Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Turns Crew Into Puppets — SkimNews
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- "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" Season 4 Episode 5, "Level Five Transporter Accident," turns the entire Enterprise crew into sentient puppets after Scotty's long-distance experiment goes wrong, with Spock and the puppet crew battling Orion pirates to take the ship back.
- Ethan Peck's Spock was the only main cast member not turned into a puppet, meaning he spent the episode acting opposite puppet versions of his co-stars during emotionally heavy Vulcan scenes, breaking only once — when puppet-Pike kept swiping his little hand on his chair.
- Director Jordan Canning, who previously worked on Apple TV's "Fraggle Rock" reboot, brokered the connection with Jim Henson's Creature Shop, bringing Henson builders onto a "Star Trek" set for the first time.
- Jim Henson's Creature Shop built the puppets using traditional Henson methods after 3D renderings to exaggerate each character's traits — Pike's hair and shoulders, for instance — with the Pelia puppet requiring a custom process using synthetic horsehair tubing boiled into spiral curls to replicate Carol Kane's wild hair.
- The puppet fight scenes against the Orion pirates took two full days to film, and a single gag of three puppets in a trench coat required eight puppeteers; even a quick shot of Pike flying through the air required armaturing the entire puppet and stitching in a green-suit puppeteer for the POV motion.
- The episode was first teased at San Diego Comic-Con in 2025 and ultimately reveals itself to be Spock's dream, leaving the door open for puppets to return to the final frontier.
Why it matters: The episode realizes a concept Star Trek fans have speculated about for years and marks the first time Jim Henson's Creature Shop has built for a live-action Star Trek set, with director Jordan Canning's Fraggle Rock background bridging the two worlds.
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