Star Trek: Discovery 4x5 "The Examples" Review

 rating: ****

the story: The crew has to evacuate a planet.

review: There's a point in "The Examples" where a project the smart people are working on is simply shut down.  This might seem a fairly disappointing moment, even considering a brief follow-up suggests one of the characters still thinks they know what they needed to know about it, and yet it helps illustrate the bold ways in which the episode strikes all the right notes without worrying too much about them, which can sometimes be a problem for a series that is sometimes brilliant and sometimes, even in seasons that are half the length of what a traditional season used to be, maddeningly vague.

The smart people include Stamets, his old rival Reno, and a visiting character (hopefully to be seen again!) who also helps extend the Emerald Chain fallout from last season, a brilliant scientist very much in the vein of Stamets and Reno, a character type the series does so well, difficult and yet rewarding to watch.  It's really, really wonderful to see Stamets in action again, which as I've pointed out really hasn't been the case since the first season, and even better to see Reno again (she debuted in the second season, fully formed), and if the guy does show up again it'll even be worth recording the other guy's name, too.  

They've assembled to try and figure out the secrets of the rogue anomaly, which this episode is now considered an artificial phenomenon, so very much in the character of V'Ger or the doomsday machine from "The Doomsday Machine" or even the Sphere-Builders from Enterprise (fans got all worked up online since the aliens in "Examples" were introduced in Enterprise; visual reference is also made to Denobulans, of which that show's Doctor Phlox was one).  

One of the things I love about the modern era of the franchise is how much easier it is to just reference known information rather than treat it as a new discovery every time it comes up.  (I'm still miffed, quite outsize to general fan opinion, that Starfleet wouldn't have known exactly what happened to Khan.)

Anyway, the episode also addresses one particular elephant in the room: the death and resurrection of Culber, and what that does to his continuing existence, including the additional psychiatric duties he's lately taken on.  No character has more surprised me in the series than Culber, since the second season, since he came back from the dead.  In the third season he became more interesting, and this season has obviously understood exactly what he's become, which is arguably more interesting than Stamets, which is why it's all the better that the season has also made such a renewed effort with him.

And the title characters, another prison drama in the franchise (Voyager was particularly keen on this, which makes it equally relevant to point out that, yes, there's a Starship Janeway in the episode, too, and one of the rare but always welcome Native American actors to show up in Star Trek, not even playing a role that has Native American connotations).  I love how this plays out, too.  The episode sort of teases it'll go one way, and then doesn't really dwell on any of the expectations, instead waiting until the end to hit unexpectedly poignant notes.

All this and Saru gets one outstanding moment, too.  Saru has really become a favorite of mine, too.  I find myself talking in his cadences at times.  Combine all this and this is why I love this episode, and how this season is developing, arguably the most smoothly of any arc in the series to date.  

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The callbacks serve to deepen connections the season has dedicated so much of its time already to help make apparent for skeptical fans.
• series - The season arc once again moves along in organic fashion.
• character - There's a lot to choose from.  Let's settle for Stamets and Culber.
• essential - A textbook example of a part of a serialized story that stands out on its own.

notable guest-stars:

Oden Fehr (Vance)

Tig Notaro (Reno)

David Cronenberg

Star Trek: Discovery 4x4 "All Is Possible" Review

rating: ***

the story: Tilly discovers an unexpected new calling.

review: "All Is Possible" turns things right around from the last episode, in all the most dramatic ways possible.  "Choose to Live" seemed half-heartedly committed to everything it was attempting to do; "Possible" takes the total opposite tack.  Book really struggles with the loss of his family and homeworld, the Ni'Var make a stand (and decision), and so does Sylvia Tilly.

The Ni'Var, for those still struggling to keep up with modern Trek lore, are the Vulcans, and Romulans.  They're the reunified version that was first teased in Next Generation by none other than Spock.  Last season, "Unification III" dropped that particular bombshell in Discovery's far future, including how the Ni'Var were purposefully withholding participation in the Federation.  This season we're getting a better look at what that means, "Possible" might end up being the best spotlight.  Where "Live" seemed so reluctant to live up to its preceding material, "Possible" absolutely goes for the gusto.  The Emerald Chain arc, and the stirring defense of Federation ideals Vance made last season, also factors into the episode.  That would be more than enough to give "Possible" a glowing endorsement.

But it also makes a statement about Tilly, a clear turning point for a character who often seemed fairly directionless, except surprisingly in a command direction.  The one real stumble in "Possible" is Tilly referencing "how long" she coveted the captain's chair, which for all intents and purposes wasn't even a thing until she found out Mirror Tilly, "Killy," was everything she never seemed capable of becoming, confident, cool, and above all, unquestioned command material.

Eventually, by the end, Tilly remembers in "Possible" that her true motivating factor was her overbearing mom, whom she realizes now exists in a distant past, far, far out of reach, and thus no longer in control of all her choices.  So she opts for a different path.  (Even mentioning how "long" her career has been is kind of a mockery of poor Harry Kim, who would've killed to wait only a thousand years to reach lieutenant!)  She decides to become a teacher at Starfleet Academy.

O'Brien, at the end of Deep Space Nine, went that route.  The movies kind of suggested Kirk's crew went that route.  Maybe with Tilly, when we see her again, will get to actually show us some of that, and not just another junior officer training cruise disaster, which admittedly much of this episode is, though it spends less time on it than you'd think, and more just getting to the point (another huge difference from "Live").  "Possible" feels like more of a goodbye than even Saru's choice at the end of last season, which this season quickly disputed.  Some fans will always point to Tilly, and not Burnham, as the most uncomfortable character to swallow in the series (she's even the one who breached the potty mouth barrier!), and so it's kind of appropriate for a season that has been rebooting to more accessible parameters would seem to consider jettisoning Tilly rather than Burnham (who once again drifts away from her Kirk mode and toward Picard this episode).

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Arguably, especially for grumpy Enterprise viewers, this is the closest we've ever gotten to Vulcans not named Spock (or Tuvok) getting to represent themselves in a dignified manner, be motivated by their own concerns, and still come off looking good.
• series - A ton of great callbacks to previous events without needing to belabor them.
• character - For Tilly a kind of big goodbye.
• essential - Sort of like David Cronenberg making another appearance but not making too big a deal about it, this is a notable episode of modest achievement, just wanting to push things in a further direction. 

notable guest-stars:

David Cronenberg

Star Trek: Discovery 4x3 "Choose to Live" Review

 rating: **

the story: Burnham must track down and neutralize a rogue member of the Qowat Milot who has been stealing dilithium and has just murdered a Starfleet officer.

review: This one's a difficult review to write, because "Choose to Live" is both an important episode and yet so strangely inert, the execution so drained of life, it's tough to admit it's just not as good as it should be.

The biggest news for fans is that Gray now has a body!  Gray's character arc, so brilliantly begun in "Forget Me Not" last season, has degenerated into the worst kind of serialized storytelling the modern era has given us, things that linger and kind of creep along episodes and seasons, seldom receiving a spotlight.  It's particularly egregious for being such an important moment, worse even, for me, than "Project Daedalus" from the second season that suddenly thought Airiam was worth exploring, even as she was a secondary character in her own episode.  "Choose" doesn't even give Gray secondary status.  He's third, behind Burnham, behind Book, arguably behind even Tilly, meaning he ranks fourth in such a dramatic moment for his development.

Getting to have his own body again.

It's poor juggling on the writing side, and sluggish editing even with all those elements to feature in a single episode.  The liveliest moment comes from Vance using a hammy metaphor to help assuage Burnham of her need for control (itself a theme of the season) when Burnham lightly agrees to the wisdom.  Saru has some nice moments with Tilly, whose arc this season is trying to figure out why she feels so out of place (which seems like it probably would've made more sense last season, when she an' everyone else literally skipped ahead into the far future and away from everything they'd known outside of their shipmates).

(It occurs to me that Gray plays fifth fiddle; even Stamets, in science hero mode once again, has more to do.)

Much of the episode trades on franchise elements recently established in Picard, which Discovery made use of in its third season already, and again draws on here.  This would be fine if the episode draws as deftly on them as Picard itself had.  Picard doesn't get near enough credit for how gracefully it played out in its first season.  Discovery can sometimes hiccup when trying to find the vibe of a season, skipping on the record player even when it has something interesting to say.  "Choose" is so busy trying to explore four or five different plot points it doesn't give enough breathing room to any of them.  Book, for instance, is supposed to be distraught and devastated, and rightly so, but in this episode he really behaves no differently after a restorative mind meld than he did before it.  You could infer differently if you'd just watched the previous episode, but in this one no real grief is visible, only conversations implying it.  I don't know if it's the acting or that the whole episode was filmed without really figuring any of it out.

We see Burnham's mom again, and this time, unlike "Unification III" last season, I again see her as the lifeless injection she was in the second season.  That's the whole episode, as close to a real bummer as this series has yet produced.

But it is nice for the Gray arc to have reached this point, no matter how badly executed. He has a body.  He can live again.  This has so far been a season where characters are finally moving on, and symbolically, amidst the lethargic chaos of an episode, we have a vantage point from which to pinpoint an exact moment in time for which to pivot the overall arc.  I don't think that's why "Choose" plays out the way it does.  But it doesn't hurt to view it that way.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - For fans of the modern era, the episode serves as a refresher course for new mythology.
• series - However much I want to read into things, the overall effect of the episode is also to drag on rather than enhance the season arc.
• character - It's a huge moment for Gray, even if he plays at best fifth fiddle in achieving it.
• essential - I don't know if the writers thought they were going to merely duplicate Gray's debut from last season by doing it any other way, but as far as I'm concerned this moment was almost blown.

notable guest-stars:

Oded Fehr (Vance)

Star Trek: Discovery 4x2 "Anomaly" Review

 rating: ***

the story: Book takes the lead in investigating the cosmic disturbance that destroyed his world.

review: The season premiere was mostly about getting comfortable in the new future setting; "Anomaly" is, effectively, a second premiere, in that it establishes what the season will actually be exploring, a black hole phenomenon that will be causing cataclysmic destruction wherever it travels.  As I write that, I call to mind not just the Nexus ribbon from Star Trek Generations but the Crystalline Entity from The Next Generation, not to mention V'Ger from The Motion Picture and the probe in The Voyage Home...So there's a lot of history behind this new arc.  By the end of the episode, our crew learns one incredibly inconvenient fact about the phenomenon: unlike the others it won't be able to be tracked...

