this short was just released by Ridley Scott regarding the upcoming Alien prequel this summer, Prometheus. Can’t wait for this movie! This short features Guy Pearce and reveals some backstory – this isn’t in the upcoming movie…

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I have to say I like either ‘the Viewmaster’ or ‘the cylon’ the best….

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I rewatched TRON: Legacy yesterday.  While my original reactions largely still stand, I’ve begun looking into a fan fiction project around this.  It would seem I’m not the only one working on TRON stuff – here’s a 10 minute short they must have done as they filmed TRON: Legacy, and a teaser trailer that was apparently included in the Blu-Ray edition.  Finally, as apparently they are working on an animated TRON television series TRON: Uprising – here’s a trailer for that too.

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TRON: The Next Day

Dillinger easter egg:

TRON:Uprising

So I finally read the Gibson short story Johnny Mnemonic this past week, and as I had never seen the movie, thought i’d get that too.  Hmmmm…not so much.  While the short story is set in the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive ‘universe’ of cyberpunk and The Sprawl – the movie just falls flat.  The director and Gibson himself (screenwriter) changed too many elements (IMHO) of the original – apparently Molly Millions was changed to ‘Jane’ due to someone else’s ownership rights, but the whole NAS thing is silly – the short story is just much more taut and effective.  The movie has many sequences that either lack dialog (where it’s needed) or have oddball distractions that don’t add to the plot, and the pacing of the movie isn’t very good, either.  Too many slow parts that could have been edited out, and the action sequences are fairly clumsy, too..

A few interesting things I noticed, however.  The LoTek clan’s hideout is on a burned out suspension bridge from Newark – echoes of his first Bridge Trilogy book Virtual Light (which had come out two years before this movie in 1993, although the ‘bridge’ in that trilogy was the Golden Gate Bridge in SF)?

Also, the look and feel crib (or steal, depending on your perspective) VERY HEAVILY from Max Headroom in a multitude of ways.  Astute cyberpunk fans could say that MH in turn stole from (or was certainly inspired by) Gibson himself, given that his first two cyberpunk books, Neuromancer and Count Zero, appeared before MH debuted.  It’s likely a tossup either way.  The ‘wasteland future’ look here might also have been influenced by the even earlier Escape from New York, too.

Johnny’s overloaded ‘head of data’ – billed as 120GB but ‘stuffed overfull’ at 320 GB – seems quaint at best now, given you can buy a TB-sized USB drive at Fry’s for around $150 these days.

It’s interesting to think that while this movie was a failure, Keanu would be back in cyberspace MUCH more successfully only a few years later as Neo in The Matrix.

Finally – the depiction of ‘The Internet’ as conceptualized by the Neuromancer series was thought for a long time the way we’d browse – sadly didn’t turn out that way, despite similar thinking as seen in say, The Lawnmower Man.

So read the story – skip the movie.

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Finished watching Redline tonight.  This is probably the craziest anime, (possibly movie), I have ever seen.

As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of ‘racing anime’ – although among the various types of anime out there – it is comparatively rare, and I’ve pretty much seen all of them (Initial D, Wangan Midnight, IGPX, etc.), save for re-watching Speed Racer all over again, which I still may do someday (the 2008 live-action Speed Racer movie, however – that’s a great flick – see previous post here).  Common elements include the racing itself, which of course in anime means over-the-top posturing and ego clashes from nearly every character at some point or another if not constantly; technology can play a factor (IGPX being the anime-futuro-mecha version of team racing, not terribly unlike the Kinetica videogame on PS2) and illegal street racing, whether in town/highways (Wangan Midnight) or crazy steep mountain/cliffside roads (Initial D).

So Redline takes nearly all these elements in one form or another and goes one better – it is a series of increasingly challenging elimination races (Blueline, followed by Yellowline, then the ultimate final race with the cream of the competitors: Redline) that are held on various alien worlds across varied and unknown terrain, not always including actual roads.  Because (of course) some of the vehicles used are hover-jet/rocket/cars (think of the hover-car/bike race in The Phantom Menace) and because nearly all the cars (even those relying on wheels) have some sort of rocket/nitro boost in them, among other abilities (The Mach 5 would be sadly outclassed here, I think).

