- Title: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The Elysian Kingdom
- wiki: link
“The Elysian Kingdom” is the first major misstep in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ First Season. In what feels like a holodeck episode (set in a time before the holodeck existed), most of the Starfleet officers on the ship start acting like characters in Rukiya‘s (Sage Arrindell) favorite story. The sets of the Enterprise get marginally redressed to act as locations in the book and only Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) and Hemmer (Bruce Horak) are aware that something odd is happening. The end goal of the series is to write Rukiya off the show in such a bizarre deux machina that you feel disappointed given all the set-up over the course of the season. As for the actors playing out the tale with limited sets and props, the episode has a community theater feel to it that doesn’t fit with anything we’ve seen before (and hopefully won’t see again).
