WHY WE LIKE IT: Hemmer hamming it up.
WHY WE DON'T: That ending, mostly.
REVIEW: Oh boy. The problem with something like this is that most of the characters are not themselves, so while it may be fun for the actors, we're not really getting anything very meaty in terms of character development. And it's particularly bad when there are only 10 episodes per season, and this is only the first. It feels like we're wasting time with this terrible cod fantasy apparently written by Sisko's alter ego Benny Russell (I'm getting a headache just trying to figure out how Benny fits the universe if he's not a Prophet hallucination). If The Elysian Kingdom had come out in the mid-20th Century, I suppose the black-skinned king would have been ground-breaking, but wizards called Caster (ha) and Pollux? It's so hack, even for a children's story.
So Pike is transformed into a comedy coward. Ortegas as a knight is essentially playing La'an, while La'an is a spoiled princess (complete with the actress' own dog). Chapel is a healer type and hardly in it (and wearing jewelry the actress designed herself, all the hallmarks of this being a lark for them). Mitchell is the scarred captain of the Crimson Guard (a redshirt joke?). Spock is the black wizard to Hemmer's white. Una is an Amazonian huntress. And Uhura is such a queen already, she comes off the best as the villain of the piece. But the comedy performances are so BROAD that it just feels dumb.
M'Benga (the king) and Hemmer are the only ones unaffected, racing around trying to figure things out, escaping from dungeons and traps, and ultimately trying to find M'Benga's daughter Rukiya who, as it turns out, is directing this story and making changes to it that help her father figure things out (a plot point hit too hard in the recap so as to almost give the game away). For a M'Benga-centric story, it doesn't really advance his character. He's stuck in the same subplot since Ghost of Illyria and mostly seems befuddled throughout this episode. Hemmer, whose humor is NOT manufactured by events, but instead comes from him, makes out the best, playing up the wizard angle, but using the power of science. He's a lot of fun, and I resent his memories being wiped at the end too. Seems so unnecessary.
And hey, it might be a forgivable "offbeat episode" if not for the whole Rukiya thing. The girl is dying (even rapidly degenerating) from a sci-fi illness that has absolutely no visible symptoms. A couple episodes ago, M'Benga was given an advanced treatment (not a cure), but this is not mentioned, nor has it had an effect. We're just ignoring it ever happened. The ship is at a sentient nebula that can sense Rukiya's loneliness inside a transporter buffer (where the girl is not strictly "aware" and uses its powers to transform the ship and its crew into storybook characters. So far, nonsense. When M'Benga finds his daughter, she's cured (at which point I thought it was a little soon to resolve the subplot, but okay), oh but wait, if she leaves Debra the Nebula, she'll start dying again. OR SO SAYS DEBRA! The completely bonkers ending has M'Benga trusting this alien presence so absolutely, he releases his child to it FOR ALL TIME, dooming her to some weird immortality. And only a couple episodes from the whole First Servant incident. Then Rukiya reappears as an adult and oh, she had so much fun in accelerated time, playing out fantasies with Debra the Nebula. If we can trust that is actually Rukiya, since we just saw how this entity could bend reality, impose personalities on people, etc. But M'Benga and the episode takes this as a given. Don't even get me started on how her refuge into fantasy is something Star Trek has consistently condemned since, well, THE CAGE!!! So this isn't just a dull episode in the context of the series, or a wrong-headed one in the context of the season, it's bad Star Trek full stop.
SECONDARY WATCHING: In "Imaginary Friend, the USS Enterprise-D also encountered a non-corporeal life form in a nebula that caused a little girl's fantasies to come true, but this story is perhaps closer to that of Masks (TNG) or Dramatis Personae (DS9).
LESSON: If you love somebody, set them floating free in the vacuum of space.
REWATCHABILITY - Low: Strange New Worlds had to stumble sometime, I guess.
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