“A Space Adventure Hour” Offers Excitement, Mystery, and a Muddled Message

I will probably annoy a lot of people by saying I didn’t like this episode as much as I perhaps should have. Listen - for the sake of the record, I did enjoy the conceit of the murder mystery. I did enjoy watching our cast play pastiches of the great names of Trek from all those years ago. I did enjoy an episode that thrust Martin Quinn’s Scotty into the limelight in a satisfying way. Did I enjoy it being a holodeck episode? Not really. Did I enjoy the message of the episode? I mean, I’m glad it had one. 

With Enterprise investigating a Neutron Star in the Blootar Nebula, La’an has been tasked by Starfleet with evaluating (testing to destruction) the newest tool in the technological asset: the Recreation Room (Holodeck), an iteration on older tactical simulations aimed at providing…game-based stimulation to a crew during deep space voyages. It’s new technology! Exciting! And La’an seems excited to test it! I guess? It would have been interesting to perhaps see the tech grow on her, despite resisting it, but instead she sort of throws herself into it with a sort of toneless eagerness. 

It is nice to see La’an explored more as a character - she has always been the most interesting of the new characters, both in terms of her origin and her development, and the ways in which she has evolved (and Christina Chong’s performance has evolved with her) have been a highlight of the show. Watching the once-aastere security chief pace with excitement over a storybook detective - let alone dance the Tango with Spock - demonstrates that the show can be dynamic when it wants to be.

So, with a nervous Scotty managing the Holodeck’s systems, La’an enters the story, her intrepid detective thrust into solving the murder of a studio executive in a manor filled with the worst, most terrible villains known to man: actors. It’s about as camp as you can imagine, especially once the holodeck ratchets up the mystery and kills Una - I mean Lucille Ball - I mean Sunny Lupino. From then on, it’s a very rote murder mystery plot: everyone’s got a motive, everyone’s out to get each other, and the twists and turns are very…predictable. The fun bit, of course, is the setting: this is the cast and crew of ‘The Last Frontier’, a Science Fiction Adventure show from 1969 that is about to get cancelled by the network for being too political/too expensive/a bit crap depending on who you ask. Wonder what that’s about, huh? 

Anson Mount as Capt. Pike and Paul Wesley as Kirk in season 3, Episode 4 of Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Marni Grossman Paramount+

The thing about going back onto the Holodeck for a murder mystery is it’s very…by the numbers. Certainly, Christina Chong sells the novelty and excitement of the first real exploration of the Holodeck, and yet the experience itself lacks much novelty to us. There isn’t much new going on here than in a classic TNG holodeck episode. Yes, having the main cast fill in for the holodeck characters is quite fun. The performances are excellent, especially Paul Wesley’s hammed-up Shatner impression - it is, apparently, all in the hand gestures (and weaponised incompetence). The standout “character” is Rose-Gooding as the agent Joni Gloss, who just feels like a serial character from a Columbo episode. In many senses, this is true of all the “characters”, from Mount’s TK Bellows through to Bab’s…Beatle? Manson brother? God knows. The whole A plot is therefore precariously balanced upon the fourth wall, propped by jokes about “short skirts” and rubber-suited aliens, plots that are technically about capitalism and the horrendous Dict-ion of Maxwell Saint. Things get even sillier once Spock arrives as La’an’s assistant, being very cold and Spock-like in front of the Hollywood holograms, “‘He doesn’t watch Television.’ ‘Oh, so he’s a Communist then.’” 

Scotty’s B plot, though ostensibly just consisting of the world’s most harassed IT technician, remains a lot more interesting than La’an’s murder mystery - mainly because Scotty develops throughout in a tangible way. This Mister Scott does not like help - at all - and he is determined not to rely on anyone…even as things start to visibly go wrong around him in a very drastic fashion. It is quite fun to watch Martin Quinn start to lose control of the situation, even as Number One and Uhura do their best to help him. My only feeling is that…this doesn't feel like the Scotty we knew from The Original Series. It’s a great character, yes! The writing is excellent! Quinn is bringing us a great performance! But this isn’t the grizzled old space engineer that Doohan gave us. Maybe that tracks, but considering this is only meant to be six or seven years before Doohan’s performance…I don’t know. The fact remains that it is good stuff. 

