Month: October 2012

Ultimately an interesting idea that gets a bit too weighed down by technobabble, and a little bit too much forcing of the plot towards where the writers wanted to be with the ending. And nothing felt particularly new either – unaware duplicates have been done better before (*Whispers* in DS9, most recently). There was some…

Nog and Jake end up on a ship crewed only by Star Fleet cadets. There was a lovely moment here where one of the cadets describes living on Earth’s moon. It’s one of the few times where there’s been a real feeling of actually *living* in the future, of people living in a place other…

The Doctor ends up in the middle of a dispute about what he did 700 years ago. An interesting and brave narrative structure that only just works. I enjoyed the ‘here’s Voyager as villains’, although I felt that the picture was just a bit too much of a caricature to be credible – for instance,…

A Bajoran prophecy almost ends in the destruction of the station. Strange episode. Up until halfway through it looks like it’s going to be a Bajoran politics episode, with a bit of religion thrown in. And then about halfway through it goes stark raving bonkers, and we end up with a possessed Kira and Jake…

Chakotay falls in love with a block of wood. Oh wait, that was an actress? Sorry, have to re-evaluate the whole episode now. That might seem a bit mean, but the poor acting (or, more fairly, the fact that the acting didn’t work for me) kills the episode. There’s a good premise here – the…

Odo gets advice on his love life from a hologram. Yuck. Not even a good b-story to distract. It’s not bad, certainly – it’s not a Ferengi episode at least. But the concepts and construction are just not worthy of Trek. It plays like one of the writers was frustrated about never having a chance…

Janeway diverts the ship to follow Star Fleet’s highest priority. This episode could have pretty comfortably been an episode of The Original Series. That’s both good and bad – the pace is pretty slow, and there’s far too much talking, and not a clear enough reason why this thing is so bad. The threat isn’t…

Sisko makes a deal with the devil in order to keep the Federation alive. Sisko holding someone against a wall saying “I’m making a new agreement” is one of the most chilling moments Star Trek has managed from the main cast. The triumph of the episode is that every step along the way to that…

Tom has a case of the body switches. The only new thing this brings to an old trope is the fact that the alien doing the body switching isn’t very competent at it – he gets caught pretty quickly, all things considered. But other than that it’s pretty straightforward. It would’ve been a lot more…

Bashir has to prove his loyalty to the Federation I never once questioned Bashir’s loyalty, and as a result this episode did very little for me. The reveal that ‘it was the Holodeck all along’ did very little for me – very little in the episode really required that up until the final act. And…