JC's Trek Talk

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 ...

Episode Spotlight TNG's Yesterday's Enterprise A great episode and definitely a highlight of TNG season 3 (really one of the best episodes of the entire series).  The Enterprise-C gets established in canon, and we learn its fate and its important place in history.  The idea of the ship coming forward in time and creating a whole new timeline in which the Federation and Klingons have been at war for two decades, and the knowledge that even with the certainty of defeat in battle the Enterprise-C has to go back in time into the battle to ensure peace with the Klingons (at the cost of the ship and crews lives) is a powerful bit of storytelling.  Great time travel story.   The transition effect when the timeline changed was great, and the framing of the scene with Picard completely blocking Worf from view (before the change) and then addressing "Lieutenant" and turning to reveal Tasha Yar!!  Sooo great to see Tasha back, and to give her some good meaty scenes wi...