Something Borrowed, Something Green

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (Something Borrowed, Something Green)

The kind of episodes where Trek explored one of their previously established races, be that first tier (Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans), second tier (Borg, Cardassians, Bajorans), or third tier (Breen, Andorians, Orions), seemed to have been largely lost to a different era of storytelling, probably due to the increased serialisation which left little room for cultural exploration when mysteries and buildup to the next cliffhanger were the order of the day. This is one of those rare examples of a modern Trek episode that does feature, if not quite examine a culture, albeit in the extremes of silliness over reality as befitting the series in which it was made. Would I have liked a properly serious examination of Orion society in an episode of 'Picard' that gave us a much stronger sense of their culture than we'd seen before? Of course, but the Orion plots they've done on 'LD' have served reasonably well to expand what has always been a race lacking in exploration. Perhaps it was because they were outlandishly green and therefore tied to the famous image of Vina from the original pilot, 'The Cage' (or more specifically, in the spirit of 'LD,' 'The Menagerie' and its use of the material since 'The Cage' didn't get seen commonly until the late-80s!). It set people wondering about such an animal-like humanoid that was so strikingly costumed and coloured - in reality, Vina was only playing an Orion (an Orion Animal Woman, to be precise!), and though it was a striking image, it wasn't necessarily something to expand upon.

That never really changed, the Orions were the also-rans of 'TOS,' showing up once more (a different shade - the first hint of depth to the race, if you can call it that), bypassed in the films and 'TNG,' where even the similarly 'image more than substance' race of Andorians were at least seen. Mentioned in 'DS9,' with the Orion Syndicate even coming into the odd story, they were still entirely absent onscreen, presumably as part of the Berman-era edict for keeping humanoid aliens more human-like, or simply less wacky than 1950s B-film sci-fi that many in 'TOS' could be argued to have their DNA in. It wasn't until a new era opened up and things became a little more connected to 'TOS' with 'Enterprise' that the race was finally shown, even if not greatly explored and from then on they've appeared in most Treks, be that live-action, films or animation. It made sense for this series to include an Orion in the main cast as it was trying to ape the style of 90s Treks, and they tended to include at least one alien from a race that could do with learning more about, like Trill, Bajorans and Ferengi in 'DS9,' or simply connecting to Alpha Quadrant races with Klingons and Vulcans in 'Voyager,' so Tendi fit right in, especially as she was, in common with the usual Trek trope, an outsider both in Starfleet for being uncommon, but also for not quite fitting into her own people's ways.

Can we say they've developed her to the same extent as those 90s characters? No, of course not, the series is at heart a short, comedy series, they don't get a lot of time to do that kind of detail, but at least it's there. In fact I'd say this is a good example of a story which uses most of the characters' existing history and the knowledge we've learned of them to enhance it, as you'd expect by this time in the series' lifespan: T'Lyn, quite the fresh, new face in relative terms is used nicely - we may not know all that much about her personally, but she's here to represent Vulcans and their unemotional nature, and once again she's given some nice lines ("Celebrating a lack of purpose is illogical," when Tendi and Mariner are expressing pleasure at the thought of finishing their work; or describing Boimler and Rutherford's new rapport as roommates with, "Their emotional closeness is unpleasant"), that really express the Vulcan attitude far more than we've seen in any other modern Trek, to the extent I'm becoming enthusiastic about her involvement in a given episode, in a way she would most disapprove of. True, she also goes down the sickly 'you are who you choose to be' route when Tendi's unhappy about her pirate assassin heritage, both cliched and not necessarily true, although quite Trekky in sentiment, but she retains her calm and poise at all times within this very expressive, violent culture she finds herself in (perhaps the only thing missing was seeing the similarities between Orion and ancient Vulcan culture, so they didn't hit everything possible).

Things are slightly different in that the colleagues she visits Orion with aren't teasing her or butting up against her Vulcan nature and attitudes, something that happened a lot with Spock and Tuvok and which had the side effect of showing how cool Vulcans really are that they can deal with all this stuff, including peer pressure, and still come out apparently comfortable in any situation, seemingly effortlessly (one reason they're my favourite race). My favourite moment for T'Lyn was when Tendi was fighting with D'Erica, her sister, and she's trapped, her sister saying Tendi abandoned her for science, and only then does T'Lyn stand up as if she's about to get involved, only paused by Mariner! So true to the person and her race, funny at the same time, even though it wasn't played up, just a small observation on character. And she did the old thing of a Vulcan relenting on strict protocol and procedure when she realises it's more fitting to the moment to abandon a report made for the purposes of curiosity at the expense of her friend's concerns, even coming up with the argument it would be unethical to submit such a report without the subject's consent - not sure I agree as it wouldn't be objective if that were the case, but again, I liked the sentiment, and how it was done with T'Lyn having to raise her voice over the sound of the ship flying in atmosphere, her hair ruffled while she remains the unflinching eye of the storm, cool and calm as ever.

Boimler and Rutherford were similarly treated quite well, as utterly silly as their storyline was: they're calling themselves 'Brutherford' since they're best mates now they live in the same Quarters without the girls (room to display their Mirror Archer and Spock action figures or model DS9 which they couldn't do when restricted to corridor living), yet they're also quarrelling over little things such as who gets to spray the bonsai tree. The arguments were an example of a well-observed knowledge of the characters and their unique history: Rutherford says his implant tells him exactly when and how much the tree needs, while Boimler makes the equally valid point he has green fingers from growing up on the vineyard, nice they're bringing things up intelligently rather than just throwing them in. That they resolve their differences by acting out Samuel Clemens on the Holodeck is just great fun as a Trekference to 'TNG,' but also becomes this surreal thing in its own right where they later suggest it as a mediation solution to a strained diplomatic situation with Coqqor the Chalnoth, where both Captain and adversary face off dressed as Clemens! It's completely ludicrous, nonsensical, and yet has a kind of internal logic that fits right in this series - crucially it doesn't work, ending up with Coqqor becoming violent until he hears of the bonsai and then after eating it and drinking the spray bottle, acquiesces to their demand to study the nebula. Even that little scene in their Quarters had attention to continuity since Shaxs had just been chucked over by the Chalnoth in the Holodeck so Kayshon is in his place here for Security - we don't know what happened to Shaxs but can assume he was injured, and that it happens offscreen allows our imagination to fill in the details.

