JC's Trek Talk

 Coming Soon Episode by episode break downs and analyses of Deep Space Nine's 10 episode Final Chapter arc (Penumbra through What You Leave Behind)

Episode Spotlight DS9's In The Pale Moonlight Arguably one of the best, heaviest, grey-area- est episodes of DS9 and I would daresay the entire franchise.  The episode opens after the fact with Sisko relating the events of the last two weeks in his personal log.  Getting fed up with posting weekly casualty reports in the wardroom and seeing that the Federation/Klingon alliance would not be able to win the war with the Dominion without help, Sisko resolves to bring the Romulans (heretofore neutral, having signed a non-aggression pact with the Dominion) into the war on the alliance side.   Sisko and Garak , the plain, simple tailor who turned out to be a former member of the Obsidian Order, hatch a plan to provide the Romulans with evidence of Dominion duplicity.  After being unable to obtain genuine proof, they decide to manufacture said proof. Sisko uses his influence to get a convicted criminal released from a Klingon prison and transported to DS9 to cre...

The Worst of Star Trek The Streaming Era Discovery: second half of season 1 – mirror universe arc Full disclosure: I am not the biggest fan of the Mirror Universe.  It's not a bad concept, and it is fun to bring up and explore once in a while.  That said, it REALLY didn't need to be brought into Discovery for several reasons.  It's anachronistic that anyone from Starfleet/the Federation would know about the Mirror Universe, since the first documented contact was in TOS a decade hence.  Also the way Discovery depicted it, the super dark, cruel, totalitarian Terran Empire where Emperor Georgiou 'space Hitler' eats sentient beings ( Kelpians ) and everyone tries to assassinate everyone else doesn't really fit with the charm of previous Trek series depictions of the Mirror Universe.  Even if Discovery was going to bring in the Mirror Universe at some point, one episode would have been enough, we really didn't need a half season long arc.  B ringing it in half a...

JC's Guide to the Final Frontier In the style of Michael Jan Friedman and Robert Greenbergers' Q's Guide to the Continuum, some glib, blunt and possibly politically incorrect musings on the final frontier: Gul Dukat Gul Dukat went from a self-aggrandizing narcissist and opportunist (and serial womanizer) to self-important egotist and delusional madman.  Sounds kind of like a certain 2020's U.S. President... Some Ridiculous Interstellar Fails In 2371 the crew of USS Voyager experimented with using a new form of dilithium to achieve transwarp velocity.  The test flight of a modified shuttlecraft turned Tom Paris into a salamander.  Paris kidnapped Captain Janeway and took her to transwarp.  And they had salamander babies on a planet.  Yes, this was an episode.  The crew left the salamander babies on the planet-probably for the best (with all the fucked up implications bringing them along would have). It's almost as bad as that time Christopher Pike promoted o...

The Worst of Star Trek The Movies Section 31 Alex Kurtzman was seemingly hellbent on making a Discovery spinoff Section 31 tv series, based on the super secret black ops organization originated in DS9 and bastardized in Discovery.  COVID related production schedule issues and Michelle Yeohs best actress Oscar win for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" resulted in the series (unwanted by the fans) being reworked into a streaming movie.  What we ended up with was a dogshit Suicide Squad/Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff with a cast of characters that it's honestly hard to care about in a movie that barely has anything to do with Star Trek.  After watching it once, I wish I could take that hour and a half back.   Into Darkness The second Kelvin Timeline reboot movie.  J.J. Abrams and co's attempt to retell (and rip off) the Wrath of Khan story, while cramming in elements of Space Seed, Section 31 and the Klingons (also a gratuitous Alice Eve in underwear scene) res...

Episode Spotlight VOY's Scorpion parts 1 and 2 and The Gift Scorpion Part 1 Voyager reaches Borg Space.  In one of the shortest teasers in the entire franchise two Borg cubes hail an unseen vessel "We are the Borg. Existence as you know it is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is-" Suddenly the cubes are struck by energy beams and explode!  After the title sequence we see Janeway in a holodeck recreation of Leonardo DaVinci's workshop, with holographic Leonardo DaVinci played by John Rhys-Davies.  After being called by Chakotay Janeway goes to engineering where she (and we) learn that one of Voyager's probes has been captured and assimilated by the Borg.  Voyager has reached Borg space.  After a meeting with the senior officers to discuss the situation the entire ship and crew are made ready for an encounter with the Borg.  Voyager proceeds to what the crew call "the northwest passage", a narrow are...