More Treks, More Treats

I also watched/rewatched some other Star Trek recently, I just wanted to write a few thoughts....

Star Trek First Contact: This Next Gen film, scripted by Deep Space Nine/Battlestar Galactica mastermind Ronald D. Moore, uses the same unfortunate formula that a chunk of the Trek films, including ALL of the Next Gen films do, that being action movies in scifi skin, with a big villain and an over the top explosion filled finale.  However, due to the skill of Mr. Moore, and maybe a bid to redeem himself after the missteps of Generations, and also given the skillful, knowledgable direction of Jonathan Frakes (William Ryker), this is widely regarded as the best of the Next Generation movies, featuring the crew at their best, giving excellent performances all around and getting great moments, all of them.  You had an important figure in Trek history, Zephram Cochrane, played amazingly by James Cromwell.  You had a dark period in human history shown, along with a pivotal moment in Trek history, first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, the Vulcans, wrote about in non-canon stories for years, but this was the first time the event was shown on the screen.  Jerry Goldsmith teamed up with his son Joel to compose the soundtrack.  Industrial Light and Magic did an amazing job with the special effects.  HR Giger, designer of the Alien, gave the Borg a wonderful makeover.

Is the film flawless? Of course not.  But the kind of nitpicks a disgruntled few throw up to try to dismiss the film fall flat, as do said critics.  Sure, it used the "action formula".  But this time, it seemed to work.  As did all the rest of the pieces.  It is a grand Trek time at the cinema and on disc many years later.

Star Trek Enterprise Season 3: I've been going through the seasons of Enterprise on disc, having missed most of them in their original running, and briefly getting on the "down on Ent" bandwagon.  As I've gone through the seasons, imo, the derision is mostly undeserved.  Was Enterprise not the best call as to where to go next in the franchise?  Yeah, I'd say.  But is it the abomination some Trek fans say it is?  I most heartily disagree.  There's some great stories in all the seasons.  Season two, especially episodes like First Flight, Future Tense, Stigma, Cease Fire and Judgement go into the lore of the Trek univers and our characters.  Regeneration, possibly one of the most controversial of the season two episodes, shows the aftermath of Star Trek First Contact, and is one of the scariest Borg episodes on any episode of any Star Trek.  But that's all seasons two, which I like much more than average.  Season three, on the other hand, is the season where they, in response to declining ratings, tried to kick it in the pants, so to speak.  They started with an attack on Earth, where some alien superweapon strikes from out of nowhere, cutting off the state of Florida from the rest of the continental US, killing millions of humans.  The Enterprise is sent in to the Delphic Expanse, the origin space of this weapon, to find where it come from and stop it.

 Ok, the time shenanigans where the series originates are interesting, the problem is that it is not strongly conceptualized from the get-go and the showrunners don't seem to be confident as to how to develop it.  Further, it seems to give the impression that merely being a prequel isn't enough.  That the early pre-Kirk Trek U can't stand on it's own, so we have to zazz it up.  Christopher L. Bennet, one of my favorite Trek fiction writers, shows that in the hands of real talent, this could pay off, but it seems to me that those who came up with this just didn't know where to go and what to do.  The Delphic Expanse stuff and the Xindi come across as more of the same.  Retcons, I'm not against as a matter of course.  But interweaving them into established history must be done with care, or else the viewer gets a bit of narrative whiplash.  Xindi?  Surely a power this potent we would have heard of before.  Such an attack on Earth, we also should have known of before.  If we haven't, we need a reason as to why not.  None was really forthcoming.

Not to say there aren't some good eps in the season.  There are.  Always when Shran (Jeffrey Combs) shows up, he's a welcome sight.  The female Andorian weapons officer will also play an important part in Season 4, my favorite of Enterprise.  The episode "Twilight", directed by Robert Duncan MacNeil (Tom Paris on Voyager), was a great "what if" ep, showing humans trying to survive after the demise of Earth and still dealing with a Xindi threat.  "Stratagem" showed a more subtle approach to the Xindi and began to finally differentiate them from just being moustache twirling baddies (took way too long to get to that, but when they did, they did it well).  And there were others.

There were great episodes in Season 3.  However, the season is hobbled by a concept that seems more thrown up there, see if it works.  Which is kind of the problem with Enterprise.  When it succeeds, it does it despite itself, not because.


Star Trek The Next Generation Season 5: Next Gen at this point was a confident, powerful, charismatic show that knew exactly what it was about and how it wanted to go about things.  Cast, crew and audience were all enthusiastically along for the ride.  This season had powerful episodes like "Redemption Part 2", showing the conclusion of the Klingon civil war, reintroducing Sela and setting up both Klingon and Romulan politics for some time to come.  We also got Sarek again, along with Spock, who had been referenced in the 24th century a couple times, but not shown, or his fate known, until that point.  His activities would also set him up for the first  JJ Abrams Trek film.  Michelle Forbes got thrown into the mix with "Ensign Ro", showing the limits of power politics in policy, even as those played by the benevolent United Federation of Planets.  Many other wonderful episodes abounded, but still powerful are "Darmok" which was a mediation on both the importance of storytelling as well as the difficulty of communication.  And then, there was "Inner Light", playing with the idea that what if you could get a good look at the road less traveled.  And then, the Ronald D. Moore penned "The First Duty", with Wesley Crusher dealing with scandal at Starfleet Academy (first appearance of Robert Duncan MacNeil in Trek, btw).

A wonderful season of tv, Trek or no.