Even the pre-credits teaser which continues the season's ongoing arc of various races' ships and crews being apparently destroyed ties in to the main plot of the episode and subtly furthers the arc since this is the first time there's been any acknowledgment by one of our characters (Freeman), that a ship has been lost - it didn't make sense to me that the Captain would be coming personally to tell Tendi she'd been given leave of absence to attend her sister's wedding, until we learn there's a diplomatic angle to it with Starfleet wanting to be cautious after the recent ship's disappearance. I'm not sure why Starfleet would care about keeping in good relations with a criminal organisation (it seems to suggest the Orion Syndicate does run their home planet, with Tendi part of the fifth most powerful family), but as far as it goes it made sense for our characters, at least. Not everything about the episode works so well, it all goes very 'Star Wars' with the sweeping orchestral 'here's a new planet' swoop over Orion showing the shuttle coming in, but at least they made up for it later with some proper Trek danger music when our little band makes an old hijacked Federation starship operational to get back in time for the wedding (unlikely it would be so easy to get off the ground, but I did like the detail it's an old-style of vessel like the one Seven of Nine's parents used, the SS Raven, fitting it to an older time period).

Wasn't so keen on all the girly talk such as at the Orion night club, as much as it's a parody of all we know of Orion culture previously, and there are some nice little jokes based on Trekferences surrounding the culture, with the best being Mariner repeating Tendi's obfuscation about how pheromones were made up by Starfleet to explain how a Captain could be taken out by some Orion showgirls (they don't mention Captain Archer or the NX-01 by name, but it's clearly referring to 'Bound,' one of the few Orion episodes in 'Enterprise'), so I enjoyed the obscure humour. All the stuff about it actually being a female-controlled society comes up even though it seems like the men are in charge (the majority female crew of the Orion ship in the teaser, or Tendi's Mother seeming to have more pull than her Father), and the raider crew even talk about how someone just got metal plates and bolts stuck to their shaved head (something we never see other than in their 'Enterprise' iteration which was uniquely brought to the table as a new aesthetic of Orion culture since we'd never seen the males before, other than the silly 'TAS' version!). I like that we do get all these different shades of green, covering the gamut of previous appearances (something they should've done for the Klingons with the flathead, crustacean-head, bumpy-head and dome-heads of various productions). Perhaps we still don't delve all that deeply into the culture, it takes many episodes and subjects to do that, and while it wasn't quite as good as 'We'll Always Have Tom Paris,' it was on the right lines, and Tendi always works quite well as this reluctant expert in combat and nefarious activities.

There weren't many issues, perhaps having T'Lyn along helped the writing to remain more logical (not that it's necessarily helped before...), but I did have a couple of mere observations: Tendi talks about them wanting photos of them in their wedding outfits and we even see some of the photos taken at the wedding at the end, but would they really use photos at this stage? I know the Doctor on 'Voyager' was really into holo-photography so he could show his 2D images on the 3D Holodeck (which never made much sense to me - why would you create two-dimensional images if you can show them in three dimensions?), but it's like they're just modern people with tablets or phones and the digital photos they've taken! Also, with T'Lyn's PADD that she throws out of the ship so her report won't be read, wouldn't it constantly backup to the nearest Starfleet computer automatically? I'm just speculating here, but that would make sense, though in this case she may not have been near the Cerritos enough for that to be the case even if that's what happens with the technology, and the ship they were in, though Federation, may not have been operational in all areas (I loved the 'Voyager' look of the consoles and design!). And what about the Holodeck exit: Rutherford enters at one end of the steamer's bar, but when he and Boimler leave, the exit appears right at their table. I'd assume it was for timing reasons, and of course the room could shift around, but I found it distracting since the exit usually has a set location in a program.

Mildly disappointing the Chalnoth wasn't voiced by J.G. Hertzler as I initially thought, even though it's a shame that when they do use him for various roles, it's never the actual, real Martok... But another 'DS9' actor does return, and one who'd been one of the few on that series to do a voice-only role: Debra Wilson! She played Captain Cusack in 'The Sound of Her Voice' ('Her' being her), and while I didn't recognise the voice (and I'm assuming the rules for actresses in animation is the same as in live action that you can only have one person with that name, so it must be her), it's nice to realise another longtime Trek performer has made it into the modern era, though I assume it was completely unrelated to her having been in a Trek before or they might have woven in a subtle joke about her previous role. I don't know who Z'oto was, so it couldn't have been a substantial role, but still, the more connections to the old actors the better for me. It seemed the season was finally on the right track, getting closer to the quality I was expecting...

**

Magic Pockets

 

 

Amiga 1200, Magic Pockets (1991) game

Why do I do this to myself? I've had a run of pretty average games in recent months so I should probably have gone for a certified winner or at least something that was relatively easy, but instead, on a whim I fancied playing this game as one of few that would actually work on a 1200. It's a 2D platformer of the kind you have to complete in one sitting, which means many sessions of getting just that little bit further before losing the limited lives and plunging all the way back to the beginning again! No passwords, no saves, not even infinite continues as in 'Aunt Arctic Adventure,' just the long, hard, painful slog of trial and error... The way the lives work in this game is that you get five at the start of a level and if you lose them you have three continues. You can pick up baby bottles to refill one life or milk bottles which will max you out to five again, and if you can scrape by to the Exit you'll be refilled again at the start of the next level. And at every 100,000 points your lives also refill to maximum (and your weapon comes out faster and more numerously, be it whirlwinds, clouds, ice blocks or snowballs). But there's no way to increase the number of continues you have so you have to be very careful not to lose that last life because that really will set you back and lower your chances of progression.

Why am I going on about the lives? Because they're the gauge by which you measure how likely you'll get anywhere in the game - though the 100,000 point marker seems like an encouragement to go for as many points as possible rather than the shortest or safest route, there really is next to no incentive in that direction since you can't control when your life will be refilled, so you could easily 'waste' the achievement by reaching that many points when you've already got full lives, which is very annoying. I learned it's much better to simply play it safe, don't go out of your way in search of a high score, concentrate on preserving those lives as long as possible, keeping track of how close you are to unlocking more milk, and hopefully making it to the end of a level without using a continue. When I say route, there aren't really multiple ways through levels, it's pretty linear, but you can go off in slight deviations which may house more goodies, but unless you're in need of another life it's rarely worth the exploration and replaying levels over and over allowed me to determine the shortest route through each level making it slightly less of a chore to get through. According to the manual there is a way of doing something in the first level of each World which will warp you to the first of the next World, but I have no idea what it was you're supposed to do: I couldn't find any hidden passages in The Cave, I tried destroying every enemy in the level, but nothing I did made it apparent how to find this mysterious warp capability. I even got as many Transport Helmets as I could, and on the third was taken to a cave housing a single bronze chalice - I thought that would be it, but no, even then I never warped...

