It’s the Puppet One.

Our esteemed host apologized for inadvertently sticking me with the puppet episode; well, Adam, I don’t think you’re really sorry one goddamn bit, you bastard. This episode is first and foremost a trap built for reviewers, an attractive nuisance, a fork in the road that will reveal one to be either a joyless scold or a vacuous stan. I think the rest of you on this little blog are probably having a boozy brunch right about now, unfurling on poolside chaises or toasting your intrepidity at getting to sit this one out like the handsome folk carousing at the end of The Sting, while I sit here processing the TV equivalent of a mugging.

It wasn’t even that bad. There’s a kind of bad, a “Spock’s Brain” kind of bad, a bafflement that cools into a gleeful but pitying sensation that you just witnessed someone’s panicked and hungover dressing at a forgotten alarm, their shirt inside out as they plan to eat something that stains in a moving car, that just doesn’t seem to happen much anymore (but as our host reminded me, Section 31: The Motion Picture exists, so what the hell do I know? Nothing. Naught but air between the ears). Perhaps the seasons are too short these days for anyone to truly, deeply phone it in or ignore the brief; they don’t hand out benzedrine at the studio commissary anymore and maybe that’s a factor too.

It’s not that it was goofy and impossible, either. I won a ‘Star Trek IQ’ contest at a con once and won a tree ornament of the Enterprise-C as my spoils, so I assure you I am a credentialed expert in the instances where Starfleet ran into historical figures or got shrunk to miniscule proportions or it turned out Krampus was real and could only be defeated by channeling Christmas cheer through the main deflector. It’s not even the first time anyone in this sprawling universe has been turned into a puppet- Lt. Kayshon of the Cerritos merits that distinction, in an episode-length metatextual defense (amidst a series-length metatextual defense) of the notion that the half of Trek that’s just unhinged playground fantasias is in fact a worthy half. Nor is it the first time the crew has gone through a gravitas-reducing transformation and had to learn to use their new nature to pull a fast one on melodrama pirates...

Ah, son of a bitch- they just remade ‘Rascals,’ didn’t they?

I didn’t think the hellmouth now gaped so wide as to compel me to come out with “you gotta hand it to ‘Rascals’,” but the median media consumption experience of late seems to be a 30 second genAI clip of a hentai girl pushing syrup-covered elevator buttons for the pervy ASMR crowd or some equally egregious shit, so here we are. To the extent that you can salvage anything worthwhile from the avatar of “we are exhausted and out of money this week” that is ‘Rascals,’ it’s that the comedy and pathos hinges upon Picard, Ro, and Guinan remaining very much themselves, and those selves are layered and fabulously interesting. Compare Baby!Picard’s chagrin and improvisational flair in declaring Riker “his number one dad” to Puppet!Pike’s manic mashing of the touch screens on his new chair. The former is funny, because it’s a head-on collision between Picard’s formality and his deep resourcefulness. The latter is supposed to be funny, but Captain Pike impotently swiping at his buttons is not what Captain Pike would do as a puppet, it’s what a generic puppet character would do.

There’s even a moment at the end of ‘Rascals’ when Baby!Ro, her spirit still bruised by the Cardassian occupation despite her diminished stature, takes a long moment to play with Grown!Guinan and, maybe, hold back the darkness inside just a bit. It’s good. It’s what all this is for, if just for that instant...in the episode where the plucky kids have to defeat the idiot villains in a pastiche of some second-string ‘90s child star vehicle. Look what you people have made me do. Look how they massacred my boy.

That earnest insistence on character is ultimately the superpower of the Muppets themselves. Muppet Treasure Island and A Muppet Christmas Carol are gems I will defend to the death, and the birth of the ‘everyone is a Muppet except for one human’ game that clearly inspired this episode. However, the joke in those movies isn’t that, say, Bob Cratchit is a puppet, it’s that he’s Kermit the Frog, and Kermit is known to be an earnest, occasionally stern, endlessly put upon, but also profoundly kind, playful, and humane being that just so happens to be made of felt and is three feet tall. The joke isn’t that the Muppets can’t do things with their three-fingered hands on wires- it’s that they can. Even when, as in this video, the Muppets come to terms with their synthetic nature, they don’t stop being themselves. They are, even in their most outlandish incarnations and behaviors, their own straight men (in the comedy sense- Pepe, Rizzo, and Gonzo are all no doubt a lil’ freaky).

Which is, I suppose, my roundabout way of saying my biggest issue with (sigh) the puppet episode is that these characters feel so uninspiring that there’s no joke to be made in making them puppets. It’s (siiiiigh) a bad puppet episode. This version of Scotty, moping about marginally imperfect grades like a high school senior biting their nails that they won’t get into all the Ivies, doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the stubborn and sarcastic third in command of Kirk’s ship played by a guy who got his finger shot off on D-Day. If Khan heard his descendant La’an whining like that, he’d disown her. T’Pring wasn’t wrong that the ship sure seems to have a lot of hijinks- but, like, is that the thing now? Do they know how dangerous a course it is they plot, making ‘hijinks’ their thing in a collective metashow that has always had (fussy, imperfect, pretentious) aspirations to be about something? Even Lower Decks, the crass adult autoparody cartoon that didn’t strike me as a good idea at the time, won me over most weeks because it knew the joke was that these people wanted to be the serious, self-possessed hyperfunctional adults that defined the other half the allure of the show, besides the madcap nonsense, and sweetly imagined that maybe the aspiring misfits could join the ranks of the competent if they tried.

Everyone’s favorite aunt Ursula le Guin said it best: “I like stiff, stuffy, earnest, serious, conscientious, responsible people, like Mr. Darcy and the Romans.” Me too. Even in my comedy. Spock won’t cut it alone.

And it’s a DREAM? A fucking dream? You guys are on a ship that runs into an illusion planet or an alien conman with powerful drugs or a holodeck or a fickle trickster god every week and you went with ‘lol Spock had a craaaazy dream’? You have a STARSHIP and went with ‘dream’? Do the thing or don’t, ya cowards.