A journey that began in 2010 has now been completed. I have now written a review for the Star Trek Fan Companion of every episode and every movie, from all seven series and across all thirteen movies, 1966 to 2018, from the first season of the original series to the first season of Discovery. There have been plenty of starts and stops along the way, but started a few years back I started making a concerted effort to get it done, and incredibly, something that seemed a long way off just a few years ago is finished. Wow! This whole project has always been driven by the belief that fans new and old alike deserve to be able to explore the franchise from a different viewpoint than the increasingly cynical one that developed during the late 1990s, that saw it more likely to reject new material than attempt to embrace it. It's possible in my reviews to find a positive take on every series, something few fans are willing to admit. You can trace their legacies as they develop, and find a new vision of the classics, and a new conception of the worst episodes, and even new takes on what the worst episodes have traditionally been considered.
Along the way I refined a couple of times how reviews were written. At some point I thought it would be fun to apply tags for notable guest-stars, and that required some revision of older reviews, but hopefully the results speak for themselves. There are a number of ways to work through the reviews, including those guest-star tags, as well as star ratings and even by the peculiar set of criteria I chose to use in coming up with the star ratings. I labeled the criteria "franchise," "series," "character," and "essential." Each of them was a way of calculating whether an episode had any intrinsic worth. The full impact of an episode was either aided or hindered by whether or not they were worth viewing on any of these scores. If they managed none of them, they got no stars at all, and so that was how I determined for myself the all-time worst episodes.
Of course, this is all subjective, but I hope it's a good starting point on an immersive journey of discovery throughout franchise lore.
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Congratulations Tony, you've compared and shown us Star Trek humanism matters. Sure we have conflicts, deus ex machinas and black coffee in nebulas, but for fans and readers - show me a place without war, starvation and someone who extends a hand. We live long and prosper and our reactions mirror who we are which I believe you have captured at Star Trek Fan Companion. But curiously what really makes Star Trek successful? If we really knew what the secret ingredients were... we'd do it again! To quote L Nimoy, so now we have ST Discovery - the War without the war within!
ReplyDeleteStar Trek is an odd mix of idealism, pragmatism, sometimes even cynicism, but also a platform for science fiction's wildest ideas. I've never seen anything like it.
DeleteYou've definitely earned Trekker pips Tony as has the Fan companion so I've added you all to the Trekology Collective.
ReplyDeleteThank you, sir.
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