As it is, I got World 1 down to about fifteen minutes, which is five levels and a bicycle race against some blue rock ogres, though it didn't matter if you won that or not. The Jungle was much harder and took me around half an hour to get through the six levels there, but then you face this huge hairy gorilla in a boxing match and after forty-five minutes to get there he'd wipe me out in seconds so it was very demoralising to spend all that time with no reward. It was at this point I began to seriously question if I had a chance of beating the game if I found it so hard and time-consuming even to get to the halfway point and became quite disillusioned by it. I hate to abandon a game, especially for being too hard, but I was seriously wondering if I may have to. Fortunately I have a good temperament when it comes to repetitive tasks and eventually found a way to beat the gorilla: you can't really avoid his attacks so you just have to go all in and whenever you've been hit you have to run over while you have a few seconds of invulnerability to lay as many hits on him as you can, and it was only around nine before he was beaten. From then on I had hope I could eventually succeed, helped by World 3 being relatively easier. The Cave was easiest, as you'd expect from the first level, third World, The Lake I'd rank second (though you have to take it slow and keep your wits about you, especially when dropping down to a part of the level you can't see), fourth and final World, The Mountain I'd have said third originally, with Jungle being the toughest, but it took me so many attempts to clear Mountain it showed it really was the hardest, as you'd expect from a final World: times when you'd start a level and be unable to escape a snowman, or the final level proper where you have all manner of nasties and almost no way to escape!

When I finally did it, succeeded at one of the toughest games I've played, completing it, getting through that final section after the last level, bouncing past the evil snowmen, dodging the bubble as it pursued me to the final Exit, I thought I'd experience euphoria, since it had been almost exactly a month to the day I'd begun this game. Some games you play for fun, others you play for the challenge. This became 100% the latter and 0% the former - it didn't begin that way, but it was such a tough, unforgiving master that although I made progress over time, getting to later and later levels, it was an upward curve at the end that felt like climbing a literal mountain: I'd get to level 25, but then there was one more. I'd reach level 26 and suffer instant death after all the Bad Things (as enemies were designated - each World had it's most dangerous, the rock ogres in 1, the wasps in 2, the pearl-spitting oysters in 3, and snowmen chucking deadly snowballs in 4), swarm you and there's nowhere to go - until you realise the best tactic is to rush past them, accepting damage and then leaping up to the first platform, jumping off it to create the spin attack which will take out a few around you, then doing it again until you'd dispatched them all, carefully navigating what was otherwise a small, simple vertical level.

Even then it's not over, you have the final section of a walled off area with pits containing a Bad Thing in each, and the ledge between where another is, but if you wait too long the dreaded bubble comes for you with instant death (where in every other level it merely trapped you for a few seconds). So then you think you have to get through as quickly as possible, but no, there's a dead end, so what do you do? Ah, of course, you must create a Transport Helmet - to do that you need to kill a certain number of enemies which cycles through each power-up until you get a Silver Star, a quite unique system since you can go between simply shooting an enemy or trapping him within your full-power projectile, until you touch it and it turns into either sweets or power-up. You do the same until you can get a Gold Star and only then do you transport out to the last of the last areas with bouncing snowmen to deal with and a run to the Exit where all you're rewarded with is The Bitmap Kid standing over the four collected toys from each World to the sound of applause. Applause is nice, but not even a new piece of music over the scene? No end credits scrolling down? No message to tell you to turn off your computer and go to sleep, turn off your computer and go to sleep? No. Anticlimax isn't the word for it, but if I'm expecting too much (it is from 1991...), I was at least (and at last), relieved! Also from 1991: glitches such as falling down to a part of an earlier level you can't get out of... urk! Fortunately rare, though.

It wouldn't have been possible unless the game had been uncharacteristically kind: I only had two continues left (I thought I only had one), so was expecting to be finished, but for some reason, maybe because I scored to the nearest 100,000 points during that final section (though I don't know why that would make any difference because it didn't in any other level, other than powering up your projectiles, but for whatever reason...), it never took away another continue and it was down to that, and that alone, I was able to finally put this to rest after around twenty-seven years (it didn't take me that long, that's just the earliest record I have of playing it!), applying adult patience where childish attention span and lack of application denied me much progress back in the 90s. The infinite continues were entirely necessary, I found, because after more than two hours to reach the final section it would've been completely dispiriting to discover I'd have to work out the exact arrangement of kills in order to get my Silver and Gold Stars to unlock the Helmet and transport out of there. I don't know how many attempts I made, but it must have been almost an hour of experimentation until I finally hit on the correct sequence, since there were only a certain number of enemies so if you didn't get it right early on (I think it was something like kill first snowman, trap next enemy, repeat), you wouldn't be able to go through the power-up sequence. If you think you only had two or three bites at the cherry I don't know if even my saintly gaming patience would have stood having to be repeatedly stymied.

It reminded me of another Amiga title, 'The Legend of Kyrandia,' a Point-and-Click puzzler in which a particular puzzle relied on the most extreme trial and error of collecting items and putting them in the right order - not fun, a cynical way to extend a game's life by throwing in a ridiculously hard and time-consuming struggle. That's how this would have been - in that case I looked up the solution in an old Amiga magazine, in this I was fortunate the game had pity on me for no real reason, so maybe I could be said to have cheated (though I staunchly refused to look up the solution for this game, nor even the time-shortening shortcut that supposedly allows you to jump from the first level of each World to the next, which would've made it a lot easier), but I stubbornly refused to give in! It may have been because the specific disk I was using was a 'cracked' copy, so maybe they altered the code somehow (I had a legitimate copy, but unfortunately it was a bit glitchy and wouldn't let me get past a certain point so had to stick with the unofficial). I know when I first played it on this play-through, when I got to the second World, The Jungle, I was somehow awarded infinite continues, but I had no idea how I'd activated it since it never occurred again and I was forced into perseverance and finding the quickest way through each of the twenty-six levels.

This was yet another Amiga game I'd played occasionally when growing up, but had never got out of the second World (I wasn't even sure I ever made it to the Exit at the end of the first level until I checked past records!). I had much less patience and skill in those days and unlike most platform games I played on the system the main character was so lumpen and handled like a breeze block, clattering to the ground if you jumped from higher than one platform up. I came to regard the Kid's ability to fall from any height without damage (a rare choice in the genre, in my experience), as an essential tactic for success, especially since he becomes a weapon when flying through the air (unless you forget that when wearing certain power-ups, such as the diving helmet, he won't spin, leaving you more open to attack), and when he's clattering across the ground at the end of his fall, usefully taking out any enemies he touches. But he was still unwieldy to control, though I wouldn't say this was yet another game with issues of poor control, it just takes a little time to get used to the idea of using his pocket weapon to bounce him up in the air and turn him into a weapon himself. Having to replay the early levels so many times means you also become proficient at them, knowing exactly what best to do, and when, and actually the greatest threat to your lives is complacency and being in a rush to get through the areas you know as quickly as possible when a laidback, but alert approach is more likely to succeed.

