Discourse · Who Keeps Star Trek · Reply · X
21 August 2026
Puppets and Purpose
Fandom Pulse (@fandompulse) on X · August 21, 2026
Rumpelstiltskin or Puppets doesn't make an episode bad. DeCandido's examples, choices with narrative direction.
Puppets in Star Trek: regardless of direction or not, is being read as part of the whole, '09 - '26.
DeCandido's comments, lack of awareness or hidden purpose. Bemused?
Lightly edited from the original for clarity (the years marked as '09 and '26).
I must confess to amusement—or is it bemusement?—at all the online fulminating about doing a puppet/Muppet episode, as if that soils the purity of Star Trek. The same Star Trek that has (checks notes) the captain riding the first officer like a horse, the Enterprise encountering Abraham Lincoln floating in space and a giant space amoeba and a doomsday machine that looks like a cornucopia that lost a bar fight, the captain having hundreds of tribbles dumped on his head, the ship’s doctor having green smoke sex with a candle, the Enterprise visiting the Nazi planet and the Roman Empire planet and the Greek god planet and the gangster planet and the Aryan sex addict planet, Voyager creating a warp drive that turns you into a horny salamander, the captain’s dog peeing on a planet thus contaminating its biosphere, the crew playing a game that is like Jenga but without the deep intellectualism, the crew being “de-evolved” (more than once!), the security chief being killed by a sadistic oil slick, the Enterprise ferrying fish people and space hippies, etc.