TL;DR – This episode brought a smile to my face from the moment it started till the second those end credits rolled.

Disclosure – I paid for the Paramount+ streaming service that viewed this episode. 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Review –

A cross-over episode used to be the mainstay of network television, with some franchises building their worlds upon it. But for every Brooklyn Nine-Nine/ The New Girl moment that is so perfectly placed that it lives on in memes. You have a sea of awkward messes that fail to elevate either side. Star Trek saw this and went, you know what, let’s take this issue of trying to get two different shows with different vibes to work and add the extra difficulty of both shows being a different medium. But does it work? Oh, yes, it does.   

So to set the scene, it is 2381, and the USS Cerritos has arrived at Krulmuth-B to take a regular scan of the portal on the surface. It has not been active since the time of Pike, but you always need to make sure. Ensigns Boimler (Jack Quaid), Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Tendi (Noël Wells), and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) beam down to the planet to make sure. It was all going well until the portal is accidentally activated when Boimler is posing for a photo and is sucked in before Mariner can grab him. Waking up after being jettisoned, Boimler looks up to see himself in the sickbay of an old Constitution Class ship to see the one and only Captain Pike (Anson Mount) staring down, and well, he ain’t in Kansas anymore. Now from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be [SPOILERS] ahead.