What lessened the appeal back in the day was a complete lack of music in the levels, something I was used to in other examples of the genre (although, saying that, the best ever 2D platformer, 'Flashback,' mostly had no background music also), but I came to see it as somewhat useful as it is beneficial to hear the sound effects, such as when you launch your pocket weapon out into the unknown and hear it suck up an enemy or stun them, so you know there's a platform or an enemy offscreen. I'd still rather hear some jaunty tunes as I platform, but it wasn't as much of a put-off as it had been. The graphics are really the area where the game attracts - I just love that kind of pixel artwork and sprites, it's all very beautiful. Not that it was in any way spectacular, nothing like 'Flashback,' the pinnacle on the Amiga (in every way: control, music, effects, visuals, story), little more than functional, but still nice to look at and as always with these very old games that I never got very far with, a real pleasure to at last see later levels for the first time all these years after, connecting with a moment from my own gaming history of so long ago, touching on childhood in a new way. And that's the appeal of something like this. Not that in itself it's a good experience (though satisfying to beat), but that it takes you back. It would still be a better use of my time to play something I know I love, such as 'The Settlers,' but coming back around in later life and completing things I started, or played briefly or occasionally, gives a strong sense of closing the circle as I get older and the young me would no doubt be impressed and overjoyed to see himself succeed at something like that so many years in the future!

For that reason I don't give it the bare minimum of one star, even though there were times when I just wanted it to end - my palms were getting red from holding the Joystick, I wasn't even sure if the Fire Button would hold out and I'm sure the excessive use did make it less responsive the more I played, and even now I'm not entirely happy I had to rely on the game's uncharacteristic generosity in giving me so many chances at the end, nor that I didn't take the time to kill all the bouncing snowmen in the last moment since I just wanted to be sure of finishing for good and all, but like so many games you force yourself to spend time with and power through the hard times, I'm sure it will remain with me as a pleasant memory overall. But I won't be playing it in another thirty years with my no doubt arthritic hands.

**

In The Cradle of Vexilon

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (In The Cradle of Vexilon)

An improvement after the last one, I was almost tempted to boost it up an extra star, but for a couple of reasons, namely the foul-mouthed Betazoid Gift Box (when it first appeared I wished Armin Shimerman had been brought in to voice it since he did the original on 'TNG,' but then I was glad they hadn't wasted him on such a sweary character), and the undercutting of the optimistic, if slightly naive lesson at the end of the story where our people are sitting around talking about the events and realising it's better to assume the best about people rather than the worst (even though in reality, while I'd go with that, you have to be wise enough to see the difference and that sometimes people are being their worst!), don't mistake people's intentions based on how you feel (a good message for internet posting, perhaps...). It was refreshing to have a genuinely good message, but then Dirk (in his fourth appearance), the guy who's been giving them such unpalatable tasks to do as scanning every isolinear chip in a room (including the... gasp, second layer!), shows he actually was hazing them as they first thought. I don't like that kind of nasty humour when the goodness and true character of the Starfleet world is made to look as cynically unpleasant as the real world. There can be misunderstandings and misrepresentation, but I don't want to see wilful maliciousness for the sake of a joke between superior officers, that's just the kind of attitude that sinks the higher nature of Trek in this series, and it stinks.

For all that, it does at least clear up a couple of problems I had: Dirk claims he got trapped in a Wadi Chula game when he was a child, but this is set in the early 2380s, the Wadi were first encountered in 2369 during 'DS9' Season 1, so that's got to be fourteen years at most, and with Dirk's high forehead and higher rank I got the impression he's around thirty. I suppose he could have been treating the word 'kid' to include teens, or maybe he's younger than he looks (it is tricky to tell with animation), but the actual reason his story was fine is because he made it up! That still should have tipped off at least Mariner that there was something fishy, since she served on DS9 in the years after that and should know the timeline of events... The other major nitpick was something else Dirk warned about how if even one of those isolinear chips failed it could be catastrophic for the ship, but we've heard before about Starfleet's famous systems of multiple redundancy (with Klingons its their internal organs, with Starfleet it's their technology!), so that doesn't add up (again, I'd have expected better from Mariner, she was off her game this time), but once again he's just making it up so we can sweep that problem into the Jefferies Tube, too.

It was most enjoyable that they brought back Chula, especially amusing that Rutherford rushes through it, having apparently read all the reports from DS9 senior staff on what it involved (or played it before), and it was lovely to see those sets, characters and tasks recreated in animated form. You see, for many people 'Move Along Home' is one of, if not the worst episode of 'DS9' (I'd probably go with 'Let He Who Is Without Sin...' or 'Profit and Lace,' myself), and so, in the tradition of 'LD' to draw attention to the silliest aspects of Trek of course they're going to bring it back somehow (only this time Rutherford's got to carry around the Gift Box to make it even more ridiculous), just as they like to touch on 'Threshold' from 'Voyager' or the many wacky elements of 'TOS.' But for me, the 'DS9' episode is one of my favourites from the early years - I don't know if it was the first I saw on TV in late 1995, but it would have been one of the earliest and I'm pretty sure I did see it because I always loved the 'Weird Stuff' stories in Trek, that old questioning of reality and being uncertain of whether you could trust in your senses, so it stuck in my mind. I can see what others dislike about it, it is strange, almost cartoonish, but for me, seeing Sisko, Kira and Dax dancing out a hopscotch and singing 'Allamaraine, count to four, Allamaraine, then three more,' is akin to Kirk's crew being forced into undignified horseplay for the amusement of more powerful beings in 'Plato's Stepchildren' - in that case it was more a sense of horror, while in 'DS9' it was the absurdity of seeing these serious people have to humble themselves to solve a problem.

And the fact that it's about solving problems, too, something I adore about Trek and often miss in the modern variations. The point I'm making is that referring to Chula and the Wadi was all about strong Trek connections to me, and I liked the angle of Rutherford treating it as ordinary or commonplace in contrast to the weirdness of its original, sinister and mysterious appearance in 'DS9' and so enhanced my appreciation of a story that I'd been unsure about. There's no teaser for a start, and I quite like it when they do have one, in keeping with the 90s Trek they're often trying to ape, but perhaps in this case it worked better because they didn't try to fit in any scenes connecting the episode to the ongoing arc of ships being attacked and 'disappeared' by a mysterious assailant, so that worked in its favour (knowing what it was about, and how disappointing it turned out to be), and gave them more time to tell their story. I wasn't initially sold as the setup seemed a bit non-Trek sci-fi generica: Corazonia sounds a bit too much like Coruscant of 'Star Wars' (though it may partly be the pronunciation), and the idea of this giant ring world brought to mind the Matt Damon film 'Elysium' (I'm sure it's a staple sci-fi concept, but that's what sprang to mind as relatively recent), then we've got the Captain and Ransom dealing with another planetary computer, this time an environmental system, so it was all a bit too cliched, even if that's one of the points of 'LD' to play with, and in, these tropes.