Book debuted last season as a kind of replacement for Ash Tyler, a would-be love interest for Burnham and a rogue agent playing by his own rules.  As is pointed out during this episode, he isn't even a part of Starfleet, and so he doesn't have to take orders.  Although it's also pointed out that as long as he works alongside our crew, his decisions still affect it and so he has to take that into account.  This leads to an adventure alongside...Stamets??

That's one of the reasons I like the episode.  Too often Stamets, even more than Culber, has been defined almost solely by his relationship with Culber.  Introduced initially as a brilliant scientist on the cutting edge, Stamets drifted away from the plot and started worrying only about his lingering connection to the spore drive, the fate of Culber, and then "adopting" Adira and Gray.  "Anomaly" feels like a direct attempt to course correct, forcing him to have a long episode with a different character, and even a whole experience that grounds him in matters that finally force him to focus on his abilities.  

Saru returns to help consult on the new crisis, and now we have him returning to his original role as a trusted ally of Michael Burnham, which like last episode feels like an attempt to remind viewers that, yes, Burnham is okay to like, her old reputation finally consigned to the past, if indeed it were ever applicable.  She takes very much a backseat the whole episode, actually, even though of course she has every reason to take a personal interest in Book's escapade.  

And yes, as the internet has pointed out, this is the first time two episodes in the franchise have exactly the same title.  Next Generation indeed had "The Emissary" and Deep Space Nine "Emissary," and "The Muse" while Voyager had "Muse," but this is the first time there's no quibbling.  Enterprise had "Anomaly," too, during its third season, in which it explored a region of space with weird properties and of course a whole crisis around them.  It seems fitting.

Also fitting are appearances from several familiar species, including a representative from the Ni'Var (the reunited Vulcan/Romulan peoples) and a Ferengi, the first live action appearance since Enterprise as Starfleet considers how to handle the crisis.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Given all the roving threats in Star Trek lore, it seems fitting for Discovery to explore such matters in one of its season arcs.
• series - Like the first season, which unrolled its premise over the course of several episodes, this second episode of the fourth season has as much to do as the premiere.
• character - It's a spotlight for a grieving Book, and a very welcome fresh look at Stamets.
• essential - I'll reserve full marks on this one if only because no definitive points are made.

notable guest-stars:

Oded Fehr (Vance)

Star Trek: Discovery 4x1 "Kobayashi Maru" Review

 rating: ****

the story: The crew sets out on its new mission of reconnecting the galaxy with the Federation.

review: Now that Discovery officially has its own timeframe and mission, its fourth season can...obviously kick off with the same kind of awesome tease the Abrams movies favored.  That means ten minutes of a wild contact mission that goes horribly wrong, until Discovery does its patented "we're Starfleet officers capable of doing really smart things" maneuver (it's honestly my favorite quirk of the series), solves the problem (all of it looking great, like the whole of the third season premiere, "That Hope Is You, Part 1"), and moves on.

Which means Burnham and her crew integrating into being a regular feature of a renewed Starfleet.  We get a nod to Enterprise (complete with the end credits theme some fans would still prefer as the series theme itself), and then Burnham once again butting heads with an authority figure, in this instance the new president of the Federation, who's half-Cardassian, half-Bajoran (which is itself a nod to Deep Space Nine, and kind of Voyager, which had Seska, who originally presented as Bajoran, but ended up revealed as Cardassian).

Now, you might argue that this is beyond repetitive, but then you have to consider that many fans still can't get over Burnham's introduction as a mutineer, which means any examination of her thought process is a constant reminder that the series itself knows her reputation (which itself is a commentary on the kind of heroics Kirk used to pull; Burnham is a Kirk in a post-Kirk world).

And all of this is posited on one of the most familiar elements of franchise lore, from which the title of the episode is derived, the no-win scenario all Starfleet cadets must face.  Introduced in The Wrath of Khan and then revisited in Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru test is an attempt to drive home that all officers must face the reality of failure, not just the possibility.  Does someone like Burnham run on luck in forever apparently avoiding the worst effects of her decisions, or is she inevitably setting herself for a terrible fall?  

The episode also visits with Saru and Book as they pursue individual goals, one of which unexpectedly propels the episode into the season's arc, to be explored later.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A statement that resonates throughout Star Trek lore.
• series - And that emphasizes how Discovery itself has been making it all along.
• character - Specifically in Michael Burnham.
• character - Many fans have continued to question why they should care about Burnham.  This seems like as clear an explanation, in terms long-term fans can understand, as the series has made.

notable guest-stars:

Oded Fehr (Vance)

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x5 "Terror Firma" Review

 rating: ***

the story: The characters escape the predator planet, and perhaps the Diviner, too.

review: In the second part of the "Dream Catcher" story, Prodigy appears to take a big leap and complete an arc begun at the start of the series.  

Now that everyone knows what kind of planet they've really found, escape is the main objective.  But there's also the question of what to do with Gwyn, the daughter of the Diviner, the tyrant who previously kept them all prisoner and who also wanted the lost Starfleet ship they found and escaped in.  As a new kind of Star Trek, it was difficult to know exactly how all this would play out, how long it would play out (and of course, there's hardly a guarantee that the Diviner arc ends here, although it's difficult to imagine him finding a way to credibly stay in close contact with them now).

Serialized storytelling is hardly new in the franchise at this point, and in most of it, the story stretches at least for a whole season.  In Discovery, however, there were elements that resolved within the first handful of episodes, such as Michael Burnham's status in Starfleet and the nature of the tardigrade helping power the spore drive.  Prodigy, as of "Terror Firma," seems to be following that model, an extended arc that traditionally would have played out in a pilot as setup for the premise.  New era, new rules.

The episode teases along the solution that rounds out the dilemma, the big mystery at the heart of the Protostar, which turns to be a protostar, a new propulsion system that surely would have been handy in Voyager itself, the series Prodigy seems so eager to evoke.  

In the process of working all this out, it's perhaps the first satisfying episode of the series so far.  Having discarded the familiar element that drove "Dream Catcher," "Terror Firma" instead is free to challenge the characters on their own terms, leaving Gwyn finally as an accepted ally, as she was clearly set up to be from the start.  That itself is a completed arc.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Janeway's nudge this episode helps Starfleet's best service tradition remain true.
• series - A welcome conclusion to the initial arc of Prodigy.
• character - Gwyn finally joins the good guys.
• essential -  The lack of heroic resolve from the ostensible lead character, Dal, remains a drawback.

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x4 "Dream Catcher" Review

 rating: **

the story: The characters end up on a planet that seems to provide them with their heart's desires.

rating: The crucial question all incarnations of Star Trek must answer is how closely do they follow the traditional storytelling model?  Most of them have a Starfleet crew exploring space in a starship encountering weird mysteries.  As of "Dream Catcher," Prodigy fits that model.

Interestingly, it even has a version of Janeway in the Delta Quadrant, once again doggedly insisting they follow Starfleet protocol.

A lot of fans grumbled at how Voyager did that for seven seasons despite a premise that seemed to contradict such things.  Prodigy is in some ways Voyager revisited, and it wastes little time doing exactly the same thing.  By the end of the episode (which ends in a cliffhanger, so the implication plays out in the next one), even the Maquis parallel of the character who seems diametrically opposed to the interests of everyone else, Gwyn, has reached an impasse.

The particular franchise trope "Dream Catcher" follows traces all the way back to "Shore Leave" in the original series and can be found in later shows like Enterprise's "Dead Stop."  Again, the character who stands out in all this is Rok-Tahk, the scary monster with a child's voice who finds illusory acceptance from cuddly creatures projected by a predatory planet in the episode.

For younger viewers who have no real Star Trek background to draw from, it's probably easier to view any of this as fresh ground.  For seasoned viewers, it's either comforting or vaguely alarming that something so familiar is already being presented.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Prodigy announces itself as familiar territory.
• series - I think this is potentially a huge misstep so early in the run.
• character - On the other hand, it is a useful way to explore these characters.
• essential - Even if the limited details of the animation make the results, especially for Janeway, as difficult to enjoy as the ring of familiarity.

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x3 "Starstruck" Review

 rating: ***

the story: The erstwhile crew meets Hologram Janeway.

review: The first regular episode of the series is also the first to explore how exactly Janeway, or Hologram Janeway, factors into Prodigy.  For long-term fans, Voyager's captain was itself the key selling point of the series.  The original series and Next Generation had their own follow-up films to ensure revisiting for at least a while, but that was the first two in what became an expanding franchise of characters, many of whom would never appear in another incarnation of Star Trek.  From Deep Space Nine onward, many characters would end up appearing only in their originating shows, or so it seemed.  Voyager has now gotten to luckiest, in the new era, with Seven in Picard, Paris showing up in Lower Decks, and now Janeway as a main character in Prodigy.

Hologram Janeway, and the ship she projects from, is the only standard Star Trek element of Prodigy.  She herself assumes the characters around her are cadets, and none of them are in a rush to correct her, so that's the premise, as far as she knows.

