Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.