I'll give them that they did something different with it, it wasn't automatically an evil subjugation machine like Landru (and many others), and really it's more of a setting upon which to hang Boimler's first mission (or errand, as T'Lyn calls it), which teaches him more about command than he's trying to teach the lowly Ensigns under him and ultimately gives him validation through saving the day when he has to clear out his team and take the toughest job himself, getting blown up for his troubles. I do wish there had been more consequence for him, as while it's just as horrible to have to send others to their potential deaths, if not more, having to run into a burning building and getting blown up for your actions is a tough school. It is a cartoon so he just gets blasted into the air and ends up looking like he's been in an explosion from 'Looney Tunes' - all blackened with a bandage on his head. I felt it should've been touch and go for a while in Sickbay, maybe he has to be out of action for a few days otherwise it does look too easy and 'quick, we have to wrap it up in twenty-five minutes, we can't carry it over to the next episode.' But I did enjoy his trials as mission leader with T'Lyn there to provide support as Science Officer (that would make him James T.!), and she was at her best, providing blunt advice and emotionless expression, but not leaping in to force her views on him (other than saving an explosive canister from hitting the ground), which is the kind of cool that only a Vulcan can bring.

His little team was also interesting, with 'Big Murf,' the blue guy (any relation to Murf of 'Prodigy' or completely coincidental? Seeing it written down it's apparently 'Merp'), who could be an animation expression of a Zaldan from 'Coming of Age' in 'TNG' (they weren't blue, but they had webbed hands which made them fishy), some Antipodean girl called Meredith (who'd apparently been in 'Room For Growth'), and Taylor the Kzinti, always fun to see for the link to 'TAS.' You can see their simplicity, yet also growing frustration at Boimler doing everything himself. It was just a nice group setup which I enjoyed and very much felt true to the way Boimler would act when 'disarming a building-sized bomb' as he puts it. It didn't make much sense that the Captain and First Officer would take on the task of fixing a planet-wide computer system themselves, but at least Ransom makes the point that they have Engineers, so why not use them? But Freeman sees it as a chance to use her knowledge of 'Archaic Technology' from the Academy days and almost messes everything up. She does bring down Chief Engineer Billups eventually (mainly for him to tell an Engineer's joke: calling it a classic setup and asking if it's 'Unitronic,' which raised a smile for its weakness - actually there were a few smiles raised throughout the episode, it was generally more pleasantly funny than nasty or horrible and I much prefer that), but it's something he says that inspires her to a solution and of course Boimler is integral in carrying off the fix, so it was good to see the teamwork.

This would seem to be the first we've ever heard of Billups keeping a ferret called Lancelot. It would be nice to learn more about our characters so we can play with the built-up backstory as the series progresses, but that's one issue I have with it, that they don't do enough in that regard, even if they do sometimes. Fill out these secondary characters like 'DS9' and (to an extent), 'Voyager' and 'TNG' did and it only opens up the story possibilities even more and makes for a much more satisfying experience, drawing you into this world. But it's really about the main four (Shaxs didn't even appear this time, which is fine since the 90s Treks wouldn't have every character in every episode, different mixes of characters like Boimler and T'Lyn, and made for more of a feeling of variety), and it works all round. Boimler's insecurities and lack of understanding of the need for formality shows how far he has yet to go, and while he's been promoted, at heart he's still very much a lower decker. I liked what T'Lyn had to say (pearls of wisdom such as 'leading by example has proven to be inefficient,' or, 'danger is an accepted risk of Starfleet duty'), but who had the toughest job in the episode? Rutherford has to go through the Wadi game, Tendi has to rescan all the chips on her own, but Mariner had it worst: she had to keep Dirk from going back to his Quarters where they'd rigged up a Chula set to get back at him, and has to feign interest in his favourite subject of Tellarite Slop Jazz - exactly the sort of thing I imagine non-Trekkers feel when they've set me off talking about Trek, so it rang true and gave me a smile!

One thing I really appreciated and is a shame it stuck out when it should come as standard, was when T'Lyn reminds an Ensign the Lieutenant has given an order and she must obey, when Boimler orders them out and she says they can help. That's exactly the kind of hierarchical status quo I want to see more of when so much in modern Trek it's about people doing what they want or feel is necessary when obedience can be the split second between success or failure, death and life. If I was to nitpick anything else I'd be surprised at our people's excitement at having access to the 'anomaly storage room' since we've seen them dealing with this kind of stuff before (wasn't that how Tendi got turned into a giant scorpion in 'The Spy Humongous'?), even in the very first episode we saw a cupboard full of old bits and pieces of tech (though I was intrigued by the idea of an adventure where Billups was turned into a church tower by wearing a hat!). Was the surreal room Boimler dreams of where the mystical koala sits meant to be a tribute to '2001: A Space Odyssey' or just standard dream room set? They didn't have Shimerman play the Gift Box, but they could at least have said something like it reminding them of Quark as a deeper cut kind of joke that they don't seem to do so much any more, instead of getting the 'humour' from lowering the tone with its swearing 'hilarity' - and they really missed an opportunity for a classic cameo as the voice of the computer, like bringing back Jeffrey Combs for Agimus - how about Marc Alaimo or someone like that (Joel Brooks for the Wadi connection?), but otherwise this episode was on the right track, er, Trek.

**

I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee)

We're back in Season 1 territory with this one - no, not time travel, and not even plot-wise since both stories are about the recent promotions and whether Mariner will keep hers, and if Rutherford can earn one from Billups to level up to his friends. No, it's in tone and content that we've dropped back down to the heady depths of the debut season when it was more about quick-fire Trekferences and gory wackiness than good stories and character. I will give them the credit for still having the occasional nice moment, such as Mariner being confronted with her tendency to self-sabotage her Starfleet career, Ransom warmly saying he's going to support her at the end, or amusing little asides such as Boimler being assigned a room in the full glare of the Nacelle (and top marks for the obvious fix at the end when Rutherford comes in and turns down the light admission through the port, something that should have been done and I was asking why it wasn't!). Still, it's the 'bone-drinking monster' of the cutesy moopsy that's Season 1 all over, just like that disgusting dog creature Tendi befriended back then, Badgey's psychotic tendencies, and probably numerous other examples, it seemed too geared towards the nastiness and grossness this series has loved when in reality that's as far as you can get from the positivity and inspiration of Trek.

