JC's Trek Talk

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 2 The Griffin Incident Jim Kirk (Paul Wesley) makes an appearance, as he, Spock and La'an are in a shuttlecraft on the way back to the Enterprise from a conference when the detect a distress call.  Following it they find the dead, derelict USS Griffin which disappeared 9 years ago.  After sending a message to the Enterprise they beam over to find the ship powerless but gravity still working.  The three examine the ship and find the crew all long dead, the bodies missing.  After reviewing messages left by the ships' security officer reporting the crew acting strangely the three themselves begin acting strangely and hallucinating.  Spock's T'Pring, Kirk sees his brother Sam and hears the crying of his infant son David, and La'an sees what they first believe to be a survivor, later seen as a "ghost" or "zombie" version of USS Griffin security chief Harper.  The dark derelict ship with out crew ...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 1 Valles Marineris Fun intro sequence, Pike on horseback is a fun callback to not only the opening scenes of the series pilot "Strange New Worlds" but the Original Series pilot "The Cage" which established Pike's fondness for and ownership of horses.  Uhura gets to mentor a trainee cadet, a Vulcan.  This is cool since three seasons ago the shoe was on the other foot, with Uhura being mentored by the late Commander Hemmer.  Pike's reticence to take a promotion echoes Riker's resistance to take the captain's chair and Picard's resistance to leave it in TNG and the TNG movies.  According to Una, six months has passed since the end of season 3.  The story proper starts when a space storm phenomenon throws the Enterprise back in time to prehistoric Earth.  Earth 6 million years in the past.  The Sol System apparently had an additional M-class planet at that time.  La'An, Una and Ortegas deal ...

Episode Spotlight ENT's First Flight Enterprise has detected a nebula which they think contains dark matter.  Excited, Archer wants to examine it closer, using a shuttlepod to duplicate a Vulcan experiment to excite the dark matter with metreon particles.  Archer then receives a message from Admiral Forrest: his old friend and fellow NX test pilot A. G. Robinson has died in an accident.  In the shuttlebay Archer prepares to go on the shuttle alone, but T'Pol arrives and insists on going with him, citing ship regulations.  After launching the shuttle and moving to the first set of coordinates T'Pol asks Archer about Robinson, having heard some details from Trip.  At first reluctant Archer finally tells her that he and Robinson were in the NX project together as test pilot, and that they both wanted to be the first to break warp 2.  In a flashback to 2143 Commander Archer meets with Commodore Forrest to discuss warp reactor simulations.  Forrest tells hi...

Episode Spotlight TNG's Elementary, Dear Data Having arrived 3 days early for a rendezvous, the Enterprise-D enjoys some downtime.  Data finds Geordi in Engineering finishing a model of the HMS Victory, a present for the USS Victory's captain (Geordi's former CO).  Geordi offers to share in a Sherlock Holmes mystery on the holodeck as Dr. John Watson to Data's Sherlock Holmes.  After ordering the holodeck to select a Holmes mystery at random the two enter the holodeck.  The two enter the holodeck and Geordi marvels at the details in the holographic recreation of Holmes study while Data gets into character.  A knock on the door (Which Data announces before the fact) signals the beginning of the mystery.  Data, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the stories solves the mystery instantly, to Geordi's annoyance.  Geordi tells the computer to freeze the program and angrily leaves the holodeck.  In Ten Forward Geordi tries to explain to Data why jumping ...

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...

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...

The Worst of Star Trek Enterprise These are the Voyages... The. Worst. Episode. Of. Star. Trek. Ever.   Enterprise cocreator and executive producer Rick Berman actually called this episode "a valentine to the fans".  NO.  This is a fuck you the fans.  Episodes like "Turnabout Intruder" and "Code of Honor" are sexist and racist, but this episode is actually insulting to the fanbase.  The six year flash-forward to the final mission of the NX-01, seen as a holodeck episode on the Enterprise-D during the events of "The Pegasus" (an episode that has bugger all to do with the Enterprise finale).  Putting TNG characters in another series episode is one thing, but putting TNG characters in Enterprise's finale is insulting to Enterprise.  A series finale is supposed to celebrate the legacy of the series.  Characters from other series distract from the finale and have no place in it.  Add to that a weak, uninteresting story, unconvincing villains,...

