Featured Essays Star Trek Narrative High Jinks Have Always Been a Part of Star Trek The shenanigans will continue until morale… does something By Val Nolan | Published on September 21, 2026 Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Alright class, let’s settle down and open one of the improbably high stacks of single document PADDs on your desk that tell time travelers from the 1990s how busy you are. Please note that spoiler warnings are in effect for this session concerning Strange New Worlds season four because today we’re going to talk about how that series reflects Star Trek’s long history of boldly going where no one expected… at least in terms of storytelling choices. In particular, the latest batch of SNW episodes is dense with eye-catching divergences from classic Trek space opera into the realms of dinosaurs, horror stories, obvious riffs on The Hangover and Casablanca, as well an episode where the crew is seemingly transformed into Mup… aherm, puppets! Love them or loath them (all art is, after all, subjective; #IDIC), these installments have become an increasingly integral part of the Strange New Worlds experience. Much online discourse refers to these episodes as “big swings,” but the use of that varies from the appreciative to the pejorative. So, instead, let’s initially think of them as “narrative experiments” identifiable by atypical aesthetics, unusual settings, novel casting choices, or a willingness to break with audience expectations. Modern examples often have a formal component (they can be presented in black and white, say, or as a musical). They can feature the regular cast playing wildly different characters (such as last year’s “A Space Adventure Hour”) or they can be a flirtation—even a full-on love affair—with stylistic tropes beyond Star Trek’s typical remit (as in the soap opera pastiche of “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass”). In all cases they represent an artistic gambit and a genuine risk on the part of the creators. In fact, I think that a willingness to take risks is so crucial to narrative experiments that perhaps we might be better off borrowing a relevant Strange New Worlds-ism from everyone’s favourite Vulcan T’Pring (there, I said it!) and instead call them what they are: narrative high jinks. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Such deviations from Trek’s tonal median are divisive to say the least, however the La’an and the short of things is that SNW’s many narrative high jinks are the contemporary inheritors of those beloved by ’90s Trek which, in turn, are the descendants of those undertaken by The Original Series (the latter motivated as much by financial decisions as creative ones). For example, SNW’s season one fairytale episode “The Elysian Kingdom” is essentially a glammed-up successor to The Next Generation’s Robin Hood lark “Qpid.” Meanwhile the black-and-white Casablanca homage of “A Case of Chiaroscuro” is equally suggestive of Voyager’s “The Killing Game” and “Bride of Chaotica!”, both of which are themselves hugely referential narrative experiments in the franchise’s history. That same SNW episode also gestures further back to the Nazi planet of TOS’s “Patterns of Force” (an installment banned in Germany until the mid-1990s). And as for “Subspace Rhapsody”? Well, it’s not like Star Trek hasn’t featured singing before, offering a platform for world-class performers such as Nichelle Nichols, Brent Spiner, Avery Brooks, and Robert Picardo, though I concede that an occasional song or two is different from a full Broadway-style production.   Indeed, while the sheer level of technical acumen and effort that has gone into SNW episodes like “Subspace Rhapsody” or “Level Five Transporter Accident” is undeniable, original blend Star Trek high jinks were far less formally experimental than what would follow. Back in the 1960s, they often tended to be an individual writer’s fascination with a specific historical era melded to an expensive production’s desire to save money wherever possible. Hence The Original Series found frequent convoluted reasons for Kirk and company to raid the preexisting wardrobes and standing backlots accumulated during Hollywood’s decades of WWII movies, pulp crime dramas, and sword-and-sandals epics. Such justifications included a human historian imposing Nazism on an alien world, cultural contamination via a book about the Chicago mob, and the incorrigible act of handwaving that is the “Law of Parallel Planetary Development” which allows the Roman Empire to exist on a distant planet. Though, personally, my favourite in terms of conceptional boldness masking obvious cost-cutting is “Spectre of the Gun,” a Western played out on incomplete sets (often just a freestanding wall) which results in a distinct and surreal aesthetic. Image: Paramount Subsequent Trek series developed their own repertoire of rationalisation for high jinks, occasionally toying with structural gimmicks such as TNG’s repetitious time-loop story “Cause and Effect” (an episode I bounce off like Roga Danar off the Enterprise’s shields) and developing a Barclay-esque reliance on malfunctioning holodecks. That technology (gestured towards by SNW in “A Space Adventure Hour”) allowed TNG’s Brent Spiner to play every character in a Western, granted Voyager’s Captain Janeway her own turn at fighting Nazis, and provided the Deep Space Nine cast with the chance to cosplay a James Bond movie (a jink so high that it earned a rap on the knuckles from then Bond rights-holders MGM in the process). Deep Space Nine would subsequently draw on its own internal mythology to deliver probably the greatest of all Star Trek’s narrative experiments (and one of its greatest episodes, period) with “Far Beyond the Stars,” during which Sisko experiences the life of a Black science fiction writer in the 1950s, with the show’s main and supporting cast populating this storyworld-within-the-storyworld as characters only loosely related to their usual roles. All of which is to say that narrative experiments, like a message from progenitors hidden in the show’s DNA, have always been a part of Star Trek’s imaginative fabric.  