Amazingly, Kate Mulgrew sounds exactly as she always did.  Some actors, regardless of aging issues, end up sounding different when doing voice work, unless they're seasoned veterans of the form.  The depiction of Hologram Janeway is exactly as fans saw her in Voyager, so there's little confusion possible.  Anyone watching without that context knows this character as a reference tool who also volunteers Starfleet protocol when necessary but who is nonetheless very much beholden to a given set of parameters.  She doesn't adopt the role of captain, she can't control the newbies.  In some ways she's an interactive version of the computer voice Majel Roddenberry provided across much of the franchise.  (There's a whole generation of fans who shudder at the very thought.  I prefer not to seek out their opinions.)

Other than that, the episode is the cast just trying to figure out how little they know about a Starfleet ship, and not much beyond that.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The next gig for a well-known Star Trek character is pretty notable.
• series - The integration of that character into Prodigy is kind of the whole point of the episode.
• character - And that character is, of course, Janeway, recognizable in all aspects except...being in command.
• essential - Is it ironic that Janeway, famously having a holographic doctor, herself became a hologram?  This series lacks such self-awareness, alas.

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x1/1x2 "Lost and Found" Review

 rating: ***

the story: Inhabitants of a penal colony in the Delta Quadrant find an unexpected opportunity for escape when they find a Starfleet ship.

review: There's a lot of chatter online about Prodigy being the first time parents have been able to show their kids Star Trek they end up actually interested in.  Of course that's the whole point.  As a Star Trek show it's certainly unique.  It's the first time ever there's a crew made up entirely of characters who aren't in Starfleet (the Janeway hologram doesn't count).

The results have to be interpreted through that lens.  Fans have long clamored for something like this, but they usually envisioned the results to be a familiar alien species like, say, the Klingons.  There are no familiar aliens in Prodigy's main cast (except the Tellarite, who doesn't really look like a Tellarite, and the Medusan), even though they're all Delta Quadrant natives and of course that's where Voyager spent its run.

That means that the vibe is very, very different.  The main conflict is similar to a subplot of Discovery's third season (intentionally or not), and as it plays out feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek (an assessment many fans still hold over the Abrams films), which is not necessarily a bad thing, but very unfamiliar franchise territory.

The cast of characters, unlike Lower Decks (for a whole host of reasons), feels like traditional animated characters, especially as you would find in an animated film.  (The animation itself would be subpar for an animated film.)  Every character is meant to stand out as a unique type, and they're fun to watch, but not even the ostensible lead, Dal, is close to traditional Starfleet material, more like the vision fans always had of what the Maquis ought to have been like.  

(In fact, you might view Prodigy as what fans thought Voyager should have been like as a whole.)

So far the standout characters are Zero, who sounds like Helen Mirren, and Rok-Tahk, the proverbial gentle giant, whose arc is particularly well-crafted in this debut episode.  The others are works in progress, although the goop creature Murf is fun.

Since this is very much serialized material, the overall strength of the storytelling is going to rely on how well individual beats are handled, and the cumulative effect.  Once more Star Trek sails into the unknown...

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A bold new vision of Star Trek.
• series - It's a solid setup that introduces all the characters and the central premise.
• character - Even if I'm not sold on all of them, the cast is well-represented.
• essential - It's such a radical departure, and the familiar elements saved for so late in the episode, that it's difficult to judge how well this succeeds as a Star Trek series on the pilot alone.

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x10 "First First Contact" Review

 rating: ***

the story: Freeman is offered another command.

review: The season finale ends with Lower Decks' first cliffhanger(s), and most of it makes up for the bit that falls very, very flat for me.

Let's get that out of the way first.  This is a series of franchise references, in some ways, sometimes so many and so often it can feel like that's the whole point, but most of the time they're handled perfectly and hilariously.  "First First Contact" is a rare blunder, and infuriatingly, one that the episode feels the need to harmer repeatedly.  This is the insistence on emphasizing guest-character Sonya Gomez, a minor character from a few episodes of The Next Generation, previously best known for spilling hot chocolate on Picard, now a starship captain.  It's obnoxious and on the nose and not even in character with how the concept of the series has used its cast of minor Starfleet officers.

So anyway, putting that aside the episode pivots on Captain Freeman, finally circling back to her after having such a notable role in the first season as the subplot of her being Mariner's mom played out and having nowhere the writers felt like going this season.  Apart from hitting overly familiar notes with Mariner (and Tendi; it's baffling how often they hit the same notes with Tendi), Freeman's arc circles the series back to the idea that the Cerritos itself is a "lower decks" starship in the fleet, an assignment Freeman would be happy to give up in order to upgrade her career.  

By the time she decides she actually wants to stay, after an amazing bit of heroism from the crew, we're thrown the curve of Starfleet actually coming to arrest her!

Then we get advancement for one of the main characters: Rutherford finding out there's a hidden truth behind his implant.  Here's hoping the next season has a much better idea of what it wants to accomplish.  One gets the sense that when conceiving this season, all they prepared was the setup of Boimler's transfer to the Titan.  This time there's drama better integrated to the Cerritos, and the characters themselves.  

criteria analysis:

• franchise - I'm knocking this point off for the Gomez blunder.
• series - A confident stride toward another season begins here!
• character - Freeman at last breaks free from the constraints of being a senior officer in a junior officer series.  And what about Rutherford???
• essential - Anytime there's a season finale cliffhanger, it deserves attention.  And this one does.

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x9 "wej Duj" Review

 rating: ***

the story: The lower decks crews of Vulcans, Klingons, Pakleds, and Starfleet unexpectedly converge.

review: I would probably have considered rating this one a classic if the online reaction hadn't been so overboard in emphasizing the role of the Vulcan in the episode.  Proclaimed an instant "best of" Vulcans!  Should be a regular character of the series!

Not that special.  What's actually special about "wej Duj" (Klingon for "three ships") is that it takes the premise of Lower Decks to further conclusions, as outlined in the story summary above.  The Vulcan and Klingon characters act as independent agents (they're essentially the Mariners of their crews), and while we've seen far more of how Klingon crews operate, this is still, for me, the more interesting of those arcs.  The Pakleds are Pakleds.  There's even a funny bit at the end featuring a Borg crew.

Meanwhile Boimler is once again trying to find a replacement crew, this time buddying up with Ransom (as is traditional in my reviews, even though Ransom is in every episode, and therefore so is Jerry O'Connell voicing him, when he has a particular spotlight, I include him as a "notable guest-star") in lying about being Hawaiian.  This is notable in that it's a rare instance of Boimler being anything but his impresion of Starfleet professional.  The arc ends with a mushy note of Boimler once again discovering his work is noticed.  Not even the only time this one has been done this season, so I'm not really counting it as a positive, and it's all the weirder because the episode otherwise is about the Mariner archetype, and she doesn't even have anything notable happening, which is another obvious oversight in a string of episodes that didn't think everything through.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The Klingon arc follows a grand tradition, and it's a rare instance of getting to hang out with Vulcans, too.
• series - It's the series doing an episode of just lower decks action!
• character - The Boimler arc falls a little flat for being overly familiar.
• essential - It's an episode the series had to do.  And mostly nailed.

notable guest-stars:

Jerry O'Connell (Ransom)

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x8 "I, Excretus" Review

 rating: ***

the story: The crew is evaluated through a series of simulations.

review: Online, "I, Excretus" quickly became infamous for doing things that could only have happened in Lower Decks, and that might be the most concise summary possible.

Where I found real merit was Boimler getting to be Boimler again.  In the first season Boimler was best understood as the nutcase who believed in Starfleet protocol so passionately it blinded him to everything else.  Throughout the second season this took a distinct backseat to trying to reconcile him with Mariner, with whom the producers couldn't decide where they wanted to go.  It had seemed obvious that a romance was inevitable, but the season finale put a big kibosh on that (for now?), so "I, Excretus" was the chance to reboot him, so once again his ridiculous efficiency is highlighted, and as it flits in and out it probably hits what to this point in the series is its peak.

Simply put, he knows exactly how to handle the Borg.  In every other incarnation of the franchise this is beyond impossible, but for Boimler, at least as far as his simulations go, all he's capable of doing it doing it better.  And better.

The rest of the episode doesn't have anything worth comparing to that, another curiosity that developed during the season.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A lot of familiar strands here.  Let's settle on the appearance of the Borg Queen.
• series - Only in Lower Decks could things play out this way.
• character - And specifically for Boimler, who finally feels like Boimler again.
• essential - Again the series sabotages itself in failing to support its best material.

notable guest-stars:

Alice Krige (Borg Queen)

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x7 "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie" Review

 rating: **

the story: Evil computer voiced by Jeffrey Combs.

review: By now, Jeffrey Combs is so familiar to fans of the franchise, casting him is tantamount to stunt-casting.  He played two regular recurring roles in Deep Space Nine, made an appearance in Voyager, and had another regular recurring role in Enterprise, and so he joined the ranks of the Star Trek family with an assured legacy.  In "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie," he's representing two legacies, his own and the classic idea of the evil computer that has taken over an alien world.  

The result is underwhelming.  By the time we catch up with the evil computer, it has already been deposed, and so the whole episode is him trying to trick his way back into control (any control!), and the episode doesn't really nail the comedic potential of it.  The vocal performance by Combs is what you would expect from Combs, but it's not really the right fit for him.  In his three recurring roles (and other appearances besides), he never wasn't unsavory of some kind, so trying to buy him as capable of ever being trusted is inherently difficult.  This is not exactly HAL.

Anyway, the episode rebounds by unexpectedly lobbing a gimme in the direction of background character Billups, who seemed previously to be as boring a Starfleet officer as can be.  But he's apparently royalty on his world, and his mom will stop at nothing to trick him into being royalty again.  So that's the arc that lands solidly in this episode.  

