Two Great Star Trek Shows Revive The Lost Art Of The Gimmicky Crossover Episode

Enlarge / Tawny Newsome (left) and Jack Quaid reprising their roles as Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler... but in real life this time. Primordial

The second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, like the first, was fun, at least in part because the series itself isn't all that new or weird.

Characters, visual elements, and specific plot constructions are new, but the core of the series is a careful recreation of The Next Generation formula of Star Trek's 90s creative and commercial peak: ensemble cast, mostly episodic storytelling with lightly serialized character development and recurring arcs, and a willingness to mix conceptual sci-fi with just the right amount of silliness. It's also great at taking old Star Trek tropes (the teleportation crash, the sickness on the ship, the talkative thriller about the nature of mankind) and giving them a new lease of life.

Episode 7, which took place early this weekend to coincide with a Comic-Con screening, unearths and expertly executes another worn-out trope, something we haven't seen on Star Trek since the days when Quark could appear on the Enterprise-D screen: the crossover episode. And despite the wide gap between Strange New Worlds and animated Lower Decks, the blending of the two shows' disparate styles come together better than any fanciful attempt at cross-promotion.

What is a crossover episode?

Let me be clear on what I mean when I say "crossover episodes". By its strictest definition, a "crossover episode" occurs whenever a fictional character from one show appears on another show. But there are nuances.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (and the general MCU-ification of large swaths of the television landscape) means that "crossover episodes" writ large happen all the time, and you're meant to watch totally separate shows that suck but take place in the same fictional universe to follow crucial plot developments on the shows you want to watch. It's not quite the type of crossover episode I want to discuss, though. I'm also not talking about times when a character from one series appears in another spin-off series (temporarily or permanently) after the cancellation of the original series, such as when Worf moved to Deep Space 9 or when Spike moved from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Angel, or when characters from Cheers occasionally appeared on Frasier.

The specific type of crossover episode that Strange New Worlds performs is an intentionally whimsical one-off thing that happens between two established but distinct shows, often heavily advertised in hopes of encouraging cross-pollination between the two shows' fanbases. They often require bending the reality of one or both shows to work - to the point that they sometimes create paradoxes where an actor is playing different characters who exist in the same reality, or where Tony Soprano is watching a show where people are talking about TV character Tony Soprano, or where characters from one show exist on another show both as fictional TV characters and as real people. I'm talking about The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones, I'm talking about Mad About You characters appearing on Friends, I'm talking about Stewie fr...