JC's Trek Talk

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...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Blog Update Comments Effective Friday 11/28 I will be opening up comments to all visitors on the blog including anonymous comments.  Comments will be moderated. Some Guidelines: Be respectful: comments will be moderated.  Disrespectful comments, hate, drama will NOT be tolerated. No Spam.  Spam belongs on sandwiches, not in the comment section Abuse will result in posts being blocked, continued abuse will result in comments being restricted back to Google accounts only.

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...

Thoughts on Starfleet Academy's Uniforms and Combadges The two trailers and small number of pictures released to date for the upcoming Starfleet Academy gives us a pretty good look at the series uniforms and combadge.  Some thoughts: Starting with Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) in the standard(?) instructor(?) uniform.  The asymmetric bottom is very much in keeping with Star Trek Discovery's 32nd century uniforms.  Not entirely sure why they didn't just use the Discovery season 4-5 uniforms.  Overall not a huge fan of this one.  The silver and black stripe just looks strange. Robert Picardo as The Doctor (EMH) from Voyager.  His special uniform (flag officer?) is mostly white, the color for medical in Star Trek Discovery.  It still has the weird asymmetric bottom (see above). Here we see Lura Thok in a special uniform with Discovery style gorgets showing her rank.  A dress uniform maybe? Holly Hunter as Nahla Ake in what I guess is an officers uniform....

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 though I would give my opinions of 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 i...