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Evil computer trope, check!
• series - It's tough to decide where the success of the Billups arc lies.  It seems like Lower Decks is the only incarnation of the franchise where this could've happened.  But in the end...
• character - ...we'll say that the success is in the ability of Lower Decks to nail another character, since it sometimes doesn't really know what to do with some of the others.
• essential - No, not really.  If you really like Billups, maybe!

notable guest-stars:

Jeffrey Combs

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x6 "The Spy Humungous" Review

 rating: ***

the story: The Pakleds think they can field a spy???

review: The problem the season began to develop was the inability to juggle the a- and b-stories.  Originally the a-story was whatever the main characters were up to and the b-story was what was happening in the background, what would in a traditional Star Trek series have been the a-story.  In "Spy Humungous," the b-story is more interesting than the a-story antics.  The main characters are busy doing ridiculous things, while the b-story continues the Pakled arc.

In The Next Generation, the Pakleds were one of the early experiments to come up with aliens who weren't from the original series.  Everyone knows the Ferengi, from these experiments, because so much time was spent developing them, and they ended up appearing in each subsequent incarnation of the TV franchise, through Enterprise. The Pakleds weren't so fortunate.  Their simple-minded idiocy, though surprisingly effective, was difficult to take seriously, and there didn't seem anywhere to go with them past an introduction ("Samaritan Snare").  Then Lower Decks comes along and they're a perfect addition to a cartoon take on the franchise that, unlike The Animated Series, is comedic in tone.

Generally with additional exposure, aliens tend to get their culture explored.  Somehow "Spy Humungous" accomplishes exactly that.  And that's a tough act to follow.  Far more than the previous episode, "An Embarrassment of Dooplers," it's a rousing success, and doesn't need leaning into, because the joke sells itself, the hierarchy of a such a society (kind of a parody of Klingons, which in hindsight seems absolutely right), and plays out on two fronts, aboard the ship and on the Pakled homeworld.

The main character shenanigans feel far too expected in comparison.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The unexpected moment in which we dive into Pakled society!
• series - With such a heavy emphasis on the Pakleds, Lower Decks needed this moment.
• character - The problem with hitting the same notes relentlessly with the same characters is that either it's a sitcom in which that's exactly what it's supposed to, or you risk beating a dead horse.
• essential - Pakleds!  They are strong!

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x5 "An Embarrassment of Dooplers" Review

 rating: **

the story: The Cerritos hosts an inconveniently nervous ambassador.

the review: It seems obvious that "Dooplers" was meant to be the Lower Decks equivalent of tribbles, and whether you think this is a good or bad thing, it's the highlight of the episode, other than the continuing attempts to explore lingering character arcs.

At this point, it's clear that the season was quite determined to linger on those arcs throughout its course.  Rutherford still can't settle into the fact that his implant essentially rebooted his whole character, Mariner can't decide how she feels about Boimler's time aboard the Titan, and so these things are rehashed while other subplots have Mariner and Boimler attempting to crash an exclusive Starfleet party (which eventually concludes with failure, but their discovery that Kirk & Spock failed to find their way in, too, in a previous generation) (which seems kind of ridiculous, if you think about it too much).  

Surprisingly, it's Captain Freeman, in her efforts to resolve the duplicating Doopler crisis (I wish they'd come up with a more creative name for the species), doing so by being gruff, the first time she gets to be successful just by being herself (it comes up again in the season finale), who shines in the episode.  Since there's so much happening around this, and the brunt of the effect of the whole thing hinging on the ambassador's hilarious embarrassment, "Dooplers" ends up losing a valuable opportunity to take a victory lap (which, again, is probably something the producers themselves figured out, given the season finale).

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The echo of "The Trouble with Tribbles" is worth savoring, plus the restraint in not actually featuring tribbles.
• series - There's the sense that, given the overall emphasis on the Pakleds in other episodes, that another set of gimmick aliens just here to be ridiculous might be Lower Decks overextending its hand.
• character - Even if everyone else kind of feels like they're treading water, Freeman gets a small nudge in a positive direction.  She's no longer just Mariner's mom!
• essential - If the episode had leaned more on the Dooplers, or Freeman, it might have been.  

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x4 "Mugato, Gumato" Review

 rating: ***

the story: An away team grapples with Ferengi poachers.

review: In the original series there were two notable attempts at full-body costume aliens: the Gorn and the Mugato.  Of the two, the Gorn have gotten plenty of attention, and thanks to Enterprise even a another appearance in the franchise.  Finally, it's the Mugato's turn!

Unlike the Gorn, the Mugato is an animal, kind of an ape with a horn, and so naturally the horn is what the Ferengi poachers are after.  That setup allows Lower Decks to once again spotlight for fans who never quite got the Deep Space Nine memo that the Ferengi aren't one-dimensional anymore.  Mariner had a friend in the first season who played off that ignorance, but in this instance the Ferengi are more or less true to stereotype until a successful negotiation turns the tide.  (There's a whole running gag in the episode about negotiations, making the resolution all the more clever.)

Tendi, for the second episode in a row, is out to prove herself, while Boimler and Rutherford are scared out of their minds that Mariner has another secret, a plotline that feels a little lazy, especially after two episodes where the series knew exactly what it was doing, but it involves enough elements (including a bartender of considerably less insightful banter than Guinan, and another of the many accents the season has been spotlighting, which for an accent guy like me has been easy to enjoy).  Although, I guess, it's nice to be worrying about Mariner for exactly the kinds of reasons we did at the start of the series instead of the business with her mom (y'know, Captain Freeman).

criteria analysis:

• franchise - It's nice to have throwbacks like the Mugato, the Ferengi, and even Denobulans (!) in the mix.  Just imagine if anyone ever gets around to all the background aliens from the original cast movies!
• series - Probably only an animated series could successfully the Mugato anyway, right?
• character - The season has been throwing up different combinations between the lead characters, which here is once again refreshing, with Boimler and Rutherford teaming up for a change.
• essential - But the stakes are fairly low.

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x3 "We'll Always Have Tom Paris" Review

 rating: ****

the story: The Cerritos hosts a visit from Tom Paris.

review: Unbelievably, after the first laugh-out-loud moment (for me) of the series in the previous episode, "We'll Always Have Tom Paris" does it again!  And thus, for me, another classic.  If you're going to do a comedy version of Star Trek, animated or otherwise, this is the sort of thing to absolutely treasure.

Tom Paris, Voyager's lovable rogue, doesn't even have a particularly large role in the episode (another commonality with "Kayshon, His Eyes Open"); actually, the b-plot with Mariner and Tendi is on the whole better and more memorable, while Boimler's hero worship itself is eclipsed by his refusal to simply adapt to new security measures and resultant crawling around access tubes...

And because the best line of the episode isn't even necessarily the best part of the episode, I'll here skip right to it: "Kazon!!!" That's when a disheveled Boimler finally meets Tom, and for the Delta Quadrant veteran who, unlike most fans, remembers the Kazon as something other than disappointing, vaguely bootleg Klingon villains, it's a hilariously terrifying moment.

Back to Mariner and Tendi, though, and especially because the next episode also has Tendi kind of trying desperately to prove herself, it's absolutely worth celebrating that the character the first episode of the series kind of introduced as more important than she ended up being, at least during the first season (taking a definitive backseat to Boimler and Mariner), the episode frames the story as Mariner realizing how little she knows about Tendi, which allows the audience to learn about her, too, and as I've already seen pointed out on the internet, giving us a deeper look at Orion culture in general than we've gotten previously in the franchise.  It's perhaps an even better character insight than we've so far gotten from Mariner, despite a pronounced effort in multiple episodes, another sign that although this is an animated comedy that spends a lot of time making references to Star Trek lore, it can build its own, too.

It's also worth noting that the name of the episode is the second time the franchise has nodded at its own episode titles.  "We'll Always Have Paris" is a first season Next Generation in which Picard reunites with an old flame.  There was also "Who Mourns for Adonais?" in the original series, with the later Deep Space Nine echo "Who Mourns for Morn?" (in which of course we still never get to hear the dude actually speak).  (Bonus points if you also thought of "The Emissary" from Next Generation and "Emissary" from Deep Space Nine, not to mention "The Muse" from that series and "Muse" from Voyager, or "Blink of An Eye" from that series and "Wink of an Eye" from the original series.  But you get my point.)

Less successful than all that is Rutherford's arc with Shaxs, not because of anything that actually happens but that it implies that Star Trek regularly randomly resurrects main characters.  Well, no, it doesn't.  I mean, weird things certainly happen to them all the time, but the only real outright resurrection would be Spock.  It just seems like a fan argument that is just taken for granted as a thing, when it really isn't.  Although maybe it's a talking point I simply haven't really thought all that much about.  Well.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A visit from another series, which is often a highlight.
• series - Which surprisingly keeps most of the focus on Lower Decks itself.
• character - In a season making a thrust at putting Tendi in the spotlight, this is the best one so far.
• essential - Not every fan will get that punchline, but those who do certainly will love it, the mark of another classic.

notable guest-stars:

Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris)

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x2 "Kayshon, His Eyes Open"

 rating: ****

the story: Assisting the inventorying of a dead collector's ship proved unexpectedly complicated.

review: With a single laugh-out-loud line, "Kayshon, His Eyes Open" becomes a classic episode, the first time (and followed rapidly a second time the next episode!) Lower Decks provokes this reaction for me.  I don't always actually laugh at funny material.  It's more often a matter of a sudden joke, or punchline, that gets me.

The set-up is in the title, the use of a Tamarian for the first time since their introduction in the classic (for an entirely different reason!) Next Generation episode "Darmok" as temporary new chief of security aboard the Cerritos, in which we learn the universal translator has mostly been able to compensate for their language's peculiar penchant for allegory.  

