Untitled Star Trek Project

This week, we watch an dreadful hour of Star Trek — cheap, mawkish and absolutely absurd — but we end up enjoying ourselves enormously. Have we found a fatal flaw at the entire heart of the Untitled Star Trek Project?

A few tense moments this week, as a fragrant dikironium vampire kills a bunch of redshirts before threatening some characters with names and ultimately the Enterprise itself. But the real suspense comes from an entirely different direction: Will this episode teeter over the edge of camp into baffling semicompetence? Will Kirk’s obsession turn him from a jovial and beloved authority figure into a massive idiot? Will any cue from the Star Trek music library go unused? (No, no and no, fortunately.)

It’s four weeks until the Deep Space Nine finale, and so it’s time for a momentous and operatic episode, an episode full of subtext and thoughtful performances, and an episode that deals a killing blow to two crumbling empires and changes the status quo forever. In short: an episode that exemplifies everything that makes us love Deep Space Nine.

Captain Lynne Lucero (Rosa Salazar) can’t wait to take command of the USS Cabot as it heads off to the Klingon border to save some settlers from a planetary famine. But that’s before she meets walking HR disaster Edward Larkin (H. Jon Benjamin) and his viviparous and prolific sidekick (Tribleustes ventricosus). Hijinks, as usual, ensue.

This week, but in the thirty-second century, two people face each other across a poker table. The man’s unbearable loss has made him resolute, and the woman remains resolute despite the loss she is about to suffer. And somewhere far away, in a distant, isolated, unreasonable space at the very edge of the Galaxy, Something — implacable? incomprehensible? — is waiting to judge what they do next.