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Amazing Episode. A tape the finger-nails episode.



"The Andorian Incident" was another all-time great ep and Shran one of MY favorite recurring characters. I might even say favorite. He was never what he seemed until you catch on to his brand of ethics and he was a very ethical character.

Is this series currently on hulu or Netlix? We could totally do some group reviews.

Lash, just a friendly suggestion: I really think you should give TNG s4 and s5 a chance, especially s5, which introduced one of my favorite Trek characters, Ensign Ro Laren (played by Michelle Forbes, who's probably spent the last several years kicking herself for prematurely leaving the Trek franchise to pursue "serious" acting. At least she had enough sense to take a juicy role on the Battlestar Galactica re-imagining.)

Yeah, TNG Season 2 IS pretty terrible, overall, as was Season 1, imo--with some exceptions. I feel that from Season 3-on, it rocked, though. No one should judge TNG before they've viewed the Season 3 ep "Yesterday's Enterprise". If you don't like that one, then you'll never like any TNG.

It took the TNG actors a bit long to find their characters IMO and a couple of them, I don't know, maybe not interesting or well written or something. I never did take to Riker. I'd probably say even worse for Voyager. Mulgrew had no one to share a scene with.

DS9 had loads of characters I liked. I thought they hit chemistry real quick in this Trek.

I agree, Lardy, "Yesterday's Enterprise" is a good 'un. I couldn't recommend s3 without reservations, though, as IMO the show was just starting to jell at that point, and wouldn't emerge as the proverbial butterfly from the chrysalis until s4. I think it's telling that s3 was the last one with the old guard writing staff and with (barf) Wesley. But, yeah, I do think s3 has its moments.

Ooh, her voice just gets me all melty. Incredibly sexy!

She was supposed to be the Bajoran viewpoint character on Deep Space Nine, but her unavailability led to the new character of Kira Nerys, played by Nana Visitor, who was pretty awesome in her own right, and transporter Chief WhatsHisFace being brought over from the Enterprise as the 'crossover character.'

Kind of a mixed blessing, since Visitor ate up her role and was great, and the other dude and his recurring marital problems subplot and 'hurt myself kayaking in the holodeck' meme was deadly dull.

For later Next Generation episodes, tightly focused ones like 'The Inner Light' and 'Tin Man' were among my favorites.



Same thought on Riker, who always annoyed me.

Data started out fascinating, and then quickly turned into Fonzi / Snuffleupagus, and got overused to the point they might as well have had a laugh track whenever he walked into the room or uttered a line.

I actually kind of liked poor Pulaski, temporary replacement for Dr. Crusher, because she just sort of rubbed everyone the wrong way, and it was neat to see the team out of their comfort zone. Same with the brief command of Captain Jellico (when Picard was missing in action), who flat out butted heads with *everyone* (starting with telling Deanna to stop wearing flouncy dresses on the command deck and start actually wearing her Starfleet uniform to work). Jellico wouldn't have let no Wesley on the bridge, that's for sure!

Deep Space Nine did seem to have a bumper crop of interesting characters. Even secondary or recurring characters like Garak and Gul Dukat were, IMO, more interestingly fleshed out than 'regulars' on other shows like Harry 'wingman' Kim or Geordi 'my only purpose on this show is to be Data's straight man' La Forge.

That's not entirely a slam on the shows themselves, so much as a benefit from Deep Space Nine having a central location, and being able to go into depth with recurring characters, unlike, say, Voyager, in which you meat the Kazon Ogla or whatever, and then the Voyager is leaving their space at Warp Ludicrous Speed, so it's kind of a buttpull if you ever see them again...

No real option for 'recurring' bad guys (or allies) if you're every waking moment is travelling multiple factors of light speed away from whoever you met last week.

DS9 is hands down my favourite, head & shoulders above the rest, I don't think there was a "bad" season (Season 1 took a while to find footing, but was still interesting).

There's an interesting "William Shatner Presents" documentary on why Season 1 & 2 of TNG were so rotten, but succeeded in spite of themselves. Just looked it up and it's called "William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge", highly recommended if you like Trek, or just behind the scenes show biz stuff.

I have been thinking about it, and the best part about the reboot is that everything in the Enterprise timeline is still valid in both timelines, so I'm hoping it can be used more in the future. There's so many species/places in the Federation that get barely any screen time.