As I've no doubt said before in previous reviews when it comes to gore, it's not that Trek never did anything like that before (there's still nothing to compare to the infamously over-the-top end to 'Conspiracy'!), it's that it wasn't done humorously or so forensically - it's not enough that Mariner has to knock her commanding officer Ransom's teeth out to provide 'breadcrumbs' as bait to lure the moopsy back to its cell, they make sure to have the detail of blood on these teeth. It all adds up to a bloodthirstiness, a desire for grossness that doesn't sit well with Trek's ideals. If it were just the gore, that wouldn't be enough to sink the episode or prevent it from reaching its meaningful messages, but it's also excessively sweary, mainly due to Mariner deliberately acting up more than her normally contrarian personality and scorn for authority would deliver. But both of these issues are only a certain level of distaste - there isn't actually a lot of the moopsy sucking animals dry of their bones and it's really only the beaten face of Ransom that makes its mark, and most of the swearing is bleeped out, though is still very obvious and unavoidable. No, it's the third prong of shame, if I can call it that, and this may be the worst culprit for destabilising modern Trek and ruining the reality and power of the franchise in general: the depressingly negative view of humanity.

I'm not a humanist, I don't believe in a human-built Utopia, nor do I see humans morally progressing as times goes on, but rather fluctuating and regressing (especially at the moment), but I do enjoy Trek's fanciful ideals of human achievement and positive development, and therefore I always find it disconcerting and miserable when that optimistic sheen is rubbed away to reveal a cynically 'realistic' view. In this case it's that humans are the cause of all problems - specifically the pair that had been captured or mistakenly imprisoned in Narj's menagerie (why couldn't he let them out as soon as he realised his mistake, is it really that funny to see humans in a cage?), who were the ones behind freeing this moopsy to cause all the chaos so as to kill Narj and gain control of his menagerie to, seemingly, make money. Even though humans are supposedly not motivated by that in the 24th Century! I understand that there can be other humans out there that aren't Starfleet, don't live in the Federation or whatever, but modern Trek seems to love bringing such people and ideas to the fore in all their series', as if they actually prefer to deal with such things rather than live in a world where we can imagine such attitudes don't exist any more. It's not even limited to this alien station, either, with Rutherford getting into competition with a rival Ensign for a quick promotion by impressing Billups.

Competition is good and it's not like we haven't see this sort of thing before, or even interpersonal differences and difficulties, but at least have the rivals come to an understanding at the end, don't leave them enemies. It makes a mockery of actual promotion, too, with Billups just pinning the extra pip on this Livik's uniform only for Tendi to pipe up asking if Rutherford can take his formerly offered promotion for saving the Cerritos and Billups just agrees. It's ludicrous in every way - why couldn't both Livik and Rutherford be promoted? There's a sense of contempt running between the two rivals and despite the fact it's fair for Rutherford to get his promotion (and a good joke that he's previously turned down offers because he wanted to stay with his mates, even if it does suggest Starfleet's fine with people not using their skills to the full, even if we've seen such people before, not just in this series, but such as 'Good Shepherd' on 'Voyager'), stripping it from Livik was not the way to do it and we're supposed to be pleased that this other guy didn't get it because he's 'our' character's rival, so there's another low tone added to what's already gone on.

That's really the heart of the problem with this episode, not as much the content but the ungracious approach to how this world operates and the people that inhabit it, and one reason, as much as I like this series and have warmed to many of the characters (why couldn't we have had a rivalry with an existing character we'd got to know over time - but then it wouldn't be so funny that this sudden upstart appears and thwarts Rutherford's surprisingly taking-promotion-for-granted attitude), it can never be fully accepted by me as 'proper' Trek, good Trek, or inspiring Trek, as much as it does get the closest in the modern era. At least they seem to have got over their need to blast Trekferences at the audience every few seconds and fill stories with such things since those early episodes, so it has improved in some ways, but there are also the problems of treating canon and lore in the way they do: a silly approach. Like Boimler, an intelligent and model young crewmember not realising he could alter the ports to lose the Nacelle glare. Or having to endure living in Quarters that are somehow right between two Holodecks and the sound travels right through the walls! Do they not think Starfleet would have soundproofing to a tee on their starships? It's ignoring sense for the sake of a silly joke, and the humour really shows up the cracks in the series as being 'real' Trek. They even seem to include less obscurity than they used to, most of it is more obvious.

It is funny to hear Captain Freeman playing at being 'President of all Starfleet' in her holoprogram (the only time she has anything to do in the episode, I think), it's fun to see Boimler bring out the Spock eye shades to filter the glare, it's nice to hear Rutherford refer to those glowing red tubes as 'Tucker Tubes' for Trip in 'Enterprise' (as you'd expect technology to be referential to past greats of Starfleet in the same way Zefram Cochrane's name was used as a measurement), and I enjoyed seeing the Romulans again in the teaser as the next ship to bite the dust when encountering the mysterious sarcophagus-shaped vessel as the ongoing arc of the season. You even see the old Romulan chair from 'TNG,' although I'm not sure why they'd be torturing a Reman, other than they don't like them. Few of them seemed to have pronounced V-shaped foreheads, so I wondered if this was a connection to 'Picard' where the 'V' was so slight as to be almost missing. I do miss the more pronounced version, and I was trying to think if we'd seen the race in modern Trek other than 'Picard' and I can't remember them showing up. Their snide, scheming ways and words were all a bit too easy to parody in the same way as Klingons = violence, aggression, warriors, and I do sometimes wish we could have intelligent humour and an approach that shows wit and ingenuity more than simplistic, lowest common denominator laughs, but that shows the creatively lacking era we're living through in general these days.

Mariner's attitude towards demotion that she'll be demoted because she's earned it rather than anyone's machinations, was true to form, even if in anyone else it would be considered a disappointing self-defeating way of dealing with opposition, but that's her all over. And I did feel genuinely sad when we see the quartet of ex-Ensigns leave their lower decks bunks behind them, so I obviously do have attachment to the setup and characters. It's ridiculous that Boimler's bunk would dent so easily (both times!), and it is rather infantilising for him to refer to it as 'Denty,' even though I can identify with imbuing inanimate objects of familiarity with some sense of personality. Can we really believe Narj abides by Federation law? I don't know what their rules are towards keeping creatures in captivity, but I can't imagine it would be as accepted in the future unless for reasons of protecting endangered species, and even then you'd expect them to have large environments to live in, probably holographic so they experienced the freedom a wild animal would expect. But the least believable element of the episode (a stretch too far?), perhaps in the entire series, is that Ransom would wear the ugly feminine gym suit (with Shaxs in the other one), made famous by Troi and Crusher on 'TNG' - perhaps the most ugly 'future costume' ever devised in any Trek, and infamous in their own right, so it was amusing (although they'd already featured people wearing them at some point in the series previously).

