Strange New Worlds joke
During the final episode of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Kam made a joke that I really enjoyed. So I’ll tell you about it below, but it requires a little context for setup, and the context involves spoilers for the final two episodes of the season, “Subspace Rhapsody” and “Hegemony.” So I’ll add some spoiler space before I continue.
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Background: Episode 9, “Subspace Rhapsody,” was the musical episode, where everybody kept bursting into song. The singing thing got resolved by the end of the episode.
The next episode, ep 10, “Hegemony,” is more serious in tone. A fair bit of the episode takes place on a planet where the locals have reproduced an American mid-20th-century midwestern small town, complete with the usual sorts of stores and businesses you might expect to see in such a place. (Side note: We saw no particular in-universe reason for that setting, so we guessed that it was chosen because the production team had a 1950s small-town set handy.)
At one point, several Enterprise crew members (including Captain Pike) are cautiously making their way through what’s left of that town after an attack by hostile aliens. One of the crew members detects more hostile aliens about to arrive, so the away team needs a place to hide.
So Pike says:
“Barbershop. Now.”
To which Kam replied:
“…Didn’t you do enough singing last episode?”
I laughed a lot.