I love Data, so I should be offended--but I just keep picturing him walking onto the bridge with a leather jacket, a spit curl and thumbs held up going, "aaaaaaaaaayyyy!"



To be completely fair, there were some decent episodes in both seasons, but I think it was more TNG's potential that kept viewers watching more than anything. Rick Berman taking the show's executive producer reigns from Roddenberry after Season 2 is typically cited as the reason for the shows upturn in quality. As much an innovator as Roddenberry was on TOS, the aging and ailing creator was definitely out of touch with modern storytelling. Berman did, however, run the franchise into the ground by milking it for so many spin-offs.



While DS9 was always good, I feel it really became a must-watch after Worf's arrival with Season 4. Something else else about his character's presence just gave the cast that extra tension and zing that made everything click like never before. It was like Worf was the missing piece of the puzzle. Everyone became more interesting, and Avery Brooks as Sisko finally seemed to be awakened from that acting coma he'd been in the first three seasons. (Or maybe it was the goatee...? )

I love the recurring threats and characters of DS9. My favorite recurring bit may be the show's frequent revisiting of the Mirror Universe that originated on TOS. I'm a sucker for good alternate reality stories, and DS9's treatment of this one was extremely satisfying. The alternate Kira (the Intendant) was just SO deliciously evil!

TNG still has the edge for me because of pure sentimentality for the characters and for the fact that it, imo, has more of what I consider the best Trek episodes ever of any of the other franchises, including TOS.

CAN YOU PLEASE stop running around in your underwear for 5 minutes, I'm trying to get work done or something...

This describes my feelings on TNG precisely.


Yep! Hulu has all episodes of all series!

I would actually be down for that!

Seeing as how this thread has evolved into an all-purpose Star Trek discussion, AND seeing as how today marks the official 50th Anniversary of the Trek franchise, I would like to suggest to the Anywhere Machine mods that it might be a good idea to retitle this thread. Perhaps "The All-Star Trek Thread?"

I am also hoping that this post will be the start of a day-long posting party about all things Trek. Later on, I will be reviewing my two favorite movies starring the Trek TOS cast, and I will also step into Gym'll's to review the 4-issue Star Trek arc by Mike W. Barr & Tom Sutton which began DC Comics' decade-plus (roughly 1983-1995) of guiding the Trek comic books.

And I would be remiss if I did not dedicate today's celebration to our dear departed friend MLLASH, Legion World's most passionate Trek fan, particularly of Star Trek TOS.

Let's boldly go where no web community has gone before!

A Look Back: STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

(A warning: This review turned out to be very long and rambling. Mea culpa. )

I think that Legion Worlders who know me well enough will not be at all surprised to see me draw analogies between the Star Trek TOS television series and its first theatrical movie, and the Transformers Generation 1 animated television series and its animated movie. After all, Transformers *was* my own Star Trek: TOS -- the former (which was of my time) a stunning feat of universe building disguised as a kiddie cartoon, the latter (which was before my time) a stunning feat of universe building disguised as a live-action space opera. And...most importantly, the first big-screen movies that both shows inspired were, IMHO, disgraceful bastardizations of their source material.

There are differences to be sure -- the first Trek movie was ponderous, pretentious, and lacking in drama, and even the nonstop swirl of state-of-the-art special effects could keep it afloat; the first Transformers animated movie was frantic, aimed at the lowest common denominator, and locked into a state of amped-up melodrama for its entire running time. What I think they have in common is a mutual misunderstanding of the shows they were based on, *despite being written and produced by pretty much the same people who gave us the original shows!* Trek TOS the TV series was always smarter and more ambitious than typical live-action space opera, but it never lost sight that it was, at heart, a swashbuckling adventure with a vivid cast of main characters. The pre-movie seasons of Transformers transcended their crass roots as a toy company's promotional means-to-an-end, and they rarely lost sight that they were smarter and more ambitious than typical toy-inspired cartoons, or that they had a vivid cast of characters. The first movies, on the other hand, got it all wrong IMO -- Trek by emphasizing potentially interesting but half-baked ideas at the expense of characterization and fun, Transformers by dumbing itself down and going pedal-to-the-metal with nonstop mindless death and destruction at the expense of characterization and gravitas.

