Soap Opera episode
WTAF. Enough with the damn genre exercises already.
Seems like that’s straight-up the plan for this entire season. Sigh.
This one looks like a Quelane episode, so I think it’s pretty fitting.
Perhaps, if every other episode wasn’t already a gimmick genre swap. Trelane and/or Q worked fine in plain science fiction where they were the wacky trickster element in and of themselves.
I’d really prefer this show to take a chill pill and focus on telling solid stories rather than doing cleverpants narrative gymnastics.
My thoughts on this are lengthy, complicated, and probably a little bit self-contradictory, but I think some of the accusations of “gimmicks” are a tad overblown. But also a tad not overblown?
“Valles Marineris” - A pretty standard Trek episode IMO, albeit one with time travel and a twist.
“The Griffin Incident” - A horror episode, but not really a gimmicky one. Star Trek does those all the time.
“Human Best Friend” - Definitely pulling from a specific comedy genre, YMMV.
“A Case of Chiaroscuro” - I won’t argue with accusations of “gimmick” here, but I thought its use of the genre was in service of a pretty damn good Star Trek story. And DS9 in particular went to the noir well a few times over the years.
“Level Five Transporter Accident” - perfectly normal, nothing to see here.
“Off-Hour” - Pretty standard Trek.
But they definitely do a lot of genre play, and recent interviews with the showrunners indicate that it’s completely intentional, and unlikely to change any time soon.
I’ve been reconciling it by focusing on each episode as its own thing, independent of the others, and hot damn, it’s surprising how hard that’s become for me.
Without Lower Decks it’s like they decided SNW needs to be the silly Trek now.
Difference is, there were straightfaced Star trek series airing when Lower Decks started. Now, the only show running (well, there’s Academy as well) is doing high camp every week.
But they definitely do a lot of genre play, and recent interviews with the showrunners indicate that it’s completely intentional, and unlikely to change any time soon.
It’s certainly intentional, I just wish they’d keep their hands on the wheel instead of following every inane impulse that crosses their mind.
As for changing, well — the show is going to end after next season, so there’s a very definite change.
I haven’t seen any of the latest season yet so maybe they’ve gotten too quirky, but I really liked the sporadic weird episode in S1-3. I’m kind of a musical episode hater but I thought the musical episode was actually really fun, and I greatly enjoyed watching people enjoy creating something. It’s like the pseudo comedy episodes of SG1 or something where the writers and cast are clearly just having fun. I enjoy that in moderation. Did S4 overdo it?
Every episode is weird in S4. Some wouldn’t stand out much usually, but most of them would.
Aw, man.