As the mystery plot develops along rather clear lines (I’m not going to reiterate it in full, except to say watching Mount stumble around with a slight beer belly like a character off of TJ Hooker is quite funny), you do begin to see the core messaging and intent of the plot begin to emerge: as the Enterprise begins to fall apart a little and Scotty struggles to let La’an know that she’s stuck inside the holographic murder box, the story-in-a-story begins to focus in on the idea of how important stories were. The mystery books used to make this holodeck story were the ones that inspired La’an to become a security officer, and (subtextually) kept her going through the trauma of her family’s death. And - when Joni Gloss defends The Last Frontier (over the dead body of Melissa Navia’s Lee Woods, of course), she speaks to what Science Fiction can do, and what Star Trek has done, in inspiring similar things in the real world through morality plays and the tough work of putting a (campy) mirror to society. 

Now this is a good message, and a heartfelt one, and you can tell the writers mean it. They should! This is why we like Star Trek! This is why we want to watch it! It’s just…one of my longstanding critiques about Strange New Worlds is that, as a Trek show, it is largely about telling the audience about what Star Trek is, and what it can do, instead of showing us. It is one thing to have our characters talk about how important Science Fiction can be - it is another thing to actually do that. It’s not like the year 2025 is devoid of crises, events and phenomena that Trek could be allegorising, and yet Strange New Worlds is much happier pleasing an audience with comfortable stories than challenging them with uncomfortable ones. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe audiences want cosy and fun in a time of crises. But it’s hardly like the 1960s were quiet and peaceful, is it?

So, with the Enterprise starting to seize up as the holodeck takes over the computer, and La’an’s life threatened by a pistol-toting TK Bellows (please let Anson Mount be in a Columbo, he’d have so much fun), everything comes to head as we discover that Spock - holo Spock, to be correct, was the twist murderer, created by the computer to hoodwink her! What a twist! What a cop-out! What a - well, okay, maybe it does have a purpose. With the mystery solved and the holodeck shut off, everyone agrees to stick the device back in a box and let someone else figure it out in, oh, a century or so. All’s well that ends well - especially for La’an and Spock, who have…figured each other out.

Two to Tango. Ethan Peck as Spock and Christina Chong as La'an in season 3, Episode 4 of Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Marni Grossman Paramount+

 I haven’t really touched it yet but there has been this long threat of romantic tension running through this episode between La’an and Spock that…works? I suppose? Weirdly, I like it. Mainly because I think Chong and Peck sell it better than Bush and Peck ever did. More importantly, unlike the Chapel and Spock plot, both parties this time demonstrate a great deal of agency in the situation. I hesitate to use the term earned, but I was a lot less annoyed about this final interpersonal twist than I thought I would be. It does make the show even more Soap-Opera-y than other shows, but here we are. 

"A Space Adventure Hour" is fun television (a phrase I’ve been saying a lot so far this season), yet it falls into the same pitfalls as the rest of Season 3. It’s A plot is middling to plodding, held up less by good pacing and direction than by fun acting and subversions of expectations. It is fun to see our cast play washed-out iterations of 1960s actors, writers and producers. It would be better if there was something more interesting going on with the plot than a rote “holodeck goes wrong!” story: hell, even the first proper holodeck story ("The Big Goodbye") has the big twist with the holo-gangsters realising they’re fictional characters! The plot also doesn’t play that much with the prototype nature of the ‘Recreation Room’, beyond the (as I said, rote) computer processing crisis it inflicts within the B-plot. It’s all very slick, it’s all very recognisable, it’s all very…safe.

Yet within the B plot - and the general character work of Spock and La’an - there are further signs that the show is capable of better. Scotty learning to seek help from Uhura (setting the foundations of the strong working relationship they have in TOS) is good stuff, as is the exploration of why he feels that way and how being on Enterprise can help him get over it. I want more of that kind of inter-crew stuff, and (like with "Shuttle to Kenfori") the A plot is just…kind of in the way.

Strange New Worlds returns next week with ‘Through the Lens of Time’.