Paramount
The second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, very similar to the first one, has been enjoyable a minimum of partly as a result of the present itself shouldn’t be all that new or unusual.
The characters and visuals and particular plot constructs are new, however at its coronary heart the present is a painstaking reconstruction of The Next Generation components from Star Trek‘s 90s-era inventive and business peak: ensemble forged, primarily episodic storytelling with calmly serialized character improvement and recurring arcs, and a willingness to combine high-concept sci-fi with simply the correct amount of silliness. It’s additionally superb at taking outdated Star Trek tropes—the transporter accident, the disease-on-the-ship, the talky courtroom thriller about the nature of humanity—and making them really feel recent once more.
Episode 7, which went up early this weekend to coincide with a Comic-Con screening, exhumes and expertly executes yet one more shopworn trope, one thing we’ve not seen on Star Trek since the days when Quark would possibly present up on the viewscreen of the Enterprise-D: the crossover episode. And regardless of the vast hole between Strange New Worlds and the animated Lower Decks, the mixing of the two shows’ disparate kinds comes collectively higher than any gimmicky try at cross-promotion has any proper to.
What is that this, a crossover episode?
Let me be clear about what I imply once I discuss “crossover episodes.” By its strictest definition, a “crossover episode” happens any time any fictional character from one present turns up on one other present. But there are nuances.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (and the common MCU-ification of vast swaths of the tv panorama) implies that broadly outlined “crossover episodes” occur all the time, and you might be anticipated to observe completely separate shows that suck however happen in the similar fictional universe to maintain up with essential plot developments on shows you wish to watch. That’s not fairly the sort of crossover episode I wish to talk about, although. Nor am I speaking about the instances when a personality on one present shows up on one other associated spinoff present (both quickly or completely) after the authentic present is canceled, like when Worf jumped over to Deep Space 9, or when Spike moved from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Angel, or when characters from Cheers sometimes popped up on Frasier.
The particular form of crossover episode that Strange New Worlds is executing is an deliberately gimmicky one-time factor that occurs between two established however separate shows, usually marketed closely in the hopes of encouraging cross-pollination between two shows’ fanbases. They usually require bending of one or each shows’ actuality to work—to the level that they sometimes create paradoxes the place one actor performs totally different characters that exist in the similar actuality, or the place Tony Soprano watches a present the place folks discuss the TV character Tony Soprano, or the place characters from one present exist in one other present each as fictional TV characters and as actual folks. I’m speaking about The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones, I’m speaking about characters from Mad About You exhibiting up on Friends, I’m speaking about Stewie from Family Guy speaking to David Boreanaz on Bones. That it feels foolish and a bit pressured is an element of the enjoyable.