Strange New Worlds solved Star Trek’s trial episode problem

polygon.com:

Star Trek is not the first thing that comes to mind when you say “legal procedural,” but maybe it should be, considering the franchise’s love affair with putting courts into outer space.

“The Measure of a Man” — the early Next Generation episode universally regarded as one of the best hours of Trek ever made, if not the best — probably clinched Trek’s love affair with legal drama. But let us not forget that The Next Generationbegan its series premiere and ended its series finale with Q putting Captain Picard, specifically, on trial for the fate of all humanity.

And the very existence of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — which this week airs its own first courtroom episode, “Ad Astra per Aspera” — owes itself to Star Trek’s first ever trial episode, “The Menagerie,” which introduced Captain Pike and first officer Number One.

So it’s only fitting that “Ad Astra per Aspera,” the trial episode of a show that only exists because of Star Trek’s terminal love affair with the trial episode, is perhaps the most perfect Star Trek Trial Episode.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 episode 2.]

The Star Trek trial episode is a trope as worn as a dog-eared paperback and as comfortable as an old sweater. Why dance around the sci-fi metaphor you made up, when you can just turn the captain into a trial lawyer and have them declare the point you’re trying to make out loud, as if Atticus Finch and Flash Gordon had been caught in a transporter accident?

It doesn’t even have to be about a big metaphor. It could just feature Starfleet administrative investigations or good old baffling alien court systems, as seen in episodes like the Original Series’ “Court Martial;” TNG’s “The First Duty,”