The Worst of Star Trek Voyager Threshold Threshold.  For about 10 years this episode held to dubious honor of being considered the worst episode of Trek ever (until Enterprise ended in 2005 with "These are the Voyages" which actually stole Threshold's shit crown).  The crew equip a shuttlecraft with a new form of dilithium and Tom Paris breaks the Warp 10 barrier (read: infinite speed).  After returning to the ship he mutates into a lizard creature.  He then kidnaps captain Janeway, takes her to warp 10 and they both mutate into salamander creatures.  And have salamander babies on a planet.  Even Brannon Braga has admitted this episode was a "royal steaming stinker". Virtuoso Voyager meets the Qomar, a species who have never heard music.  They then go totally googoo fan girl over the Doctors opera singing.  Boring premise.  Also the Qomar come across as jerks for fangirling over the Doctor, then just as quickly replacing him with a "superior,...

The Worst of Star Trek Deep Space Nine Profit and Lace A potentially progressive episode in the tradition of trek, using Ferengi society to talk about gender inequality, the "glass ceiling" and women in business, totally wasted by playing the "Quark in drag" plot device as the butt of a joke.  What could have been a good "deeper message/moral lesson" episode was instead turned into a cringeworthy crossdressing comedy.   Let He Who is Without Sin… DS9's Risa episode.  Jadzia takes Worf on a vacation to Risa.  And he's miserable the whole time.  Which should have been obvious before they left.  And he bitches and complains the whole episode.  Yawn.  The episode was supposed to explore the topic of sex, but it wasn't able to deliver on that due to tv restrictions at the time.  The only thing we got resembling that was Terry Ferrell and Vanessa Williams in one piece swimsuits with their legs around each other. The Muse Bad boring A-plot abou...

Starfleet Academy Series Premiere Review Addendum: The Title Sequence Although not seen in the pilot episode "Kids These Days", the Star Trek Starfleet Academy title sequence (first seen in episode 2 "Beta Test") deserves a close look and reaction.  These are my opinions. The Sequence Heavy on the theme of growing: the seed sprouting, growing into the plant, and eventually the tree, the buildings being built.  And of course the area around the buildings is the shape of the Star Trek delta-yawn.  The tree sprouting flowers, the flower petals flying through the Academy campus/USS Athena corridors and the atrium/courtyard.  And then the show's title over a skylight window conveniently shaped like the delta.  Ending over a wide shot of the Athena landed on Earth at San Francisco.  Fade to black. The Visuals As I mentioned above, heavy of the themes of growing and building.  But that doesn't really fully tell the series story.  It doesn't really say wh...

Starfleet Academy Series Premiere Review "Kids These Days" Following a special Star Trek 60th Anniversary Intro, the episode opens with a main character giving a speech, clearly a callback to the 'Space, the Final Frontier' speeches, as well as Una's speech at the beginning of Strange New Worlds eponymous pilot.  We get a little flashback to Caleb Mir as a child that establishes Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti), a half Tellarite-Half Klingon as the bad guy and Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) in a DIS season 3 uniform and badge.  The stardate on screen 853724.6, gives the year of approximately 3177.  Ake delivers starfleet's ruling that Caleb's mother Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany) is to be imprisoned, separated from her son.  Ake seems to have very little empathy for the situation at hand.  Nahla mentions Caleb going to Bajor.  Caleb escapes the "facility" by stealing Nahla's badge.  Next we see Caleb (Sandro Rosta) as a young adult with a rap sheet.  After ...

The Worst of Star Trek The Next Generation Code of Honor The poster child for the issues in TNG season 1.  Poor casting decisions and a bad story resulted in this racist and sexist episode.  The aliens of the week being Hollywood stereotypical, tribal African caricatures all played by African American actors and the sexism throughout the episode ("a woman? Your chief of security?") make this episode nearly unwatchable.  When asked about TNGs worst episode at a convention, Jonathan Frakes famously once said "One of our worst, and the one even Gene [Roddenberry] was ashamed of, was that horrible, racist piece of shit from the first season "Code of Honor". Oh my god in heaven!" Shades of Grey The clip show.  A boring, skippable episode.  I'll give this one a slight break, seeing that the 88-89 season was shortened by a writers strike, and the writers on TNG were exhausted by end of the season despite only producing 22 episodes down from 26.  That does not...

The Worst of Star Trek The Original Series Turnabout Intruder The finale episode of The Original Series.  Kirk's old flame is jealous of his success as a starship captain, so she steals his body to become captain of the Enterprise.  Miserably bad acting, a tired boring gimmick (the body swap trope), and a premise (Lester's motivation being that women can't be starship captains) that is sexist and insulting to what the franchise stands for (and wrong: see captains Hernandez, Georgiou, Batel and Janeway among others).  It boggles the mind that Gene Roddenberry's name is in the credits as the writer of this episode.  With this episode TOS ended with a deafening whimper. Spock’s Brain "Brain and Brain!  What is Brain?!"  This episode.  The long ridiculed, goofy third season premiere.  A goofy story filled with silly, absurd, nonsensical, cringeworthy moments like McCoy remote controlling brain-less Spock and being able to perform brain surgery after g...