All of which is a long-winded roundabout way of saying that the second Trek movie, "The Wrath of Khan," was not only an artistically and commercially successful return to the best qualities which had made the TV series so special, but also managing to be thematically ambitious and (despite a drastically reduced budget) visually worthy of its widescreen presentation, all at the same time! (And now, we have reached the point where the Trek/Transformers analogy breaks down, because the first Trek movie was a box-office hit despite its awfulness, whereas the Transformers animated movie was a box-office flop upon its original release, and while I firmly believe that the post-movie episodes of the Transformers TV cartoon have many moments of brilliance equal to or better than the pre-movie episodes, it was ultimately a qualified success, because by this time the show's toy-company sponsors were slashing the show's budget by having at least half of the season's episodes cheaply animated in Korea instead of lushly animated in Japan. The upshot was that, while the script to the third season's movie-length premiere episode was everything the big-screen movie *should* have been, chock full of characterization & continuity Easter eggs, and with a beautiful light-and-shade plot structure building to a series of dramatic crescendos, it was unable to fully rise above its complete lack of production values. But I digress.)

"The Wrath of Khan" differentiates itself from the first Trek movie by embracing the TV series' vivid characterizations and, even more crucially, the series' universe-building continuity. The source for the plot was one of the episodes more popular with fandom, "Space Seed," with Ricardo Montalban as Khan, a genetically enhanced post-human from the late 20th Century who was revived in the distant future from suspended animation and proceeds to resume his world-conquering ambitions, only to be defeated by Captain Kirk and exiled to a dreary planetoid. Fast forward a decade-and-a-half, and Khan is now the widower warlord of a hopeless world, carrying in his passionate heart a burning vendetta against Kirk. The Captain, now a reluctant Starfleet Admiral, is, for his part, very much feeling his advancing age and deeply depressed, with almost every ember in his once-fiery spirit extinguished. Through a series of circumstances, Kirk ends up back at the helm of the Enterprise (whose current Captain, former First Officer Spock, is not the least bit sentimental or bitter about his unexpected demotion -- he is, after all, a Vulcan...well, technically, a half-Vulcan...I think you get the idea.) It all ends with Khan and his acolytes blown up real good, and Kirk reunited with his estranged geneticist ex-lover, Carol Marcus, and their unplanned, now grown, son, David, but at the cost of his friend Spock's life, who repairs the ship's warp drive, only to find that even his more resilient Vulcan physiology cannot fully compensate for the copious amount of radiation he is exposed to.

STWOK was the brainchild of Harve Bennett, a veteran producer/writer of prime-time TV shows and mini-series, who was brought in by Paramount as a replacement for Trek's creative progenitor, Gene Roddenberry, who had burned all his bridges with the studio during the chaotic production of Trek movie 1. Bennett was unfamiliar with the Trek show, and so he dutifully watched the entire series, finally fixating upon the aforementioned episode "Space Seed," and its villain, Khan. After various drafts either plotted, co-scripted, or supervised by Bennett, the producer hit paydirt when a Paramount executive, Karen Moore, referred him to Nicholas Meyer, a seasoned novelist and scriptwriter who had made his directorial debut a couple years earlier with "Time After Time," a delightful time-travel drama-comedy with none other than H.G. Wells as the hero. Meyer, not unlike Bennett, didn't know Trek from Captain Video. It could be argued that the creative/production team's favoring solid craftsmanship and professionalism over a blindingly heavy emotional investment in the project coupled with egomania and a lack of team spirit (as was most likely the case with Roddenberry and Trek Movie 1) was what ultimately made STWOK work for both committed Trek fans and the average moviegoer.

The movie, upon viewing it with the distance of many years (I think the last time I saw it was in the early 2000s) is not perfect. To my mind, Spock's death lacks foreshadowing and buildup, coming off as borderline arbitrary, and his death scene drags on far too long. But the ending, with Spock's lovely memorial service punctuated by William Shatner's surprisingly sincere and nuanced delivery, saves the movie from going off the rails. My other niggles are with some of the casting of the characters not previously seen on the Trek TV series. The biggest positive for me in that area is Bibi Besch as Carol Marcus; I consider Besch a criminally underrated character actress who died far too young (she was also the mother of the beautiful and talented Samantha Mathis, whose career, sadly, has taken her down a path of a lack of industry and fan appreciation similar to her mother's.) Merritt Butrick, another promising actor who died too young, plays David and gets the young man's anger and angst right, although he looks a bit longer in the tooth than he should (he was 23 at the time of production.) The negatives include the wasting of the fine African-American actor Paul Winfield's talent, in a glorified "redshirt" role as the doomed Terrell. But the worst offender is Kirstie Alley as Saavik, the Enterprise's young Vulcan officer and Spock's protege and heir apparent; I will concede that a lot of this ill will I bear towards Alley might be retroactive, given the way that any promise she had shown as either a serious actress or a comedian pretty much vanished after her first couple seasons on the TV show Cheers, when the fine line between Alley's on-screen and public personas basically disappeared in a shrill riot of pull-out-all-the-stops 24/7 buffoonery. But even viewed with as much objectivity as I can manage, Alley really does seem to me like she's constantly bug-eyed and fidgety and about to crack up -- hardly apropos casting for a Vulcan, I would say.

