star trek iv the voyage home

New Escapist Column! On “Star Trek: Picard” and “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”…

Posted on April 7, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. We’re doing a series of recaps and reviews of Star Trek: Picard, which is streaming weekly on Paramount+. The sixth episode of the second season released this week, and it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the series.

One of the interesting aspects of the second season of Star Trek: Picard has been the way in which it has been drawing more overtly from classic Star Trek tropes, with the season taking a number of cues from Star Trek: First Contact. However, the season has drawn most overtly from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. What is interesting about this is that the show understands that The Voyage Home isn’t just about time travelers from an imaginary future, but about fugitives from television.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Star Trek | Tagged: future, hope, idealism, Mental Health, picard, star trek, star trek iv the voyage home, star trek: picard, Television, time travel, utopianism, Voyage Home | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Star Trek: Picard” Remixes “The Voyage Home”…

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. We’re doing a series of recaps and reviews of Star Trek: Picard, which is streaming weekly on Paramount+. The third episode of the second season released this week, and it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the series.

One of the interesting aspects of the second season of Star Trek: Picard has been the way in which it has been drawing more overtly from classic Star Trek tropes, with the season taking a number of cues from Star Trek: First Contact. With the third episode, the season reveals some method to this approach, offering a reframing of the movie’s basic premise that places a greater emphasis on the familiar narrative template employed by Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: California, los angeles, picard, star trek, star trek iv the voyage home, star trek: picard, the voyage home, time travel | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Wrath of Khan” and “The Voyage Home”, and the Soul of “Star Trek” in “First Contact”…

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. Given that this month marks the 35th anniversary of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: First Contact, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at their relationship within the Star Trek franchise – and how they connect to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

For many Star Trek fans, The Wrath of Khan remains the most beloved and most brilliant entire in the franchise’s cinematic canon. However, it’s notable that The Voyage Home was a much more populist hit, resonating with general audiences. For a decade following the release of The Voyage Home, it provided a template for the franchise for a decade. However, with the release of First Contact, the balance of power shifted. Suddenly, the franchise found itself caught in the gravity of The Wrath of Khan, which exerted a powerful gravity on the franchise’s direction and development.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: continuity, fandom, film, franchise, Movie, star trek, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek Into Darkness, star trek iv the voyage home, star trek: first contact, the voyage home, the wrath of khan | Leave a comment »

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (DC Comics, 1986) (Review)

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Darren

This June, we’re taking a look at some classic Star Trek movie tie-ins and other interesting objects. Check back daily for the latest reviews and retrospectives.

The comic book adaptation of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home does a surprisingly good job of translating the comedy adventure into comic book form. Relying the creative team of Mike W. Barr and artist Tom Sutton to produce a one-shot comic book adaptation of the feature film, DC Comics have reached a point where they are able to consistently and reliably churn out comic books based around the Star Trek franchise.

Indeed, one might imagine that the somewhat lighter tone of The Voyage Home would pose a challenge for the duo, eschewing the grand space opera of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in favour of something more firmly rooted in modern sensibilities. However, Barr and Sutton do a wonderful job adapting the screenplay into a charming comic, even if it does seem to be aimed more squarely at hardcore Star Trek fans than casual viewers.

Standing tall…

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Filed under: Comics, The Original Series | Tagged: dc comics, Earth, kirk, Mike W. Barr, star trek, star trek iv the voyage home, the voyage home, time travel, tom sutton | Leave a comment »

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home by Vonda N. McIntyre (Review)

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Darren

This June, we’re taking a look at some classic Star Trek movie tie-ins. Check back daily for the latest reviews and retrospectives.

Comedy doesn’t always translate well between different media. That’s not to suggest that comedy works better in one medium as compared to others, merely to contend that certain forms of comedy don’t translate perfectly between different media. It works any number of ways. Something that is funny in sound and vision is not necessarily hilarious in prose. Gags relying on delivery might play better with a seasoned performer than in the mind’s eye of a reader. Witty prose doesn’t always lend itself to narration or articulation on film.

