How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3's Fake Documentary Episode Sabotages Itself

Spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" follow.

"What Is Starfleet?" That's the title and central question of the latest "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" episode.

/Film's Witney Seibold has often described "Star Trek" as a workplace drama and that description rings true, including for "Strange New Worlds." "Star Trek" is a series about a close knit team of competent professionals doing their jobs; their job just happens to be running a starship and exploring the universe. Like any procedural, "Star Trek" trusts the audience to understand and pick up the procedure no matter which episode they watch. "What Is Starfleet?" mixes up the formula by bringing a fresh set of eyes to the Enterprise.

Beto Ortegas (Mynor Lüken), little brother of Enterprise pilot Erica (Melissa Navia), is a filmmaker who has been documenting the crew over the past few episodes. This one pays that off by framing the whole episode as a documentary Beto made about the Enterprise crew; it opens with a disclaimer that the footage includes declassified Federation information. Beto is the center of the story, but he's actually behind the camera and unseen for most of the episode, interviewing the crew and asking them questions.

The mockumentary is a great hook for an episode, and one that many other TV shows have used before. Sitcoms like "The Office" and "Modern Family" have made a whole series out of it. The closest comparison in sci-fi is "Final Cut" from the 2003 "Battlestar Galactica," which similarly follows a journalist documenting a starship crew. But with "What Is Starfleet?", I couldn't help but think the episode was stuck one foot in, one foot out of its premise.

The backing of "What Is Starfleet?" is not a typical Enterprise mission. The planets Lutani VII and Kasar are at war, and Starfleet is backing the Lutani (reasoning is classified). The Enterprise is assigned to transport a superweapon to the Lutani from the ocean Tychus-B. Specifically, a living superweapon: an enormous moth-like creature that can travel through space and unleash energy blasts. It's also sentient and does not want to be used as a weapon.

I can see why this premise got used for the documentary episode because throughout it, Beto is being an antagonistic interviewer. He's out to question if Starfleet lives up to its stated mission of peaceful exploration, or if it's just a military force with a friendly veneer. So, the episode puts the crew in the bind between obeying orders or doing what's right.

The visual language of the episode adjusts to the framing, such as extreme close-ups of the leads when they're being interviewed. Initially the episode uses the format in some clever ways. Take Security Officer La'an's (Christina Chong) interview, where she says violence is a last resort but one to prepare for, being spliced with footage of her training with numerous weapons.

The episode loses its way as it goes on, though, because the documentary footage can't do justice to the central conflict of the episode. So much of the episode is set on the Enterprise bridge, following shots of the crew observing and reacting to the creature through the view screen. That, and repeated wide shots of the creature flying through space. This creates a screen-within-a-screen effect that only reinforces the episode's conflict feeling removed from the Enterprise itself. The interview segments decrease throughout the middle chunk of the episode, further wasting the doc angle. (If you want a TV episode that manages to make the most of putting its leads in the hot seat, may I suggest "Testimony" from "Veep.")

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is purposefully episodic like older "Trek" shows, but while those series had 20+ episodes per season, "Strange New Worlds" only has 10. That means the writers are more limited in which ideas they can use. "What Is Starfleet?" would've been best served as two separate episodes: a faux-documentary emphasizing more personal and small-scale conflicts, and a traditional episode about the Enterprise intervening in the Lutani/Kasar conflict. It feels like since they only had room in the season for one of those episodes, they threw them together. I don't know for sure if that's how the episode came about, but from what ended up onscreen, it's the logical conclusion.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is streaming on Paramount+; new episodes release on Thursdays.