SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Season 4 Episode 5, titled “Level Five Transporter Accident,” now streaming on Paramount+.
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At long last, the most anticipated event in recent “Star Trek” memory is here.
No, not another movie or another series focused on a legacy character. We are of course referring to the long-awaited puppet episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”
In the episode, Spock (Ethan Peck) is helping Scotty (Martin Quinn) with an experiment that would set a new record for the longest distance an object has ever been sent via transporter.
Naturally, Scotty chooses a creepy puppet his brothers used to frighten him with as the object in question, due in no small part to the fact he plans to transport it directly into the quarters of a former Academy rival on another starship.
Spock is dealing with his own issues in the episode, including La’an (Christina Chong) breaking up with him. Being near Vulcan, he contacts T’Pring (Gia Sandhu) and asks for her help in attaining a deeper understanding of logic. She agrees, one condition: no hijinks.
Aboard the Enterprise? Perish the thought.
Spock takes a shuttle craft out to place equipment that Scotty will need to boost the transporter signal. But when Scotty engages the transporter with the puppet in place, the titular transporter accident occurs, turning the entire crew aboard the ship into sentient puppets.
This episode was first teased at San Diego Comic-Con in 2025, and holy cow does it deliver. In what has to be one of the funniest episodes of “Star Trek” ever made, Spock and the puppet crew battle a band of Orion pirates attempting to steal the Enterprise while also learning the limitations (and advantages) of their new puppet forms.
In an interview with Variety, Peck admitted he was skeptical when he first heard about the episode’s premise.
“We’ve gotten a few episodes over the years where I’m like, ‘Really? Are you sure? Are you serious?’ And this is definitely one of those,” he said. “And then the puppets showed up on set, and it became very real.”
Peck was the only member of the show’s main cast who was not turned into a puppet, but he said that he found a silver lining in that.
“I guess I was a little bit disappointed, but also I was the one that got to act with all of them. No one else got to act with the puppets,” he said.
This episode was helmed by Jordan Canning, who previously worked on the reboot of “Fraggle Rock” at Apple TV. With that connection, she put the “Strange New Worlds” team in touch with the folks at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, who were more than happy to board the Enterprise.
“There’s quite a Henson presence at Dragon Con, Comic-Con, all of these things, and of course ‘Star Trek’ is there too,” said Jason Weber, creative supervisor at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. “So there’s always been this mutual admiration between our cultures, if you will. To be able to finally jump in and work with them was an amazing experience. We had a blast.”
Weber’s team set out doing 3D renderings of the puppet versions of the Enterprise crew, with each puppet taking on exaggerated features of their real-life counterparts.
“For example, with Pike, it’s got to be the hair, right?” Weber said. “He’s got those strong shoulders and he’s got that hair, so that’s what we’re going to focus on and exaggerate.”
And while most of the puppets were hand-built using traditional Henson methods, the puppet for Carol Kane’s character, Commander Pelia, was slightly different.
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“For Pelia, we had done this process where we took synthetic horsehair tubing and we put it onto a spiraled form and boil it in in place,” Weber said. “That way, when you take it off, it’s got that spiral curl. She has that insane hair, and so we realized it in this fashion.”
Most people agreed that the Pelia puppet was their favorite.
With the puppets ready, then came the challenge of shooting the episode. As Canning explained, shows like “Fraggle Rock” have sets specifically designed to hide the puppeteers, but “Strange New Worlds” posed unique challenges.
“These sets obviously are built for humans, and so there was a lot of really interesting challenges and fun challenges that the puppeteers and the writers and the art department especially really embraced,” Canning said. “I was like, ‘You have all these great consoles in the bridge you can hide puppeteers behind, or in the sick bay.’ You’re always just looking for places to hide puppeteers, basically.”
But the “Strange New Worlds” team quickly learned that there are many limitations on what a puppet can do during a scene. Even something as simple as holding something in their hand is complicated to achieve.
“You’ve got a little puppet with a little tiny hand with no mechanism in them, and you want them to pick up a prop,” Weber said. “Well, your wrangler is going to have to rig that into their hand between shots, you cut to it, and there it is. They’re holding it.”
Even something as simple as walking down a hallway, as T’Pring does with Spock at one point, requires a great deal of effort and expertise.
“Donna [Kimball] is lying on her back, kicking with her feet, moving forward, performing with Ethan, and holding this — basically like a pile of phasers on a stick in her arms to make it look like she’s carrying it,” Canning said.
Despite the silliness, the episode does feature some very emotional moments for Spock. Torn between his Vulcan and human sides and having suffered some real horrors this season (looking at you, “The Griffin Incident”), Spock has to have some very intense conversations with T’Pring — or at least with her puppet.
“The challenge is not looking at the puppet and thinking, ‘I’m looking at someone’s hand inside of a sock, like an elaborate sock,’” Peck said. “It’s very easy to be kind of pulled out by like, ‘I’m acting with a puppet right now,’ and I’m doing something really serious and heavy, and so I had to be really careful not to let any of those thoughts infect my work.”
To Peck’s credit, Canning said that there was only one moment during the entire shooting of the episode that he broke during a scene. “It was when Pike was trying to swipe his little puppet hand on his chair,” she said. “He just kept going and going, and we were pushing in on Ethan, and he was keeping it together. And then he just burst out laughing at the end.”
But speaking of laughing, one cannot talk about this episode without getting into the epic puppet fight scenes. Puppets are not designed for stunts, so getting them to fight to take the ship back took some very creative shooting.
For example, the scene with three puppets in a trench coat attacking one of the pirates required eight puppeteers. The final fight between the Enterprise crew puppets and the Orion pirates took two days to film, according to Canning. Even a quick shot of Pike flying through the air at one the pirates took elaborate planning.
“Pike is armatured, basically, when he’s flying,” Canning said, describing a process in which something is fitted over a metal or wire framework. “When there’s great POV slow motion shot, they armature the entire puppet, so he’s basically wired in that position, and then you have the piece in between where Frank the puppeteer is in a full green screen suit, and he puppeteers [Pike] across, and then you have the POV flying towards the captain.”
In the end, it turns out the entire episode was a dream of Spock’s, but let’s hope that this is not the last time we see puppets on the final frontier.
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