Level-Five Transporter Accident and the Strange Things That Make Us Ourselves

I was raised by puppets.

Not exclusively, obviously. There were actual humans involved in my upbringing. But Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Daniel Tiger, and The Muppet Show were woven into my childhood in ways that probably explain more about me than I should admit publicly. Somewhere along the way, talking frogs, fuzzy monsters, neighborhood trolleys, and felt creatures became part of my cultural DNA.

So when Star Trek: Strange New Worlds looked at sixty years of science-fiction storytelling and decided what the franchise really needed was puppets in space, I did not require convincing. Why shouldn’t Trek go there? This is a franchise that has given us singing Klingons, parallel universes, body swapping, de-evolution, omnipotent beings with questionable senses of humor, and enough transporter accidents to make me seriously question why anyone continues voluntarily stepping onto those pads. If the Enterprise crew becoming puppets is where we suddenly decide things have become unrealistic, I am not sure we have been watching the same Star Trek.

“Level-Five Transporter Accident,” written by Henry Alonso Myers and Dana Horgan and directed by Jordan Canning, understands exactly what kind of episode it is making. This thing is kitschy. It is chaotic. It is gloriously committed to its own ridiculousness, and almost immediately I found myself accepting things I never realized Star Trek would someday ask me to accept. Puppet Pike. Puppet Una. Puppet La’an. Puppet Uhura. Puppet Scotty. And puppet Pelia, who spends the entire experience barefoot for reasons I am still going to need someone to explain to me.

Then there is Little Ricky.

I do not know what combination of childhood nostalgia and nightmare fuel was required to bring Little Ricky into existence, but congratulations to everyone involved. You did it. I have seen things in Star Trek that were supposed to be terrifying. The Borg. The Gorn. Salt vampires. That thing crawling out of Remmick’s neck in “Conspiracy.” Little Ricky can sit with them.

What surprised me most, though, was how quickly the novelty stopped being the interesting part. I knew I was looking at puppets. Obviously I was looking at puppets. Yet within minutes I stopped thinking about the fact that Pike no longer looked like Anson Mount or that Una, La’an, Uhura, Scotty, and Pelia had been replaced by felt versions of themselves.

They were still themselves.

Puppet Pike was unmistakably Pike. La’an somehow remained aggressively La’an despite having considerably less control over her own limbs. Scotty’s particular combination of brilliance, insecurity, and barely contained panic survived the transformation perfectly. Pelia may actually be the rare person whose essential Pelia-ness becomes easier to understand once she is made of felt.

That fascinated me because almost everything physical about these people had changed, yet the things that made us recognize them had not. It also gave the episode permission to find comedy in just how badly suited the puppet body is for life aboard a starship. The crew still knows how to do their jobs. They just no longer have the appropriate anatomy for doing them.

Puppet hands, it turns out, were not considered during the design of Starfleet control panels.

That leaves Spock running around the bridge desperately trying to keep the Enterprise functioning, moving from station to station because the people who normally operate them literally cannot. It is frantic and wonderfully funny, and Ethan Peck’s absolute commitment to Spock’s seriousness makes the whole situation even better. Spock does not behave as though he has wandered into a puppet episode. There is a crisis aboard the Enterprise, his crew has become functionally incompatible with its technology, and apparently he is going to have to run the entire starship himself.

Meanwhile, puppet physics have created their own set of rules. Pelia gets sliced in half and essentially restuffed. La’an loses an arm and later turns up in Med Bay having it reattached while the rest of the puppet crew watches with the fascinated curiosity of people observing a particularly interesting craft demonstration. Medical care aboard the puppet Enterprise apparently exists somewhere between twenty-third-century science and owning a decent sewing kit.

Somewhere in the middle of laughing at Spock desperately trying to hold all of this together, something occurred to me.

Spock dreamed this.

And suddenly the question was no longer why Strange New Worlds had turned everyone into puppets.

It was why Spock had.

The absurdity started looking different after that. His subconscious has not simply turned the people around him into puppets. It has made them extraordinarily difficult to permanently hurt. They can be sliced apart, lose limbs, suffer damage that would be catastrophic in the real world, and somehow be put back together.

At the same time, they cannot function without him.

