JC's Trek Talk

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 10 Tomorrows Enterprise Uhura has returned to the Enterprise from a refresher course while the Enterprise is examining a white hole.  Uhura detects a signal right before an energy wave hits the Enterprise-music.  After being treated for minor injuries in sickbay Uhura returns to her quarters.  She continues to hear voices-Scotty yelling.  She consults with La'an who believes the Uhura may be experiencing something time travel related.  In the science lab she traces the source of the message she detected on the bridge and ends up making contact with herself.  On the other side, The Enterprise is examining a newly formed black hole.  This enterprise is about a year in the future.  Kirk is in command, Dr. Boyce is acting chief medical officer.  Uhura and Scotty are in a relationship.  Uhura, Scotty and a visiting Ortegas take a shuttle into the black hole.  Uhura detects a signal-...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 9 Once La'an a Time After returning to the Enterprise from a Benzite dignitary's wedding (which La'an saved by exposing an Orion diplomat as a spy) the crew encounter an artificially created flat planet.  Beaming down the crew find themselves in a medieval fairytale land, based on as it turs out, the storybook Dr. M'Benga used to read to his daughter.  Only M'Benga remembers the events of the original encounter.  The planet is populated by doppelgängers of the crew.  The Bolzman Brain entity original helped M'Benga deal with difficult issues he was going through, now it is doing the same with La'an who has been dealing with some personal issues.  The crew dress up as their doppelgängers to see the story out.  La'an poses as her doppelgänger, Princess Talia.  Prince Dashing appears in the likeness of James Kirk.  While the away team are imprisoned in a dungeon, Pike and Spock's counterparts be...

  Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 8 Orders of Magnitude James Kirk visits the Enterprise.  He gets a checkup from Dr. M'Benga while Pike and an away team beam down to a planet to investigate a distress signal.  Pike, Uhura, Una, A'sha and Chapel enter some caves and lose contact with the ship.  Meanwhile a shuttle with Admiral Simon Reeger rendezvous with the Enterprise.  As a captain Reeger commanded the USS Constellation during the Klingon war.  Meeting with the senior staff Reeger gives the crew a mission to investigate the attack on a Federation base.  Kirk as the ranking officer aboard is made first officer under Reeger.  Following a gamma ray trail the Enterprise leaves orbit to pursue the attacker.  In the ready room Kirk and Reeger have a tense talk, Kirk's father George was XO under Reeger during the war.  Reeger says that George Kirk was not a combat capable officer and was afraid of command, but that Ji...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 7 Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass Captain Pike wakes up in sickbay.  While checking him for a concussion M'Benga says he was in a shuttle accident.  The last thing Pike remembers is hosting a captain's table, that event according to M'Benga was 2 weeks ago.  M'Benga says he has amnesia.  Spock is also injured and in a coma.  M'Benga relieves Pike of duty.  In Pike's quarters he meets with Dr. Chivers, the ship's counsellor (wearing a blue outfit of similar style and color to those worn by Deanna Troi in TNG).  It turn out that this is all being orchestrated by Trelane (see "Wedding Bell Blues").  Trelane has the ship and crew stuck in his "soap opera world".  The crew speak in weird patterns with strange, dramatic pauses and act overly melodramatically.  Onboard a shuttle La'an is returning to the enterprise with a heart donor for Spock-his brother Sybok (also played by Eth...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 6 Off Hour In a new twist for trek, the episode takes place in real time, complete with a chronometer count down on the screen.  Also a reference to Dr. Boyce.  Interesting.  We see the crew getting ready for some downtime aboard ship.  The ship gets pulled into a slipstream wormhole.  Everything get's electrified until Pike manages to get the shields up.  The ship is damaged, Scotty is stuck in the turbolift, engineering has to evacuate, Pike an co are trapped on the bridge, M'Benga and Chapel are stuck in sickbay.  Una, La'an and Spock are down in the port galley.  The split screens are an interesting choice.  The Vulcan cadet is featured in this episode, this time working with Scotty.  M'Benga is pinned against the wall by a lab table, his back injured.  If the lab table is moved he will die.  Stakes.  TNG/DS9/VOY alum Brian Markinson plays Dr. Boyce, the CMO from ...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 5 Level-Five Transporter Accident Scotty wants to carry out the longest distance transport ever, and use it to get back at his academy rival.  Pike has a new captains chair, which becomes a plot point later.  Spock contacts T'Pring and invites her to Enterprise.  Spock takes a shuttle to deploy transporter buoys.  Scotty attempts his transport, an accident seemingly beams away every crewmember, then the Enterprise itself.  The Enterprise reappears, Spock goes aboard to find everyone turned into puppets.  After the crew try to determine what happened and after some overly done bickering they contact Admiral April and advise him of the situation.  Spock being the only one capable of running the ship is busy between the bridge, trying to restore the crew, and T'Pring, is overwhelmed.  An encounter with an Orion ship goes awry when the Orions see the crew in puppet form.  The Orions attack t...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 4 A Case of Chiaroscuro The episode is entirely in black and white.  Interesting.  The black and white is immediately explained as part of the plot and not just a gimmick. Una leads a mission to retrieve a malfunctioning probe from inside Klingon space.  The shuttle is nearly detected by the Klingons and is forced to land on a nearby planet to hide.  They find the planet under Klingon occupation.  Much of the episode is very TOS-esque: the crew incognito on a "parallel earth" planet, the planet modelled after a specific Earth region or period (in this case 1940s-esque movie noir), the crew in native/period attire among the natives, and the planet affected by outside influence.  The message at the end-that in life things are not black and white, but many shades of grey is an interesting, vey TOS introspective look at humanity, nicely set against the episode being completely in black and white.  Dem...

Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 4 Reaction: Episode 3 Human Best Friend The episode starts with cutting between Ortegas and Scotty's personal logs, followed by Una and Pike discussing the upcoming mission and the stress the crew has been under (previously mentioned in "Valles Marineris").  The crew decides to stop at a shore leave planet where the atmosphere causes you to become drunk.  The crew's shore leave antics include Ortegas (not feeling the effects of the atmosphere) stuck with Scotty and trying to find Pike, Spock hallucinating Jim Kirk, Una singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in Klingon (likely selected because of Bonnie Tyler's recent passing), Dr. M'Benga playing bartender ("It's green" apparently a TOS reference" and Pike getting a tattoo.  Add the ticking clock of the alien delegation the crew was to meet in two weeks coming to meet the Enterprise in two hours and the missing shuttle and you've got a typical ...

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...