JC's Trek Talk

Star Trek In Memoriam 2025 Clay Hodges Actor TNG "The Vengeance Factor", "Man of the People" and "Phantasms", VOY "Repentance", Star Trek VI Rex Holman Actor TOS "Spectre of the Gun", Star Trek V Paul Capp Actor DS9 "Defiant", VOY "Caretaker" Joe Farago Actor, Stuntman Star Trek VI Bruce French Actor TNG "The Drumhead", VOY "Caretaker", ENT "The Andorian Incident", Star Trek: Insurrection Gary Jense n Stuntman TNG "The Icarus Factor" Layla Sarakalo Extra Star Trek IV Roberto Orci Producer, Screenwriter Star Trek 2009, Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek Beyond Patty Maloney Actress VOY "The Thaw" Clive Revill Actor TNG "Qpid" Gene Winfield Set Builder, Model Maker TOS Margaret Clark Novel and Comic Book Editor Pocket Books, DC Comics Clifton Jones Actor TNG "Redemption" and "Redemption Part II" Lorna Raver Actress VOY "Q2" Peter ...

 Merry Christmas!

What is Star Trek About? A Reflective Essay What is Star Trek about?  This is an interesting and loaded question.  From it's beginning with the original series in the 1960's Star Trek is and always has been about deep, thoughtful, intellectual stories about an optimistic future for humanity.   The concept as conceived by Gene Roddenberry was a future in which humanity (a united humanity) works together with other races and species in common cause.  The cause being exploration, learning and personal betterment.  A future where humanity has overcome its internal struggles and provincial attitudes and prejudices and moved beyond national squabbles, beyond poverty, disease, war, into a more enlightened future.  In the original series this was often shown in the form of episodes that were in truth morality plays, set in a sci-fi concept and a future several hundred years hence. Episodes like "Let That be Your Last Battlefield" that took a very blunt look ...

Trek Throwback Thursday Star Trek in the 1990s The 1990s.  Arguably Star Trek's golden age.  Many would call it the peak of the franchise.  The Next Generation hit it's stride, Deep Space Nine ran it's entire seven seasons, Voyager ran it's first five, Kirk and company made their final motion picture appearances, and The Next Generation cast starred in three motion pictures of their own.  Whether you watched reruns or new episodes of TNG or DS9 on whichever channel had the first run syndication rights in your area or caught Voyager on UPN (remember UPN?), you saw some of Trek's finest hours: TNGs "The Best of Both Worlds", "The Inner Light" and "Chain of Command", DS9s "Duet", "The Visitor", "In the Pale Moonlight and "Far Beyond the Stars" and Voyagers "Scorpion", not to mention some of the franchises greatest movies, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek First Contact.  The h...

Strange New Worlds Season 3 DVDs A heads up: On December 8th CBS Home Video announced a release date of March 3, 2026 for DVD, Blu Ray and 4K editions of Strange New Worlds Season 3.  Yaay! That said, for at least a month now listings on Ebay and Amazon show DVD and Blu Ray copies of SNW season 3 already available for purchased. Against better judgement I purchased one from an Ebay listing.  Having received the item I am pretty sure these are bootleg discs. The menus are low quality and have the options "Play All", "Episodes" and "Resume Film".  The menu backgrounds-taken directly from the Season 3 poster are noticeably low quality. Also the set labels (case and disc labels) do not list the episode names.  The labels on the 3 discs are the same as the case label (the poster), instead of the standard grey and silver labels on other CBS DVD releases.  The back of the DVD case label shows a very generic blurb about the series that has nothing specific to do w...

Upcoming Holiday Post Schedule Thursday, December 18: Throwback Thursday post Tuesday, December 23: Essay special post: What is Star Trek about? Thursday, December 25 (Christmas): No Post Wednesday, December 31 (New Years Eve): 2025 Star Trek In Memoriam Thursday, January 1 (New Years Day): No Post Week of January 5 2026: back to normal posting schedule Happy Holidays!

Episode Spotlight TOS's Where No Man Has Gone Before The second pilot.  The first episode to star William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk (also James Doohan as Scotty and George Takei as Sulu).  I will be a bit biased here since this is one of my all time favorite episodes of all of Star Trek.  I have always loved this episode.  The story is great, the Enterprise discovered a recorder marker from an old Earth ship, the S.S. Valiant which disappeared over two hundred years earlier.  The episode opens with Captain Kirk's first log entry and the first scenes with Kirk and Spock together (also the introduction of 3-D chess).  You can already feel the history and friendship between Kirk and Spock.  After bringing the recorder aboard Spock listens to the recorded logs and we learn more about the fate of the Valiant: a magnetic space storm had pulled them in this direction, the ship was swept outside the Milky Way Galaxy, they then attempted to re-enter the ...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season One Episode 10: A Quality of Mercy A Quality of Mercy An interesting what-if alternate timeline episode, in this episode what if...Pike never left the Enterprise and was still captain during the events of TOS Balance of Terror instead of Kirk?  Because of this much of the episode plays as a beat-for-beat, word-for-word recreation of Balance of Terror, with Ortegas in Lt. Stiles place (even given Stiles lines).  Interesting to build a little backstory for Commander Hanson at Outpost 4, also connecting him and his son to Pike's fate.  Nide touch to have Hanson wearing the outpost badge first seen on the same character in Balance of Terror (and also later seen in Arena).  And that brings me to Kirk.  James Kirk.  Here we see for the first time Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk, captain of the Farragut in this timeline instead of the Enterprise.   RANT INCOMING We also see future Admiral Pike in a bad attempt at a TOS mo...

Thoughts on Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Starfleet Academy's 32nd century Starfleet Ships I am not a fan of the 32nd century Starfleet ship designs from Star Trek Discovery and the upcoming Starfleet Academy series.  I get that these are designs from a far future when new technologies and techniques have been developed by Starfleet, but there are a number of things about these ships that just don't work for me. Overall Esthetics I know that these are designs from the 31st and 32nd centuries when technologies have evolved and changed over the centuries and new technologies have been developed and discovered (see programmable matter).  That said, many of these designs don't look remotely Starfleet.   The Courage and Eisenberg classes look much more at home as battleships in some alien fleet.   The Mars Class with it's crab claw looking nacelles(?) is interesting, but again not very Starfleet.  The design would much better fit an alien ship. ...