this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 3x04 "A Space Adventure Hour"
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It's a classic Star Trek storyline but it still checks out. Also love seeing La'an leading the episode
Edit: on further reflection, whilst I enjoyed the episode (all the call backs to TOS vibes were great), I think this shows the weakness of having shorter seasons, in that there's less space (pun intended) for "frivolous" capers like this.
I do love that the staff, be they actors, wardrobe, production, etc don't have an insane routine like the old days but maintain that at least 12-15 episodes per season is a nice compromise
I think this is why we need more animated Star Trek. While no recent animated Trek show has really managed to get past the equivalent total runtime to a ~5 season, 10 50-minute episode Trek series, I think animation could be a medium to get past some of the budgetary and labor limitations of a live action show in order to return to something closer to a TNG-style season. Not only that, but you could have the cast doing and interacting with things that would simply be impossible to do with any quality in a live-action show.
Although truth be told, I think half my opinion is just fueled by sourness over the end of Lower Decks and Prodigy. I really think though that animation could be the medium for a serious mainline Star Trek series that isn't (originally intended as) an excursion into a genre. Unfortunately, we sort of live in an animation dark age because of executive and general stupidity.
I've thought about having a more serious animated series in the franchise, and I think it could work. There would of course be a group of people that wouldn't watch because it's not live action, but depending on how they do it the costs could be a fair amount less too.
Now I feel like a really awesome thing would be something like Star Trek: Excelsior as an animated series that focuses on Captain Sulu after Generations.
I mean, Patrick Stewart did Picard in his 80s, and Takei’s only 3 years older than Stewart. However, Takei would probably be well into his 90s by the time this hypothetical series went into production; you’d also probably have to audition an understudy from the start in case Takei kicked the bucket.
That would be an intriguing idea, and animation would be a good way to do it too! I would usually prefer that they go the new ship and new crew route, but if they tell stories I'm interested in I would be happy to see it.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot while I've been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.
They do have the odd one-off "fun" episode in DS9 - this past week was "Our Man Bashir" which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren't really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.
When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that's much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock's vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that's about the extent of it at the moment.
And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there's missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn't even really there, so that's a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La'ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.
that is my only concern as well, in a 10 episode season if already 2 has been on the "frivolous side" there's not much left for actual scifi-exploration stuff.
In the other tv series you had 24 episodes each season, you can go around on 2 or 3 episodes each season with silly stuff that was welcome to change the tone from the more serious episodes, here I'm worried. I liked the episode thou, so I'm complaining, but I liked it.