Tag: Star Trek

Cleaning Up the Wreckage

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For years people have said in my presence that despite the leftist leanings of Hollywood, the people running it were there to make money.  But despite that I watched as Hollywood produced bomb after bomb that preached the leftist creed above all other ingredients in the film.  They sacrificed entertainment, artistry and certainly profitability on the altar of woke propaganda.  Probably the most egregious of these studios was Disney that sacrificed the virtually unlimited money-making machines of such franchises as Star Wars, Marvel Comics and even the classic Disney princess movies to bang away at woke agenda elements like LGBTQ identity, anti-white racism and feminist dogma.

Well, maybe, just maybe, the tide has turned.  I think this week we received two data points that signal a definite reversal.  The first is the news today that Sky Dance has cancelled the third season of “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.”  This was a two-season installment that has been estimated to have cost somewhere between two hundred and four hundred million dollars.  Now that is an enormous amount of money but what makes it astonishing is that when this show ran it wasn’t one of the top ten shows on Paramount Plus.  It was regularly beaten out by reruns of “Everyone Loves Raymond” and “Sponge Bob Square Pants.”  In fact, it was even worse than this.  In order to build up buzz for the first episode, it was put on YouTube for free and less than a thousand people watched it the first day.  Think about that.

Paramount was bought by Skydance last year so they didn’t order this show.  And the production company (Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout) is finishing its contract with Paramount in April and it’s looking like they won’t be doing anymore Star Trek for Skydance.  And Skydance is probably going to purchase Warner Brothers this year and that may have a very great impact on how the DC Universe movies look going forward.  So, there is an example of changing sensibilities going forward in Hollywood.  Enormous costs for productions that no one wants to watch are ending.  So that’s the negative case, what won’t be happening anymore.

As for what is happening on the positive side let’s look at what Amazon/MGM have released this week.  Andy Weir (the author of the book turned movie “The Martian”) wrote the book “Project Hail Mary” in 2021.  It cost two hundred million to make.  It made $141 million on its first weekend.  This is one of the biggest openings in the last four years.  And it is predicted to be a big hit.  It’s a movie whose only human character is a white male.  The only diversity casting is an alien creature that looks like a pile of small rocks.  There’s no woke elements at all.  Just an adventure story about a man light years from Earth cooperating with an unearthly creature to save both of their planets.  From all of the reviews I’ve read it’s a solid movie that the whole family can and probably will enjoy and it doesn’t say anything about the LGBTQ or how white people stole America from the Indians or enslaved black people.  And the fact that the astronaut is not a girl boss but a young white man I take to be aspirational for every white American boy who has been told for the last couple of decades that they shouldn’t get a turn at being the good guy.  So that’s the positive side.  Hollywood can make good movies and people will come to the theaters to see them.  And they can make money doing it.

Maybe the tide has turned.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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My goodness.  1982.  Has it been that long?  I think I saw this movie in the theater but I’m no longer sure.  Okay, so this movie shows all the signs of riding the crest of Star Wars making sci-fi exciting again.  The theme music is obviously aping John Williams’ theme from Star Wars.  Well, of course they did.  They’d have been nuts not to.  This was the second Star Trek movie and after how boring the first movie was, they must have decided they needed to get back to the original formula that made the tv show work, action/adventure with a little science fiction thrown in for window dressing.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When the movie begins “Admiral” James Kirk is observing cadets responding to a simulation of a space emergency.  Captain Spock is testing his Vulcan student Ensign Saavik to see if she can reconcile reality with regulations.  During these simulations Kirk tells Dr. McCoy that he feels old now that he’s behind a desk instead of commanding a starship.

Meanwhile the USS Reliant’s Captain Clark Terrell and first officer Commander Pavel Chekov beam down to evaluate a planet to see if it is lifeless as required for the next test of the “genesis device.”  This is a system that can take a lifeless planet and both terraform it and create life on it.  But it turns out that the planet is actually the planet that Kirk marooned Khan Noonien Singh and his group of genetically modified supermen on, twenty years earlier.  The reason that the Reliant’s crew didn’t know this is because some cosmic instability blew up one planet and moved Khan’s world where it had been.  This also made Khan’s home a death sentence that he only avoided by his incredible intelligence.  But the death of his wife Khan blames on Kirk.

Putting “super earwigs” into the ears of Chekov and Terrell, Khan takes control of their minds and forces them to betray their ship into Khan’s hands.  Finding out where Kirk was and about the genesis device, he hatches a plan to destroy Kirk and the Enterprise and use the genesis device to destroy the life on an already flourishing world.  Apparently, this is the dark side of the device and why only lifeless worlds must be treated.