So the story follows a few key racers as they make it past a Yellowline race (already in progress at the start of the movie) and gain entry to the Redline final race (the third act of the movie is that race).  Unexpected plot elements include the ‘roboworld’ planet where Redline is to be held – doesn’t want the race to be held on their planet, and so does everything they can (including armies, space weaponry and bio-weapons) to stop the race and kill all the racers if possible.  Also JP (one of the main characters) has a shady past (unlike nearly every other racer who has a ‘shady present’) and is known for ‘fixing’ races, for which he was sent to prison at least once.

The plot is otherwise fairly straight forward, about what you’d expect in a racing movie/anime, save for the following:

First – it is completely hand-drawn animation.  No CGI.  Which is probably in part why it took seven years(!) to make.  The results are VERY impressive, although in many racing sequences the action is so crazy-chaotic it can be hard to figure out what is going on.  They make use of every frame in this movie to excess, and it shows.

I would have to describe the visual style of the movie as ‘Roy Lichtenstein vs. Aeon Flux‘ with a not-completely-subtle dash of Wacky Races thrown in for good measure.  JP looks almost as if he walked right out of an Aeon Flux episode, and he’s not the only one.  The stark color contrasts seen here really stand out (hence the Lichtenstein impression) with an incredible level of detail not normally seen in an anime (or most animation generally).  The ridiculous cast of racers *has* to have been influenced by Wacky Races, and the later IGPX, I’m sure – they are a total collection of freaks and misfits.

What passes for character development here is the second act, where the various racers prepare for the Redline race and have at least a few scenes of conversation here and there.  Sadly, there is a bit of gratuitous nudity thrown in (for no apparent reason) and there was some random profanity at points in the movie (I watched in Japanese with subtitles but it may have also made it into the dubbed version) which, taken together with some of the extreme action and character design, probably make this movie NOT suitable for kids – i’d rate it a PG-13.

But it’s definitely a very well-made, beautifully animated movie and if you like anime, worth seeing for that reason alone – they set a pretty high bar.  One of the few anime I’ve seen that equal this movie’s animation quality would be Appleseed – but that movie has a *lot* of CGI mixed in with the traditional animation, so not really the same thing.

Check it out!  Again I got it from Scarecrow but Amazon now carries it too if you don’t live in Seattle.

Other Redline reviews:
Anime News Network
Notaku Blog

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Well, as the saying goes, all good things (must?) come to an end. And so it is with the ‘Clone’ series of books. I have now read each book in the series at least twice, a couple of the early ones probably three times. (earlier posts on this series are here and here.) Just finished the second reading of the final book: The Clone Redemption, which came out in late Oct. of this year (had been waiting several months for it eagerly). How did it come out? Let’s discuss. I will try to talk about this book in light of past plots and also try not to give things away, but can’t guarantee anything :).

So first and foremost, i was glad to see the Japanese Fleet and SEALs get their due. While this is probably the bleakest book of the entire series for many reasons, the SEALs and Japanese fate was met with strength, dignity and a couple interesting twists (e.g. the encounter with the shipboard Yakuza contingent) that served to bring more humanity to these mysterious characters. In earlier books we had only really seen Master Chief Illych for any significant time, so this gave us a chance to see at least a couple more in a bit more detail, which was nice. And it was also interesting to see the inner workings of the Japanese command staff and its fleet more than before.

The Unified Authority, true to form over the past few books, defies belief in its ability to sink ever ‘lower’, both morally and in the various battles where they show up. While we don’t see anymore of the previous fleet commander(s) that bedeviled Harris (and occasionally Freeman) in the past, their own ‘evil’ boss, Tobias Andropov, head of the planetary Linear Committee, makes his own presence felt by implication several times and then directly at least once.