In the end, however, those are minor complaints. STWOK proved that the Trek franchise could work on the big screen, won Trek many new fans (my then-tween self circa 1987 with her hands on a VHS cassette included) and arguably saved the franchise from oblivion. For that, I am a thankful and happy viewer.

A Look Back: STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (SPOILERS!!)

It needs to be said here at the start that it's very difficult for me to be impartial about this movie. I had seen some of the earlier Trek movies before I saw this one, but this was the first Trek movie I saw on a big screen in a proper movie theatre. In addition, I was already a fan of Kim Cattrall before her role in this movie, and many years before the TV series Sex and the City introduced her to the mainstream mass audience. And I'm happy to say that, having watched this movie for the first time in a few years, I love it just as much as I did back in the day, maybe even more.

The story was inspired by a "springboard" concept provided by Leonard Nimoy himself after the fall of the Berlin Wall: In a nutshell, what if the Klingon empire were to fall through both their own neglect of the conditions their people live in and their overreliance on militarism? Would there still even be a need for Starfleet? And most importantly, how would our intrepid Captain Kirk react?

That last question is answered early on, and the answer is not pretty. Though Kirk is understandably hostile and distrusting of the Klingons, moreso than ever after one of them killed his son (it happened in the third Trek movie, "The Search for Spock,") his hawkish declaration to the more liberal Spock -- "LET THEM DIE!" -- never fails to give me gooseflesh. Nicholas Meyer is back to direct and co-script a Trek movie for the first time since "The Wrath of Khan" (in the interim, he co-wrote the fourth Star Trek movie, "The Voyage Home," which was directed by Nimoy, and which I consider the most overrated of the first six Trek movies; tellingly, it was also the highest-grossing at the box office; I've always been contrary.) And Meyer wastes no time in pushing the viewers' buttons -- to have an African-American actor playing the most unapologetically racist and fervently anti-Klingon member of the Federation could have been a bit on the nose, but when the actor is the late, great Brock Peters, it totally works (Meyer has admitted that Peters was very uneasy about some of the dialogue, but it's a testament to Peters' professionalism and talent that he nails it.) Before long, the Enterprise crew have the worst brought out in themselves when they end up playing reluctant hosts to a Klingon delegation led by the idealistic, progressive Chancellor Gorkon (the reliably good David Warner*) and his daughter and fellow politician Azetbur (Rosanna De Soto.) The crew are on far from their best behavior, which comes back to haunt them when they are framed for an attack on the delegation's ship and the assassination of Gorkon. After Captain Kirk and Doctor McCoy (who tried to save Gorkon's life but failed due to his improper knowledge of Klingon anatomy) surrender themselves to the Klingons rather than endanger the lives of everyone aboard the Enterprise, they are subjected to a kangaroo court (where they are defended, earnestly but ultimately in vain, by an ancestor of TNG's Worf, played by Michael Dorn himself.) Kirk and McCoy are sentenced to lifetime imprisonment at a Klingon gulag, and while they deal with this deadly dilemma, the rest of the Enterprise crew, led by Spock, slowly unravel a conspiracy from not only rogue Klingons (including one of Gorkon's associates, General Chang, played by Christopher Plummer) but also rogue Federation members, none of whom want the war to end. Even one of the highest ranking members of the Enterprise crew -- Kim Cattrall's Vulcan character, the sexy and sly Lieutenant Valeris -- turns out to be a saboteur tied up in the conspiracy. This is all very juicy stuff, impeccably executed by Meyer and most of the cast during the first half of the movie. And even if some of the gulag scenes feel like padding (not helped by a couple of cheap jokes at the expense of the prisoner portrayed charismatically by Iman, who turns out to be a shape-shifter whose default race and gender both remain ambiguous), and if Plummer's plummy performance as General Chang is the slightest bit too self-aware, with the result that this villain lacks the genuine menace of Ricardo Montalban's Khan, this is still, in my opinion, a remarkable science-fiction allegory for global politics (and, sadly, its themes remain as relevant as ever one full quarter-century later) that raises important questions without settling for trying to provide easy answers. The movie is also quite notable for managing to be both deconstructive of the Trek TOS mythos *and* maintain just enough reverence for said mythos to help the dark stuff go down easier.