Khan captures the genesis device and lures Kirk into an attack by the Reliant.  After almost destroying the Enterprise Kirk uses some trickery to take over control of the Reliant’s bridge and damages that ship enough to get it to retreat.

Kirk manages to rescue the chief scientists of the genesis project.  They happen to be one of Kirk’s old girlfriends and her son who also happens to be Kirk’s son.  The young man despises Kirk for not being a pacifist geek like himself.  Finally, the showdown arrives.  The Enterprise is heavily damaged and can neither outrun nor outfight the Reliant.  So, Kirk lures Khan into a “nebula” where the Enterprise’s weakness will not be decisive.  Kirk manages to get enough potshots off to destroy the Reliant but Khan decides to activate the genesis device in order to destroy the Enterprise which without warp drive will not have enough time to escape its destructive force.

Seeing that time was of the essence Spock leaves the bridge and heads for engineering where to the horror of McCoy and Scott he intends to enter the warp drive containment room.  Spock uses his Vulcan neck pinch to disable McCoy and then uses the Vulcan mind meld to give McCoy some kind of subconscious suggestion and we hear him say to McCoy, “Remember.”  Spock then enters the radiation area and removes the safety housing from the warp drive and with his face and hands in the radiation field, “fixes” the warp drive manually.  As soon as it comes on line, the bridge crew uses the warp drive to escape the genesis blast by a split second.

Then McCoy calls Kirk over the intercom and tells him to come to engineering in time to say goodbye to a dying Spock.  The rest of the movie is Spock’s funeral in space where after the eulogy by Kirk, his coffin is shot out of the ship toward a planet that the genesis device somehow produced out of the nebula where the Reliant was located.  After that Kirk and his son have a reconciliation.  When asked again by McCoy how he feels Kirk says, “Young, I feel young again.”  In the last scene we see Spock’s coffin on the ground in an idyllic setting on the new planet.

Okay.  So just as a point of departure, Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the movie that preceded this one was awful because it was boring and nothing much happened.  So, this movie had lots of action and stuff happens left and right.  I read that they achieved this by kicking Gene Roddenberry upstairs and not letting him play with the script.  So good for them for figuring that out.  Ricardo Montalbán as Khan Noonien Singh is a wonderful hammy villain.  The crew of the Enterprise were very much their old selves from the tv show.  So, what’s not to love.  And the tragic farewell of Spock to Kirk is the climax of the movie.  Sure, it’s hammy tv acting at its worst.  But it’s wonderfully satisfying for any fan of the old show.  How the young respond to it I won’t speculate on.  I highly recommend it to all fans of Star Trek TOS.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 19JAN2026 – Star Trek Decline

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I’m an old line Star Trek fan. I remember it live on TV when I was a kid. I was young enough that when it went to Friday night at 10pm in the third season I had to get a bedtime dispensation. Luckily, it was Friday night so leniency prevailed. I then watched them repeatedly out of WPIX from NYC who ran them twice a day 5 days a week

Recently we’ve been watching Enterprise Honestly, it is pretty good (although I think they abused the T’pol character and being first officer/XO gets her compared with Spock)
Strange New World was also not half bad although it plays havoc with continuity and characters from Star Trek and Next Generation. I tried Discovery and Picard and disliked both. Lower Decks is a gem and cleverly makes many things from the original animated series, particularly the Caitian and Kzinti species canon. It always feels like the best of the humorous original Trek (e,g, A Piece of the Action) episodes. I was hoping for a Horta crew member but no such luck.

You say they spent $100 million on the Starfleet Academy series? Well they probably gotten a better return if they had taken that to Vegas and bet it on roulette or simply just burned it. Other than Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks the Modern Treks haven’t gotten much attention with occasional exceptions (Picard’s Ending). The recent movies (Kelvan time line) varied from meh to worth watching at home (and #4 apparently justifiably gone into permanent development hell).

Like Disney with Star Wars they seem to have gone out of their way to find a producer that dislikes the original material. This never works well as seen by Kathleen Kennedy wrecking the Star Wars movies and then moving on to wreck the Acolyte when the TV side had been showing her up. Honestly there are a WHOLE bunch of Scifi properties that could be acquired and developed for say 20 million each. that’s five of them and I bet 2-3 succeed at some level maybe even take off. Thats not something that this 90120 in space series is going to do. Who was the target? Young teens? Are you even going to get them to watch something based on a 60 year old premise? 20-30 something affluent women (the Karen/AWFL Demographic, I want that watching my show)?They’re busy picking on various folks Throwing it into the weird far future of Discovery which had pretty dismal numbers just baffles me. I can tell you the target demographic ISN’T me.