Dayshon isn't even the focus of the episode.  He isn't even the secondary character with the biggest spotlight.  That falls to Jet Manhaver, who's a kind of substitute Boimler (more on him in a moment) as a counterpoint for Mariner on the away mission aboard the collector's ship (which itself is stuffed with even more easter eggs than the series already regularly features, including a far less glorious memento of Kahless the Unforgettable than the sword Worf and Kor fought over in Deep Space Nine's "Sword of Kahless" which nonetheless is a subtle link to the Abrams films, which feature Klingons in helmets).  Jet isn't exactly a Boimler, but his penchant for protocol still rubs Mariner the wrong way.

Anyway, long story short, Kayshon gets turned into a puppet.  The line that got me isn't exactly complicated (it's literally "Kayshon, when he was turned into a puppet"), but it's such a succinct, distinctly Lower Decks punchline, it's a perfect way to explain the appeal of the series, something Lower Decks hadn't previously nailed.

(Though, again!  Somehow the very next episode does it, too!)

The episode also gives Boimler's time aboard the Titan actual airtime, and at once takes a subtle jab at modern live action Star Trek (all action! all the time!) and nods at Riker lore (Next Generation's "Second Chances" and Deep Space Nine's "Defiant," the existence of transporter duplicate Thomas Riker, whom I wish we had also gotten an update on, as last we heard he was headed to a Cardassian prison of some kind, and that was DS9's third season, well before the Dominion War even started!), a funny way to get Boimler back aboard the Cerritos.

(This is also a reminder that Lower Decks takes place between Nemesis and Picard, and in fact significantly closer to Nemesis than Picard, as by Picard Riker is in fact mostly retired.)

criteria analysis:

• franchise - There are fans who consider "Darmok" to be one of the best episodes of any Star Trek series (including a good blogging friend of mine), so this nod is long in coming.
• series - A spotlight that ably demonstrates everything that makes Lower Decks work as a comedy version of the franchise.
• character - All four main characters of the series have something to contribute to the episode.
• essential - And, for me, the first real laugh-out-loud moment of the series.  Counts for a lot!

notable guest-stars:

Jonathan Frakes (Riker)

Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x1 "Strange Energies" Review

 rating: **

the story: Ransom gets zapped with weird energy and develops godlike powers.

review: Welcome back, Lower Decks!  The second season opens with a fairly unambitious episode that nonetheless grounds it in traditional franchise lore, a plot device demonstrated previously in the original series ("Where No Man Has Gone Before," "Charlie X") and Next Generation ("Hide and Q"), although played very differently in Deep Space Nine (Sisko as the Emissary of the Prophets, a series-long arc that never sees him develop special powers, unlike his rival Dukat, who does when he becomes emissary for the Pah-wraiths).

And while Ransom, a key member of the command staff voiced by the biggest name of the regular cast, Jerry O'Connell (as a reminder, I list O'Connell as a guest-star when Ransom has a significant part, even though he's generally in every episode), certainly deserves an odd spotlight every now and then, that "Strange Energies" devotes its time to a supporting character in this situation is a little disappointing.  Boimler, locked up as a member of another crew (Riker's Titan) at this point, would have been the obvious choice, and it almost seems as if everyone realized what a terrible mistake it was, as he's barely even in the episode.

Tendi and Rutherford instead have the significant spotlight, although nothing much comes of it except to highlight that they're pals.  Even more surprising is that even Mariner doesn't have much to do!

The whole experience seems calculated just to make sure someone popping in for the season premiere doesn't feel too bogged down in series specifics, which is kind of funny, as Star Trek traditionally holds premiere and finale slots to make bold series-specific statements.  Well.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - The familiar plot device is a nice reminder of the kinds of things Star Trek has done in its rich history.
• series - My quibbles aside, it's genuinely nice to see Lower Decks return with new material regardless of its overall merit.
• character - I don't think there's a significant spotlight for anyone here, with Tendi coming closest (although the four episodes I've seen as of this writing suggest there was a specific push for her, and this was merely a soft start).
• essential - Not at all. The kind of episode you can enjoy but not worry too much about.

notable guest-stars:

Jonathan Frakes (Riker)

Jerry O'Connell (Ransom)

Reviews of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season Two Beginning Shortly

 Watching the first two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, second season, it made me realize that I really do love this series.  I've got reviews for every episode, every movie of the franchise here at Star Trek Fan Companion.  I don't love all of it.  I don't love everything fans traditionally love.  I don't even "hate" the stuff fans traditionally hate.  I don't dismiss entire series, as many fans have, so the reviews you'll find here are as comprehensive as you'll likely find without being merely informative (in fact, I have very little summary material here, which you can easily find elsewhere).  

Star Trek Arcs XVIII: Romulan Elegy

The conclusion of this series on story arcs in the Star Trek franchise revolves around a thread weaving through three separate projects and interweaving two separate arcs. Unthinkable. But it happened.

Star Trek Nemesis gets little to no respect from fans, but it’s always been a personal favorite. Its plot revolves a clone of Picard created by the Romulans, who end up bitterly regretting it when he seizes power in his bid for revenge. In the process, Data sacrifices himself to stop him, and everyone thought they knew exactly what would happen next, and they were so sure they were bitterly disappointed and it seemed like nothing at all would happen.

The next Star Trek movie premiered seven years later and was somehow a reboot and a continuation. Its complicated timeline sets it after the events of Nemesis, so that we see an aging Spock involved in the response to the destruction of Romulus. Canonically we have no other information at that point involving familiar characters.

In Picard, we see what happened in the aftermath. In fact, Picard himself torpedoed his Starfleet career in bitter disgust at how the Federation effectively turned its back on the Romulan refugee crisis. Then of course he winds up being drafted right back into the action.

At the same time, he’s unraveling a mystery that leads him into a most unexpected reunion with Data, culminating in a “dream sequence” in which his android friend gets the chance to say an extended farewell, giving his final thoughts on the journey he took toward becoming more human. 

It’s bittersweet and heartbreaking, and really quite beautiful. It’s by far the most unlikely arc of the franchise, and probably impossible to occur in any other context.

Star Trek Arcs XVII: The Xindi

One of my favorite franchise arcs is the Xindi crisis from Enterprise’s third season, until Discovery and Picard the only example of full serialization in Star Trek. 

Of course, as was true of the franchise, to that point, even that left plenty of room for standalone stories, plus a few out-and-out standouts. Here’s a complete rundown:

“The Expanse” - The second season finale kicks off the arc with the Xindi launching an attack on Earth, carving a swatch across Florida and killing, among others, Trip’s sister. The Enterprise is subsequently sent into the eponymous region to seek out the Xindi to confront them and prevent further attacks.

“The Xindi” - We meet the Xindi Council, along with weapons developer Degra, in the third season premiere, but the Enterprise crew itself quickly determines that their search for answers won’t be easy.

“Anomaly” - The region of space they’re forced to travel through is itself dangerous, and contains mysterious spheres, the first of which they encounter here.

“Extinction” - Doesn’t have a ton of arc relevance.

“Rajiin” - Enterprise never understood that modern fans had a hugely different opinion of hot chicks than those of the original series. So this episode, featuring a hot chick helping the Xindi Council spy on the crew, was yet another instance of not getting the expected reception.

“Impulse” The region’s weird properties have negative effects on…everything, but here they’ve resulted in Zombie Vulcans. Fans loved this one. If there was one way to guarantee a good reception, it was to drop in a random horror episode (see also: the second season’s “Dead Stop”).

“Exile” - Sato has another in her long series of uncomfortable situations, this time with an alien who could give them actual information about the Xindi.

“The Shipment” - For me this is the first episode of the season to dig fruitfully into the arc, in which Archer meets some actual Xindi, and discovers that it’s definitely going to only get more complicated.

“Twilight” - One of the true highlights of the arc is also a classic “reset button” episode (in the vein of “City on the Edge of Forever,” “The Inner Light,” “The Visitor,” and “Timeless”) in which a great premise must be undone so there can be a happy ending, in this case Archer losing his ability to retain long term memories and thus seeing an alternate version of how all this plays out, and developing a very different relationship with T’Pol.

“North Star” - A kind of classic original series episode that serves as a kind of metaphor for how the arc will need to play out.

“Similitude” - The other major highlight of the arc sees Trip needing to be saved by growing a clone from which Phlox will harvest needed organs. It’s one of those bitter ethical dilemmas the franchise can do so well, and a great spotlight for the show’s best character.

“Carpenter Street” - The most direct overlap between this arc and the Temporal Cold War, featuring pizza and Jeffrey Dean Morgan nearly quitting acting because of his Xindi getup.

“Chosen Realm” - Another nod to the original series that serves as a cautionary tale for Archer growing too obsessed with the mission.

“Proving Ground” - Our Andorian pal Shran pops up.

“Stratagem” - Another big highlight of the arc is Archer’s considerable battle to win Degra over as an ally. It’s the “In the Pale Moonlight” of the arc, solidifying Degra’s importance and humanizing, once and for all, the enemy, in the best franchise tradition. 

“Harbinger” - The crew becomes more aware of the Sphere Builders and their role in all of this.

“Doctor’s Orders” - A Phlox spotlight. Kind of sad, because it forces him to spend a lot of time alone, and he always works best off of other characters.

“Hatchery” - Another cautionary tale of obsession.

“Azati Prime” - The crew reaches the Xindi! But it’s still going to be very far from easy to resolving all this…

“Damage” - Driving home the point that sometimes hard choices must be made.

“The Forgotten” - An episode for grief.

“E2” - The crew interact with their own descendants (like “Children of Time”), and once again the emphasis is on the cost of completing the mission.

“The Council” - Archer, with Degra as his firm ally, meets the Xindi Council. No happy ending here: Degra is murdered by the more belligerent faction of the Xindi as thanks for his efforts.

