Together at last for the first time, Joe and Nathan find themselves on Planet of the Horny but Unattractive White People, faced with a moral dilemmma that wouldn’t challenge a slow-witted five-year-old. Ah, we have fun, don’t we?
Our writers are on strike this week, and so we’re just going to mark time until we reach the end of this blurb. When an uncomfortably horny Lwaxana Troi beams aboard the Enterprise, a series of events happen, culminating at last in the episode’s closing credits. Mick Fleetwood guest stars as a fish.
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.
After the Enterprise-C emerges from a mysteriously swirly space anomaly, Joe and Nathan find themselves in an alternate timeline where Star Trek: The Next Generation is dramatically and impractically lit, full of incident, and sceptical about the 1990s belief in the End of History. Star Trek: Discovery Series 1 arrives nearly 30 years too early, in Yesterday’s Enterprise.
In this week’s episode of Likeable and Competent People Solving Space Problems, Beverly finds herself in a shrinking universe from which her loved ones are disappearing one by one, while Nathan and Joe (who inhabit a very similar universe) find a version of Star Trek capable of inspiring a lifelong obsession and, ultimately, an untitled podcast project.
Star Trek: The Next Generation makes anotherill-judgedattempt at romance this week, as Beverly Crusher has an eventful two-week relationship with an alien ambassador, Commander Riker, and an attractive young woman, who are all somehow the same person. It all goes as well as you would expect in a series where every episode returns reliably to the status quo before the credits roll.
(Warning: after the closing credits, there are some incidental spoilers for Strange New Worlds Series 2, Episode 7, Those Old Scientists.)
They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, “He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.”
Now this is what Star Trek is about — kind, competent people solving a space problem, while learning about the importance of storytelling, connection and understanding. Magnificent.
This week, the Enterprise crew worry unnecessarily about upending the lives of people living under a weird-ass conservative regime, only to find that those people are desperate to get out and there is no good reason at all to prevent them. Also, Deanna has sex, with unfortunate results.
This week, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Joe and Nathan sit down to watch a sentimental sci-fi favourite from their youth, only to discover that it’s really just a police procedural where some of the regular cast get to do funny voices. Still, they get to see Marina menacing people with a gun, so there’s that, I guess.