The scientists Breeze and Sweetwater provide an ultimately bittersweet but necessary ‘conscience’ to the story in some ways, and while they may have ended up being subtle manipulations of the U.A. against Harris and the clones, they help him enormously in spite of this, and that’s definitely a good thing.

Which brings us to Harris and Freeman. I think the former does even more maturing as a person in this book, especially given its increasingly bleak morality play as the plot continues to the end – but he’s still got a ways to go (the interlude(s) with Ava G. and the continued soul-searching around saving natural-borns that otherwise would prefer him and the other clones dead are proof of that) and he knows it. Freeman actually becomes much more of a ‘human’ in this book vs. the past books. Like before, we largely see him through Harris’ eyes and perspective, so aside from his actions and (still very few) words, he’s still very much an enigma, but he lets down his guard (and in some ways, semmingly his will to continue living at all) at points in this story, and it’s a bit weird to consider.

So some quibbles. I liked this book, and very much enjoyed the entire series, but would have liked a bit more of:

1) Avatari back story. We see what happens here (mostly) but if there was a story component even MORE of an enigma than Freeman, it’s the Avatari. Maybe just providing more text from the Morgan Atkins Bible at some point earlier would have been sufficient, I don’t know – but it would surely have been interesting to learn.

2) Did the ‘sleeves’ on the various human colonies persist post-Avatari? If there are other future books, that might be interesting to explore.

3) As noted to the author in an earlier discussion on the SadSamsPalace blog last year – what about that secret Mogat base in DC discussed several books ago? It never comes up here for obvious reasons – but maybe there are more Avatari clues there?

4) Finally – when will Harris have his ‘say’ in front of Congress, the Linear Committee and others who ultimately betrayed humanity via banishing the clones and taking control of the U.A. the way they did – when will the truth come out? I guess this is future book material too?

What might be an interesting next step here – instead of say, another book series or simply another sequel – might be to take an ‘art’ or ‘major events’ timeline approach. I’m thinking here of past Chris Foss-illustrated books like the old Spacecraft, 2000-2100 A.D.: Terran Trade Authority Handbook. Those books were largely a vehicle for putting out an art book – AFAIK, they made up the stories to explain the paintings therein – for the most part it works, although in the later Great Space Battles they get a bit too far afield (the painting of a giant ‘space cereberus’ is simply too silly to take seriously).

But with a pre-written and far more cohesive narrative like the Clone books, this approach could be pretty cool – the author could go back in time across the entire series and fill in/retell details he had to leave out first time around (due to space, editing, deadlines, etc.) – and – you get the chance to enlist some artists to ‘visualize’ some of these events too? Certainly the ‘destruction of the Doctrinaire’ would be a great one, as maybe the first encounter of Morgan Atkins’ science team with the Avatari? I could see a smiling portrait of Sweetwater, Breeze and Freeman presenting to the U.A. command ‘rabble’ during the battle gaps while fighting the Avatari on Terraneau, etc.

Another example of such an ‘external’ book to tell related stories and details would be the (also originally from the 70s) Starfleet Technical Manual describing the Star Trek universe. In any event, there are a lot of possibilities.

To sum up, I liked the series very much, there were a few things I quibbled with here and there, and of course hated waiting months between books (not much you can do about that one – when you write them all at once you can definitely end up with a horrible third story and beyond – ask The Matrix :)). Quality demands time, despite our lack of patience as readers.

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Again with the sci-fi movie series, eh? So (now) having seen all four of them (not talking about Alien vs. Predator, which I have also unfortunately seen) I can truly say that only the first two are worth watching. Alien (from way back in 1979 – Black Hole vintage) was a great horror story in space, and has lots of (now) famous actors in it, including Tom Skerrit, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt and of course Sigourney Weaver (ultimately the star of all the movies). The somewhat obscure (at the time) bio-mechanoid H.R. Giger art and set design really made Alien a unique movie – and with Dan O’Bannon as a key writer plus Ridley Scott as director (this was several years before Blade Runner) were a great combination.