Spock has dreamed an Enterprise where the people around him are remarkably difficult to lose, but he alone is responsible for keeping everything running. I am not prepared to tell you exactly what that means, but I am absolutely prepared to stare suspiciously at it.

Especially because this is happening after “The Griffin Incident.”

Since the Griffin, Spock has been retreating toward logic. What happened aboard that ship weaponized emotion, vulnerability, love, and fear against him, and Spock came away with an understandable conclusion. Emotion made him vulnerable. Logic helped him survive.

So he reaches toward the part of himself that feels more orderly and controllable, and that includes reaching toward T’Pring. He asks her for help reconnecting with his Vulcan side. T’Pring, quite reasonably, wants to avoid chaos.

Spock then falls asleep and dreams an Enterprise full of puppets.

Including T’Pring.

There is something wonderfully revealing about that, even if I am not entirely sure what it reveals. Spock consciously reaches toward T’Pring because she represents Vulcan discipline, familiarity, logic, and perhaps a version of himself that currently feels safer. She wants distance from chaos, and his subconscious pulls her directly into it.

The more I thought about the dream, the more I noticed how often it gives Spock the opposite of what he seems to be seeking while awake. He wants order and dreams chaos. He wants greater control and dreams a ship where he has to control almost everything himself. He is frightened by vulnerability and dreams people who can be damaged almost beyond recognition and simply put back together. He is trying to contain emotion while surrounded by puppets, a form of storytelling practically built around exaggerated expression.

I do not think the episode wants us to diagnose Spock from his dream. Dreams are messy things, and Star Trek dreams have the added complication of occasionally happening inside a half-human, half-Vulcan brain. But the contradictions are hard to ignore.

Spock is trying to solve himself, except Spock is not a problem to be solved. His human side is not a malfunction waiting for a Vulcan technician, and his emotions are not an inefficient subsystem he can shut down because recent events have demonstrated some troubling performance issues. Logic and Vulcan discipline genuinely are part of him, but choosing them cannot make the rest of him stop existing.

That makes the end of his relationship with La’an feel more significant than simply another development in Spock’s complicated romantic history. La’an has been part of a period when he was exploring more of his humanity, and after the Griffin that exploration has become frightening. Turning toward T’Pring makes sense because she represents something familiar and structured. I do not see someone who has finally discovered the correct path. I see someone looking for solid ground.

We know enough about Spock’s future to understand that the struggle between his human and Vulcan identities will not be resolved here. The Spock we eventually know does not become compelling because one side defeats the other. He spends a lifetime discovering how both can belong to the same person, and this Spock is still trying to figure out what to do with the pieces of himself that frighten him.

That makes one of the episode’s most recognizable pieces of Star Trek imagery particularly interesting. The episode deliberately evokes the sacrifice scene from The Wrath of Khan, only the people occupying those emotional positions are Spock and puppet Pike.

Why Pike? What does his captain represent to him at this moment? Mentor, safety, family, or simply someone Spock cannot imagine losing? I do not know, and I like that the episode does not tell me. This is Spock’s dream, though, so placing Pike inside imagery associated with one of the most profound relationships and sacrifices in Star Trek history feels significant enough to make me pay attention.

And then, because apparently Spock’s subconscious cannot allow us to sit with that emotional symbolism for more than thirty seconds, the Orions yeet Pike out of an airlock. Into space. He survives, because of course he does.

It is ridiculous, but it also completes something the dream has been showing us all along. The people around Spock can be placed in extraordinary danger, but they are remarkably difficult to lose. Pike can occupy the visual language of sacrifice one moment and be launched into space the next, yet somehow he is still there. Still Pike. Still recoverable.

The dream is not the only place the episode plays with the difference between who someone believes they are and what is actually true. Scotty and Pelia continue a character thread that became especially interesting in “Human Best Friend,” and I am beginning to suspect that Montgomery Scott may be one of the least reliable authorities available on the subject of Montgomery Scott.

Scotty believes Pelia pushed him because he was not good enough. What he discovers is almost exactly the opposite. Pelia thought he was the better student and pushed him because she believed there was more in him. Once again, Scotty’s internal picture of himself does not match what someone else sees when they look at him. The brilliant engineer was already there. Pelia knew it. Scotty was the one who could not see it.

