What better way to celebrate our love for Star Trek than to go to a holiday party with the crew of the Enterprise? Star Trek: Very Short Treks are part of a new series of cartoon shorts that put the crew in some pretty out-there situations. Really. The latest was a holiday party where Spock was in charge of the entertainment and it didn’t go as planned.
Created by Casper Kelly, it’s genuinely funny to see Star Trek characters who are usually pretty competent in their jobs doing poorly. Watching Spock make a “blooper reel” that includes a man losing his legs and dying during a failed transporter incident is actually very funny, even if the rest of the Enterprise doesn’t find their coworker with missing legs that funny.
The blooper reel is filled with plenty of people losing limbs, apparently (Spock skips those because Uhura tells him that those are not funny), and then he goes on to show his own break-up for comedic purposes. What’s really sad is that on Strange New Worlds, they all sang a song with Nurse Chapel while she broke up with Spock during “Subspace Rhapsody,” and he had to just stand there and watch it happen, so this is the second time they’ve just stood by and watched his break-ups.
Spock’s idea of humor is when things just go wrong, and he even says that he doesn’t understand what is and is not funny and he’d rather just erase all emotions from the universe—which, while not entirely the truth about Spock, we can laugh about. The shorts so far have been less than five minutes and are a funny little glimpse into the nonsense of the Enterprise. And this one brings back Hemmer (Bruce Horak)!
Spock is a comedian
For someone who said, “I believe the best entertainment is meditating on how to quietly eradicate all emotions. However, it is logical to offer up entertainment the majority prefers, even when that preference is for something as unpalatable as comedy,” he really is funny in this short. Who wouldn’t have laughed when all of a sudden a blooper reel included someone’s corpse? Oh right, probably no one. Still, the short itself has gotten a bit of a split reaction from fans. Some think it’s very funny. Others don’t think it’s very Spock-like.
To be fair, the reaction to Ethan Peck’s Spock on Strange New Worlds has been overwhelmingly positive for good reason: He’s fantastic as Spock, and that shows in these shorts. They’re meant to be silly, and yeah, sure, Spock would not think showing a dismembered crew member was funny in the reality of the series, but that’s not the point of Star Trek: Very Short Treks. They’re a silly little way of celebrating our love for the series, and it’s okay sometimes to laugh at these characters we adore.
In another timeline, maybe Spock would be so checked out of his emotions that he wouldn’t realize he shouldn’t do that. Besides, Spock making his own blooper reel is funny.
(featured image: Paramount+)