“Countdown” - Putting all the pieces together, the crew realizes that the Sphere Builders are the ones responsible for all this. But they still have the aggressive Xindi to deal with, and a second assault to stop.

“Zero Hour” - The season finale. You can guess how it ends.

“Storm Front, Parts. 1 & 2” - Well, almost! The fourth season opens by closing out the Temporal Cold War, including recovering Archer from an alternate WWII, where he was whisked at the last minute when stopping the final Xindi weapon.

“Home” - Archer attempts to recover, “Family” style, from the psychological fallout of his traumatic experiences. 

Captain Picard Day 2021!

 I haven’t been very good at acknowledging Captain Picard Day (which is basically Star Trek Day) in the past…like at all (unlike First Contact Day!), but I marked it my calendar an’ everything this year, and social media reminded me, and so here I am!

Ironically, we first learned about this in a Riker episode (“The Pegasus”), but in case you’re not familiar, here’s the gist:

The Enterprise of course is a ship with families aboard. The children are encouraged to create artwork to help celebrate Picard as captain of the ship.

(Which is all the more ironic, as Picard frequently professed his dislike of children.)

Anyway, this is as good an excuse to celebrate Picard in the real world as any. At its height Next Generation was able push Picard as a cultural icon. There was an actual business book called Make It So that encouraged taking leadership lessons from him. 

Star Trek fans still find it hard to let Picard compete with Kirk as best captain, but Patrick Stewart has been beyond reproach as favorite actor in the franchise. He never really parlayed that into a significant movie career, but he had plenty of TV projects for years keeping him busy, a lot of them drawing from classic literature and/or Shakespeare.

And of course he has since gone on to star in the to date only Star Trek series to serve as a direct spinoff and namesake for a single character.

Star Trek Arcs XVI: Duras Prologue

When fans think of arcs in Star Trek: Enterprise they naturally gravitate to the season-long Xindi affair. Feeding into that, however, is a three-episode arc that rounds out the second season, which actually acts as a prequel to events from The Next Generation, previously chronicled here as Part VII: Worf/Empire in this series. The impetus for the Klingon political saga was Duras creating intrigue by claiming Worf’s father had been in collusion with the Romulans.

As it turns out, as it proved true with the son and sisters of Duras, his ancestor, also named Duras, was just as despicable.

Archer had run afoul of the Klingons as early as the first episode of the series, but it wasn’t until “Judgment” that he made an enemy. The episode plays out as a courtroom drama in the style of Rashomon, in which we see the events leading up to the trial from the perspectives of Archer and Duras. There’s a neat subplot involving Archer’s public defender, who helps prove that Klingons need not be considered the enemy for a new generation.

Archer ends up in Rura Penthe (the same prison planet seen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which the trial format also evokes), but his faithful crew immediately springs him. But in “Bounty,” he’s recaptured by a Tellarite. Archer once again uses the opportunity to try and make peace with an apparent enemy.

The mini arc concludes in the second season finale, “The Expanse,” which is better known for kicking off the Xindi saga. Duras pursues Archer all the way to Xindi space, ensuring that epic space battles are a part of that story before we even meet a Xindi.

The whole affair is very similar to how the fourth season would be conceived, consisting as it would be almost entirely by two- and three-episode arcs, of which we will focus on an interrelated five episodes’ worth two entries from now.

Star Trek Arcs XV: The Andorians

The Andorians first appeared in the origin series episode “Journey to Babel,” and for all intents and purposes that was it. Their unusual look (blue skin, antennae) was both a blessing and curse. Next Generation introduced two additional blue-skinned aliens (Bolians, Benzites) but even they were used sparingly.

Then Enterprise. In its first season, the prequel gave them another shot as one of the first major encounters for Captain Archer in “The Andorian Incident,” represented , as they would be for the duration of the series, by Shran. Mostly they were used as counterpoint to the Vulcans, reluctant allies of humanity. Shran didn’t seem in much more of a hurry to embrace “pink skins,” but at least he respected Archer.

Later in the season Shran shows up again in “Shadows of P’Jem,” thanks to ongoing hostilities between the Andorians and Vulcans. In the second season, “Cease Fire,” Archer is able to leverage his unexpected rapport with Shran to peace talks between the two.

The third season, which is otherwise concerned with the Xindi arc, has Shran show up to offer his support in “Proving Ground,” another significant step in the path toward the Federation.

In the fourth and final season, “Babel One,” “United,” and “The Aenar” give us our most extended look at Shran and the Andorians, as well as the final building blocks (including roles for Tellarites and Romulans) of the Federation, which is what Archer’s relationship with Shran always pointed toward.

Star Trek Arcs XIV: Temporal Cold War

Enterprise came around when Star Trek had been on TV continuously since 1987, with one period where there was only one series airing for the length of half a season (the start of Deep Space Nine’s third season) but otherwise two running simultaneously from 1993 to 1999. It was a glut of material, and even with one breaking radically from the mold (again, Deep Space Nine) it became easy to take the franchise for granted, and for the first time there was a sustained reaction of discontent, that in this era never really went away. Enterprise entered this fray, and attempted to have its cake and eat it, too, by being a prequel series that simultaneously looked far into the future, thanks to the story arc known as the Temporal Cold War.

Fans may have disagreed, but I loved the results.

In the first episode, “Broken Bow,” Archer must rescue a Klingon from the clutches of the Suliban, who operated at the behest of a shadowy character never officially named but quickly dubbed Future Guy by fans.

The best episode of the arc came next. The face of the Suliban, Silik, attempts to convince Archer they don’t have to be enemies, but another agent, a human from the far future named Daniels who had been masquerading as a crewman aboard the ship, presents Archer with a counterpoint. The beauty of “Cold Front” is that for a brief moment you really don’t know who to trust, capturing new levels of ambiguity that have often been the hallmark of Star Trek’s finest hours, in a franchise otherwise best known for keeping things pretty straight.

The first season ends and the second opens with “Shockwave,” which sort of mashes the ambiguity back into standard shape, hammering home that probably the whole reason the Temporal Cold War is concerning itself with Archer at all is because of his role in early Starfleet history, and the birth of the Federation itself.

The arc again leaps for greatness in its next appearance, “Future Tense,” which attempts no grand statements, but instead weaves in the Tholians (heh) and simply allows the weird possibilities of temporal shenanigans (including a clever use of repeating time that’s saved as a side element of the plot) to enjoy the spotlight, Archer being frustrated that he has no control of any of it (a metaphor apt for the whole series).

Then the Xindi arc happens and in the third season Daniels again pops up to emphasize Archer’s big future, and in “Carpenter Street” helps him out with a little bit of contemporary time travel (with emphasis on pizza! and Jeffrey Dean Morgan suffering under heavy latex).

The producers got the message that fans weren’t having it, so the fourth season wraps up involvement in the Temporal Cold War with “Storm Front,” which naturally revolves around time travel and Nazis. I always liked to speculate that the head alien Nazi was in fact Future Guy (speculation had always hinged on a Romulan, admittedly). And then the series ends at the end of the season anyway.

Star Trek Arcs XIII: Seska

The two biggest lies in all of Star Trek fandom are that Voyager didn’t do story arcs and that it wasted the potential for drama from the Maquis crew.

In fact both ended up bundled together and the results are still among my favorite arcs ever in the franchise.

Seska’s arc began in “State of Flux” in the first season, in which Chakotay learns the horrible secret of his old friend, that she’s not only not even a Bajoran but Cardassian, and has just made a deal with a faction of the Kazon, the marauding aliens who had caused Voyager hassles since the first episode. Seska betrays everyone and defects, the picture of the nefarious image fans had built up for themselves of the Maquis. 

The best episode of the arc comes next, “Maneuvers” in the second season, which is a straight sequel, in which Seska manipulates Chakotay into a trap. Chakotay himself is never better than in this episode, too, full of dramatic purpose he otherwise tended to lack, being more of a quiet type (which itself is not a problem and in fact, if anything, a welcome change of pace).

The season then weaves a more deliberate arc, sometimes as a subplot or even a single scene, as Seska continues to plot against Chakotay and the rest of the crew, including a conspirator. “Alliances” might loosely be included in this, as it features the secret origin of the Kazon’s troubles, and an attempt to solve them.

“Investigations,” however, reveals the identity of the conspirator (which itself involves a number of recurring characters the series likewise never gets credit for having in the early seasons), and features as its unlikely hero Neelix, with Tom Paris getting one of his periodic shots at playing the uncontrollable rogue fans also always expected.

The arc rounds out the season and opens the next one with “Basics, Parts 1 & 2,” in which Seska and her allies take control of the ship, until finally being defeated.

All of this was received poorly by fans mostly because the Kazon themselves were greeted poorly, considered to be “dirty Delta Quadrant Klingon rip-offs.” Me, I never had a problem with them. So much of Star Trek alien design is similar as it is, a layer or two or three of prosthetics, all variations on a humanoid look…It cost the producers the confidence to pursue further extended arcs (though there were attempts here and there), and arguably led to the minimizing of Chakotay, who was the face of this most ambitious of efforts.

Anyway, Seska was a great character, and the series itself knew that well enough. She had a brilliant reprise late in the third season, “Worst Case Scenario,” arguably the mother of all holodeck malfunction episodes, and then one more time in the seventh with “Shattered,” in which Chakotay (of course) travels the ship when it’s been splintered into different time periods.

Star Trek Arcs XII: Section 31

One of Deep Space Nine’s shorter and yet most impactful arcs involved the introduction of Section 31, a secretive intelligence organization within Starfleet that played by its own rules and was alone convinced of the good it did.

In the sixth season episode “Inquisition,” Luther Sloan attempts to recruit Julian Bashir, who despite a long friendship with the former Cardassian spy Garak can’t bring himself to condone Section 31’s existence, which to this point had been largely unknown outside of its own circles.

