All of Clint Howard’s Star Trek appearances ranked from worst to best

Commander Buck Martinez – Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Clint Howard’s most recent appearance cemented his status as a one-man easter egg.

The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode Under The Cloak Of War was a deadly serious episode sandwiched between two very silly ones. Strange New Worlds’ whiplash shifts in tone are one of its most controversial aspects. Even within the episode, Commander Buck Martinez, with his trademark manic energy, and laugh-out-loud malapropisms was probably the closest The Cloak Of War came to a silly moment, with his.

There are some significant parallels to Under The Cloak Of War in previous Star Trek episodes where the horrors of war pushed our heroes to make take morally questionable actions, but Buck Martinez brought up another parallel, M*A*S*H, a show about people finding humor among the horrors of war, that didn’t flinch from depicting those horrors.

Commander Martinez was the chief medical officer at J’Gal, a Federation colony that came under attack during the Klingon War. We meet him during a flashback when he recruited Nurse Chapel to the makeshift tent hospital there. Even though we can clearly see that J’Gal is a warzone, the gravity of the situation doesn’t hit until he reveals that he fast-tracked Chapel’s recruitment when their last nurse was killed.

That one scene the two sides of Strange New Worlds brought together as one, the best of both worlds, if you will. Clint Howard’s comedic vibe always has a slightly dangerous edge, which foreshadowed that the episode was about to take a dark turn.