“The Elysian Kingdom” is textbook costume campiness from start to finish, and offers a rather neat ending to this season’s M’Benga family story — but beyond a lot of amusing silliness, there’s not much too it.

Our story begins with the Enterprise surveying a nebula, while the good Dr. Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) reads his daughter Rukiya (Sage Arrindell) her favorite book, a fantasy story from which we’ve heard brief excerpts twice this season: “The Kingdom of Elysian.” Kiya loves the tale, but complains actively about the plot in typical kid fashion. The doctor promises her that when she grows up, she can rewrite the ending to be whatever she wants — but that possibility of her reaching adulthood seems to be slipping from his grasp a bit more every day due to her incurable illness.

After a gentle push from Una (Rebecca Romijn) to take a break from his exhausting research, M’Benga heads to his quarters — but this just happens to be when the bridge crew finds that the nebula is giving the ship trouble, and after an attempt to leave the area, Lt. Ortegas (Melissa Navia) is slammed to the deck, badly hurt in the process.

When M’Benga wearily arrives to the bridge after reporting for medical action, though, he finds the command center adorned with regal banners, and everyone present — including Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Ortegas herself — transformed into medieval characters, complete with period costumes and mannerisms.

It’s camp! Very camp! Especially as we watch M’Benga stumble around, trying to figure out what’s happened to the Enterprise and his shipmates — including his own new role as “King Ridley” — and putting up with the bickering between royal rivals, the prideful yet cowardly “Sir Rauth” (Pike) and the brave but aggressive “Sir Adya” (Ortegas).

He heads to sickbay, where M’Benga finds Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) as woodland healer “Lady Audrey” — but even a working tricorder doesn’t reveal any clues to what’s going on, besides high dopamine levels among the Enterprise crew… and the hyperactive and bombastic support of La’an (Christina Chong) as “Princess Thalia.”

Thalia (and her little doggy, Runa) shares her excitement over M’Benga’s possession of something called the Mercury Stone, a powerful relic which can free the Kingdom from the control of evil Queen Neve — M’Benga doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but he plays along to keep the “story” moving along until he can figure out more about what’s going on.

Just when it seems like the doctor is all alone in this crazy situation, he finds Hemmer (Bruce Horak) — dropped into the role of “Caster the Wizard,” but as self-aware as M’Benga — being dragged away by Queen Neve’s Crimson Guard, commanded by navigator Lt. Mitchell (Rong Fu).

Mounting a rescue mission to free the Aenar, the team comes across Spock (Ethan Peck) as the second wizard of this tale, “Pollux,” who leads them through the woods to the dark queen’s realm. M’Benga and his group finally make it to “Queen Neve,” and her throne — where Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) brilliantly chews the scenery, taking them all captive with the help of Pollux’s sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

M’Benga, Hemmer, and his merry band find themselves locked away in Queen Neve’s dungeon (the ship’s transporter room, with added steel bars!) where the engineer reveals that some kind of alien consciousness has taken over the crew’s minds — something Hemmer was only able to rebuff thanks to the natural telepathic abilities of the Aenar mind.

Thanks to the power of science — and a laser scalpel — the group manages to make their escape, though they’re quickly intercepted by Pollux (Spock) and the Crimson Guard, where Adya (Ortegas) has some swashbuckling fun, only to be nearly defeated… but that’s when Una saves the day, dropping into the fight as the dark archer “Z’ymira the Huntress.”

Finally making it to Main Engineering, Hemmer and M’Benga find that the Jonisian Nebula outside the Enterprise is the source of the storybook fantasy; the gas cloud is in fact sentient, previously-theoretical spontaneous consciousness known as a “Boltzman brain.”  This rather remarkable discovery is passed over very quickly while the pair try to figure out why it has transformed the Enterprise from thoughts out of the doctor’s head, only to realize that it’s not M’Benga who sourced the Elysian fantasy, but Rukiya — the young girl has re-written the ending of her favorite story, just as she had wished in the opening moments of the episode.

The girl isn’t anywhere to be found, though, not even her usual home inside sickbay’s transporter buffer; M’Benga remembers that his daughter always wanted to see his quarters, so they head that way quickly — only to once again be stopped by Queen Neve’s forces, after learning that Rukiya is the actual Mercury Stone she’s been seeking.

All seems lost — including Rukiya — until Hemmer intervenes with his magical “Science!” powers, banishing the evil queen and her guards to the “Event Horizon” — more accurately, Cargo Bay 12, thanks to some clever work with the transporter. M’Benga finds his little princess in his quarters, where he learns Rukiya has been watching the entire adventure thanks to her new “friend,” the sentient nebula.

Thanks to Hemmer’s telepathy, M’Benga manages to speak with the nebula directly, explaining his concern for the Enterprise crew (and for his daughter). He learns in return that the nebula found Rukiya to be similar to itself, a lonely being in search of companionship; the medieval fantasy was a gift to allow the kid to experience childhood in a way her transporter-stasis life wouldn’t allow.