Aliens, the next movie, was directed by James Cameron and took a different tack to turn the saga into an action movie, this time including Michael Biehn (Terminator alum and regular Cameron movie actor). Here, Ripley gets to be a badass and save the day again, despite a squadron of Marines sent to ‘protect’ her and Paul Reiser (who plays a great corporate douchebag, and thankfully ‘gets his’ from the aliens themselves – ha!). And who can forget the classic “game OVER, man!” from Bill Paxton? One of his classic goofy movie roles.

Alien3 was pretty bad. interesting premise (Ripley, Hicks and Newt’s ship is diverted somehow to a prison colony but only Ripley survives the crash – Lance Henrikson shows up again now as the scientist trying to continue the research on the aliens but Ripley ends up as the ‘Christ figure’ and kills herself to thwart him). Interestingly enough, Wired has an article on David Fincher (the director) this month, where he’s still fairly pained about the whole experience – it’s safe to say that the low quality of the movie upon release is probably not his fault based on this article.

Which brings us to Alien (4): Resurrection. Pretty simple plot – yet *again* the ‘Company’ is trying to do experimental research on the aliens (they just can’t learn that lesson, can they?) but this time they are also using clones of Ripley to incubate the alien babies as their hosts. They also seem to be trying to ‘meld’ Ripley WITH the aliens along the way, as she finds out later. A ship of baddies arrives at the military research ship where all this ‘research’ is being conducted – but then when Ron Perlman gets his face popped by Ripley after being a smartass – someone gets trigger happy and the baddies effectively kill most of the guards. However, only Winona Ryder knows about the aliens onboard and what’s really going on – and that Ripley is a clone (200 years have apparently passed since the original Ripley died on that prison planet, after all). So then we go into lengthy chase/confrontation scenes where we find out WR is a robot (remember Ash from the first movie and Bishop from the second? Same deal). We also find out that one of the objectives of the alien research was to allow the alien to have live babies(?) instead of laying all those eggs with face-huggers in them – wtf? After all this useless/?? plot tedium that kills about 45 minutes, the survivors almost get away in the smaller ship only to have an alien on board (again) but manage to kick it out the airlock (again) and then see a sunrise on earth, where the movie ends.

So, while the movie wasn’t near as cheesy as ST:Insurrection – it lacked nearly any original plot and many moments of WTF all over the place – I like many of Joss Whedon‘s writing creations, most notably Firefly/Serenity, but he’s really grasping at straws here (and drowns in the process). He doesn’t include enough plot to make it more a straight horror movie like the first one (and really, now having had 3 previous movies, how could you build onscreen terror in that sense anyway?) nor any real interesting action sequences that even come close to matching the second one. We’ll just politely ignore the third movie altogether. 🙂 And most of the dialog is pretty throwaway too – save the new ‘malevolent’ Ripley, who as a clone with alien blood had a much darker tone and personality than her original – but they never really explore it to any degree, the most she ever says at once is maybe a sentence?

Oh well….

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So as everyone (who’s seen them) knows, Star Trek movies can be a mixed bag. To date, there now have been 11(!) of them, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture way back in 1979, to the ‘reboot’ of Star Trek in 2009 with an all new cast playing Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc.

Of these movies, the rule of thumb has usually been even-numbered movies good, odd-numbered bad-to-at-best-mediocre. So by that rule, you have the second (Wrath of Kahn), fourth (The Voyage Home) and sixth (The Undiscovered Country) being the good movies with the original cast, and the first, third and fifth (*especially* the fifth) being very lame and/or plodding/boring.

Moving to the TNG cast, we have Generations (great villains but not enough to save the lame plot and they should have killed Kirk at the start of the movie, not wait until the bitter end), First Contact (easily among the best Star Trek movies), Insurrection (more below but plodding and obvious, basically an extended TV episode) and Nemesis (a decent return to form, even if it meant Data pays for bailing out the Enterprise crew this time with his life).