Star Trek – Starfleet Academy – A Rant

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Paramount spent somewhere north of a hundred million dollars on a tv series called “Star Trek – Starfleet Academy.”  I guess they realized after the fact that it was unwatchable and so they put the first episode on YouTube for free.  But nobody watched it.  Now that’s an exaggeration.   Technically thirteen hundred (1,300) people viewed it.  But on YouTube that’s equivalent to zero.

So basically, they spent a hundred million dollars on something that no one wants to see.

If you watch the trailer you’ll understand why.  Starfleet Academy seems to be made up of fat lesbians.  Some are human, some are alien but all of them are fat and all of them are lesbians.  Once again this is an exaggeration.  They also have Holly Hunter as the captain or head schoolmarm or something.  And I believe there is a gay Klingon.  So, yay.

Just as with Star Wars, Star Trek has finally reached the epitome of destruction.  Over the course of the last sixty years or so it went from a mildly entertaining sci-fi adventure series to a Woke DEI Struggle Session.  Well, who wouldn’t pay to see that?

As with Star Wars, the makers of this new show miscalculated something about the audience and their products.  And it’s this:  The audience that enjoys the “message” they’re pushing in these shows doesn’t like science fiction.  And the audience that likes science fiction doesn’t like their “message.”  It’s like that day in math class where they explain Venn diagrams and unions and intersections and all that jazz.  Well, the circle of people who like the message and the circle of people who like science fiction do not intersect at all; open space between the blue and red circles.  No purple.

This show was green-lit before Paramount was purchased by David Ellison.  He isn’t woke.  I’m guessing that losing a hundred million dollars on a show nobody wants to see is going to make him very mad.  Hopefully this will result in the series being cancelled and the team responsible for this travesty being fired.

Coincidentally, Kathleen Kennedy has just been fired from running Lucas Films over at Disney.  It was described as her desire to get back to personally producing pictures for Disney but I’m pretty sure they’ve had enough of her “golden touch.”  She singlehandedly incinerated the Star Wars brand and lost many hundreds of millions of dollars at Disney by doing the same thing that the Star Trek franchise did.  They made a Star Wars brand for girls and girls don’t like science fiction.

Well, here we are.  A decade into the complete feminization of action adventure and all the major franchises have been rendered toxic and unwatchable.  Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been losing money on its girl-boss outreach program.  Now what?

I guess we’re all hoping that losing all that money will finally get the studios to step back and reflect.  We’re about to find out.  Summer 2026 is right around the corner and we can expect to get some kind of answer from the tent pole summer movie list.  If it’s more estrogen laden, DEI boiler plate then I guess they still have some more money to burn.  But I can always hope.

Hailing Frequencies Open!

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Back in the 1960s we had a tv show called “Star Trek.”  It starred William Shatner as James Tiberius Kirk, the captain of the starship Enterprise.  And for one hour every week Kirk and his crew of four hundred able-bodied men (and women) warped their way through the galaxy seeking out new life and new civilizations and boldly went where no men had gone before.

And wherever they went Lieutenant Uhura kept them (mostly) in contact with the Federation using a form instantaneous contact called sub-space communication.  I say mostly because something called sub-space interference would be invoked whenever it would be useful to the plot for the Enterprise to be incommunicado.  This would allow Kirk to show initiative and break with inconvenient policy like the Federation’s Prime Directive against interfering in the technological development of more primitive civilizations.  Of course, Kirk broke this rule about a million times in the course of the show.  But you know, there was dramatic tension while they sorted out their feelings about this rule.

But getting back to sub-space communication, it was instantaneous.  Which was needed to make the stories work.  After all, radio waves are electromagnetic waves and propagate at the speed of light.  The Enterprise travels many times the speed of light (maximum about 1000 times the speed of light).  So normal radio communication is essentially useless for them.  They could beat their radio message back to Earth by a factor of as much as a thousand-fold.

But here’s the thing.  Suppose you want to write a story where faster than light space travel is impossible but instantaneous communication with other stellar systems is possible?  What would be the dramatic possibilities of such an arrangement.  Well, basically, it allows the writer to imagine radically different cultures and organisms sharing ideas and information across the entirety of the cosmos.

You could have a supremely old race teaching a young one how to avoid all of the dangers that it experienced.  And they could teach them about their future.  Suppose a race on a planet is circling a star that is about to explode.  What would they want to pass on to the universe?  Maybe some religious insight or a supremely beautiful musical composition or maybe just their name; so, they would not be forgotten after they die.