Season 4 hasn't exactly inspired so far and would rarely reach the quality and accomplishments of its previous two seasons, which is strange when you think they must have learned what worked and what didn't by now. Usually a Trek fourth season plays to a series' strengths (even 'DSC's was mildly more interesting in general), but I'm always ready to reappraise and reassess. This remains one of the lesser examples that would sit alongside Season 1's output quite comfortably, and at this stage that's a bit of a disappointment, though it does have flashes of good stuff shining through. But I don't find myself wanting to detail every moment and detail, and there were plenty of Trekferences throughout which I could list or comment on, but I just wasn't all that engaged with it, it's fine, nothing more. And the title, clearly inspired by Harlan Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,' doesn't make any sense because they're fleeing, but they do have bones, so there's another nitpick for you!

**

Twovix

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (Twovix)

The start of a new season of this series should by now fill me with anticipation since I like the characters, love the clean animation style and appreciate the deep knowledge of those behind it, but I have to say I was unimpressed on first viewing this season opener and it's actually slightly lessened on second viewing. When I think of the Season 3 debut episode with its fun 'First Contact' theme and terrific guest star voice I'm disappointed on almost all counts with this attempt at a 'Voyager' throwback - it doesn't help that we know how well they can do these kinds of stories with James Cromwell coming back for 'Grounded' and the enjoyable recreation of DS9 for 'Hear All, Trust Nothing,' complete with both Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman, so to set an episode on Voyager and not have a single member of the crew return to voice their character was a big missed opportunity and really lessens the impact of the episode. That wouldn't have been a problem if the story was enthralling, but we seem to have plummeted right back into 'the worst excesses' of this series as I too often have pointed out. The Voyager itself looks amazing, beautiful, wonderful, but if all you're going to do is throw around countless Trekferences (or should that be specifically Voyferences!), with little else of value then it's a real waste. I know 'LD' is supposed to be comedy, it's meant to be funny, poking fun at Trek and having a laugh about the obscure or bizarre, but I just found it to be lacking in anything deeper, and we know how good they can write these things, as shown by both previous seasons' finales.

Perhaps there is an element of modern Trek fatigue since the potential and quantity of what's currently being produced has gone right down, but that didn't affect my enjoyment of Seasons 2 and 3 - it does mean that when I see something that could be better I'm less inclined to support it since the whole ship is falling apart now. It's almost the way the old series' were perceived, with 'DS9' being successful and 'Voyager' a patchy follow-on, in the same way that 'Hear All, Trust Nothing' was lauded, while this one must surely be considered a lesser attempt at reviving an old series. The view of those two classic Treks is actually quite different - now 'DS9' is given credit, but then it wasn't considered very good, while 'Voyager' was the exciting ship-based series, the 'true successor' to 'TNG.' Both have been popular in more recent years and for me, both vied for title of greatest for some time until I came to see 'DS9' was most definitely the superior on repeated viewings, the reason I collected all the episodes on video, while only buying a few 'Voyager.' But we're not here to discuss old Trek, this is brand new and I should also say this is my first ever Blu-ray review, having finally upgraded to the higher definition media last year - in fact, I think the main reason was to be able to see this (and other new Trek that may or may not have been released only on BR, such as 'Prodigy' Season 2), and regardless of story quality, the visuals are pin-sharp and perfect, even on a non-HD screen I can see the difference, so that's one positive to take away!

While I didn't find the episode very funny, it is fun to see hybrid versions of some characters: Captain Doctor Frigleeman was the best name, a combination of Freeman and Migleemo, but Sh'Barnes (Bajoran Shaxs and Trill Barnes), and Swhale Whalens (Steve Stevens and Matt the whale), were also entertaining. Trouble is, this combining of personality and character had a lot of potential: 'Tuvix,' the episode this is all based on, spent an entire forty-five minutes (or whatever it was: maybe it was only forty-four, to be precise!), and barely scratched the surface of such potential. What if Tuvix had been allowed to live and they'd spent several episodes with him? What about other possibilities? It's a rich source of story potential, but it's just played for absolute ridiculousness and madcap tomfoolery - even the idea that Janeway murdered Tuvix, this being one of the more controversial decisions she made, is glossed over in the humour of calling Janeway a murderer. This time the solution has no bite because T'Lyn manages to combine all the 'Tuvix army' as T'Illups (Dr. T'Ana and Billups), starts calling them, into one giant blob, which Tendi conveniently describes as non-sentient so there's no ethical concern, apparently. I'm not suggesting the series should change its whole style and treat the subject matter seriously, the whole point of picking one of the 'Voyager' stories like that was to enjoy the silliness of it all, but maybe it would have been better to choose either one that had less potential to explore, or a more suitable target for mirth.

They had robotic recreations of the Janeway/Tom Paris salamander creatures, that's wacky enough (I wonder if they'd really have made an official record of such things...), and doesn't really make much sense since the ship had been outfitted with holoemitters throughout, but rather than being a greatest hits episode, they chucked in a load of Trekferences without anything more to them. They bring back the evil clown from 'The Thaw' (still the scariest episode of Trek), Michael Sullivan from the Irish holoprogram episodes, and Dr. Chaotica, but none of these were voiced by the original actors. I feel they would have been better served to do a proper, full-on Captain Proton story - maybe it would have been too much to bring Robert Duncan McNeill back again since he'd already appeared once on the series, and would again, but Harry Kim (who'd also go on to appear later), or the Doctor would've been good. All the stuff in Sickbay called out for the EMH to be activated - didn't even need to be the 'real' Doctor, could've been just another recreation of him, and that would have had its own ethical implications considering what happened to the Mark I EMH towards the end of 'Voyager.' Have Neil Rayner back as Chaotica and make him the star of the show, taking over Voyager mid-flight, I don't know, something more than just throwing a load of different elements at the wall (literally, since this is another of those sci-fi tropes of crewmembers being attached to walls or ceiling by alien gunk as it takes over their ship/station/facility!).

Let's move away from what might have been and consider what is: the 'Voyager' theme plays out gloriously, the ship is gorgeously rendered into 'LD'-vision... but would they really have clumsy 3D standees of the former crew? Especially when, as noted, the whole ship now has holoemitters! Don't forget, even Reg Barclay recreated Voyager and her crew in holo-form (and where is Dwight Schultz - his character seems ideal for this series). I think my biggest issue is with the sadness of the ship's status itself, 'decommissioned and preserved for future generations' as Freeman says in her log, which is just such a waste, it must be less then ten years old, or around that figure, and was brand new, cutting edge, top of the line at launch! That's one thing I don't think has been addressed very well in modern Trek, but to some extent in general - we did see another Intrepid-class ship on 'DS9' so they could use the 'Voyager' sets, and I loved that, but there was no sense of the new Intrepid-class' developments across the fleet, we didn't see them doing much in the Dominion War. True, we didn't get to see much of late-24th Century Starfleet after the war, and these ships were designed for long-range scientific and exploratory missions, not warships like the Defiant, but we were never given the developmental view of how things adjusted to bio-neural gel packs or other specifically 'Voyager' related upgrades, and obviously Trek post-'Enterprise' has had almost none of the natural design and generational changes Trek used to be so good at showing, because it largely hasn't cared about the details to the extent that even having a series that shows the USS Voyager is still fairly radical in itself!