Finally, 2009’s Star Trek – which actually follows a not-dissimilar plot to Nemesis (crazy bad guy with huge-ass ship and a chip on his shoulder bigger than the Gamma Quadrant, bent on making Earth PAY) but with an all new cast excepting Nimoy (much to Shatner’s likely chagrin). While I felt that many of the actors chosen here look a bit too young to be playing those roles, I guess they are in fact largely the same age(s) as the original cast was back in the original series – they just don’t have those bryl-cream 60s ‘dos (sorry Kirk) so don’t look as ‘old’? Dunno. Plus i’m older than all of them (sad) anyway. But a very entertaining movie nonetheless and definitely looking forward to the sequel.

But I digress – this post is about Star Trek:Insurrection (the 9th movie, second-to-last with TNG cast) – and since this is an odd-numbered movie, set phasers to Expecting Disappointment.

Where to begin? So we join our heroes assisting in some sort of surveillance on a remote planet of what appears to be a quiet small town of regular looking, yet alien people with gardens, playing kids, etc. Kind of looks like a Seattle suburb (with the faux-Roman pueblo-like structures and ‘marble columns’ everywhere) without the cars or electricity. There are Federation people plus some stretchy-faced aliens manning the cloaked spy post. Then Data literally goes nuts and blows the ‘cover’, by which the locals find out about the operation and the spy installation on the overlooking hill, etc. It’s at this point the rest (Picard, etc.) all get involved – the Enterprise gets called in, somehow running into Worf along the way (they never explain why he showed up, save to complete the TNG cast for the movie, apparently) and they slowly (not kidding) begin to move the plot along.

So they disable Data’s craziness by singing show tunes from HMS Pinafore to trick him (wtf? Is this the Simpsons?). They have several obligatory ‘deep thought’ scenes where Geordi sees a sunrise with ‘real eyes’ for the first time (oooooo) and Data gets lectured by an otherwise token alien kid about how to have ‘fun’ (somewhere else in the galaxy, Wesley Crusher is laughing maniacally). Picard starts getting getting out the space Cialis for one of the native chicks (far too many of these ‘discussions’ at various points in the movie – should have listened to Elvis instead). And Riker/Troi literally take a bath together as they try to rekindle their romance from TNG? Nothing near as interesting for Dr. Crusher (who just gets to watch Picard try to score with the local more than once and briefly talks about boobs with Troi – I am not making that up). Worf at least gets to beat up some bad guys later and zap things occasionally, and Geordi gets to have some ‘Scotty moments’ later in the Enterprise engine room while people are flying around the room and the computers spray sparks and steam(?) – are the computers on the Enterprise powered by dry ice now? 🙂

Somehow amid all these distractions, the crew find a ‘holodeck ship’ on the planet with a fake version of the Seattle suburb in it – immediately Picard guesses the (other, stretchy-faced) aliens’ plot – they were going to kidnap the suburbanites onto this ship and take them off the planet for some weird reason – which ultimately turns out to be that the planet itself makes you stay young/immortal (another tired Star Trek plot device used since the beginning of time). Picard sticks this factoid back in the Admiral’s face and gets his shiny bald ass handed back to him (well, metaphorically), so he slowly, cut-it-with-a-knife symbolically takes off his command uniform for a Wilson’s Leather jacket, packs up some phaser rifles and tries to sneak down to the planet without apparently telling anyone. The rest of the cast ‘bust’ him as he’s trying to leave, and of course most go with him (that’s where most of the future dialog lines will be spoken, after all) except Riker and Geordi who stay behind on the likely doomed Enterprise.

But of course you know, THIS means war – so the bad aliens start chasing Picard and the suburbanites around on the planet while the aliens in orbit go after the Enterprise. Our proud flagship proceeds to get its ass kicked pretty well (at one point it is headed for some sort of nebula cloud with SMOKE pouring out of the engines) before pulling some nerdy stunt at the last minute to save the day (of course). It’s funny how AFTER they throw away the ship’s warp core (propulsion) and sustain damage from the attacks and are flying through some volatile dangerous space cloud that THEN Riker decides to go on the offensive? Kind of like waiting until all your tires are flat and your car is almost out of gas to drive your pregnant wife to the delivery room? What makes it even worse is that at one point Riker calls up the ‘manual control’ option – and an XBox Joystick rises up dramatically from the console (#$#@%*&!>??) and he proceeds to pilot the entire ship like an arcade game? Again, not making this up.

