Strange New Worlds' Six Month Puppet Episode Was Secretly About Breaking Spock

The showrunners have said they spent six months building the puppet episode of Strange New Worlds, running that build alongside everything else the show still had to shoot, with an entire crew hired that this production didn't have before. From the outside that sounds absurd for what looks like a joke where the crew turns into puppets. It took me until the last ten minutes of the episode to work out what all of that effort was actually for, and once I saw it I could not stop seeing it.

Before I get into any of that, I have to be honest about where I'm standing. I love puppets, not as a bit but as an art form. I wanted to be a puppeteer as a kid, I had a puppet growing up, and I own a professional grade one now. That means I'm exactly the person this episode was built for, which means my saying I liked it is worth nothing on its own. If the argument for this episode only works because I like felt, it isn't an argument, and I'd rather find that out than pretend otherwise.

My first reaction to the Strange New Worlds puppet episode was that it was stupid, and it took the back half to change my mind

When this was announced, I wasn't charitable about it either. My honest first reaction was the same one a lot of people probably had: what are they doing? For the first 40 minutes of actually watching it, I was saying out loud, more than once, that this was stupid. Somewhere in the back half it flipped for me, and I found myself thinking that it was actually kind of clever, even though the premise was still ridiculous.

Then the last ten minutes happened and I sat back. The part that got me first, though, had nothing to do with the story. It was the money.

These are not cheap puppets, they're Jim Henson Creature Shop builds that likely cost thousands each

The word puppet is doing damage here, because people picture a sock. What's on screen is full Muppet grade construction. The end credit card reads Puppets by Jim Henson Creature Shop, not the Jim Henson Company, a distinction worth making since I've seen both names printed this week. TrekCore reported that the Creature Shop didn't just build these puppets, they operated them too.

I have a friend who works at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta who restores old Sesame Street and Muppet puppets and is classically Henson trained, which produces a very specific looking object you can spot across a room. Nobody has published a budget for this episode, and I went looking, so I can't tell you what it actually cost. What I can tell you is what my friend charges: a completed puppet or mascot suit runs somewhere between six and ten thousand dollars depending on the internals, working arms, hand ability, wiring. Go count the puppets in the episode, and that's just what's sitting on the shelf before you even show up.

The real expense may have been reworking a standing set to hide a puppeteer crew, though nobody has confirmed that happened here

The puppets aren't the expensive part. When you shoot puppets on a standing set, the performer has to physically be somewhere, which normally means either cutting the floor open to carve a path for the puppeteer or rebuilding the floor into risers. I'm not telling you that's exactly what they did here, because nobody has actually said so, and I'm not going to invent it for you. But that is how this is normally accomplished, and there is no cheap version of it on a standing set for an ongoing series that still has to shoot every other episode.

Henry Alonso Myers said it was "easily more than 6 months of work," and that they had to staff an entire crew of puppeteers on top of the crew they already had. Akiva Goldsman said that alongside every normal prep meeting for every episode, there was always a separate puppet meeting.

Calling this a gimmick doesn't hold up because there's no audience left to hook

A gimmick is a hook, and a hook exists to go get you an audience you haven't got. Strange New Worlds has five more episodes after this one and then a final season of only six before it's finished. Goldsman called that last season a six episode goodbye that walks these characters to their known future. There's nobody left to hook.

That's also why the dare behind it doesn't bother me. Anson Mount has said the whole thing started as a dare the cast threw at the writers, and if you've spent any time on a set you know exactly why that's true: somebody hands you a word you have to work into an episode, somebody bets you can't. The dare is how it started. Six months of work is what happened afterward, and only one of those two things ends up on screen.

Star Trek has always used silly formats to hide real character work, from Shore Leave's giant rabbit to Enterprise's Vanishing Point

Since the money wasn't chasing an audience and wasn't an accident, the other easy answer was that it's a stunt, a swing for the sake of swinging. I couldn't make that one work either, because this franchise has done this from the very beginning. The original series episode Shore Leave has a planet that manifests whatever the crew is thinking about, including a man in a giant rabbit suit, played dead straight, Alice in Wonderland and everything. You accept it not because the effect holds up, but because the episode was about something and the rabbit was how you got there.

Data got two dream episodes that weren't stunts either: Birthright in 1993, where his father shows up as a blacksmith, and Phantasms eight months later, both written by Brannon Braga, the second directed by Patrick Stewart. That's real money and the lead actor put behind the idea that the inside of a character's head is a location worth building. Go back further and the deepest cut is the very first Star Trek ever shot, The Cage, where Talosians put Pike inside illusions built from his own wants. That footage was reused in The Menagerie in 1966, and what the illusion unpacks there is Spock's career ending loyalty to Pike. Discovery did the same thing to the same character seven years ago, with Spock's mind scrambled and the Talosians' projection putting him back together, if memory serves. The one I didn't expect to find is Enterprise's 2002 episode Vanishing Point, where Hoshi Sato is transported off a planet, starts going invisible and intangible, and watches the crew move on without her, only for the whole hour to have happened in 8.3 seconds inside the transporter's pattern buffer.

