the captain’s chair in the process) was a great metatextual bit from director Jonathan Frakes.
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.
Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana. Follow him @markturetsky.com on Bluesky.