Meanwhile, back on the planet, Picard still hasn’t gotten laid, and those pesky stretchy aliens figured out a way to beam him and his alien missus up to their ship after some slow-hiking ‘chase’ scenes (unlike the heroes of Lord of the Rings, *these* suburbanites apparently aren’t familiar with the concept of ‘running’ when confronted by alien spaceships flying overhead shooting lasers at them). Now captive himself, Picard then proceeds in the time-honored Star Trek strategy when captured: GUILT the aliens into submission, using shame-filled pontification and lecturing. And (not) surprisingly, it works on the ‘regretful’ key alien baddie. Unfortunately however, the ‘non-regretful’ key alien bad guy only becomes MORE intent on blowing everyone up, of course – like Ricardo Montalban, he is a man of action.

But because apparently the budget wasn’t expensive enough for Paramount’s taste yet, we are treated to some scenes of spaceships flying around getting set up for the big bad-guy system blow-up – which it turns out is a false start, because Picard, Worf and the regretful alien baddie somehow TRANSPORTED the ‘really’ bad alien and his crew to the HOLODECK to trick them. Far be it from me to question, but everytime I’ve seen ANYONE ‘beam’ anywhere on any Star Trek in history – they always somehow knew (or I guess, suspected) they were being ‘beamed’ – except until now. Naturally this drives the key baddie into a REAL killing frenzy, which is resolved by (only) himself getting sent over to the main ship charged with blowing up the system, where Picard follows shortly and they have a crappy shootout/clamber-around chase until Picard saves the day (this mano-a-mano ‘climbing battle’ was done far better, more brutally and believably in Serenity three years later – sorry guys).

So then the day is saved, the suburbanites go back to their car, bar and electricity-free Tuscan Village, and Data plays in the hay with the token kid. Picard (of course) ditches his local honey without actually consumating anything (gag), promising to come back and use up his 300+ days of accrued vacation time when he gets the chance, but of course the Federation needs him the most right now. The rest of the crew smiles on as they beam up and fly away in the Enterprise, which seems all repaired already? Little does the ship know its impending doom in the next movie…muhahahha! It’s almost like they wait to make the next movie by the same amount of years it would take in ‘Star Trek time’ to build a new Enterprise? So that’s good, Picard CAN use that accrued vacation after all – everybody wins!

What more is there to say? Well, there were some elements in this plot that weren’t horrible, but too much cornball or tedious stuff overwhelmed them in the end. It was cool to see Anthony Zerbe (both an Omega Man and Matrix veteran, if you can believe that) again as the naive Starfleet Admiral who ultimately gets his from the key alien baddie (big surprise). The (new) Enterprise looked pretty cool and had a new Captain’s Gig small ship that drops out of the saucer section – although its inability to kick ass was pathetic – isn’t this the *flagship* of the fleet? Finally, I like Patrick Stewart, but does he have to be in almost every scene? It reminded me of the TNG finale (where he *is* in every scene) – why make a big deal about having a bigger cast than the originals (TNG vs. Kirk/Spock/etc.) when you end up largely ignoring them for most of the movie? Data of course (assuming the Spock role) gets a lot of screen time although some of it is fairly lame or tedious – but he gets payback (kills himself) later in Nemesis anyway, so no biggie there. I realize that it’s tough to handle a big cast *and* give them all something to do *and* make it interesting *and* live up to fan expectations *and* do it in only one movie without the extra time and character development that a series can provide, but….

Ultimately, I think where Star Trek succeeds or fails is when the balance of action and plot move along nicely without getting overwhelmed by too much lecturing, Shakespeare quoting (you laugh, but it’s true) and/or techie tangents (the holodeck, time travel, aliens that can completely take over the ship in less than 5 min. of arrival, etc.) that can derail the viewer in short order. Here, the Shakespeare quoting and time travel are nowhere to be found (good), but the pacing and believability of the plot vanished into deep space with them (bad).

