This one had a couple of turns of phrase that smacked of an inexperienced Trek writer: Riker introduced himself as "Commanding officer William Riker" (rather than "Commander" or "First Officer"), and Crusher called him "Bill" rather than "Will".
On the bright side, I can rationalise these as evidence that this is far from a canon story. 🤣
The Bill thing at least is a joke about TNG season 1 - they had Troi call him Bill and it was in the early series bible that Picard would call him William and he would be called Bill by "close female friends." I hate these shorts (although I'm glad they exist for the animation, at least), but that was a pretty funny callback.
Yes indeed - it's basically a Star Trek version of "Duck Amuck." Very lightweight, but I'm enjoying it more than the actual shorts. The first one is linked here.
The videos have made me completely disinterested in even looking at the preview first issue comic.
I don’t want to reward the behaviour in any way. One viewing per very short Trek is all they will get from me.
Paramount can gauge the success from how much repeated viewing these the narrow slice of the mostly American male population of an age to have loved 90s humour. Maybe they think it’s got high overlap with Berman-era fans. I’m dubious but data will tell the story.