This week we drop into a parallel universe where Voyager’s situation is desperate, resources are constrained, and the crew has no alternative but to live by its principles — helping, making friends, reaching out, forming alliances, working together to solve problems, seeking out new life and new civilisations, that sort of thing. Turns out, it would have made quite a good premise for a Star Trek series.
Nothing to learn about gender politics this week as we visit Angel One, where large aggressive women lord it over their twinky male consorts, and Star Trek: The Next Generation finds plenty of exciting new ways to be as offensively sexist as possible. Could someone pass Gene a napkin, please?
A terrifying cave monster attacks a bunch of miners in pastel jumpsuits and burns them alive: it must be killed to ensure a continuing supply of raw materials for the engines of capitalism. But then, of course, we reach out, learn that the monster is a person, and thereby discover a terrifying truth about ourselves. A triumph: literally the thing that Star Trek is for.
While we wait for the final season of Lower Decks to drop, we head back into the show’s distant past to see how it reintroduces itself to the world at the start of its third season. As you might expect, it’s with love, loyalty, extreme cartoon violence and a few affectionate digs at one of our favourite Star Trek films. And, inevitably, gallons and gallons of alien seminal fluid.
Some time in 2374, Ben Sisko, tired of helming Deep Space Nine in wartime, considers handing the job over to someone else. At the same time but in 1953, Benny Russell dreams of a version of himself living beyond the daily indignities of existing as a Black man in America. And meanwhile in 1998, people tuning in for this week’s episode of White People Living on the Moon find themselves watching something far better than they had a right to expect.
This week, untrustworthy foreigners attack and terrorise Enterprise for literally no reason other than the arbitrary tenets of their weird and incorrect religion. There’s a lesson to be learned here, but only if you don’t think too hard about it.
Long before the invention of Ronald D Moore, the Klingons were simple souls who enjoyed brownface, poisoning grain, making lists of rules, and planting a bomb on the bridge of the Enterprise. But by 2364, the next generation of Klingons had embraced the wave of liberalism sweeping across the galaxy, all except for a few holdouts who refused to read the series bible and decided they would pass their time yelling and pointing guns at the warp core instead.
In this week’s outstanding instalment of Competent People Solving Space Problems, the Enterprise is hit by an unexpected and dangerous premise which separates the crew into five distinct subplots and forces each of them to confront their greatest fears. Deanna contends with yet another fibriform space anomaly, Geordi faces the horrors of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, Worf takes on the unlikely and challenging role of midwife, Data finds himself having to leave his genitals in another room, and Picard is trapped in a confined space and compelled to be nice to people for a while.
A quick trip to the afterlife this week, as B’Elanna discovers the importance of faith and family, and as Voyager itself discovers (too late, perhaps) the importance of the same things. We also learn that hell is the Voyager sets only lit slightly differently, which is something that we had hitherto only suspected.
On the ravaged surface of the Federation colony planet Rana IV, the crew of the USS Enterprise are surprised to discover an excitingly modernist Malibu home set in a lush, quadrilateral garden; after landing on the planet with an away team, Will Riker is surprised to find himself dangling upside down by his ankles; soon after that Deanna Troi is surprised to find herself suffering from an unpleasant and potentially fatal earworm. Meanwhile, back in 1990, Nathan Bottomley and a very young Joe Ford are increasingly surprised to discover a new season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which surpasses both its predecessors in both competence and interest.
