Comfort food this week, as Star Trek: The Next Generation tries and fails to create a romantic comedy about an exciting new space wormhole. Deanna learns a valuable lesson about the dangers of enjoying herself, some Ferengi learn an urgent lesson about paying attention to their GPS, and the rest of us learn a timely lesson about straight, white American men in the late 1980s. We still have fun though.
Star Trek goes outside this week, for a top-tier episode in which Sisko and Kira are both confronted by radical integrity and self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming opposition. Solid and memorable.
The second season of Star Trek: Discovery comes to a climax as Spock commemorates Star Trek’s first pilot by taking Michael to Talos IV so that they can both stand around a bunch of singing flowers, weepily recounting their formative childhood traumas. Meanwhile, Paul and Hugh are not the first people to experience difficulties maintaining a romantic relationship after one partner has died. Anyway, Nathan has fun, even if no one else does.
It’s the pilot of a thrilling new spy-fi series, in which Gary Seven (Robert Lansing), his plucky secretary Miss Lincoln (Teri Garr), and his cat Isis (herself) hang out in the twentieth century’s most stylish decade, drinking cocktails after lunch and occasionally foiling America’s military–industrial complex. Is it time for us to end our trek through the stars so that we can complete an assignment here on earth?
This week a mediocre script fails to be enhanced in any way by mediocre direction and some mediocre performances. But there’s an upside: a Voyager episode with real consequences that will open up unimaginable new vistas of storytelling and character development. Or not, probably.
