Recently I was watching an episode of the excellent new series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s the most recent Trek series and a throwback to the original show, and it’s rapidly become one of my favorite shows on TV.
The episode in question - Episode 5, Spock Amok - is a comedic one. The Enterprise is at a star base for repairs, and the crew is off having various low-key adventures. Nurse Chapel is seeing her hookup boyfriend, there’s an Enterprise scavenger hunt, there’s some tense diplomacy, and Spock and his fiancee somehow manage to switch bodies during a mind meld. And it’s a super fun episode, with lots of hijinx! (Spock even comments, “I hate hijinx.” It’s great.)
And then it struck me. As delightful and breezy as this episode was, it did not contribute to an over-arching narrative. If you skipped it, you would not have missed out on any serious plot developments. There was no compulsion to make this fit into a grand plot. There was no need to make this a “ten-hour movie” (a phrase I have come to loathe). Nope, it was a straight-forward one-off episode, where the characters had room to stretch and develop. Is.. is that even allowed these days???
And it was glorious. It was a classic filler episode.
Since the rise of prestige cable, and especially with streaming services, TV structure has changed dramatically. Back when I was a lad, fending off the roaming wooly mammoths with my Trapper Keeper, TV seasons were typically 22 or 24 episodes long on the broadcast networks. With that much time in a season to fill, the so-called “filler” episode became common.
A filler episode is commonly defined as one where nothing much happens to advance the plot. And that’s not a bad thing! Just like a plot heavy episode can be bad (see: the back half of the Game of Thrones final season), a filler or a breather can be great, if written well. Of course, bad filler makes the fans scream online that “nothing happened this week!!!”
Now that a season of TV is more commonly 13 or 10 or 8 episodes, there really isn’t a lot of room for this. Everything is a push forward to advance the plot. That can lead to some breakneck narratives, but it can also lead to a series where the only reason a character does something is because the plot demands it. (Again, see the back half of the last season of Game of Thrones. No, I’m not obsessed. Stupid King Bran.)
Let’s stick with the Star Trek franchise for an example. Most Next Generation fans will tell you that two of the very best episodes are the Best of Both Worlds, Parts 1 & 2. These are the ones where Captain Picard gets kidnapped by the Borg and assimilated into a half-borg, half-human hybrid to serve as their avatar. The episodes are justifiably praised as tense, exciting, and thrilling.
But what’s also a great episode is the one that came immediately after it, Family. This is literally an episode where the crew of the Enterprise takes a breath. The Enterprise is docked near Earth, which gives the crew a chance to visit their families. Jean-Luc goes to see his brother’s family on the Picard family vineyard in France, Worf’s adoptive parents come to see him, and Dr. Beverly Crusher has to deal with some personal effects of her late husband.
Compared to the events of the season 3 cliffhanger and the season 4 opener, not a lot happens here. There are no alien attacks, no warp cores overheating. No, it’s just a bunch of people trying to process their traumas and connect with their families. Jean-Luc has to come to terms with the things he did while the Borg were controlling him and reconcile with his prickly brother. Worf accepts that his human parents have unconditional love for him. Beverly has to decide if she wants to play a message for her son that his father recorded before he died. Nothing happens, and yet everything is different. The characters have evolved and changed and grown by the end of 44 minutes, plus commercials.
These are increasingly rare these days. Back when networks needed an audience to actually park themselves in front of the TV at the same time each week, episodes were more self contained. Audiences couldn’t just catch up on Hulu or binge it all in a weekend, so it was rarer to have a show that demanded you watch every episode from the beginning. (“Oh you missed Episode 1 of Law & Order? Well, episode 326 will make no sense until you see the first 325.”) So there had to be more self-contained episodes, ones that didn’t mention larger plot points.
It’s kind of a lost art now. One of my all-time favorite shows is The X-Files, and they were masters at mixing the Monster of the Week episodes with ones that advanced the larger alien conspiracy. And if you ask an X-Phile what their favorite episodes are, chances are they’ll tell you it’s one of the self-contained ones that don’t mention aliens, like Clyde Bruckerman’s Final Repose, or Squeeze, or Home, or (my favorite) Humbug, where Mulder and Scully need to investigate a series of bizarre murders around a town a retired sideshow performers in Florida.
Must have been something I ate... IYKYK
Maybe that is why I was so thrilled to see Spock engaged in some low-key hijinx on Strange New Worlds. Since that show is very much a throwback to the original Star Trek,it was nice to see them throwback to some classic tv structure as well. Hopefully, a few more shows can follow their lead and give viewers a chance to get to know the characters a little more.
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