I dunno; I guess it’s a weird feeling to be excited that the last episode was just… fine.

All right; back from San Diego and I had a chance to catch up with all the announcements and press the SNW cast did and boy is it disconcerting to not be four episodes through season three without hearing that season four’s principle photography was completed and it’s just a high wackiness quotient again and Akiva is doing the begging-for-fan-input thing that CBS/Paramount has been agitating for since Disco episode 1 dropped when they couldn’t believe Star Trek fans mostly were repelled by the idea of the first ST show on TV for seven years started with three minutes of subtitles from Klingons we didn’t recognize and fully one-fifth of the season being served up as filler backstory that could have been the two entire first episodes distilled into three lines of dialogue said in a shuttle seat. And then when we all begged for a Pike-and-Number-One show, we got it but with the same off-brand tone. The badass captain… can’t make a decision? The icy, no-nonsense first officer… turns into the ship’s mom? Nurse Chapel is a tough as nails war hero? Scotty is… younger than Kirk? What the actual hell.

Anyway, this episode is… fine. Even granting the Hector Gonzalez quote, “After Lower Decks, this is really the best it is going to get with this team at the helm. That’s kinda sad,” it’s a little by-the-numbers. The crew’s in trouble; Jim Kirk gets command of the Farragut but still needs bailing out. The Reavers from Firefly are revealed to be a generation ship full of mutated humans and it takes Kirk to learn not to be impulsive and take the Enterprise bridge crew’s feelings into account before he kills everybody. Uh oh! Remember that guy who didn’t kill Pike because he saw Pike was human when he knocked off his faceplate? Let’s not mention that when Kirk realized he killed 7000 people for no reason, and then asks, “Why does it feel differently that they were all humans?” Because you haven’t learned yet that risk is our business but also there is infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and are still a pink Kree bigot? Who wants this Kirk?

I mean, who wants to see these feet-of-clay versions of these titans of adventure fiction? Why does Hollywood in general and the Kurtzman era of ST feel that anybody wants to see heroes before they become heroes? Why not just another sci-fi filled adventure of action, laughs, and a little friends-we-met-along-the-way from heroes being heroic? There is an artistry to coloring inside of the lines to deliver a high quality experience every night. A restaurant can experiment with its menu because they have all year to shine; a show with ten episodes a season it takes eighteen months to make can’t afford for half of them to be genre-exploding takes of whimsy or agony to prove some kind of point. Musical episode? “Heroes” with feet of clay? Freaky Friday, with not just mind swaps but body horror and fast aliens who used to be more frightening when they were slow? It all just seems so banal and obvious and over-designed and bleached of all color that hounding Walter Mosely of all people out of the writers’ room seems sadly on-brand for this version of arguably the best action-adventure show of the television era.

I mean, this whole thing is an embarrassment in a television landscape where Noah Hawley is crushing an Alien show set on Earth. Can you imagine something more off-brand than a space show set on Earth and it still works? A streaming landscape where Columbo is back without apology and it’s by the guy who did the best Star Wars movie of the modern era? Jon Hamm basically does a Don Draper update for Apple called Friends and Neighbors, and Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson of all people just slide into the films The Rock and Kevin Hart don’t make anymore because of the ego hit Dwayne took on Black Adam?

Can Skydance hire someone who understands the property, and knows it so hard that they feel it in their bones that first steps isn’t to get Paul Giamatti and make him a half-Tellarite/half Klingon who hums the Star Trek TV show theme a thousand years in the future where apparently science fiction doesn’t exist but the CW still does? They need to hire folks who understand that they are doing a science fiction show and that first steps is to hire science fiction writers and let them cook. This restaurant only has ten chances to serve food and they need to concentrate and not phone it in. They have a responsibility.

Point is, the rest of filmed entertainment has upped their game, and Star Trek… arguably the best action-adventure show of the television era… is doing a Muppet episode.