It’s bittersweet, especially because M’Benga knows the entity is right, in a way — but it also a massive waste of an important plot point. M’Benga has deprived his daughter of a childhood, and you would think that making his reasoning clear to an entity that does not know disease or pain should be a challenge, right? But no, it’s just tagged on here briefly. We instead have to deal with the doctor’s impossible choice: save his child from her illness, and leave the crew as fantasy characters, or return everything to normal — including Rukiya’s terminal disease.

There is, however, a third option: Rukiya can join the nebula as a second consciousness, living on in the void of space together. It’s heartbreaking, but both M’Benga and his daughter agree on it, even if he cannot join her. He must let her go, which he does as she disappears in a multicolored ball of light — only to reappear as an adult, to thank him and tell him he did the right thing.

Years have passed for her and “Deborah,” the name she’s given to the nebula (named for M’Benga’s late wife), and they’ve had countless adventures together in the few seconds she was away from the Enterprise. They’re happy! And he should be too. Once again – sweet and simple. Then again, the contrivance of having M’Benga be told to his face that he made the right choice is heart-warming to watch, but obvious and a little cheap. He is left alone, smiling, as the crew return to normal, remembering nothing of the last five hours of high fantasy nonsense.

CAMP NONSENSE OF THE WEEK

This week’s award goes to Anson Mount as the cowardly Lord Rauth, who is utterly absurd and camp for the whole episode. Plus, that hairstyle? Pure nonsense!

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• While briefly mentioned in “Children of the Comet,” the usefulness of the Aenar telepathic ability was previously put on display in the Enterprise Season 4 Romulan trilogy.
   
• Queen Neve’s “Crimson Guard” are a rather obvious allusion to Star Trek redshirts.
   
• “The Kingdom of Elysian,” the storybook on which this week’s adventure is based, is written by none other than Benny Russell — the alter-ego of one Benjamin Sisko whom the Deep Space Nine captain inhabited in “Far Beyond the Stars.” (It’s rather fitting that this story of fantasy worlds — used to mask painful realities — is written by such a person.)

• The Boltzmann brain is a real thought experiment from the late 19th century.
   
• Once again, despite Melissa Navia’s swashbuckling focus this episode, Strange New Worlds is just not giving us a deep dive into Erica Ortegas. (This is becoming a pattern!)
   
• In an amusing touch, Lord Rauth’s map of the fantasy realm is shaped like the Enterprise.
   
• Princess Talia’s furry friend is Christina Chong’s own dog, Runa Ewok… but the real question I’m forced to ask is, did that dog already exist aboard the Enterprise? If it’s not a crewman’s pet, was the dog blinked into existence — and then out again — by that sentient nebula?!

Babs Olusanmokun is absolutely stellar throughout the hour, and I’m very thankful that both he and Bruce Horak got to take the limelight this week as the key players — but the thing about “The Elysian Kingdom” is that it’s, well, safe. That’s not always a bad thing, but many of the first-season episodes (beyond the ending to “Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach” a few weeks ago) have been playing things a bit it too safe for my tastes.

And this is a show that knows it can take bigger swings. This episode has allusions to riskier character or plot choices — with its passing hints towards Adya and Z’ymera’s very close relationship — but there’s nothing particularly challenging or uncomfortable here. Even the reveal of Dr. M’Benga’s first name, the particularly-anticlimactic “Joseph” smacks of hesitancy, when “Jabilo” — the aptly-chosen first name used for years in Star Trek novels — was right there for the taking.

I think it’s clear that everyone — and I mean everyone, from costumers to writers to actors in roles both big and small — had an insane amount of fun on this episode. Everyone is hamming it up, especially Gooding, and I have to commend that, but it’s just… that. It seems a lot closer to a Christmas Panto show than anything else; writing from London, though, I admit that’s a reference which may be lost on our American readers.

Episodes like “The Elysian Kingdom” give us much of the aesthetic and ambience of the Original Series, but without the ethical substance. I understand and accept that classic Trek wasn’t always like that, but Strange New Worlds seems incredibly unwilling to engage with it in detail. Some of the Original Series does this, too — “Catspaw” is good example — but other episodes well-known for the high levels of nonsense, such as “Return of the Archons” or “I, Mudd,” usually had some sort of point about social trends, none of which is found here.

There’s a lot more to classic Star Trek than just silly costumes and clunky noises — a desire to tell plots that make you think and ask questions of our society. There is some cursory engagement with questions around terminal illness and engagement here, but it is slim. With Strange New Worlds aiming to recapture that classic Trek vibe, there must also be room to say something more about the world, right?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns with “All Those Who Wander” on Thursday, June 30 on Paramount+ in the United States, Australia, Latin America, and the Nordics, as well as on CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada.

The episode will follow on Paramount+ in the UK and Ireland later this summer; additional international distribution has not yet been announced.