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...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season One Episode 9: All Those Who Wander All Those Who Wander Uhura finishes her training and officially becomes an Ensign.  We get to see another Starfleet ship for the first time in this series.  The USS Peregrine is a Sombra class ship, supposedly a variant of the constitution class (although it looks like a constitution class).  M'Bengas statement the the Sombra class is made from Constitution class parts is a weak handwave to be honest.  I liked Hemmer likening the cold to Andoria-nice touch.  The baddie turns out to be the Gorn, which the recap at the beginning of the episode kinda spoiled.  Also not surprising regardless.  We get some more good Uhura-Hemmer scenes, which makes the ending of the episode that much more gut wrenching.  This episode does have a lot of blood and gore for Star Trek.  La'ans past with the Gorn definitely helped in this episode, and we really got some good La'an scenes.  I'v...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season One Episode 8: The Elysian Kingdom The Elysian Kingdom So we finally get the conclusion to the Dr. M'Bengas daughter storyline.  It's a fun, heartwarming storyline, but at the same time I personally am glad it ended at this point, as dragging it out further could have been a burden on the series.  So we get to see all the main cast playing alternate characters.  Trek has done this before, but never this soon in the series (see TOS Mirror, Mirror, DS9 Far Beyond The Stars and Our Man Bashir, VOY The Killing Game 1/2, et. al.)  Putting it all inside the fantasy world of the storybook M'Benga reads to his daughter is interesting.  This episode is one of the first times in the series Christina Chong really gets to flex her acting skills (and singing ability).  The somewhat cerebral nature of the plot is quite TOS at times, M'Bengas struggle with his daughter, trying to figure out (with Hemmer's help) how the ship and nebula a...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season One Episode 7: The Serene Squall The Serene Squall Starting out with more Spock and T'Pring stuff.  Ok.  Gia Sandhu is pretty good as T'Pring.  And a little more Spock and Chapel.  Ok.  The pirate story is interesting, and not thing Trek as done in quite some time.  Spock's lines about his issues with hunches is similar to his making a guess in Star Trek IV.  The Enterprise being lure into the trap and captured is not the most original for trek, (see TNG Rascals, VOY Basics, among others) but still fun.  Jesse James Kaitel as Dr. Aspen/Angel is pretty good, the twist of her being the pirate captain and betraying the Enterprise crew is not wholly original.  Pike's "get the hell out of my chair" got a little chuckle from me.  Captain Angel escaped, leaving the door open for a possible return. Again, not unexpected.  Interesting including S'tonn from TOS Amok Time.  "Xaverius" being Sybok is an ...

The Kelvin Timeline In light of the recent announcement that there will most likely not be a 4th Kelvin Timeline JJ-Verse reboot movie I thought I would give my opinions on the Kelvin reboot movies. Star Trek 2009 Officially just titled "Star Trek" this movie "rebooted" the Star Trek franchise after it's forced hiatus following the cancellation of Star Trek Enterprise 4 years earlier.  This in itself is not a bad thing.  The issues are in execution.  First, taking Star Trek, something that has always been more than a bit intellectual and focused primarily on problem solving and characters and making it into fully action "pew pew" shootemup summer action flicks.  This totally doesn't fit with the franchise.  The biggest explanation for this is that the creative powers and primarily director J.J. Abrams were more familiar with Star Wars and tried to make Trek more like Star Wars.  Star Trek is NOT Star Wars.  The result as I see it in Star Trek 2009 ...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season One Episode 6: Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach A more serious episode after a light hearted episode.  The Enterprise arrives at a planet Pike previously visited 10 years ago when he was a lieutenant (before his time on the Enterprise).  That would put his visit in 2249, so Alora referring to Pike as Lieutenant (his rank at their last meeting) is a bit of a stretch.  Commander maybe?  More of M'Benga and his daughter.  The planet is called Majalis...no points for guessing the inspiration.  The floating cities on Majalis are more than a little like the floating city of Ardana in TOS The Cloudminders.  The child being the prophesized "First Servant" whether he consents or not is a bit dark.  Yes the boy tells Alora that he does it willing, but can a child that age really make that choice?  This is exactly the question of this episode.  In some ways this is reminis...