Strange New Worlds Review: Level-Five Transporter Accident

Spoilers below

It's OK, everyone. We got through it.

More than any other episode in this season of genre tourism, it's probably not going to be possible to talk about "Level-Five Transporter Accident" without reflecting on my own relationship to the genre in question. The obvious forebear to this story is "Smile Time", an episode of Angel's fifth season in which the eponymous hero is turned into a puppet by demons who themselves are masquerading as Sesame Street-style characters, to give them cover while they siphon the energy of children.

This is generally considered a high point of an already very well-regarded series (the later revelations about its creator's cruelty and predatory behaviour notwithstanding). It's not just that the idea had never been done before, or that it lent itself so well to Whedon's ability to tell funny stories that are also unsettling. The hyperbolically brooding, self-serious Angel was the perfect character to replace with a fundamentally ridiculous puppet. Even before the episode aired, the idea of the episode had everyone excited to see what would unfold.

People did not, to put it mildly, feel similarly when pictures of Puppet Pike first emerged. There were obvious reasons for that. First is the general (and I think accurate) belief that Strange New Worlds spent too much of its last season being silly. Second is the feeling that in a show of just forty episodes, it's not a great sign that they'd cribbed two separate high-concept episode ideas from a TV franchise almost thirty years old [1]. Beyond that, though, it just wasn't at all clear what the gimmick was actually for. What could the puppet episode be, other than "the puppet episode"?

It comes as some relief, then, to learn "Level-Five..." has so strong an idea of what it wants to bee. "Smile Time" made Angel into a puppet as a new way to explore who Angel is. This episode does the same for Spock by turning everyone else into a puppet. This isn't a Whedon show, it's The Muppet Show, bemused "human" guest star and all.

Just has been the case for almost the whole of this season (I discussed "A Case Of Chiaoscuro" as an exception last week), whether this works for you will depend in large part on whether you find the Muppets worth your time. I myself am fiercely pro-Muppet - I'm drinking my morning coffee from my "Pigs In Space" mug right now - which gives me an immediate advantage with this episode I know plenty of people are going to lack.

If we assume that this is an idea that was worth the trying, then, the question becomes whether it actually all comes together. Here too, I think the news is good. Spock is the absolutely perfect choice as a straight man to the hijinks. A ship where everyone got zapped but Erica, or La'An, would both have been interesting to watch, but I'd still put Spock over either of them as the, well, logical choice.

But "Level-Five..." doesn't take the obvious route, and immediately dial the chaos up to eleven while Spock raises an eyebrow and tries to appear unruffled. Instead, the level of chaos around him ramps up at the same rate as his sense of anxiety. This has several benefits. It allows the episode to have its cake and eat it, starting out getting mileage from the incongruity of our heroes acting as a professional Starfleet crew while being silly puppets, and ending with a full-on Muppets fight scene. Also, though, it underlines what the whole point of the episode is about - Spock is struggling with his mental health, and doesn't know what to do about it.

It's here that even those who find nothing of interest in the Muppets themselves might find something valuable in "Level-Five Transporter Accident". I've talked elsewhere about the ways in which Spock's struggle with his "human half" plays out as a metaphor for experiencing mental health problems in a society which treats such issues as taboo. Spock is feeling like more and more is being put on him, with less and less support (note that the first thing he does after his current partner breaks up with him is call his ex, because he can think of no-one on the ship he can talk to). Everything is piling up inside his head, with no way to flush it out. He's constantly one more task away from a panic attack.

The puppet scenario reflects this perfectly. All of a sudden, Spock must literally do everybody's job. But it's not just that. Spock's fear about the next panic attack is reflected by this episode's recurring motif of constriction, (Spock is tied up at one point), his need for space that he doesn't feel he has (Pike notes that all the puppets can cram into small volumes, which of course leaves Spock as the only person who needs more space around him) and breathlessness. On the latter, we've got the resolution of the battle with the Orions requiring Spock pass out from lack of oxygen, but there's also the idea that puppets can survive in space because they don't need to breathe. Spock's dream simultaneously casts the Enterprise as somewhere he is trapped, and underlines how his fear of running out of breath isn't something anyone else on the crew seems to need to worry about. They can flush their problems no problem; hell, they can even flush themselves.