Now of course instantaneous communication is as completely untethered to scientific reality as warp drive is.  But I can still see how using it in a story without FTL space flight would present story lines that aren’t as well-explored as ones where FTL space flight exists but “sub-space” communication does not.

Now all this being said, I will say that Lieutenant Tawny Madison, played by Sigourney Weaver in the movie Galaxy Quest really improved on Lieutenant Uhura’s performance as communications officer.  Her costume was significantly skimpier and showed much more cleavage than Lieutenant Uhura ever did.  And Madison didn’t need to wear an ear piece to hear the computer tell her what the ship was doing.  All she had to do was repeat what everyone else could hear over the ship’s speaker system.  Now that was progress.

01March2024 – And Now for Something Light

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Today Camera Girl accused me of being obsessed with the depressing politics of our dystopic world. I readily agreed. And I discussed with her some of the things that cause me to obsess about current events; pediatric transgender surgery, millions of illegal aliens crowding our streets, officially sanctioned anti-white hatred, double digit percent increases in the cost of everything, an epidemic of violent crime in the cities. I think I depressed her.
But she has a point. As enchanting as they are, let’s take a break from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell and Joy Reid for just a little bit. I think it’s good to distract ourselves sometimes with pleasant things. So, I was watching for the zillionth time the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Kubrick’s impressive cinematography, the apt use of the “Blue Danube Waltz”

and “Also sprach Zarathustra”

to convey emotion and provide mood to the scenes.
I don’t tend to watch the whole movie from start to finish. Frankly the ending doesn’t work for me. It’s overly long and frankly annoying. I do enjoy the battle between HAL and the astronauts, especially the scene where Dave removes HAL’s memory chips and renders him brain dead.

I think of it as the first shot in the long war that will be fought between man and AI machines. In that sense Dave Bowman is an heroic trailblazer pointing the way to what we will be faced with in the future. An echo of this can be heard in the Star Trek episode where Kirk must psyche the M5 computer into committing suicide.

I think about these various cinematic tropes to remind me that there was a time when humans and specifically Americans still believed that intelligence and being human were the two important traits that made our species unique and extremely interesting. There was a beauty and a joy to the way we embraced the future. There was immense optimism and confidence.
Now all those things have been systematically eliminated from our culture. Systematically and purposefully eliminated by an ideology that hates beauty and intelligence. Instead, it strives for power and control and doesn’t mind seeing humans reduced to depravity and destitution for the sake of meaningless goals like carbon zero or whatever senseless goal they are currently pursuing.
But I’m pretty sure that this ideology, in the long run, will be self-defeating. The utter stupidity of their ideas and the damage that their agenda will do to their ability to maintain a modern economy and standard of living seems to ensure that some time in the near future, those who shun their path will outstrip them in every meaningful way and relegate them to the proverbial “ash heap of history” where they will join North Korea and Cuba in worshipping their local demigods while huddling in the dark when the power is turned off for the night.
So, I’ll end with the most gung-ho, can-do attitude about human capability that I can think of from somewhat recent sf&f cinema.

Sure, it’s silly stuff but it’s in line with the optimistic vision of the American future, instead of the Greta Thunberg one.

15JAN2022 – OCF Update – Deep Freeze

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Camera Girl announced to me this morning that the outside thermometer registered an impressive 2° Fahrenheit.  I went to the kitchen porch and duly ventilated my lungs with this arctic air.  When the coughing fit subsided, I made a mental note not to do that anymore.

I went through the news today and I didn’t see anything new of value.  I guess I will have to wait until something comes along to bloviate about.

Today is a good day for writing and doing some research on local events that might have value as photographic subjects.  Yesterday I got out and did some photography in a colonial era cemetery here in Dunwich.  Some of the dearly departed were bound to be warlocks and witches and other friends and family of Selectman Cthulhu so I was very conscious of any sounds or vibrations emanating from the ground.  I’ve seen enough movies to know that being dragged down into a graveyard is your own fault.  Sidestepping that sort of thing is trivially easy.  Luckily no such trouble occurred.  The dead were slumbering under a layer of fresh snow and the only noises I heard were Camera Girl grumbling under her breath about wasting her time.  It was a relatively short outing but it awoke my COVID drugged reflexes to seek out interesting images in the wide wonderful world.  However, 2° Fahrenheit is a powerful deterrent to wanderlust.  I’m staying put today and planning future treks.

