Month: February 2010

Chekhov (OK, Walter Koenig) writes an episode. It’s a little clumsy, to be honest. There’s a lot of flat out exposition, and some quite silly ‘peril’ scenes. There was a germ of a good episode here, but not quite enough to make it work. 86 down, 651 to go.

OK, so the Enterprise runs into a lost celebrity, and his fiance just happens to be on board? Suspension of disbelief tested. A shape changer who changes into a deflector shield? Suspension of disbelief out the window. A silly plot undermines some of the good bits of writing in the episode. 85 down, 652 to…

Another great episode. It would have been easy to do an exact rehash of the previous tribble episode, but the story here is probably actually a little better than in the previous episode. Again, the tribbles are mainly played for laughs, but it works quite well. 84 down, 653 to go.

Here’s a handy rule of thumb. If you’re ever writing an episode of Star Trek and you find the need to use the phrase ‘I am the Head Female’, I would humbly suggest that your episode has gone off the rails. Still, some of the weaker points are made up for two things: firstly, the…

A very ‘Star Trek’ episode – find a strange new threat to a planet, talk it out of eating everyone. Generally I found this episode a bit flat, but there were some occasional flares of something a bit more interesting (such as the conversations with the threatened planet’s Governor). 82 down, 655 to go.

After the previous episode this was a positive shock. Wow. A great setup, and some very interesting backstory on Spock. A lot of which got picked up in the recent movie (the scene of the kids picking on Spock is clearly a reference to this episode). Oh, and Spocks cute (/vicious looking) pet Sehlat. 81…

I’m just going to do one paragraph reviews of these animated series shows, which are (after all) just 22 minutes long each, including credits. If you close your eyes, you would find it hard to tell this isn’t the old series. The sound, the music, and the voices are all good. The actors are clearly…

Overall there’s probably more good than bad in the third season of Star Trek, but only just. I think that there were five or so good episodes, another dozen mediocre episodes, and then about six really dreadful episodes. But almost all of the good episodes are in the first half, and a fair chunk of…

So it would appear that the 23rd century Star Fleet is trapped in the 1960s when it comes to gender equity. Personally, I find that a bigger leap of logic than the idea of a machine that can exchange the bodies of Kirk and Dr Lester. “It’s better to be dead than live alone in…

Right in the dying moments of The Original Series, another pretty strong episode. There are some silly bits – the musketeers who arrest Kirk, for instance. But for the most part the episode hangs together pretty well. The library/portal to the past is a clever idea, and for once the attempt to do something a…