So yes, Spock's dream. I don't need to tell anyone reading this that "It was all a dream!" is usually considered one of the most aggravating endings in fiction. In this case, I'm perfectly happy with it. No small part of that is simply that the episode's premise was so utterly ludicrous that canonically declaring it as not having happened seemed the best possible conclusion. More than that, though, one of the reasons the dream ending tends to be so poorly received is that it allows the writers to make dramatic calls they know they won't have to follow through on - character deaths, world-changing events, that sort of thing. There's a reason "reset switch" is effectively a term of abuse within genre fandom.

Here, though, what's being handwaved away is an incredibly silly story about a handful of space pirates so incompetent they lost a fight with half a dozen tiny people made of felt and cotton wool. There's almost literally no weight to what we thought was happening, which means learning it didn't can't carry the same sense of being cheated of something. What actually mattered during the episode was the effect the situation was having on Spock, and what that said about his state of mind. Given that fact, learning we spent almost the whole episode inside that mind doesn't really strike me as a problem. Dreams tell us something about ourselves. I don't think it's hard to argue we learned more about where Spock is from the crews Muppetification being a dream, than we would be had it been "real".

Plus, too, it's not like the episode isn't warning us something is up. The inconstant way both voice commands and hand controls are being used, Scotty being trapped under a photon torpedo until he suddenly isn't (fun Who Framed Roger Rabbit reference there, by the way), the turbolifts sometimes needing Spock to work them, and other times not? One could be cynical here and argue that these clues might have been more obvious were the show not struggling to make things work more broadly, but by the time Spock leaves Scotty and Pelia in engineering only to find them on the bridge, it's clear there must be something up, even before Pelia notes the sheer ridiculousness of puppets being able to talk to each other in space. The script clearly knows it's being cheeky, too; note how the very final seconds teases whether we'll get the only more frustrating ending than "it was all a dream", namely "it was all a dream... OR WAS IT?". Honestly, I'm really not sure there was any better way to approach the "crew as puppets" concept. Whether this is prima facie evidence that this episode shouldn't exist at all, I expect people will have different opinions on. As far as I'm concerned, it made its case.

Crisis averted, then. It's not just that this is the best we could have expected from a SNW "puppet", episode. There's an effort to say something interesting things about our characters in a way I wasn't expecting (La'An's relief at remaining a puppet was a particularly clever moment). It's also worth noting that voiceover work and on-screen acting are not precisely equivalent, and the cast here frankly do a much better job of voicing their puppets than David Boreanez did in "Smile Time" (this is also the first time since she was introduced that Pelia has felt like she's in the same show as everyone else).

Perhaps the last season and a half of this show has led me to lower my standards so much that almost any thematically competent story feels like progress. I don't think I'd have thought as much of this episode had it happened two years earlier, and it doesn't feel like a great sign that this is my second-favourite episode of the season thus far. We are where we are, though. This is both one of the season's better explorations of a genre, and one of the smarter ways to use that genre to say something about the characters the show is ostensibly about. We can wish success meant something more than baseline competence, but right now, any episode free of colossal screw-ups counts as a win.

It's a bar low enough for a puppet to clamber over, and at the end of the day, these ones did.

[1] The other being "Subspace Rhapsody", and the idea of a "musical episode". In point of fact, 2002's "Once More With Feeling" was neither the first TV episode to be a musical (Cop Rock was doing it back in 1990), or even the first episode of a TV show to do a musical episode as a one-off (Chicago Hope did "Brain Salad Surgery" in 1997). Still, there's no getting away from the fact that, in terms of the sci-fi/fantasy genre, Whedon's episode is the one everyone thinks of as the wellspring.

Ordering

1. The Griffin Incident 2. Level-Five Transporter Accident 3. Human Best Friend 4. Valles Marineris 5. A Case Of Chiaoscuro