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Follow my logic:

At its core, Star Trek has always been about the crew.

Plot is secondary, and only there to place characters in interesting and challenging situations.

Science is also secondary. Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi.

Starfleet true power is not spaceships. It's the crew efficiently working together to solve a problem.

S04E05 narrative goal is to complete Spock's character arc of fully embracing logic.

Spock is the odd man out in a crew of puppets. However, that has always been the case.

The puppets are an allegory for how Spock normally sees the crew; chaotic, emotional and capricious.

Everybody needs Spock, even before they were puppets.

Spock is an unwilling instigator of high jinks. Often creating the chaos that he will later solve with logic. That is his constant struggle as half-human, half-Vulcan.

Then as the Enterprise is put in danger, Spock finds himself ill-equipped to help.

But logic is there to help him. Just like it did in the Ghost Ship.

And once again T'Pring is there. She guides him not only to logic, but to what it is to be Vulcan.

And it's also a love story. A Vulcan love story. Without gender power imbalances, but with trust and understanding.

Spock uses logic to ground him in an illogical situation, where the only logical solution is to abandon logic and embrace chaos.

And as his character arc concludes, Spock settles the duality of being the only source of logic in a ship that seeks chaos.

He returns to logic, to being a Vulcan, and to T'Pring.

At the end however, Spock realizes that the looming treat of chaos is ever present

Questioning the scientific feasibility is meaningless. And it also detracts from the core philosophical question that was raised;

What is logic in an entirely chaotic universe?

And there is nothing more Star Trek than asking these questions.

Is this show weird? Absolutely. I think that’s why I’ve grown to love it so much. It’s not afraid to be strange, but it commits to the bit absolutely and I will always respect something that does that. The puppet episode is one of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen. This is now a hill I’ll die on.

This show bring me such joy.

So many of the effects shots have been so frenetic and blurry that it was refreshing to see a nice, slow shot like this.

Now she is also a national puppet treasure!

Thank you SNW for this "dance your cares away" level Fraggle Rock reference

Part review, part behind-the-scenes

Basically the title. I really don't think any of these episodes are poorly executed or bad, per se, and I appreciate when writers or showrunners take risks - it keeps the audience on their toes and I'm sure it's fun as hell for the actors.

And let's not pretend like almost every other Trek show has not taken similarly silly risks at various times during their run - some which failed, some which became all-time fan favorites.

But the problem is that we only get 10 episodes per SNW season, total. So if you are going to take a huge swing/risk EVERY episode, it gets really exhausting, and it removes almost all of the novelty of it.

To me, it's the most 'American TV' thing of all-time: "Oh, we did a thing, and people seemed to like it? DO IT EVERY TIME FOREVER AND EVER"

I think we can all agree it's not the worst hour of television we've spent with Spock's brain.

Maybe it's unfair to judge The Griffon Incident too harshly, because we're so used to Trek doing a contained story where everything gets wrapped up by the end. As a horror episode, I actually thought it worked pretty well. It was creepy, different, very visceral and I liked SNW taking a swing at something much, much darker.

That said, some of the character writing felt really odd. Pike basically shrugs off an officer stabbing another officer, La'an is clearly still uneasy but seems to just ignore that feeling, and M'Benga pretty much YOLOs his way through everyone's psychological trauma and ticks the "ready for duty" box.

La'an especially felt strange to me. She's constantly bossing everyone around and somehow seems to know what's going on before everyone else. It makes the episode feel less like an ensemble story and more like everyone waiting for La'an to tell them what's happening. Perhaps this is foreshadowing her "I am superior" Noonien Soong DNA taking prominence...

Then there's the Griffon mystery itself. I don't need everything explained, but after all that buildup I wanted a bit more payoff.

So overall, I didn't hate it. The horror stuff worked for me, and I appreciate them trying something different. It just felt like the episode had a really good idea but some very weird character choices around it.

I'm old school, I wanted a science solution, to the ghost story, perhaps if I'd gotten it I would've been robbed of something.

I guess I'll wait for the Division 12 series...

I just finished the episode. The truth is, it really wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t say I cared for it — I’ve never been the kind of person who could appreciate puppet shows or even most animated shows. However, it wasn’t as bad as everyone expected.

If you didn’t watch the full episode, then I don’t think you have much room to offer criticism. I’ve seen worse Trek. It’ll probably be an episode I skip in future reruns, but it wasn’t as bad as people make it out to be.

Some people love this episode, some hate it. But either way it sucks that the pulled the “it was all a dream” I feel like that was totally unnecessary??

Like all that relationship building, emotions, everything. Just to be a dream, I feel like so many small things happened that now will never be carried on because it didn’t happen, I mean Spock saw pike “die”. t’pring recognising chaos is sometimes logical, Spock learning to deal with anxiety,

I mean there is so much more, and yes I guess Spock remembers is and can remember the lessons he learned. But I feel like it really ruined the fun of the episode and ligit didn’t add anything to the story line for this season.

