Category: Star Trek Musings

Aimless Discovery (February 2017)

The following blurb is from the 68th episode of the DTM-Cast posted on February 5th, 2017. I make this point because this was shortly after the next Trek series was pushed back from its May date to a then-indeterminate point of time. As of this post, the series is set to debut in the fall… that is, until the next big delay hits the series.

For the record, my feelings haven’t changed since then. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea then and even now, there’s more apathy towards the whole deal than anything. Which is funny considering how optimistic I was about Enterprise before that series debuted… perhaps that should have been a omen of sorts.

Anyway, the blurb from February, slightly edited to fit the written word…

Continue reading “Aimless Discovery (February 2017)”

Random Thoughts On… The 37s

The second season premiere episode of Star Trek: Voyager has the eponymous Starfleet vessel, trapped thousands of light years across the other side of the galaxy, coming across an old pick-up truck in deep space. From there, they encounter an SOS and go to a planet where the SOS is coming from. Turns out some folks from 1937 (hence the name of the episode) were kidnapped, placed in stasis, and treated as holy relics by their human descendants.

As Voyager would discover, it turns out those humans have made quite a little civilization for themselves here in the Delta Quadrant, and those freed relics from the past feel that they’d be happier sitting around “New Urth” for lack of a better term and has some crew members considering sticking around… but like a good formula show that lives and dies by its status quo, none of the Voyager folks jump ship and so they all continue onwards towards their old home.

Interesting note about this episode was that it was originally intended to be the season finale of the first season, but network executives held it off because of network reasons. Watching this episode with that in mind – and I haven’t seen this episode in years – The 37s does come off as more of a season ender rather than a season opener. The question of whether the crew should stay at this new world or continue on towards the old one is something that should be touched on at the end of a season where you have that cliffhanger potential.

As for the episode itself? It was alright; had a bit of humor with the Ford pick-up towards the beginning of the episode, gave us a cool visual of the ship landing, and a neat little idea that fared a little better here than when TNG did it in their first season finale.

Anyway, that was just a random thought.

About Discovery…

So, there’s a new Star Trek series coming out. It’s gonna be called Discovery, it’s gonna be on CBS Access, Bell Media, and Internation Netflix services, it’s due in early-2017, and it features the worst looking starship design in the history of the universe. Just the overall layout of the ship makes my head hurt and I doubt any considerable amounts of polishing will change my perspective on this.

In any event, some details have been revealed in regards to what the series is all about and I thought I take some time to discuss a couple of these points here. Nothing outlandish or deep; just some quick ramblings.
Here’s what we know, thus far.

1 – The series will take place ten years before Kirk took command of the USS Enterprise.
This somewhat intrigues me a bit; not necessarily because I was looking forward to any sort of series in this timeframe, but rather in how they’re going to try and recreate that kind of atmosphere in 2016 without making the stuff that was done in 1966 look dated and cheap. The 2-part “In A Mirror Darkly” episode did a fine enough job in 2004, but that was just using pre-existing sets and props. Not to mention, the timeframe would place this during Captain Pike’s tenure on the Enterprise, which had very different looking uniforms and even more primitive looking setpieces and props… not to mention paper print outs, which Enterprise never did, by the way… oh, god, I just realized that now.
2 – This will focus on a particular event heavily discussed in the Original Series but never really touched on.
No Romulan Wars, No Axe-Damar, no Kobayashi Maru. It’s something else… presumably the space age virus that made people forget what century they were in. I suppose this one deserves a bit of clarification of sorts.
In the early days of Star Trek, a lot of the familiar lingo and parameters had yet to be established. Whether it was a Federation or a Space Probe Agency, whether it was deflector shields or deflector screens. Photon torpedoes were originally nothing more than proximity phaser shots. The key point, however, is the time frame. Star Trek is set in the mid-23rd century and yet there would be episodes that would reference events taking place during then-present time as something that took place 200 years ago – the most famous of this being the episode “Space Seed” where the Enterprise uncovers a space module from that era (it’s the one with Khan.) This would either reference events taking place in the 21st century (then near-future) or Star Trek actually took place in the 22nd. That would get fixed up later, but the fact that episodes still use the 200 year reference is amusing in hindsight.
3 – The main character will be a Lieutenant Commander… with caveats. Whatever that means.
An interesting direction for sure… rather than focus on the captain or even the ensemble cast, the series will be told from the perspective of an underling. I don’t get the “caveats” bit, but I suspect that will be a thing to be elaborated on as time moves forwards.
4 – Yes, the cast will be racially diverse. Yes, there will be a gay character. And yes, more people care about these details than they actually should.
Trek casts have had some semblance of diversity, going back to the original series which had a black woman and an Asian dude. Doesn’t seem like much until you realize that it’s an upgrade over the original pilot which featured nothing but white people. And yet this is a point that is made into a big deal for… absolutely no reason?
Here’s the thing; I don’t care about the color of their skin, I don’t care about their sexual orientation, I just want a cast of interesting characters. All that other stuff is secondary to me and the fact that “our casts is gonna be racially diverse and we’ll even have a gay character” is an actual selling point of this series only goes to show how far we as a society have regressed. It seems to me that more people are focused on making casts diverse in ethnicity and sexual orientation than they are trying to tell a good story. And it is unfortunate that the people making new Trek has to resort to this blatant pandering to sell their show, especially considering that in the world of Star Trek, racial diversity and gay people aren’t something to be celebrated as a big deal; it’s something that is accepted as easily as the Earth being round.
The worst that could happen is that if this overhyped gay character turns out to be bland as shit, then people will constantly refer to that person as “the token gay character.” It’s happened in other contexts in the past. It can happen again in the future. Just focus on giving me great characters to care about and then focus on the details.
5 – There will be robots.
Yes! ROBOTS RULE!

Um… er, I mean… cool. We need more robots. Robots get no love.

That is all.