In the seventh season episode “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” (in times of war the law falls silent) Bashir again runs into Sloan, realizing that Starfleet, in its increasing desperation during the Dominion War, has knowingly embraced Section 31’s questionable tactics. Fans as eagerly embraced this second spotlight as they had the first, both serving as pinnacle demonstrations of the morally gray areas so often associated with the series.

Late that season, Bashir confronts Sloan directly in “Extreme Measures” when he realizes Section 31 was responsible for a genocidal plague inflicted on the Founders that has inadvertently (?) also infected Odo.

Section 31 shows up in the fourth season of Enterprise, with the revelation that Malcolm Reed once worked for Section 31. Captain Archer takes a dim view on the revelation when Reed struggles to come clean in “Affliction”/“Divergence,” in which we meet his former handler Harris.

The idea is reprised on a far grander stage in Star Trek Into Darkness, in which we learn Admiral Marcus is also a part of Section 31, and thinks of nothing to use it in an attempt to launch all-out war with the Klingons.

Section 31 factors heavily into the serialized storytelling in the second season of Discovery, which features Agent Leland and new recruits Mirror Georgiou and Ash Tyler. There remains in development a full Section 31 spin-off which at one time was speculated to feature Georgiou and Tyler, although developments since that and the third season have perhaps complicated things.

With the movie appearance and heavy presence in and potential spin-off from Discovery, Section 31 has turned into as significant a development of modern Star Trek as anything else you could name. A certain step away from the original hopeful vision of the future Gene Roddenberry envisioned, Section 31 instead of a contradiction often serves to distinguish the enduring morals of the main characters. When Bashir or Kirk reject its tactics, we cheer them as heroes. When Mirror Georgiou embraces Section 31, we’re not surprised. When Tyler finds a temporary refuge in his crazy life, we can even begin to see it in a different light. In modern Star Trek, too, is the ability to see the good even in the bad (a legacy dating all the way back to “Balance of Terror”).

Star Trek Arcs XI: The Dominion War

Now, to this day when Star Trek fans think of extended arcs they really have just one in mind, and that’s Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War arc. 

The war itself doesn’t begin until the end of the fifth season, and I’ve broken it down to thirty-six key episodes (six of them consisting of two-part episodes with the same name, although the series features multiple two-part episodes with separate titles, including in the war arc). Since this one’s so long I won’t waste much time with preamble or dwell much on any one installment, instead a brief note on what it contributes to the arc.

At the end of the second season, “The Jem’Hadar” at last let’s us see the Dominion after many previous references to what dominates the other side of the wormhole introduced in the first episode, the Gamma Quadrant equivalent to the Federation. It ends with a big swerve when we learn that the Jem’Hadar are mere foot soldiers, and that they are controlled in part by the Vorta.

The third season begins with the two-part “The Search,” which serves the dual purpose of exploring the initial ramifications of contact with the Dominion as well as revealing the truth of shapeshifting Odo’s origins: he hails from the Founders. As in, Founders of the Dominion…

In “Improbable Cause”/“The Die Is Cast,” factions within the Romulan Star Empire and Cardassian Empire attempt an invasion of the Gamma Quadrant, and are met with a spectacular and definitive defeat.

The season ends with the further threat of Founder infiltration in “The Adversary.”

The fourth season begins by ramping up the threat in the two-part “Way of the Warrior,” in which the Dominion manipulates the Klingon Empire into war with the Cardassians.

In “Homefront”/“Paradise Lost,” the Founders infiltrate Earth and sow chaos within Starfleet itself.

In the fifth season premiere “Apocalypse Rising,” the true identity of the Founder infiltrator within the Klingon Empire is finally revealed.

Later, we meet the real Martok (the guise of the infiltrator dating back to “Way of the Warrior”) in a Dominion prison camp also hosting the remains of the Romulan/Cardassian fleet, as the Cardassians officially join the Dominion during “In Purgatory’s Shadow”/“By Inferno’s Light.”

Then, in “Call to Arms,” the season finale, the station is evacuated and the war begins.

The sixth season kicks off with the famous six-episode continuous arc, the first real extended serialization in franchise history: “A Time to Stand,” “Rocks and Shoals,” “Sons and Daughters,” “Behind the Lines,” “Favor the Bold,” and “Sacrifice of Angels,” which of course culminates in the retaking of the station.

The season continues to explore the war in a variety of ways from that point. “Statistical Probabilities” is a pessimistic view of its eventual outcome. “Waltz” sees the psychological fallout for Dukat. “In the Pale Moonlight” is probably the single best episode of the whole arc, in which Sisko grapples with his conscience.

Finally, in “Tears of the Prophets,” the biggest casualty of the war occurs: Jadzia Dax.

The seventh and final season continues and concludes the war. “The Siege of AR-558” is a straight-up war story, complete with a post-traumatic stress fallout follow-up, “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

The final ten episodes of the series are a second grand serialization: “Penumbra,” “’Til Death Do Us Part,” “Strange Bedfellows,” “The Changing Face of Evil,” “When It Rains…,” “Tacking Into the Wind,” “Extreme Measures,” “The Dogs of War,” and the two-part finale, “What You Leave Behind.”

Star Trek Arcs X: Kor

Here’s a fairly loose arc but it’s a pretty interesting one that goes deeper than it might seem, which is why I’m pulling one particular character from the many to appear in Deep Space Nine, and somehow not even one most fans are going to think about.

A somewhat lost element of Star Trek lore is that the first Klingon to ever appear was going to be a recurring character if actor John Colicos hadn’t been so busy. Kor makes his debut in “Errand of Mercy,” and would have also shown up in “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Day of the Dove” (the other major Klingon appearances of the original series) if Colicos had been available.

So his replacements (Koloth in “Tribbles” and Kang in “Dove”) instead make their debuts, and the three of them then resurface three glorious decades later in the Deep Space Nine second season gem “Blood Oath,” which also finally cements Jadzia Dax’s credentials as a formidable character after a fair bit of waffling and uncertainty.

Long story short, Kor is appropriately the last of these Klingons standing, and he becomes subject to a prolonged arc of deciding what makes an aging Klingon’s life worth living.

First he shows up in “Sword of Kahless,” in which he competes with Worf on a mad quest to discover the legendary warrior’s weapon. Here he gets to nudge Worf into having a working relationship with another Klingon, which would eventually lead to his bond with Martok.

Which...would kind of be bad news for Kor himself, as we learn when we see him for the last time in the seventh season episode “Once More Unto the Breach,” in which we learn Martok’s backstory and Kor’s domineering role in it, and as such more about Kor’s backstory itself.

But the episode resolves Kor’s later dilemma by giving him the belated warrior’s death he had long sought.

The short arc is, all the same, a remarkable opportunity for the franchise to give a full story to a character (and species) that might have seemed one-note initially. But that’s Deep Space Nine in a nutshell, both in its own regard and how it deepens the franchise as a whole, sometimes in quite surprising ways. In no other series to date has an effort been made to flesh out such a seemingly minor character from another series, let alone itself. 

Star Trek Arcs IX: Bajoran Politics

When it comes to Deep Space Nine, a whole series of articles about its many arcs could be written, but for these purposes I’m only going to cover some of them, the ones in clearest focus. The first (I don’t count Sisko’s role as emissary, because in most instances it was a secondary element that didn’t really carry episodes) kicks off at the end of the first season, “In the Hands of the Prophets,” the episode many fans consider to be the start of the identifiable Deep Space Nine, where the rich tapestry of the series, and the confidence to explore it, kicked in.

Significantly, the recurring characters Kai Winn and Vedek Bareil are introduced. The death of Kai Opaka earlier in the season (introduced in the pilot as such a friendly personality) left a huge void in Bajoran affairs, one Winn, as fans would certainly come to see, was more than willing to fill. Bareil, meanwhile, becomes the touchstone that humanizes Kira as more than just someone struggling to overcome a brutal past.

The second season kicks off with the longest-to-that-point continuous story in franchise history, a three-part episode, “The Homecoming,” “The Circle,” and “The Siege,” that never receives near enough recognition for its significance, or achievement. Kira is tasked with rescuing a lost Bajoran hero from a Cardassian prison camp, but the ramifications end up being far more complicated than anyone could have anticipated. Kira herself is replaced aboard the station by the guy, but more importantly, Winn and her pal, played by Frank Langella (he opted to go uncredited at the time but it’s a huge casting coup that still demands trumpeting), are so obsessed with retaining power they engineer a massive conspiracy and even a hostile takeover of the station! 

Later that season “The Collaborator” marks the deepest exploration of how murky the Occupation really was, implicating saintly Bareil but ultimately challenging even Opaka’s legacy (it’s basically the Bajoran equivalent of “Sins of the Father” from Next Generation).

In the third season, the series featured its last major highlights of Bajoran politics. Fans were never that interested in Bajoran politics, alas, but the season still delivered two big moments: the death of Bareil and the rise of his successor.

Bareil dies in “Life Support,” agonizingly, a small piece at a time, as Winn manipulates Bashir into keeping him alive long enough to settle peace talks with the Cardassians. No single appearance does a better job of establishing how cold a villain Winn really is, the price of politics in any culture.

In “Shakaar,” Kira finds a potential new lover and Bajor a new leader when she’s given a chance to duplicate that bring-the-hero-back-from-the-dead trick, which turns into an old-fashioned western showdown in a canyon, at least ending this particular arc of the series on an appropriately high note.

Kira segues into a sustained slow burn romance with Odo for the duration of the series. Bareil, Mirror Bareil anyway, shows up again in the sixth season, “Resurrection,” though Shakaar quickly becomes lost in the shuffle, eventually never to be seen again, well before the final episode, which is a shame. Even Winn ends up relevant only as an ironic foil, and ally, of Dukat. 

