star trek | the m0vie blog

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Family (Review)

Posted on March 6, 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.

He’s still out there. Dreaming about starships and adventures. It’s getting late.

Yes. But let him dream.

– Robert and Marie try to figure out what all this “Star Trek” milarky is about

Starry, starry night…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: borg, family, france, klingons, Michael Piller, patrick stewart, ron d. moore, ron moore, ronald d. moore, ronald moore, star trek, star trek: the next generation, Television, the next generation, tv | 13 Comments »

Watch! The Worf of Wall Street Trailer!

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Darren

The Wolf of Wall Street is one of the best movies of the year so far, and we’re coming to the end of this leg of our nostalgic sprint through Star Trek: The Next Generation, so there’s really no better time to share this wonderful spoof mock-up of everybody’s favourite Klingon. It’s a superbly edited and timed piece of work. Check it out below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: klingons, star trek, the wolf of wall street, Wolf of Wall Street, Worf | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Best of Both Worlds, Part II (Review)

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Darren

The Best of Both Worlds, Part II was always going to feel like a bit of an anti-climax. After all, the show had spent so much time building up the Borg as this implacable and undefeatable adversary. In Q Who?, it had taken the interference of a god-like entity to allow the Enterprise a chance to escape their unstoppable foe. In The Best of Both Worlds, Part I, the Enterprise had been able to run for a while – but the Borg eventually caught up with them and took what they wanted.

Since The Best of Both Worlds, Part II was never going to end with the Borg destroying Earth, and since Star Trek: The Next Generation was never going to be a show willing to exact a dramatic cost high enough to justify victory against such overwhelming odds, the resolution to the two-parter was never going to live up to the heightened drama and impossible stakes suggested by The Best of Both Worlds, Part I.

Still, the second part of the adventure is charming and exciting enough that it never completely falls apart. While the resolution to the crisis does seem a little trite and convenient, The Best of Both Worlds hangs together as the show’s best two-part adventure until at least Chain of Command in the sixth season.

A Number One fan?

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Commander, Earth, episode, family, home, jean-luc picard, locutus, locutus of borg, Michael Piller, picard, review, Riker, sector 001, shelby, star trek, star trek: the next generation, Television, the borg, wolf 359 | 14 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Ron Jones Project & The Best of Both Worlds OST (Review)

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

In 1991, The Best of Both Worlds got a CD soundtrack release. It was incomplete, running just under forty-seven minutes. (Five minutes music would be included on The Ron Jones Project and 2013 would see a release of a more complete two CD set running fifty-five minutes.) However, this was the first soundtrack album released for Star Trek: The Next Generation since Dennis McCarthy’s score to Encounter at Farpoint in 1988.

The music for The Best of Both Worlds is iconic. In the Regeneration documentary included with the blu ray release of the episode, Seth McFarlane jokes about hiring Ron Jones on the strength of that closing sting. The impressive orchestral score to The Best of Both Worlds remains one of the most instantly recognisable soundtracks in the Star Trek canon. And yet it was written by a composer who was on his way out the door.

Of the twelve discs in The Ron Jones Project soundtrack collection covering the episodes scored by Jones, only three include scores for episodes that aired after the second part of The Best of Both Worlds. (And the third-to-last disc only features one episode from the fourth season.) So, what happened?

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: bobw, film score monthly, Jones, music, Rick Berman, ron jones, star trek, star trek: the next generation, the best of both worlds, the borg, the next generation, the ron jones project, tng | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 3 (Review)

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Darren

The third season is on a very short list of contenders for “the best season of Star Trek ever produced.” Maybe one or two other Star Trek: The Next Generation seasons make the list, maybe the first two seasons of the original Star Trek and maybe two seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. From beginning to end, the third season of The Next Generation hangs together remarkably well, churning out consistently entertaining adventures and several runs of truly classic episodes.

There are two main stretches in the season where the show produces episodes that could legitimately be ranked as the best of The Next Generation. The first comes around the midpoint of the season, from Yesterday’s Enterprise through to Sins of the Father, all episodes that would not look out of place on a “top ten episodes of The Next Generation” list. The second runs from Tin Man through to Sarek. And that’s ignoring the wonderful gems scattered throughout the season, from The Defector and The Hunted through to The Best of Both Worlds.