It is also such an extraordinarily Pelia form of mentorship. Encouragement apparently exists, but you may have to spend several years questioning your competence before she gets around to explaining it. Carol Kane’s particular Pelia energy also survives puppetization completely. She gets sliced in half, restuffed, carries on with her day, and apparently never considers putting on shoes. That woman contains multitudes.

The rest of the crew gets smaller moments that keep the episode from becoming exclusively Spock’s story. La’an and Una experiencing space together feels like somebody finally checked an extremely specific square on Enterprise bingo, while Pike’s relationship with his captain’s chair caught my attention more than I expected.

He tries the newer, more technologically advanced chair and discovers that newer does not necessarily mean better. Maybe it is simply a joke about chairs. But this is Christopher Pike, a man whose future and relationship with command are always sitting quietly somewhere in the background, so I noticed. There is something about the place he occupies now that fits.

Sometimes the old chair is the right chair.

Those character details are ultimately why the puppet experiment works for me. Strange New Worlds does not turn these people into puppets and ask us to laugh simply because they look funny. The transformation exaggerates things we already know about them and occasionally reveals something we did not.

That is actually very old-school Star Trek, even if the felt is new.

This franchise has been transforming its characters almost from the beginning. “The Naked Time” stripped away inhibition. Mirror Universe stories changed circumstance and morality. Transporters have duplicated, divided, combined, aged, de-aged, lost, and occasionally rediscovered enough people that Starfleet really should have commissioned an independent safety review by now.

Compared with all of that, puppets almost seem reasonable.

What Star Trek has always understood is that changing something familiar can give us another way to see it. Take away inhibition, alter circumstance, change physical form, and ask what remains.

This time, almost everyone Spock knows loses the physical form he recognizes.

And they remain themselves.

Maybe his subconscious is challenging him. Maybe it is processing what happened aboard the Griffin. Maybe this is simply what an exhausted half-human, half-Vulcan brain produces after a particularly difficult few weeks. I do not need the episode to choose an answer for me. I like that it made me wonder.

I also understand why “Level-Five Transporter Accident” will probably be a dividing episode. It asks the audience to accept its insanity quickly and remain inside it for a long time. If puppet Star Trek does not work for you, there is a significant amount of puppet between you and the closing credits.

But I hope Strange New Worlds keeps taking swings like this. One of the things I enjoy most about the series is its willingness to ask how many different kinds of stories can still be Star Trek. Horror. Comedy. Romance. Musical. Film noir. Now puppets.

The answer cannot simply be that anything works because somebody puts a delta on it. The experiment has to tell us something about the people inside it, and this one does. Scotty discovers that the person Pelia always saw is different from the person he has been telling himself he is. T’Pring gets pulled directly into the chaos she hoped to avoid. Pike remains Pike even when the laws of puppet physics send him floating through space.

And Spock dreams a universe where almost everyone changes except him while, awake and unchanged, he is desperately trying to decide which pieces of himself he can live without.

That is a lot to get from felt.

Then again, maybe I should not be surprised. I was raised by puppets.

Long before I knew what a Vulcan was, felt creatures were helping me understand complicated people. They taught me that differences did not have to be frightening, that feelings could be approached through imagination, and that absolute chaos could somehow coexist with friendship, curiosity, and kindness.

I knew they were not real. I could see the fabric, the stuffing, the impossible mouths, and the hands that did not work anything like mine. But that never stopped them from feeling alive because recognition has never depended entirely on realism.

Something underneath made them themselves.

Maybe that is why “Level-Five Transporter Accident” worked for me. Spock dreams of changing almost everyone around him and discovers that none of them really change at all. Meanwhile, awake and outwardly unchanged, he is struggling with whether some part of himself needs to change in order to feel safe again.

Felt creatures have been explaining complicated people to me for most of my life. Apparently they just needed a level-five transporter accident to make it aboard the Enterprise.

And after fifty-four minutes of puppets, Orions, detachable limbs, Spock’s subconscious, Little Ricky permanently moving into a dark corner of my brain, and more character development than I expected from anything containing this much stuffing, I am left with one mystery the episode simply refuses to resolve.

Why was Pelia barefoot?

Remember…

✨Be Kind. Do More Good. We Got This.

💫Until next time, lovelies, keep jibber jabbering about the stories and things that move you.