I called it. That’s all I’m going to say. Rewind the tape to last week, because I called it on my own show and I called it again as a guest on somebody else’s. La’an and Spock are becoming a thing.

And my only question is why this show feels like it has to keep dealing with Spock’s relationship stuff. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But it’s now becoming a thing, and I think it’s almost becoming too much of a thing.

This is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3, episode 4, and it’s a fun episode. It isn’t a bad episode, by the way. What they do, they do well. The premise is that they’re going to investigate a thing, and the thing is literally unimportant. It’s a flare. The space sci-fi part of the hour is only there to give us a ticking clock later on. It’s a complete contrivance, and it’s fine.

What marks the rating down for me is everything else that got stacked on top of it.

A Black Room With Orange Lines

La’an gets called down by Pike and asked to test a new piece of technology. “The device we’re going to be testing is called the recreation room.” “Holodeck for short. Sounds better.”

Starfleet wants to know if these new recreation rooms are worth having posted on ships. It also gives Scotty something to do, because he’s working the test with her. The chief engineer is on shore leave, because we have to get that actress out to begin slowly pushing Scotty in. We’re seeing a lot of Scotty evolution this season.

But the crux of the problem is that we have holodeck technology. Not just any holodeck technology. Advanced holodeck technology, as if from The Next Generation.

Fans of the shows are going to say this is an anachronism, this is horrible, why would they have this. The episode tries to claim it’s a test, that we’re finding out the limitations, and all of that is fine. The problem is that it looks exactly like the holodeck from The Next Generation. It doesn’t look like early stages. If it had been a framework, something more rudimentary, I could go with it. But no. It’s a black square room with orange lines. It’s a holodeck, something we never saw in The Original Series.

It’s funny, because I hate getting hung up on things like this. I’m not normally the guy who does. But I am today.

It does at times feel like these writers are lazy. Somebody made that argument last week, that this show is creatively bankrupt, and it turned into the usual drama. My problem is never when they borrow from relevant stuff in their own era. My problem is when you get full body walking holograms like in Discovery season 1, when you’ve never had anything remotely like that. It’s like they can’t live in their own playground when it comes to the technology. Normally they do, and then they get bored. I just don’t understand what the issue is with telling the story inside the universe you’re in. You’re doing a fine job. Strange New Worlds didn’t need holodecks. You could’ve easily said you were testing an early form of this technology.

Why the Technology Is Too Much, Too Early

The mystery is framed around La’an because she’s the one running the test, and she loves mystery books of a specific type. So the computer combines the two. There’s a murder, and it happens on the set of a sci-fi show called The Last Frontier, which is essentially a riff on The Original Series.

They’ve borrowed Kirk as a character in it, though he isn’t actually Kirk. They borrowed Paul Wesley’s image because he’s in the system, in the transporter buffer. “I am known for my diction.”

I have an issue with that, because of how we’ve always understood the holodeck to work. It’s essentially replicator technology meeting transporter technology. And I’m talking The Next Generation here, because at this point in the timeline they didn’t have replicators. They had synthesizers, which is the precursor to the replicator and not the same thing.

So say I’m on the holodeck in The Next Generation and I ask for a Victorian room with a dining room table, a full dinner spread and music playing. The transporter has the patterns of all of those items and creates them in combination. The table is real. It gets built the same way the replicator builds everything. A person who walks into that room is a hard light construct. That’s a different set of parameters, and this episode has that same level of technology sitting right here.

If you remember the pilot of The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint,” they made a point that having holodecks on starships was a new thing. That’s 100 or so years in the future. Maybe it’s more like 80. Whatever the number is, it’s the far future. For this technology to be so completely the same is my first big gripe.

The Same Malfunctions, Decades Early

Say you can get past that. When they finally have the technology up and running, they’re having all the same problems that made up the holodeck adventures on The Next Generation. The exact same ones.

So you’re trying to tell me that from the inception of this technology, we’ve known there are things about it that aren’t safe.

It’s one thing to say the technology works this way, you have a malfunction, and it’s a one-off. Then it became another, and another, and another. By the end of the Next Generation era I would’ve been asking why in life we even have holodecks anymore. And then you get the logical conclusion, which is the Doctor from Voyager, a hard light construct who has sentience and walks off the holodeck with an emitter. Yay, hologram people are now real. That’s the eventual evolution of this.

But if we knew the problems now, it just creates anachronisms in the series. And I know I’m inconsistent. There are things that bother me and other things where I kind of go, whatever. This bothered me only because it’s such a departure. This episode felt like lazy writing to me.

Less 90210, More Sci-Fi

Which brings me back to where I started. La’an checks in on Spock, and he’s apparently decided to do dancing instead of his normal morning calisthenics. She joins him for a moment, and they have a moment. It’s a no-brainer. I literally called this last week.

What is this hard-on they have for Spock’s love life? I don’t need it. Spend less time 90210ing me and more time giving me an actual sci-fi adventure show. Please. Anything else feels lazy, and you guys are not supposed to be lazy.

What the Mystery Got Right

I’m not a huge fan of this episode. But I didn’t hate it. I actually enjoyed it a lot.

I enjoyed seeing Paul Wesley do the greatest Shatner impression ever. I enjoyed everybody playing who they’re supposed to be, roughly speaking, in that universe. I loved everything about the mystery itself. I thought it was cool.

And once you get past all the holodeck stuff, I love that the computer used Spock as the person nobody would expect. He did it. Spoilers. He did it. But it wasn’t him. The holodeck created him. La’an says it right to his face: “You’re a hologram. You have been since the moment I walked into the holodeck. I asked the computer for a mystery made for me, and it gave me you, because it knew I’d never suspect him.”

It felt very reminiscent of Data, when the holodeck was first asked for an enemy comparable to his intelligence. “Create an adversary capable of defeating Data.” Remember when he was Sherlock Holmes, and it gave us Moriarty. It’s the same premise.

So again, they’re borrowing better writing from better shows, and they’re doing it badly. It’s a little patchwork. This is the first episode I’ve seen that made me think last week’s critic has a point in some places.

At the end of the day, I still like the episode. I like what they’re doing. I just want them to come back to the show they’re actually making, with a little less glitz and glamour and more fundamentals. I’m not going to call it a filler episode, but it certainly felt filler-ish. It was fillery. I’ll go there with it.

The Verdict

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3, episode 4 lands at a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t impressed. I was a little bit bored at times. I like some of the things they’re doing. Overall, it’s not bad, but it’s not great. So I’m going with my classic on this one. Stan, if you’re watching, it’s a 7 out of 10.

It’s kind of mediocre in the story and plot department, and the anachronisms with the Next Generation holodeck stuff really detracted from it. I wish they’d done more with the ideas. They’re fun ideas. I feel like they could’ve come together a little better. Can we get back to telling unique adventures that take us somewhere inside this universe?

Hopefully next week brings a better installment.

Let me know what you think of that first gripe in the comments on the video above. Is a full Next Generation holodeck on Pike’s ship a problem for you, or am I the one getting hung up? Good, bad, ugly and indifferent. Just be polite.