One useful framework for analysing their appearance and frequency is found in Adam Kotsko’s academic book Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (2025). In it, Kotsko identifies three creative strategies at work in contemporary Star Trek (and, indeed, as far back as the 90s shows). The first of these is fan service, “which emphasizes continuity above all else and results in giving the faithful more of the same.” The second is an “attempt to maximize artistic freedom through a declaration of novelty or discontinuity.” The third is an “assertion that the new instalment is a necessary moment in the overarching story” and so an exercise in “unexpected fresh world-building.” While all three are present in any given iteration of Trek, it is usually the case that “one strategy will tend to predominate.” In the case of Strange New Worlds, we might say that the series begins as fan service (with a literal fan campaign championing the show after Pike, Spock, and Number One appeared in the second season of Discovery) but has lately chosen to prioritise artistic freedom via its emphasis on creatively overpowering high jinks. Image: Brendan Adam-Zwelling/Paramount+ The words which Kotsko uses to describe this approach are key, in particular, “discontinuity.” For the majority of the riskiest instances of high jinks on Strange New Worlds have manifested as narrative breaks in the characters’ presumably otherwise coherent storylines. The crew busting into song throughout “Subspace Rhapsody,” for instance, is presented as the consequence of a subspace fold, a literal interruption to the fabric of space and time; Pike’s awakening with amnesia in a soap opera existence sees him having supposedly lost two weeks (and a certain amount of visual definition!) to a head injury; while Spock’s dream of the crew as puppets (an episode which, no apologies, I adore on account of its commitment to the bit!) occurs during a period of unconsciousness following an accident which damaged his shuttle. These discontinuities and accompanying moments of confusion are further reflected in elements of fan experience when encountering such ambitious acts of creative freedom within an established franchise with decades of tonal and aesthetic history. Some viewers, it seems, feel like they have <stares off screen> woken up in a different universe entirely! That kind of meta discontinuity is the trade-off for any bold creative risk: there is always the possibility of audience rejection. And though I would maintain that many of SNW’s high jinks episodes could easily be the highlight of a given season, their presentation in largely uninterrupted stretches throughout season four, for example, imperils audience immersion in the existing Trek storyworld. After all, if a series is seemingly entirely discontinuous then continuity itself begins to lose all meaning (or, put another way, if Captain Kirk is dressed as a Tommy Gun-toting mobster every week then what exactly are we watching?). Thus the defining struggle of Strange New Worlds becomes not that between the Federation and the Gorn, or between Pike and a future preordained since TOS (in, fittingly, yet another example of narrative high jinks, AKA the episode where they watch an episode of Star Trek); instead it is the attempt to balance traditional tales of boldly going with striking exercises in artistic freedom. Image: Paramount Can Strange New Worlds ultimately achieve this state of equilibrium? Certainly it did in seasons one and two. Arguably even season three, though here the balance begins to shift. The present run has further weighed things in favour of high jinks to the delight of some and the weariness of others, and so we will have to wait until after the final season to answer our question for definite. Nonetheless what we can now say is that in its desire to emulate and eventually align with the original of the species, Strange New Worlds has taken on board what Kotsko calls TOS’s “experimentation with different genres and settings,” often by “directly imitating well-known science fiction or fantasy concepts” (even the recent “Orders of Magnitude,” acclaimed as a return to classic Trek, is essentially SNW doing Crimson Tide). Yes the prevalence of high jinks in shorter streaming era seasons has left the series open to accusations of straying too far from Trek’s initial premise, however, as the puppet version of T’Pring notes at the end of “Level Five Transporter Accident,” such “unorthodox” approaches can—even if we are at first resistant to them—yet come to be seen as “endearing” in time.[end-mark] The post Narrative High Jinks Have Always Been a Part of Star Trek appeared first on Reactor.