Yesterday’s Enterprise | the m0vie blog

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Q-Squared by Peter David (Review)

Posted on February 18, 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.

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

Q-Squared is probably Peter David’s most ambitious Star Trek: The Next Generation novel. “Q-Squared is almost my challenge to the reader to keep up with me,” he boasted in Voyages of the Imagination. Essentially a meditation on reality and free will within that construct, Q-Squared is a breathtakingly confident endeavour. It’s an interesting reflection on the potentiality embraced by The Next Generation, the broadening of the franchise’s perspective to embrace the best of all possible worlds.

Q-Squared hit stands in early July 1994, just over a month after All Good Things… brought the curtain down on The Next Generation for one last time. It’s tempting to look at the two stories as companion pieces. All Good Things… is an exploration of the time that the crew spent together – jumping backwards and forwards to trace our heroes over the course of their lives. In contrast, Q-Squared jumps sideways – looking at what might have been, or what could have been.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: crossover, dimensions, jack crusher, jean-luc picard, pad, peter david, q, star trek, star trek: the next generation, time, timelines, Trelane, Yesterday's Enterprise | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Last Generation (Review)

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Darren

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

The Last Generation, a five-issue miniseries written by Andrew Steven Harris and illustrated by the wonderful Gordon Purcell, feels like a companion piece to Harris’ Alien Spotlight: Borg issue. Both are essentially stories about the morality of using time travel to re-write history, and both can be read as a reflection on Star Trek continuity as a whole.

Published from November 2008 through to March 2009, The Last Generation feels like something of a preemptive rebuttal to JJ Abrams’ May 2009 reboot of Star Trek. Much like Alien Spotlight: Borg before it, it feels like a conscious attempt to vindicate and validate the franchise from the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation onwards.

Given the fact that the “reboot-in-all-but-name” back-to-Kirk nature of Abrams’ film was openly discussed well ahead of the release, it’s hard not to read The Last Generation and Alien Spotlight: Borg as protests against the decision to set the clock back on the franchise and start with Kirk yet again.

A shot in the dark…

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Filed under: Comics, The Next Generation | Tagged: Federation, khitomer, klingons, star trek, star trek: the next generation, war, Yesterday's Enterprise | 1 Comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Yesterday’s Enterprise (Review)

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Darren

Yesterday’s Enterprise is one of the best-loved pieces of Star Trek ever produced. Its inclusion is a given in absolutely any “best of” poll being run for Star Trek: The Next Generation or even the franchise as a whole. A rather thoughtful piece of high-concept science-fiction exploring the importance of the right people in the right time, Yesterday’s Enterprise is proof that The Next Generation has truly come of age. After two years of wandering in the wilderness, the show has finally found its feet.

Of course, the production of Yesterday’s Enterprise was quite traumatic. The story and script went through multiple iterations between the original pitch and the version presented on the screen. The episode was written by pretty much the entire writing staff over the Thanksgiving weekend, racing against the clock to get it finished. Due to scheduling issues with Denise Crosby and Whoopi Goldberg, it was filmed in late December instead of early January.

As with so much of the third season, there’s a sense that the episode was held together by chewing gum and rubber bands. However, also like most of the third season, that sense only comes from those delving into the behind-the-scenes stories. Looking at the episode itself, this was a show on the top of its game.

The battle bridge…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: alternate reality, Denise Crosby, enterprise, Federation, Ira Steven Behr, klingons, natasha yar, romulans, ronald d. moore, star trek, star trek: the next generation, Tasha Yar, war, Yar, Yesterday's Enterprise | 11 Comments »

Star Trek: The Lost Era – Well of Souls by Ilsa J. Bick (Review)

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Darren

This November and December, 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.

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

Well of Souls is a story of the Enterprise-C, the ship introduced in Yesterday’s Enterprise. One of the best-received episodes in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Yesterday’s Enterprise established Rachel Garrett’s ship as the troubled Enterprise, the tragic flagship, the doomed space craft. Ilsa J. Bick builds on that characterisation in Well of Souls, one small story from some point in Garrett’s command of the Federation flagship.

While Well of Souls feels like a rather unconventional Star Trek novel, it is charming in its own way. Bick connects her tale to the themes of Well of Souls, suggesting a troubled ship manned by a struggling crew. The novel returns time and again to the theme of unfortunate choices, the weight of making the best decision of the options open. Unlike Kirk or Picard, Bick seems to suggest, this version of the iconic starship doesn’t get that many lucky breaks, with her crew repeatedly forced to accept the least bad of a selection of unappetising choices.

Well of Souls is a thoughtful, introspective piece. It doesn’t flow or pace itself as well as it might, but Bick crafts a compelling picture the never-the-less. While not quite the best of the Lost Era tie-in novels, it’s ambitious and insightful. It lacks the energy of Serpents Among the Ruins or The Art of the Impossible, but it’s still a very worthy read for anybody looking to sketch out a gap in the Star Trek mythos.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Christopher Pike, Cold War, Ilsa J. Bick, indiana jones, james t. kirk, John Harriman, kirk, Klingon, picard, spock, Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Original Series, star trek vi: the undiscovered country, star trek: enterprise, Starfleet, StarTrek, United States, vietnam, War on Drugs, William Shatner, Yesterday's Enterprise | 1 Comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Enemy (Review)

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Darren

The Enemy is just a fantastic piece of television. The third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation has maintained an impressive consistency up to this point, despite all the difficulties bubbling away behind the scenes. However, The Enemy is the point where everything seems to have finally settled down and the show is truly comfortable churning out episodes of this sort of quality.

It’s a very typical Star Trek plot, with one of our leads trapped on the planet surface and forced to team up with an enemy soldier in order to survive. It’s a very standard morality tale about how the enemy is not as different as we might like to think; it’s an exploration – in a very Star Trek style – of how two people can overcome their differences in order to survive a suitably desperate situation.

The Enemy is a demonstration of just how well-oiled The Next Generation had become at this point in time, and how even the most standard of plots could be executed with considerable skill.

The show’s quality is climbing…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Brannon Braga, David Carson, Defiant Ones, Enemy, Geordi La Forge, Next Generation, picard, Relativism, Rick Berman, Romulan, Star Trek Next Generation, StarTrek, William Riker, Worf, Yesterday's Enterprise | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Marvel Comics) #3-4 – The Cancer Within (Review)

Posted on January 2, 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.

Poor Doctor Pulaski. She seems to have just disappeared from the canon. First season casualty Tasha Yar seemed to haunt to the show, returning for Yesterday’s Enterprise while her daughter become a recurring foe from The Mind’s Eye onwards. Even Wesley popped back every once in a while following his departure from the series. Pulaski, on the other hand, remains something of a phantom.

Barring an audible reference to her made in the background during the Star Trek: Voyager finalé Endgame, she disappears from the franchise without so much as a peep at the end of Shades of Grey. She isn’t even referenced by name in the first episode of the third season to air (Evolution) or the first produced (The Ensigns of Command). While Beverly Crusher’s return is used as a plot point for Wesley, we only get the most fleeting of references to Pulaski in Who Watches the Watchers?

While this can easily be explained by the complex relationship that Diana Muldaur seems to have with Star Trek: The Next Generation. She has suggested the atmosphere on set was decidedly unfriendly, so the fact that Pulaski doesn’t return should not be that much of a surprise. What is interesting is the general apathy that the expanded universe seems to have for Pulaski. While even guest characters seem to get their own back stories and development in novels and comics, Pulaski is treated as a decidedly minor character in the Star Trek canon, reduced to guest spots and small appearances.