Finally, I have to say that I have decidedly mixed feelings about Valeris turning out to be a villainess. Cattrall's performance is so note-perfect, and the character so witty, charming, and assertive, that even when Meyer accidentally (?) telegraphs her true colors on a couple occasions before her real alliances are revealed, I ,and I imagine many other viewers as well, found ourselves on first viewing holding out hope that the hints were just red herrings, because we liked her so much!) OTOH, the revelation of Valeris' true loyalties add shades of moral and ethical ambiguity to her personality, and help make her a complex, multilayered, fascinating (Vulcan-related pun wholly intended) character.

In the end, while it's true that nothing lasts forever, I believe that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered country was as artistically triumphant as it was existentially inevitable, and a more than fitting finale to the first era of Star Trek.

How would you have felt if Saavik was in the place of Valeris as was originally intended?

Good question, Kappa. Most likely I would have actually *wanted* Saavik to be revealed as part of the conspiracy, given how ghastly I found Kirstie Alley's performance as her in "Wrath of Khan" and how bland I found Robin Curtis' performance as her in "The Search for Spock." (I don't even count Curtis' cameo as Saavik in "The Voyage Home," especially after I found out that, IIRC, she was originally supposed to have been carrying Spock's child! EEEEEWWW!!)

For what it's worth, I think Saavik worked much better in her appearances in the 80s Trek comic book from DC, something which I'll elaborate on later today when I review the first four issues in the Gy'mll's forum.

I actually like both Alley and Curtis as Saavik (though Curtis was better IMO). I'm glad they didn't go with that since Saavik was one of my favorite parts of WoK and it was really cool seeing Spock take on a mentor role to another hybrid Vulcan character, especially someone even more removed from humanity than he was. Making her a double agent would have undermined that great emotional core of the previous films.

What great emotional core?

Just kidding, just kidding!

To each their own, as I often say.

And to reiterate something I said in my review of STWOK, I remain convinced that my perceptions of Alley's performance as Saavik were inevitably influence by the sad spectacle she's spent the past 20 or so years making of herself.

I... don't know if this is the place to mention it, but last week I got a Janeway headsketch from Adam Hughes and a Seven of Nine sketch from Sean Chen.

Sarky, I think that's better mentioned in the Gym'll's forum. There are, IIRC, at least a couple of Trek comics threads already there, and I'm planning to start a new one tonight, focusing on the DC Trek comics of the 80s and 90s.

"First Contact" I think was my favorite of the movies. Some of the best guest acting from Alfre Woodard and James Cromwell. Got real chills both when the Phoenix extended pods, a nice bit of writing there and when the "alien" pulled down his hoody.

Ooby-Dooby!

"First Contact" was amazing in that it dared to have the crew split into two different movies - one drama, the other comedy! It was like ST:WoK and ST:tVH in one movie! And yet, it totally worked.

"Wrath of Khan" might be my sentimental favorite, but one point has always bothered me: In "Space Seed" Khan is clearly of Indian descent, and his crew is multicultural. Yet in the movie, Khan is not so clearly Indian anymore and his crew is now all white and blonde?? (and also a lot younger than him???) It's like the movie couldn't even entertain the notion that a multicultural crew could be the bad guys - that because they were the results of bio-engineering and eugenics, that had to equal "white and blonde."

And then having Khan be a straight-up pasty Brit in the reboot just reinforces the white-washing...

Um...it didn't work for me. At all. I thought the comedy scenes could charitably be called "gratuitous and ham-fisted." Very Michael Bay, IMHO. (Bad influence, Frakes, bad, bad!)

But, as always, I respect your opinion.