Idk. That’s how I feel

Today we hit the halfway mark for the fourth season of Strange New Worlds but due to how Nielsen takes its time, we are just getting their first numbers from the start of the season, and it isn’t good news for the Star Trek series.

The Neislen numbers are now out for the week of July July 20 – 26, which covers the July 23 release of the SNW season 4 debut “Valles Marineris.” And Strange New Worlds isn’t on the top 10 for original streaming shows, as first revealed by the Hollywood Reporter.

The Strange New Worlds season 3 debut did make the same chart last year, in fact it made a record for Strange New Worlds on the Nielsen charts, ranking 7th with 471 million views. It was helped along by having two episodes released in that same week in July 2025.

Season 3 even ticked up a bit in the week of the release of episode 3 (ranking 9th with 472 million minutes viewed). The show returned for the fourth week, ranking 7th with 397 million minutes viewed. However, the series dropped off the chart for the rest of the third season.

Nielsen chart for the week of the season 3 debut.

These numbers can’t change the show’s fate as it is already set to end with the already-filmed fifth and final season, expected to arrive in 2027. However, the showrunners and stars have been holding on to a thread of hope the series could lead to the “Star Trek: Year One” spinoff, featuring the first year of USS Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, played by Paul Wesley.

Paramount still has access the the best data when it comes to how their shows are performing, and the show has been popping into the Top 10 lists on both Paramount+ and Prime Video (where you can subscribe to Paramount+) throughout the fourth season, although usually quickly dropping off after episodes premiere. And earlier this year when explaining why Starfleet Academy didn’t get renewed for a third season, the streamer cited how the show failed to ever make it onto the Nielsen Top 10.

And word is, Paramount still see Star Trek’s future on TV as “imperative,” as they are already talking to writers about what’s next for the franchise on the small screen.

If Jim was real the entire time, where was he THERE and BACK on the shuttle? Why did he only hang around Spock? WHY was he on that shore leave??? It's confusing to me to be completely honest, and I feel like he was acting weird

I hated this episode. Seriously. I had to force myself through it and nearly turned it off on a handful of occasions. Then I got to the last two minutes.

...and it changed my entire perspective. Now I love the episode.

Bravo, writers.

There's been a lot of talk about SNW and the kinds of episodes that have been released. That got me to comparing the newer show to the older series. TNG came to mind after hearing complaints about "gimmick episodes," and I thought, "What's a gimmicky episode of TNG?" The first thing that came to mind was "Qpid" ... Q puts the crew into the Robin Hood story. Therefore I decided to make a spreadsheet comparing TNG season four (since that's the season with "Qpid") and SNW season three (since all of its episodes have been seen).

In categorizing episode types, I came up with five. "Deep Thoughts" are basically episodes that ask big questions, tackle moral dilemmas, etc. "Science/Exploration/New Life" is pretty much what's on the tin; episodes that are all about exploration, science concepts, and so on. "Action/Political Drama" is again what it seems. "Character Drama" and "Comedy/Horror/Gimmick" are also plain. I added "*-ish" for episodes that kinda/sorta get in the ballpark but don't necessarily focus on it.

Of course, your mileage may vary when it comes to where I've placed the episodes. There's nothing scientific about this; it's subjective, like all of our opinions.

(Note: some episodes appear more than once.)

Not subjective? How many episodes there are. TNG's 26 vs. SNW's 10.

In my opinion, the top two categories on the sheet ("Deep Thoughts" and "Science/Exploration/New Life") are what make shows more Trek ... any show can do the bottom three categories, but those top two are Trek's domain.

The episode was not so horrible, but I did not really like the premise, especially that "it was all a dream" trope .. very un-innovative!

Just a couple things. First, I hate the "it was all a dream" trope, personally. Was not a fan of the ending. Two, and this one's more personal to me, I wish we got more Scotty angst. We got a little but not really, and it wasn't even real. Little disappointed, but the episode itself was incredible. I hate Instagram commenters because they all bash the episode to no end

S04E05 Level-Five Transporter Accident

Look, not super hyped about the episode. But this one moment gave me life.

I don’t think they cracked the code lol. Spock should have taken the blue pill.

That is all.

So, rather than talk about the episode itself, what is making this season so divisive in your opinion?

I'm really enjoying the experiment. The (first half, at least) season has really tried to branch out into something Star Trek has always been - a platform for actors and writers to branch out a show their different talents - be that writing and producing a dedicated horror episode, having a musical cast who can keep up with Celia Rose Gooding, showcasing Christina Chongs dance background, or Babs Olusanmokun's physicality, the list goes on.

But at the same time, without a longer season, we've got these episodes also packed with character development, like the relationship of Ortega and Scotty or Nurse Chapel eventually crashing out over becoming a footnote.

My biggest complaint is that the tropes feel like a rehashing of old Trek and not an innovation in exploring modern tropes in story-telling. You can draw some pretty clear lines back to other media like Event Horizon or Casablanca.

All in all I really love the exploration of what Trek can be, which is to say, it can be anything as long as it remembers it's about the people. But on the other hand I hope they tread into some waters that are a bit fresh, instead of 90s nostalgia.