The tale of a tardigrade and its nemesis

It’s too late to stop everyone making a song and dance about this, but I’m quite sure that director Michael Giacchino (yes, that one), and writers Chris Silvestri and Anthony Maranville weren’t intending this story to be a serious addition to the Star Trek canon. (Personally I think the misnumbering of the Enterprise was a deliberate way of showing that.)

xIt’s far more in the madcap realms of US Saturday morning cartoons than the original animated Star Trek was (British audiences, think of the start of the Doctor Who story Love & Monsters for the sort of tomfoolery involved). But at its heart, it’s still very much a Star Trek story, with a parent’s love central to the tale and the embracing of a different culture after initial (or in this case, long term) antagonism.

Animators Pixomondo have a great deal of fun with this, with recreations of core elements of the original series mythos (e.g. the first and last encounters with Khan) and some of the more endearingly daft images – Abraham Lincoln, Apollo’s hand – recreated. There’s sections of dialogue reused from the 1960s show and areas of the Enterprise far closer to their 50-year old counterparts than we are getting in Discovery. (Maybe that’ll shut a certain part of fandom up, but somehow I doubt it.)

Verdict: Short, sweet and effective – another triumph for the Short Treks. 9/10

Paul Simpson