Much of Star Trek IV: The Voyager Home plays as broad farce, following a bunch of time-travelers from the future (and refugees from television land) as they try to interact with the real world. The movie does have some wonderful character moments – notably Spock’s character arc that beautifully brings him a full circle and Kirk’s relationship with Spock – but it also plays the Star Trek ensemble in a highly caricatured manner, more as archetypes than fully-realised three-dimensional characters.

This is grand. After all, these are fictional characters rather than real people. After all stories are more than just excerpts from the biographies of fictional characters. While it’s nice to have consistent characterisation, suggesting that you can’t have Kirk and Spock acting in an exaggerated fashion for the sake of comedy is a very narrow and restrictive view of what Star Trek is or should be.

The Voyage Home gets the big character beats right – Spock’s insistence that the crew rescue Chekov, Kirk convincing Gillian to trust him, Spock “guessing” – that we can excuse the crew’s lack of awareness about a time period they have visited before and the general flippancy of the movie itself. The novelisation, however, is another matter. Vonda N. McIntyre clearly cares a great deal about the characters. That was one of the strengths of her work on the novelisations of the last two films. Here, however, McIntyre struggles to balance that with the tone of the story.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: characterisation, continuity, environmentalism, gillian taylor, kirk, save the whales, spock, star trek, star trek iv the voyage home, star trik iv, the voyage home, time travel, vonda mcintyre, Vonda N. McIntyre, whales | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Tribunal (Review)

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Darren

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’m taking a look at the first and second seasons. Check back daily for the latest review or retrospective.

Tribunal is probably the weakest episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in quite some time, hampered by the fact that it never seems too ambitious and the fact that the episode ends because we’re three minutes away from the closing credits rather than because it feels like the story has been told. Tribunal is hardly the deepest or most sophisticated episode of the show’s second season, spending most of its time riffing on Kafka and Orwell, but it’s still solidly entertaining – a rare example of black comedy on Star Trek that works surprisingly well.

I suspect the biggest problem with Tribunal is where it’s placed. The second season of Deep Space Nine has been hitting it out of the park since around Blood Oath, giving us the strongest run of episodes we’d see until the start of the fourth season. Indeed, had the show found its groove a little bit earlier, the second season of Deep Space Nine could have been on par with the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation as “that season the show found its groove.”

However, it remains an impressive run of episodes, a rallying of the show in the last third of the season, showing just what Deep Space Nine was capable of. Most of the episodes in that run felt very different from anything done on The Next Generation and most offered some major insight into how the world of Deep Space Nine works as distinct from the rest of the franchise.

A broad cast of characters…

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine | Tagged: Armageddon Game, Bajoran, Benjamin Sisko, Cardassia, Cardassian, crime, deep space nine, Kira Nerys, Miles O'Brien, O'BRIEN, Recreation, star trek iv the voyage home, Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Original Series, star trek vi: the undiscovered country, star trek: deep space nine, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, StarTrek | 2 Comments »

Star Trek (DC Comics, 1984) Annual #1 – All Those Years Ago…

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Darren

This August, to celebrate the upcoming release of Star Trek: Into Darkness on DVD and blu ray, we’re taking a look at the Star Trek movies featuring the original cast. Movie reviews are every Tuesday and Thursday.

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the movies with tie-ins around (and related to) the films. We’ll be doing one of these every week day. This is one such article.

It’s weird to think that the original cast of Star Trek didn’t get a proper on-screen origin story until JJ Abrams rebooted the franchise in 2009. The show produced two pilots – The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before – and even the pilot episode that wound up airing was broadcast as the third episode of the first season. Given the realities of sixties television, it’s probably not too surprising. Rather famously, Gilligan’s Island scrapped its origin story pilot, reworking some of the footage (along with re-shot footage) into a later episode – deciding to skip the story of how everybody got here and just get to the meat of the story.

And you can understand why this approach worked with the original Star Trek. Structurally, the series was a product of its time, largely episodic. Sure, there were recurring alien races and even a few recurring guest stars outside the senior staff, but there was a sense you could jumble the viewing order of most of the episodes up and not notice anything strange.

At the same time, the lack of an origin leaves a vacuum. After all, each of the four following spin-offs opened with a two-hour special about putting the crew together to take their place on the final frontier. In hindsight, having had years to grow old with these characters and watch their friendships (and personalities) deepen and broaden, it occurs to us that we never really say them come together for the first time.