The Bajorans in the series were in a lot of ways the first time fans got to explore what Vulcan society might look like, something Enterprise later accomplished (another link between the two series I always enjoyed). Not Kira and nor Ro before her reached the iconic status of Spock, however, so it was easy to take all this for granted. Is it that Kira wasn’t in Starfleet? Well, just perhaps.

Star Trek Arcs VIII: The Maquis

Arguably the most ambitious arc of the franchise was envisioned to help launch Voyager, and yet it continued down fascinating roads even from that point: the creation of the Federation rebels the Maquis.

The Maquis were Federation citizens who lived on worlds affected by treaty stipulations with the Cardassians, most famous for their Occupation of Bajor, a concept introduced in The Next Generation but played out most dramatically in Deep Space Nine. Eventually it wasn’t just those directly affected, colonists living on those worlds, but Starfleet officers who renounced their commissions to stand up for what they believed in.

The first appearance of the Maquis was in the eponymous two-part episode during the second season of Deep Space Nine. In it, Sisko and an old Starfleet friend confront the problem together until Sisko realizes his friend has actually already defected.

The same basic premise plays out in “Preemptive Strike,” Next Generation, airing about little more than a week later (if you were watching at the time, it was nearly three straight weeks of Maquis intrigue across Star Trek programming, with a few weeks’ gap; if it had happened later no doubt there would have been an actual crossover, which still has yet to happen in the franchise, and probably even the debuts of some of the actual Voyager characters). 

“Preemptive Strike” resonates more with fans than “The Maquis, Parts 1 & 2” thanks to pivoting around a known character rather than someone introduced in the story. That character of course is Ro Laren, the Bajoran who had been a recurring character in Next Generation for years, who was even originally considered to continue on in Deep Space Nine (and subsequently replaced by the new character Major Kira).

By the end of the episode, Ro feels conflicted by her decision to join the Maquis because she feels she’s betraying Picard directly. In that way, we end the initial experiences with the Maquis with the ability to view them in a positive manner.

When Voyager begins, “Caretaker” of course sees Starfleet and Maquis ships stranded in the Delta Quadrant and deciding to function as a single crew to find their way home again. A lot of fans expected the series to be an endless sequence of the competing ideologies in conflict, and never really forgave it for making a different creative choice. Though, to be fair, the Maquis were former Federation and in most cases even former Starfleet; the biggest hurdle was reintegrating into rigid Starfleet procedures (played out in the episode “Learning Curve”).

The Maquis story instead picks back up in Deep Space Nine, third season, “Defiant,” in which Riker’s transporter duplicate Thomas (“Second Chances”) is the third major defector we see play out, although the fourth and final one, in the fourth season’s “For the Cause,” ends up being by far the most dramatic one. 

At first Sisko believes it’s his girlfriend Kasidy Yates, which would certainly be bad enough, but it turns out to be straight arrow security officer Michael Eddington, a reliable recurring presence since the previous season.

We find out how powerfully Sisko feels this betrayal in the fifth season. “For the Uniform” is arguably the pinnacle of the pre-Dominion War period for the series. Sisko swears to bring Eddington in, but this proves incredibly difficult.

However, once accomplished it becomes a definitive turning point for the Maquis. When the Cardassians join the Dominion, they enact a scorched earth policy against the Maquis, and Eddington finds himself imagining a heroic last stand in “Blaze of Glory.”

The fate of the Maquis is transmitted to Janeway’s crew in Voyager, and in “Extreme Risk” we see how powerfully it affects B’Elanna Torres, the hotheaded half Klingon, half human engineer.

Finally, in “Repression,” a sleeper suggestion is awakened among the former Maquis members of the crew, implanted by a zealous Bajoran years earlier, thereby somewhat bringing the whole arc full circle.

First Contact, Picard & the Trojans

On First Contact Day, today forty-two years before humans meet Vulcans, in Star Trek cannon, let’s take a look at an often overlooked aspect of the film from where we gleam this information, First Contact.

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I only recently tracked down the Berlioz piece from the scene where Riker walks in on Picard listening to classical music at full blast. But as it turns out, the piece has significant insight into the film and Picard himself, so it’s worth discussing, regardless of my shame.

First of all, the piece comes from an opera, which for whatever reason I’d never really considered, possibly because I’ve never pursued opera. I was always on the lookout for Berlioz appearances in classical music compilations, hoping I’d randomly come across it, which obviously never happened.

Instead, I finally just googled it, and discovered that the piece came from Les Troyens (The Trojans), specifically the beginning of Act V (the final act of the opera)

The opera is based on Virgil’s The Aeneid, which serves as both a myth for the founding of Rome and a sequel to The Iliad, very similar in structure to the other sequel, The Odyssey, although history sometimes is kinder overall to it, as The Aeneid can be placed firmly in the records, as well as Virgil himself, whereas Homer and his epics can’t.

Anyway, to make a long story short, if you know anything about the Trojan War, you know that the Trojans came out on the losing side of it, and so Berlioz composed his opera about the bad end and the subsequent efforts by Aeneas to bounce back as he flees for his life.

Act V doesn’t begin with him at all, though, but rather a young sailor named Hylas who is equally homesick and hoping for his fortunes to change.

Do you begin to see the parallels?

When Riker enters Picard’s quarters, they’ve recently been sidelined from the response to the latest Borg attack, because Starfleet doesn’t trust Picard’s ability to keep a level head. Naturally he would much prefer to be a part of the action, for any number of reasons (as the film dramatizes in various scenes, including his primary motivation, having once been assimilated into the Collective).

So Picard is listening to the opera, and the scene features this particular song, as a direct parallel.

There’s more! The composition of the opera itself was problematic, which I’m sure the clever writers of the film (Braga & Moore!) were well-aware of, as well as the fact that Berlioz was in fact French, just like Picard. Seldom was Picard’s national origin relevant to his character (at random points in the first season of The Next Generation and again the first season of Picard), but I would wager those clever writers (Braga & Moore!) had exactly that in mind when they chose Berlioz.

The opera itself, again, had complicated origins. A full recital didn’t happen for years. There was a popular revival following WWII. Someone immersed in history, and you would expect Picard to be (given any number of examples), would be aware of all this, adding another layer to his choice of music in the scene.

The Trojan War itself would be a parallel, given the last Borg incursion, and even a preview of developments yet to come in the film. The famous Trojan Horse is featured in the opera, and of course the Borg end up using the Enterprise itself as one.

So there you have it! Sometimes fans complain about First Contact because it also features references to Moby Dick, as had Wrath of Khan (one of the most sacred elements of franchise lore, a movie endlessly defended by fans) before it.

As it turns out, there was a deeply resonant cultural reference all its own there all along.

Star Trek Arcs VII: Worf/Empire

If Gene Roddenberry had had his way, this one would never have happened, and modern Star Trek (and I suppose, Battlestar Galactica) would be a different story.

You see, when The Next Generation was being developed, he didn’t want to use any of the familiar aliens from the original series. That’s why there are so few Vulcans in the series. It’s also why we got the Ferengi, and even the Borg. But then Worf, who of course is Klingon, became a part of the regular cast of characters, although even at first he had a relatively minor role, no clearly defined post (Yar, after all, but the chief security officer).

As the first and second seasons developed, things changed again, and we even met Worf’s former lover, K’Ehleyr, in “The Emissary,” which indirectly started out the arc that would come to define him.

But it wasn’t until a jealous and manipulative rival named Duras attempted to lie his way to power in “Sins of the Father” that the high drama of Klingon politics finally became a thing. Worf ends up losing honor among his people, a rare unhappy ending for a Star Trek episode, but only the beginning of the story. We also meet his brother Kurn in the episode, by the way.

“Reunion” is the episode where everything really changes. We meet Gowron, who goes on to be chancellor of the Klingon Empire (and idol of bug-eyed aliens everywhere), K’Ehleyr returns, Duras attempts one last great plot, and...Alexander. That’s a whole arc, in a manner of speaking, as is how Gowron eventually loses power, which involves Worf’s relationship with another Klingon, Martok, but I’m limiting myself to the strict causality of events, so I won’t get into all of those details.

Anyway, Duras kills K'Ehleyr, Worf kills Duras, Gowron becomes chancellor.

This leads to the two-part “Redemption,” which itself involves another quasi-arc involving Yar and her Romulan daughter Sela (won’t get into that, either), in which the Klingons experience a civil war, exactly what the events of “Sins of the Father” were supposed to avoid. Clearly that didn’t work out so well.

The story picks up in Deep Space Nine, in the two-part “Way of the Warrior,” in which Worf, having sacrificed so much already, finds himself caught once more between the Empire and the Federation, as Gowron, who unbeknownst to him is being manipulated by the Dominion, declares war against the Federation, and asks Worf to stand by his side, which of course he refuses to do, compounding all his previous problems.

Finally, in “Sons of Mogh,” Kurn has had enough and wants his misery, at always being the victim to Worf’s choices, to end. But this is Star Trek, so every time suicide seems to be the answer, another one must be presented, and his memory is completely replaced instead. Worf gets to continue his journey alone. Until Martok. Long story short, they bond, and the increasingly dishonorable Gowron forces Worf to kill him near the end of the Dominion War, in “Tacking into the Wind,” which leads Martok to become the new chancellor.

Without all this, the idea of serialized storytelling, in Star Trek and genre television in general, might have taken longer to standardize. It’s the first time Star Trek made a concerted effort to tell a continuing story, especially one with so gosh darn many unhappy developments. Ronald Moore tends to get a lot of credit for it, which gave him enough of a reputation that he found himself in the position to totally reimagine Battlestar Galactica as a modern, grim, heavily serialized drama, in which the robotic Cylons are basically a lot of Duras fans.