If you want to say you don't want this level of absurdity in your Star Trek, that's a real position and I've got no argument against it, that's taste. But the franchise has always gone here, and the tradition has one rule that has nothing to do with how silly the frame is: break the format and put nothing inside it, and you've made a stunt. Break it and load it, and you've made what I've started calling a loaded frame, which is the only kind worth doing.

What's actually inside the frame is Spock, and this season has been walking him backward toward Amok Time

Strange New Worlds is going down, in my view, as Spock's college years, the experimentation era where you break it off with the fiancee back home to find out what else is out there, try things, some of them embarrassing, and eventually come back around recognizable. This season has been waking him back up three separate times, not three in a row.

In episode one, watch him in the conference room: colder and more analytical than we've seen him, to the point where people crack jokes around him and he doesn't get them and doesn't pretend to. Nobody wrote about that when I went and read the premiere coverage, and that's my read, not a reported one. Episode two, the horror episode, is the clearer example: T'Pring appears as an apparition and goes straight at his Vulcan identity, ties him down in sick bay and starts taking his ears off. Get the direction right, because it's easy to invert: she isn't making him more Vulcan, she's making him more human, and the way out is a meditative logic exercise, so he escapes using the most Vulcan tool he owns. Episode four is the one that doesn't fit my read. Spock is barely in it, and his one real beat is dismissing a crew member's concern about a probe in an episode that's entirely about that dismissed instinct being correct. I sat that one out rather than defend a premise I thought was contrived, because if you only ever show the episodes that fit, you're not describing a pattern, you're building one.

Ethan Peck says the show is turning Spock back into the analytical original series version, and Goldsman has confirmed where that road ends

I met Ethan Peck at a convention, and what stuck with me was the difference between him and Anson Mount. Mount plays it like an actor's actor doing the job well. Peck loves Star Trek and loves playing Spock in a way you can hear across a table. So when he said at CCXP in Mexico this spring that they're working to turn this more emotional Spock into the more computational, analytical Spock from the original series, I didn't hear a press line, I heard him.

Akiva Goldsman said in July that by the time the show reaches Amok Time, Spock and Chapel's relationship is not where it was left, adding that "every coloring book has lines, and the lines of ours are where we end up." Amok Time aired in 1967 and has been sitting at the end of this arc the whole time like a wall. That reframes the season for me: this isn't a show doing a bit, it's a show spending its last year putting a character back where it found him, one episode at a time, and the puppet episode is where that finishes.

The reveal in the last ten minutes shows the whole thing happened in Spock's head, and that he chose logic rather than hid behind it

Spock wakes up in his own quarters and Chapel is there to meet him, and she isn't a puppet, she never was. There was a transporter accident, but what it actually damaged was his shuttle and some buoys. Everybody turning into felt happened inside his head while he was unconscious. My gut reaction was that this made the whole insane hour make sense, and every problem I had with it seemed to evaporate. That's a dangerous reaction, because a twist that retroactively excuses everything in front of it is a cheat, and there's a real complaint that the show runs out of things to do with the puppets before the hour is up. The reveal doesn't make that complaint go away. The dream doesn't forgive the silly hour, it tells you what the silly hour was in service to.

Inside the dream, someone tells Spock flat out that the situation can't be met with logic, that the chaos is the solution, not the obstacle. Spock says, "I know what to do," and takes the captain's chair and shuts off life support to knock out the boarding party, a cold, ruthless, completely Vulcan calculation. He doesn't abandon logic to win in there, he needed the chaos in order to use it. When he wakes, he tells Chapel that in that state she taught him how to face anxiety and accept illogical things, and she tells him that's a relief, because that's exactly why she came aboard in the first place. Asked whether he still wants to go back to a life of logic, he says, "Very much so." Both of those things are true minutes apart: he's learned to sit with the illogical, and he wants order more than he did before. That's not a contradiction, it's a man who's proved to himself he can survive the chaos and picks logic anyway, which is different from hiding behind it. Canon tells you where Spock lands. It doesn't tell you he chose it, and that choice is what they put inside a puppet show.

My verdict: a nine as production, a seven as story, landing around an eight overall

That finally answers what I couldn't work out at the start. They hired a crew they didn't have, built puppets that cost what a used car costs one at a time, and almost certainly cut into a standing set that has to keep shooting, all so that one man could work something out in his sleep and wake up knowing who he wants to be. Nobody spends that to land a joke when there's no audience left to sell the joke to. You spend it because the silly frame is the only place you can put a decision that big without the show turning into a lecture about it.

As production, I'd call it a nine and I won't be argued down, given the build, the performance, the staging, and the logistics of getting a puppeteer crew inside a standing set on a show that still has to make its schedule. As an hour of story it's probably closer to a seven, since it sags in the middle and the reveal is carrying more than a reveal should have to. Where it actually lands for me is around an eight out of ten. What almost cost me this episode wasn't the puppets, it was a habit of asking whether a show was allowed to do a thing instead of asking what the thing did, and that question isn't criticism, it's a permission slip that will stop you at the door of every interesting episode ever made.

What's the format break you wrote off before watching, and were wrong about?