Moby Dick | the m0vie blog

Star Trek – Obsession (Review)

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Darren

The first Star Trek pilot, The Cage, was produced in 1964. To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, this December we are reviewing the second season of the original Star Trek show. You can check out our first season reviews here. Check back daily for the latest review.

The Star Trek franchise really does like Moby Dick, doesn’t it?

The show had done its first appropriation of Herman Melville’s iconic story of obsession and revenge earlier in the second season with The Doomsday Machine. In that episode, Commodore Decker sought to avenge the loss of his crew upon an unstoppable planet-killing machine. However, the basic formula quickly worked its way into the franchise’s blood. Obsession casts Kirk in the role of Ahab, albeit with a radically different ending and tone. After all, it is very cast Ahab as the heroic lead of a weekly television show.

“It’s behind you!”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan would return to Moby Dick for inspiration. Khan would even paraphrase from the book, without a hint of self-awareness or irony. After that point, it seemed like the franchise was more interested in mimicking the themes of The Wrath of Khan , which inevitably meant carrying over the themes of Moby Dick as well. Nevertheless, Star Trek: Voyager did its own variant of Moby Dick in Bliss and Star Trek: First Contact would reference the book directly.

Obsession is a competent if unspectacular episode, one that suffers from the fact that it has been done better and more compellingly in recent memory. However, given all the changes taking place behind the scenes, Obsession flows surprisingly well.

It really sucks to be a red shirt, eh?

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: bloodbath, death, farragut, garrovick, gene roddenberry, kirk, leslie, lieutenant leslie, Moby Dick, obsession, ralph senensky, Ray Bradbury, red shirts, space vampire, space vampire cloud, star trek, star trek: the original series, the original series, tos, vampire, vampire cloud, William Shatner | 3 Comments »

Star Trek – The Doomsday Machine (Review)

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Darren

The Doomsday Machine is another Star Trek classic.

Much like Amok Time directly before it, The Doomsday Machine is a piece of Star Trek that works both as powerful drama and clever allegory. It is an episode that has had a tremendous influence on the franchise. The “planet killer” has become a staple of Star Trek tie-in fiction, and even the franchise itself has kept the episode’s legacy alive, with the son of Commodore Decker originally planned as a regular in Star Trek: Phase II and eventually appearing in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

All hands on Decker…

The Doomsday Machine is at once a beautifully tragic character study and a potent cautionary tale for the atomic age. The episode the first example of “Star Trek does Moby Dick”, a story template that would become popular enough to sustain another episode in the same season, quite a few later Star Trek episodes across the franchise and no fewer than two of the franchise’s trips to the big screen. In many ways, The Doomsday Machine sets the template for Star Trek engaging with classic literature, building off The Conscience of a King.

It’s also beautifully produced, right down to the creature that Spinrad himself described as “a windsock dipped in cement.”

A commandeering presence…

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: armageddon, command, Commodore, commodore decker, commodore matt decker, decker, doomsday, doomsday clock, herman kahn, james t. kirk, kirk, Leonard Nimoy, literature, mad, matt decker, Moby Dick, mutually assured destruction, nimoy, norman spinrad, nuclear annihilation, obsession, science fiction, Shatner, spock, star trek, the bomb, William Shatner | 12 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Q Who? (Review)

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Darren

This January and February, we’ll be finishing up our look at the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and moving on to the third year of the show, both recently and lovingly remastered for high definition. Check back daily for the latest review.

Q Who? throws down the gauntlet for Star Trek: The Next Generation. It serves as a fitting reminder that Picard and his crew are still amateurs when it comes to space exploration. They don’t even win the day – they suffer “a bloody nose” before limping away from their strange new opponents to lick their wounds. For a crew that never seemed to sweat before, who never seemed like they were under pressure, this is a shocking development.

More interestingly, it’s something unknown in a universe that has become far too familiar. Three of the four episodes leading into Q Who? ended with the crew accepting that there were some things they’d never fully understand or comprehend, and – while it’s unlikely this was intentional – it seems like a nice bit of thematic foreshadowing rather than haphazard plotting. For the first season-and-a-half of the show, it seemed like the Enterprise was always dealing with the familiar, always in control of the situation.

With Q Who?, everything is put into perspective.

Borg to death…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: borg, Cold War, Cyborg, Dan Curry, Denise Okuda, Donna Haraway, february, Federation, games, Geordi La Forge, iphone, jean-luc picard, McDonalds, Moby Dick, Next Generation, picard, Soviet Union, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: first contact, star trek: the next generation, Time Squared, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D), William Gibson | 23 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The White Buffalo

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Darren

I’m sure there must have been a good movie in there somewhere. The story of Wild Bill Hickok hunting down the wild white buffalo from his nightmares through the Old West could have been a compelling one, even if it’s hard to imagine it ever being a classic. Instead, the movie is hackneyed cheese-fest that seems uncertain what to do with itself. It doesn’t help that Charles Bronson, sleepwalking his way through the production, gives the best performance of the film. If that’s not a bad omen, I don’t know what is.