Untitled Star Trek Project

It’s all about faith this week on Deep Space Nine — Weyoun’s faith in Odo and the Founders, Nog’s faith that the genre rules of the comedy B-plot will lead inevitably to a happy ending, and the writers’ faith that wonderful, charming actors like Aron and René can make it all land from underneath a kilogram of latex.

After just over a season of reliable and competent, this week, Star Trek: The Next Generation goes for dramatic and surprising — with amazing results: a memorable epsiode full of good performances and the sort of direction that lets those performances shine. One of the best.

This week, an episode of Star Trek: Picard makes a compelling case for the existence of 21st century Trek, as familiar and well-loved characters find themselves in a show with dramatic lighting, beautiful special effects and witty and clever dialogue. But even more than that, they learn that no matter how bleak or unwinnable a situation, as long as you and your crew remain steadfast in your dedication, one to another, you are never ever without hope. Or giant squid.

This week, Star Trek makes a triumphant return to form, as we are joined by Tom Salinsky to watch the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which the crew of the Enterprise meet their match, as they confront the most terrifying alien species of all time — Americans from the 1980s.

Here’s a link to Tom Salinsky’s Trekaday blog, which is currently heading towards the end of Star Trek: Enterprise. You can also pre-order his upcoming book on Star Trek from Amazon UK.

A Very Important episode of Star Trek: The Original Series this week, in which we tackle the Serious Issue of Mental Illness, a Terrifying Social Problem which causes ordinary people to conceive an Unquenchable Desire to Take over the Entire Galaxy and to Use Capital Letters Unnecessarily. Fortunately, it can be cured by a Simple Intravenous Injection, which seems to have started working almost immediately. So, no harm done really. Except to this episode’s guest woman, who is dead.