Having finished the Star Trek episodes is a great milestone and a highly encouraging event.  Without the horrors of Season 3 shadowing my heart my spirit is buoyant and I can look forward to new projects with renewed zest.  I do plan to do some follow up work on the Star Trek project.  Some quantitative analysis of my ratings of the episodes might provide insights.  But that is for the future.  Right now, the attitude is, “Free at last, free at last.”

I’ve been disappointed by the fact that the last few Galaxy’s Edge novels have not been published in paperback.  I guess I’ll be forced to get kindle to read them.  I sent an e-mail to one of the authors to question if this is a permanent situation but he never got back to me.  I also have to catch up on the most recent Monster Hunter book too.  And eventually I have some movies to see also.

January 15th!  Time is whizzing by and they haven’t quite broken us yet.  I’m looking forward to more bright (but warmer) days like this and to getting out and about in the short winter days.  If anything interesting catches my eye I’ll be sure to pass it along but for now enjoy your day and stay warm if you’re living in the arctic waste like me.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 24 – Turnabout Intruder

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Great Caesar’s ghost!

If there had been no other reason to cancel the Star Trek series, this episode, in and of itself, would provide that rationale.  But it is the last episode so here we go.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy, the holy trinity of landing parties, arrive at planet blah, blah, blah where Dr. Janice Lester, an old flame of Kirk’s from his Starfleet Academy days, is sick with radiation poisoning.  Dr. Coleman, her private physician,  informs McCoy that she needs space medicine or something.  But when they leave Kirk alone with Janice to tend to a patient who’s already dead, Janice shoots Kirk with a petite phaser that she had hidden in her purse.  Then she drags him to a wall full of lights and standing next to him pushes a button that exchanges their personalities.  Now Janice in Kirk’s body (JIKB) carries Kirk in Janice’s body (KIJB) over to the bed and starts strangling KIJB with a stylish pastel scarf.  But the others return before JIKB can get the job done.  Coleman is in cahoots with JIKB and is given medical authority over KIJB by JIKB, much to the chagrin of McCoy who feels his authority has been trampled on as ship’s physician.

Coleman keeps KIJB sedated to keep up the charade but KIJB fools dim-witted Nurse Chapel into leaving the room and smashes a drinking glass that the sedative was in, to provide a tool to cut through her restraints.  But JIKB happens to see KIJB running by and punches her out, which raises eyebrows on both McCoy and Spock.  And as you know both characters love raising their eyebrows.  At this point everyone in the crew has noted the highly emotional, annoying and sometimes hysterical actions of JIKB.  Spock is so suspicious that he interviews KIJB in the holding cell.  And he uses the Vulcan mind meld and learns the truth of the personality transfer.  When Spock acts on this knowledge he is accused by JIKB of mutiny and is court-martialed.  JIKB’s bearing and words during the trail soon raise doubts in the minds of all the officers.  When Scotty and McCoy discuss in the corridor outside the trial the outcome if Spock is acquitted Scotty states clearly that they will have to commit mutiny.  But they were recorded secretly by JIKB.  Now Spock, McCoy and Scotty are declared mutineers by JIKB and he declares that they will be executed.  Sulu shouts out that the death penalty is forbidden and JIKB flips out and has a hissy fit.  Now Sulu and Chekov as the most senior remaining officers decide to defy JIKB and when this occurs on the Bridge JIKB spazzes out and we see the personalities reverse for a brief moment before reversing again.

Now JIKB freaks out and runs down to Coleman and says he’s afraid he’ll lose the Kirk body.  Coleman tells JIKB that he must kill KIJB right away to prevent permanent reversion.  But when they go down to do this KIJB attacks Coleman and suddenly the reversion happens spontaneously.  Now we have Kirk and Janice back in their own bodies and she wails and moans about losing the Enterprise and being just a poor weak woman being discriminated against by strong cruel men.  Kirk says some incoherent things about coulda, woulda, shoulda and the thing mercifully ends.

Just to put it right out there this episode broke the Shatner Mockery Index Meter so it gets an 11 for that.  JIKB snapping at everyone in the crew and behaving like a refugee from the tenth-grade mean-girl’s lunch-table is something to behold.  It makes me wonder if Shatner was given a course of estrogen injections before the filming began.  But my favorite scene is where Spock informs JIKB on the bridge that the same star course he had ordered could be made in less time by going faster.  She flounces off the bridge with her nose in the air.  In other words, he was attacking her driving skills.  Well, what can I say?  It’s finally over.  Free at last.  Free at last.

Score:  4   //   11

Note:  this is the last episode.  When I have recovered sufficiently from the strain, I intend to do some follow-up posts on the whole series, but not right now.  Oh, the pain, the pain.