The long-awaited puppet episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds beamed onto Paramount+ this week, maybe the most out-there swing yet for a show that never met a gimmick it didn’t like. But much like season two’s musical episode, “Subspace Rhapsody,” season four’s “Level-Five Transporter Accident” manages to still feel like Star Trek—despite the fact that most of the characters have gotten a Jim Henson’s Creature Shop makeover.
Strange New Worlds executive producer Henry Alonso Myers, who co-wrote “Level-Five Transporter Accident” with Dana Horgan, explained how the show approached that challenge.
“We spent a lot of time trying to basically make sure that it worked and felt genuinely like a Star Trek episode,” he told TV Insider. “Yes, we were going to have fun. Yes, we were going to do all of these things, but if it doesn’t feel like Star Trek, what are we doing? That was what we had to hold to throughout the entire episode. I mean, one, we had not done a transporter accident episode yet, and we felt like this was an opportunity to do a transporter accident at a level which it had not been done before in Star Trek.”
And if you’re going to do a puppet episode, the Strange New Worlds team figured, you really have to go all out. “And then the other thing was if you just had one puppet, that wouldn’t be, I feel like, us rising to the occasion,” Myers said. “We really wanted to try to make it as big and as bold and push the edges of it as much as we possibly could.”
In a separate interview with Variety, Strange New Worlds star Ethan Peck, who plays Spock, confessed he didn’t quite believe the puppet episode was real until he actually saw the new versions of his co-stars.
“We’ve gotten a few episodes over the years where I’m like, ‘Really? Are you sure? Are you serious?’ And this is definitely one of those. And then the puppets showed up on set, and it became very real,” he recalled.
Spock is the only Strange New Worlds regular who didn’t get puppet-ized, for story reasons we won’t spoil here. But Peck was ok with that, because “I was the one that got to act with all of them. No one else got to act with the puppets.”
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