All Those Years Ago... isn’t nearly as elaborate or as sophisticated as Vonda M. McIntyre’s Enterprise: The First Adventure, but it does hint at a growing curiosity about how the team came to work together.

Second star on the right…

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Filed under: Comics, The Original Series | Tagged: Amok Time, dc comics, kirk, Marv Wolfman, Mike W. Barr, Motion Picture - Star Trek, spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, star trek iv the voyage home, Star Trek Original Series, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, StarTrek, Where No Man Has Gone Before | 6 Comments »

Star Trek – Cast No Shadow by James Swallow (Review)

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the movies with tie-ins around (and related to) the films. We’ll be doing one of these every week day. This is one such article.

Valeris is a fascinating character who gets a bit lost in the scope of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Given the film’s focus on bidding a fond farewell to the iconic crew of the Enterprise, it’s understandable that the newest addition to the crew should get pushed aside. It’s even more notable because Valeris is clearly a stand-in for the character of Saavik, another of Spock’s young female Vulcan protegés, making her not only a newer character, but a substitute for a newer character.

One of the most interesting things about Star Trek tie-in fiction is the scope afforded by the gigantic shared universe. Across the dozen movies and the seven-hundred episodes of television, there are countless supporting characters and concepts thrown out. Due to plotting necessities and the demands of particular stories, some of these ideas are never truly fleshed out. The sheer volume of tie-in material means that writers do get a chance to develop and expand upon these character which might otherwise be forgotten.

Writing a novel centred on Valeris is a very bold idea, but one which acknowledges just how intriguing the concept of Kim Cattrall’s Vulcan traitor is, despite the fact the film treats her as a minor character at best.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: James Swallow, John M. Ford, kirk, Kirstie Alley, Klingon, Leonard Nimoy, List of Star Trek characters (G–M), ronald d. moore, Saavik, spock, star trek, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, star trek iv the voyage home, Star Trek Movie Memories, star trek vi: the undiscovered country, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, StarTrek | 2 Comments »

Star Trek – The Movies (Review)

Posted on August 22, 2013 by Darren

It’s interesting how radically different the Star Trek feature films were from the show that spawned them. All were anchored in the classic science-fiction series. Star Trek: The Motion Picture felt like it was heavily influenced by The Changeling. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan obviously drew on Space Seed. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock evoked The Menagerie. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home featured the same plot device (and time travel technique) as Tomorrow is Yesterday. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier had Kirk defeating one final god-like being. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had the crew finally make peace with Klingons.

However, they were quite clearly a very different animal from the original television show. Which makes a great deal of sense. After all, there’s a world of difference between a fifty-minute adventure produced for weekly television and a big theatrical event. However, what’s interesting about these changes is that they weren’t necessarily in the direction you might expect. The television show was a collection of episodic adventures, but what’s really striking about the films is that most of them have a reasonably clear serialised arc.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: Changeling, Gene L. Coon, gene roddenberry, Motion Picture - Star Trek, Roddenberry, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, star trek iv the voyage home, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, star trek vi: the undiscovered country, StarTrek | Leave a comment »

Star Trek – In the Name of Honour by Dayton Ward (Review)

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the movies with tie-ins around (and related to) the films. We’ll be doing one of these every week day. This is one such article.

The Klingons changed rather dramatically, between the classic Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Part of the changes were physical – most obviously, advances in make-up allowed Klingon characters to be shown with their now-iconic forehead ridges. However, there was another interesting change. Somewhere between The Turnabout Intruder and Encounter at Farpoint, the Klingons went from generic communist stand-ins to a fully-formed alien culture with a wealth of ritual and tradition.

To a large extent, this shift took place during the movie era. Klingons wound up being the focus of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and were a significant presence in each of the films that followed. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, produced at the same time as the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, suggested that it wasn’t necessary for the Federation and the Klingon Empires to be mortal enemies. The final movie featuring the original cast, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, tied up Kirk’s adventures with the promise of galactic peace.

Still, it’s hard to reconcile the differences in characterisation between the Klingons seen in the classic Star Trek television show and those from the later spin-offs. With In the Name of Honour, Dayton Ward tries to explore this radical shift and also to bridge The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country. He does the former much better than the latter.