Month: February 2010

The first real break out episode for Patrick Stewart as Picard, and also about as close as things have come to a good episode so far. There are some clumsy scenes (mainly due to writing), but Stewart’s performance more than makes up for it as he really starts to make Picard seem like a Captain…

The only word for the first ten minutes of this episode is ‘gratuitous’. Scantily clad young men and women hugging each other and jogging around. The fundamental idea of this episode comes down to an old law and economics idea – that is, you can have very high, randomly enforced penalties as an alternative to…

This episode was not off to a good start when Picard made a dig about Economics before the credits. The rest wasn’t as bad as the average of this season so far, it was more a problem of bumpy implementation this time. The uselessness of Troi is becoming particularly apparent, when she can’t even tell…

Finally a decent bit of Star Trek. This is a nice episode, which works out nicely and gives a bit of useful background to the characters as well. This was the first time that I started to get a proper feel for Picard and Riker. Or, rather, a feel for them as they’d later be…

Five episodes in, and this show really is quite lucky to not be canceled yet. Here we come to the big reveal on the season’s big bad aliens, and what do we get? Some fairly pathetic cowards who behave like left-over stooges. The big fight scene seems more like ‘Munchkins versus Star Fleet’ than anything.…

I think there must have been a problem with my DVD. Because the scene where it was explained that the culture was a result of a violation of the Prime Directive by a previous Star Fleet mission which accidentally left behind a copy of *Jungle Drums of Africa*. Because surely they weren’t intending to just…

Right. So that first two-part episode was a bit of a rocky start, but pilots are like that, aren’t they. Too many characters to establish. Now that’s out of the way maybe we can have a good episode. No such luck. This is just bad. From the seduction of the android “fully functional in every…

The second half of the pilot picks the pieces up a little. There are still some problems – Picard is being a bit of a dick, and his characterisation is still settling down. And the Wesley Crusher issue is starting to rear it’s head. But the core of the story is an interesting SF idea,…

Star Trek returns to live action TV for the first time since 1969. In we sweep to a fantastic looking Enterprise, a cool looking Captain, and then: it’s super-powerful aliens. Again. *sigh*. Oh well, at least the Q are the apotheosis of the idea. And really, the first 10 minutes isn’t promising. It’s incredibly talky,…

A lot of people rate this as the best of the movies. I’m not sure I agree. It’s a good movie, certainly (it’s the only one that I could ever convince my wife to suffer through, at any rate). But in a lot of respects it just isn’t very Star-Trek-y.r As a movie it tries…