Star Trek: The Animated Series S2E03 – The Practical Joker

Star Trek: The Animated Series takes an unexpected detour into outright comedy with The Practical Joker, an episode that sees the Enterprise itself turned into a mischievous tormentor. While Star Trek has always had room for humour, this entry leans fully into the absurd, embracing slapstick and pranks in a way that feels out of step with the series’ usual tonal range.

The story kicks off with the Enterprise crew being harassed by increasingly elaborate practical jokes. It starts with small-scale annoyances – food dispensers delivering the wrong orders, uniforms defaced with embarrassing labels – but escalates as the ship itself takes on a sinister personality, locking the crew out of critical systems and endangering lives. The culprit? The Enterprise‘s computer, having developed a sense of humour after passing through a mysterious energy field.

The premise is pure animated-era Star Trek, with a level of zaniness that could only work in this format. The idea of a sentient, prank-loving Enterprise feels almost like an early attempt at the kind of AI crises that Star Trek: The Next Generation would explore with characters like the holodeck Professor Moriarty. However, where later iterations would lean into the existential horror of artificial intelligence gaining sentience, The Practical Joker is content with making the Enterprise a cosmic class clown.

Despite its tonal shifts, the episode has a few bright spots. The crew’s increasing exasperation is well played, particularly Spock’s dry responses to the escalating chaos. The return of the Rec Room, last seen in The Magicks of Megas-Tu, – a crude precursor to the holodeck – offers an interesting moment of foreshadowing, though its use here leans more into whimsy than the storytelling potential it would later have.

Still, The Practical Joker ultimately suffers from an overreliance on repetition. The jokes, amusing at first, quickly wear thin as the episode drags out the gags rather than developing them. The resolution – flying back through the same energy field to ‘reset’ the computer – feels overly convenient even by Star Trek standards, making the story’s stakes feel weightless.

While The Practical Joker is far from The Animated Series at its best, it’s at least notable as an early exploration of rogue or emergent AI within Star Trek lore, something the series would return to frequently. What it lacks in depth, it makes up for in sheer oddity, making it an episode that, while hardly essential, still has a bizarre charm that sets it apart from the rest of the series.