Did you know that there are Star Trek Minisodes out there? They’re meant to tide viewers over until Star Trek Discovery–often in a hilarious way. Via Gizmodo:
Star Trek: Short Treks has so far been the perfect way to while away the time until Discovery’s return in a few weeks. “The Escape Artist,” the fourth and final minisode in the series, shines a spotlight on the infamous Harcourt Fenton Mudd — and to learn more, we spoke to Mudd himself, Rainn Wilson.
Wilson, who also directed the short, stars once again as the cosmic conman Harry Mudd, wheeling and dealing his way across the Star Trek galaxy after his prior Discovery appearances in the morally murky “Choose Your Pain” and the excellent time-loop episode “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.” While those episodes gave us some intriguing sides of Harry to explore, “The Escape Artist” instead focuses on the more humorously zany side of Mudd’s many escapades—digging into a lighter humour that Discovery at large is looking to capture more often in its second season.
Asked about humour and Star Trek, Wilson said:
Yeah, people kind of forget the original series—and The Next Generation—have a lot of humour in them. And some episodes were almost straight-up comedic. And so, there’s another aspect of the Star Trek legacy that’s not just the humour and the banter, but, humour in the situations. Think about “The Trouble With Tribbles,” so many other episodes that were almost like watching an hour of comedy, you know? And Discovery— and I think it was a good choice that we made—that this modern world, if you’re rebooting a Star Trek franchise, I think it was the right way to go to have it be more episodic and have a through line.