Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Pulls Off Puppet Episode With Henson’s
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- 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' aired Season 4 Episode 5, 'Level Five Transporter Accident,' in which a transporter mishap turns the Enterprise crew into sentient puppets, now streaming on Paramount+.
- Jim Henson’s Creature Shop designed and built custom puppets for the episode, using traditional methods and specialized techniques like heat-set synthetic horsehair for Commander Pelia’s spiraled hair.
- Jordan Canning, director of the episode, leveraged her experience from Apple TV’s 'Fraggle Rock' reboot to coordinate with Henson’s team and adapt human-scale sets for puppet filming.
- Ethan Peck portrayed Spock in live-action throughout the episode, acting opposite puppet versions of his co-stars, and admitted struggling to maintain seriousness during emotional scenes with puppets.
- Jason Weber of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop led the creation of exaggerated 3D-rendered puppet likenesses, focusing on iconic features like Captain Pike’s hair and shoulders.
- The puppet fight sequences, including a two-day shoot for the final battle and complex rigging for slow-motion action shots, required up to eight puppeteers for single scenes.
Why it matters: This episode represents a rare fusion of high-concept sci-fi storytelling and practical puppet artistry at scale, involving significant production coordination between a major streaming series and a legendary effects shop—setting a new benchmark for genre television ambition within a single self-contained episode.
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