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.
Of course the people you care about are going to cause you pain. It will hurt, but the love it yields will far outweigh the sorrow. Now, hand me the electron coupler.
In this week’s Strange New Worlds, we watch standard space genre things happen to relaxed and likeable characters. Which, turns out, works incredibly well.
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. (Ecclesiastes 9:5)
This week, like every week, we continue to experience our gradual, humiliating dissolution, to dread our own inevitable deaths, and to consider with dismay the deaths of everyone we have ever known or loved. And so, to cheer ourselves up, we decide to watch an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
This week Enterprise fans get the chance to watch their favourite show with Jonathan and Marina sitting next to them on the couch, which only raises enraging and bewildering questions like Is any of this even real? and Does any of this actually matter? (to which the answers are of course not and if you like, respectively). Meanwhile, Trip is forced to sacrifice himself to ensure that Archer gets the chance to participate in the foundation of the Federation, without which, to be honest, none of us would even be here. Probably.
Basically nothing happens on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this week, as Nathan undergoes a religious experience which inspires him to be terribly nice to people for a change, while Joe anticipates failing to win a major podcasting award. Still, sometimes it’s just nice to hang out with the people you love, isn’t it?
A return to the realm of cheap Saturday-morning-cartoon Trek, where the only person apparently putting in any effort is Master of Dialect, Jimmy Doohan. This week, we find ourselves in a universe where space is white, stars are black, people age backwards, women give birth to large old men, and the Enterprise crew are listless, lifeless and dull.
This week, we watch an dreadful hour of Star Trek — cheap, mawkish and absolutely absurd — but we end up enjoying ourselves enormously. Have we found a fatal flaw at the entire heart of the Untitled Star Trek Project?
A few tense moments this week, as a fragrant dikironium vampire kills a bunch of redshirts before threatening some characters with names and ultimately the Enterprise itself. But the real suspense comes from an entirely different direction: Will this episode teeter over the edge of camp into baffling semicompetence? Will Kirk’s obsession turn him from a jovial and beloved authority figure into a massive idiot? Will any cue from the Star Trek music library go unused? (No, no and no, fortunately.)
It’s four weeks until the Deep Space Nine finale, and so it’s time for a momentous and operatic episode, an episode full of subtext and thoughtful performances, and an episode that deals a killing blow to two crumbling empires and changes the status quo forever. In short: an episode that exemplifies everything that makes us love Deep Space Nine.
Captain Lynne Lucero (Rosa Salazar) can’t wait to take command of the USS Cabot as it heads off to the Klingon border to save some settlers from a planetary famine. But that’s before she meets walking HR disaster Edward Larkin (H. Jon Benjamin) and his viviparous and prolific sidekick (Tribleustes ventricosus). Hijinks, as usual, ensue.
