Risa

TAS seems to be a cultivated taste.

I’m all for encouraging franchise fans to make the effort.

That’s a food synthesizer gone mad as part of the overall corruption of the ship’s main computer.

A space anomaly (TM) has integrated ‘playful’ entertainment programming from a holographic simulator. We also see artificial gravity shenanigans, and Scotty directing engineering specialists to force open the door to the simulator.

The TAS screencaps (thanks to Trek Core’s fantastic library) are from the episode ‘The Practical Joker.’

In TAS, we first see a precursor of the later Holodeck technology. In ‘The Practical Joker’, we first also see the familiar Trek trope of a space anomaly affecting the crew’s holographic entertainment simulator, leading to the ship being taken over in some way.

The VR simulator is within one of the Enterprise ‘Rec Rooms’ that also serves as a mess. The malfunction of the nearby food synthesizers was one of the first symptoms of the ship’s computer (AI) pulling practical jokes.

Here’s an image of what was happening on the other side of the closed Rec Room simulator door by the time Scotty’s team was trying to break in to rescue the other officers.

TAS introduced so many great ideas to the franchise. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth viewing all the episodes at least once. A few are classics.