I originally set the DVR to record Insurrection this time because I was thinking it was actually Nemesis (brain fart, big time). So i’ll have to roust that one up and report back soon – it’s probably the only one left I haven’t seen more than once or possibly twice?

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Ah, Shatner…

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Got the early 70’s Star Trek:The Animated Series on DVD from the library last week. This was an ‘interim’ series done by Filmation from 1973-74, originally intended as a kid’s Saturday am cartoon show but given the hunger at the time for anything/all things Star Trek, actually served to ‘continue on’ the original 60’s series for many fans. I had seen at least a few of these either back then or later in reruns, and had borrowed the set from a friend a few years ago but neglected to watch many of them then.

The show had 22 episodes, which is pretty good considering that the original series only has 79 to begin with (and the third original season had a lot of crappy shows, for that matter). Most of the original cast is here (Kirk/Shatner, Spock/Nimoy, Scotty/Doohan, Uhura/Nichols and Takei/Sulu) save for Chekov/Walter Koenig, who was left out due to budget constraints – but did get to write an episode, The Infinite Vulcan.

One difference (besides being animated instead of live-action) is that the shows are only a half-hour, meaning in practice about 24 min. or so – whereas the original had hour-long episodes. So this constrains the storytelling a bit, but they still did pretty well with what they had. Another is a better variety of weird aliens, architecture and landscapes – animation naturally provides more flexibility in that case, and they used it well.

On balance, the quality is pretty good here. Even though of course Kirk and Spock get the vast majority of the lines – and now after having watched 40+ years of various Star Trek shows enough to think sending the 3-4 most important members of the crew on all the dangerous away missions is STU-PID, guys! – it’s still entertaining. I think besides having most of the original series’ actors, it helped having many of the original writers (or eminently qualified newbies like Larry Niven) handling the scripts, and Dorothy Fontana, one of the key veterans of the original series running the show overall.

Looking at specific episodes, I’d have to say my favorites were the following:

Beyond The Farthest Star – While elements of this plot were used already in an original series 3rd season episode (Day of the Dove) this is better than that one, even if shorter. This story has far more of the sense of wonder and exploration Star Trek is known for, and the alien taking over the Enterprise is more plausible in this story the way it unfolds.

Yesteryear – Here we see some of Spock’s back story and tie in The Guardian from the original series – a great combination.

The Survivor – Despite the increasing proliferation of crew members wearing cheesy handlebar mustaches from this episode onward – the plot is interesting and has a twist or two to boot.

The Magicks of Megas-tu – A favorite recurring theme on Star Trek is ‘ancient aliens visited Earth/other planets of the Federation in primitive times and now we have to deal with how we treated them’ – This idea was also seen in Who Mourns for Adonais? (original series) and even later in the animated series in How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth which throws in the oft-seen ‘Star Trek loves to whip out the Shakespeare’ in its title. I’m not going to go into that one, as anyone who’s watched any amount of Star Trek (TV or movies) will be already familiar with THAT tendency….’Magicks’ is also interesting in that the included DVD commentary notes the network said they couldn’t do an episode with ‘god’ in it – so they chose Lucifer instead

The Slaver Weapon – This is the Larry Niven episode, which includes elements of his own books and stories as a plot foundation (Slavers, Kzinti, etc.) and it definitely works well.

The Jihad – This was one I remembered reading from the books Alan Dean Foster did based on the animated series (Star Trek ‘Logs’) and the animated version is unfortunately not as good, because it leaves out some of the dialog (it’s probable that ADF simply ‘wrote more’ as he did the novellas *after* the series aired) and the sequence with the ‘dune buggy’ they use to escape a molten lava volcano here is pretty silly.

If you don’t want to watch the series on TV – you can always read the books referenced above, which should still be around in paperback somewhere – they came out in the early 80s I think?

All in all, it was good and interesting to revisit these. Several of them are definitely up to the best of the original series for sure, even if their stories aren’t as long timewise due to the shorter format.

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