In Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (S1 – EP5) Spock Amok

Synopsis: It’s a comedy of manners when Spock has a personal visit in the middle of Spock and Captain Pike’s crucial negotiations with an unusual alien species.

The Story

Following up on events seen in last week’s episode. The Enterprise has put in for repairs at a local space station, which allows for a majority of the crew to enjoy some leave. This allows for Spock and T’Pring a little time together, but it’s time that gets interrupted by a delegation of  R’Ongovians who insist on having Captain Pike’s science officer as their point of contact for negotiations to join the Federation. Further complicating matters is the fact that Spock and T’Pring end up switching bodies when a meditative exercise concerning their katra’s goes a bit amok.

Elsewhere in the story. We see Nurse Chapel struggle with her rather complicating dating life. While Una and La’an undertake a number of games in order to figure out ways to break regulations.

The Acting

Ethan Peck and Gia Sandhu continue to amuse us with Spock and T’Pring’s wonderfully offbeat relationship. While we get a fun performance from Jess Bush as Nurse Chapel who amid her own relationship trauma acts as a sounding board for the Enterprise’s science officer.

We also get fun performances from Rebecca Romijn and Christina Chong decide to see how many of Starfleet’s regulations they can break while playing an unusual variant of bingo.

Overall

After the drama of last week’s story. The writers opt to demonstrate that Strange New Worlds can do comedy just as well as Lower Decks can. Not only do we have the relative awkwardness of Spock’s relationship with T’Pring, which is a relationship that we know is doomed. The body swap story trope is kind of old territory to tread and isn’t really where the humor came from in this episode. For me, the fun was seeing Una and La’an break some rules.

As a comedy episode. It was alright. And thankfully the writers did just about enough from keeping it from becoming a total farce, which likely would have undone the great work they have done in establishing Strange New Worlds’ identity as the Best Star Trek show to come out since the TNG era.

On the upside, we get a nice remix of some classic Star Trek music taken from Amok Time, which is used for Spock’s dream. We also see some great visuals as the R’Ongovians fly the Federation flag as their ship leaves the Space Station after some successful negotiations. This sequence alone is worth the price of admission.