Of course, one of the most impressive aspects of the third season is the fact that the consistent quality visible on the television screen belies the chaos unfolding behind the scenes. The third season was a deeply troubled year of television, with plenty of unfortunate conflicts and moments of sheer desperation from the creative team. Perhaps the most wonderful demonstration of how far the show has come is obvious in the consistent professional quality of the output.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: 1989, 1990, characters, gene roddenberry, Ira Steven Behr, Michael Piller, ronald d. moore, sexism, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the enext generation, subversion, Television, the borg, the next generation, utopianism | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Vendetta by Peter David (Review)

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

Vendetta was published in May 1991, which is an astonishingly quick turnaround for a novel building on the events of The Best of Both Worlds, which was broadcast in 1990. Vendetta is billed as “the giant novel”, in the spirit of Jean Lorrah’s Metamorphosis – the March 1990 novel building off The Measure of a Man and advertised as “the first giant novel.”

It’s offers a suitably epic premise – the Enterprise caught between the Borg and the Doomsday Machine with the fate of the universe at stake.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: borg, Comics, Doomsday Machine, peter david, richard arnold, star trek, star trek: the next generation, the borg, the doomsday machine, the next generation, vendetta | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Best of Both Worlds, Part I (Review)

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Darren

So we’re here. It’s the end of the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the season where the show really kicked into gear. After a decidedly uneven first and second seasons, where moments of brilliance blended with hours of tedium, the show had really pulled its act together. Even the weakest hours of the season where still competently produced, the average quality increased significantly and the stronger episodes just hit it out of the park.

The Best of Both Worlds is really just the cherry on top. But it’s one hell of a cherry.

He’s looking right at us…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: best of both worlds, borg, borg collective, cliffhangers, colonialism, fans, jean-luc picard, locutus, Michael Piller, patrick stewart, picard, Q Who, star trek, star trek: the next generation, Television, the best of both worlds | 8 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Transfigurations (Review)

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Darren

In way, what is so interesting about Transfigurations is how incredibly generic the story is. It’s a cookie-cutter Star Trek story, a collection of the narrative elements one associates with the franchise – mysterious aliens, energy beings, metaphors about tolerance and fear of the unknown – all loosely sorted into something resembling a linear story.

There’s none of the cheeky subversive charm from early in the third season. This isn’t a deconstruction of “energy being” stories in the way that The Bonding was a deconstruction of “red shirt” deaths. This is just a straight-up story about an alien species learning an important lesson about tolerance, dressed up in a science-fiction mystery, with a romantic subplot thrown in for Beverly because the show hasn’t really done much with Gates McFadden since she returned.

The result is as bland as you might expect, with a sense that everybody involved was just exhausted by the production difficulties that had haunted the third season, and desperately trying to make it to the hiatus. Transfigurations is nowhere near as bad as The Price or Ménage à Troi. It’s just forgettable and average.

Mellow yellow…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Beverly Crusher, Crusher, energy beings, evolution, john doe, Mutants, mutations, René Echevarria, star trek, star trek: the next generation, third season, transfigurations, x-men | Leave a comment »

Star Trek/X-Men: Star TreX (Review)

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Darren

We’ll be supplementing our coverage of the episodes with some additional materials – mainly novels and comics and films. This is one such entry.

Being honest, I’m surprised that it took this long for one of the comic book publishers working with a Star Trek license to come up with the idea of crossing over Star Trek with one of their comic book properties. After all, Barbara Hambly’s Ishmael crossed the franchise over with Here Come the Brides, another piece of cult sixties television. Crossing Star Trek over with a decidedly pulpy comic book franchise was really the next logical step.

Indeed, while DC Comics would eventually get involved in the publication of a crossover with The Legion of Superheroes, I remain surprised that they never tried to cross the franchise over with Green Lantern while they were publishing monthly Star Trek comic books. Both franchises are products of a sixties outlook on space travel and on America’s post-war role in the wider world (and, well, universe), and they’d be tailor-made to fit together.

However, it wasn’t until Marvel managed to secure the Star Trek license in 1996 that our heroes had their first encounter with a proper superhero franchise.

X-over…

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Filed under: Comics, The Original Series | Tagged: star trek, star trex, x-men | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Ménage à Troi (Review)

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Darren

So, here we are again. We almost made it. Two episodes away from the series finalé and… boom! Lwaxana Troi episode. Sometimes you just can’t catch a break.

Still, this is the point where we reflect on how far the show has come in a season. Ménage à Troi is hardly the best episode of the season, but then Lwaxana episodes rarely are. We need to compare like with like, to get a sense of how far the show has come along. It’s not enough to say that Star Trek: The Next Generation is a better show when it made Ménage à Troi than it was when it made Manhunt or Haven, but it’s close.

Ménage à Troi is a problematic episode, much like Manhunt and Haven are both problematic episodes. There’s a weird awkward dated quality to the show’s attempts to do relationship humour – a vaguely unsettling sexist undertone about how confident older women are inherently hilarious and its great fun to see them involved in embarrassing relationships. Unfortunately, Ménage à Troi continues that trend.