Modern Trek was never, is never, likely to go back to the care, precision and fidelity of its carefully constructed future history, and in fact has done more and more damage to the legacy (after swinging away from that damage in 'DSC' in creating new series', but is now on the pendulum swing back again with 'SNW' being especially egregious), but that's one reason why seeing such strong links back to the past makes me think of how Trek used to be, and how I liked it to be. 'LD' has, as I've said many times before, people that know their Trek, but also surprise with their mistakes or misses: at the very start of this episode Boimler's assigned to Holodeck waste removal, and I know they've covered this before, but it still makes no sense whatsoever that any waste wouldn't be simply beamed away or auto-cleaned by the system itself. That's just a minor nitpick, and not a new one, but what about the oddity of T'Ana and Billups standing on Voyager's Transporter Pad and instead of having someone operate the controls, they contact the Cerritos and have them beam them back to the ship. Maybe it's happened before, but it just didn't seem right to me. If Cerritos is doing the beaming they could just collect them from anywhere, if Voyager then a technician would do it. And T'Lyn calling Voyager outdated? It's only a few years old, unless she means in comparison to Vulcan ships, but this is a big issue for me that it's rare to see actual Vulcan ships in the 24th Century and it always seemed more likely that they were part of Starfleet rather than their own fleet (with exceptions, like the Vulcan research vessel that goes into the Gamma Quadrant, in 'Vortex,' I think).

At least I could get on board with her superior olfactory sensitivity when she says it smells of Borg. I like to imagine they have a damp mushroom smell about them (apart from Seven of Nine - I'm sure she smells of roses!), and makes me think of when Bashir and O'Brien teased Worf about what his odour smells like! T'Lyn is very good, completely dispassionate as a Vulcan should be, and while it's a shame Gabrielle Ruiz didn't become a full cast member with her name in the main credits (it is Season 4, so they could have made a big thing of it since Michael Dorn joined 'DS9' that season, and the same for Jeri Ryan on 'Voyager'!), she does get plenty of screen time this season and this episode. Unfortunate Tendi doesn't seem to know better than to hug a Vulcan, but at least younger generations not having social norms of reserve and personal space is a true reflection on today's world I suppose you can say. T'Lyn doesn't try to disguise her meaning or do anything other than state bluntly what she has to say, she drinks water, room temperature, may be interested in seeing Tuvok's Quarters if they're austere, and her whole motive for being on the Cerritos is to prove she should be reinstated in the Vulcan fleet, so despite my problems with there being a Vulcan fleet, I like how they've set her up even if I'm not sure she was well enough used this season as a whole.

I don't know why she beamed all the hybrids (it's all a bit 'The Island of Dr. Moreau'), into a holding cell when she could just as easily have kept them in stasis in the Transporter buffer, but then we wouldn't have had them all combine into one, a sign the story takes precedent over logic (not good for a Vulcan!), and if they were trying to ridicule the pseudo-scientific solutions of the series they were tributing then they did a sterling job with the idea of being able to isolate the various personalities to be able to assist in separating them back into their individual bodies again since that made no sense. It might have been interesting to see some, if not all of the characters, exhibiting residual effects of the combining in subsequent episodes - perhaps T'Ana has a sudden yen to get into Engineering problems, and Billups medical problems. Maybe Shaxs starts remembering 'past lives' from Barnes' symbiont, that kind of thing. Instead, the ongoing arc of the season is another of those new Trek big canvas missteps. I won't go into the story of the season here, I'll wait until we get to it later, but I will say the resolution to that was back to the disappointing serialised failures that began with 'DSC' each season (ironically, their Season 4 had the best arc so far in their series, though that's not saying much!), but when I first saw it I was certainly intrigued, even if I suspected some kind of Romulan plot, perhaps because the intent to subconsciously introduce the idea of Romulan involvement comes up when they speculate on the classified mission the Cerritos is on, a subtle trick to make you think of them, especially when they did a similar thing in the final season of 'Enterprise' with the drone ship going around taking out various species' ships.

It's good to see Captain Ma'ah again, voiced by Jon Curry (and Kari Wahlgren's Key'lor, the female Klingon, also returns for what seems a brief reprisal), and the Klingon stuff is always fun as they go full trope with it, although I did question if someone would be needed to transcribe an old warrior's battle tales as surely the computer would be able to do that, unless it was a traditional ceremonial pastime that required another warrior to do the work, since the Klingons are nothing if not traditional! Talking of computers, there is a major, glaring omission in that we don't get to hear Majel Barrett as Voyager's computer voice, something that really feels missing. Obviously they can't get new recordings, but surely someone could've gone to the trouble of getting dialogue from past episodes, or even AI to pick out relevant quotes, or even if none of these options were possible, an actress doing an impression would have sufficed jus to show intent. They did it effectively on 'Picard' with the Enterprise-D, and you can't bring back such a classic ship and fail to have the old Federation computer voice, it just isn't right. It's because she did it for so long, across so many episodes and series' that she's really missed, and while I can do without it on some (like 'DSC,' since that already feels so far from Trek it would almost be a slight to have her there, in the same way it sounds so wrong whenever they use the USS Enterprise theme from the films and 'TNG,' when it's so specific to that ship), for classic ships it's an absolute necessity.

I'm not sure how much sense it is for Voyager to have cameras all over recording every image and sound. This has been a big background issue for a long time, the question of whether Starfleet records everything all the time. I've always come down on no, they don't, partly because there's a big ethical issue of privacy (which seems to be a decreasing right in the world as time goes on and technology becomes ever more powerful and tempting for governments), but also it would lessen so many dramatic stories if they could simply look up what was said or done in any room or area. Occasionally there have been forays into this question, the most obvious being 'Court Martial' on 'TOS' when Kirk was able to use some footage in the court case, or they showed what he did, I don't remember exactly. And I think it was in 'Visionary' on 'DS9' when it's either the Klingons or Romulans tampering with a Replicator in a corridor and Odo's security cameras pick it up, although that was slightly different since it was a Bajoran station and Odo was notoriously rigorous about such things, regardless of privacy 'rights,' more concerned with protecting the station at all cost (though even he didn't have surveillance everywhere). In this episode it's a throwaway concept with Ransom having seen Mariner and Boimler's conversation in the corridor, and in this case you can say it's another addition as part of turning the ship into a museum exhibition (shame we didn't get to see it going to the Starfleet Museum as we'd later see on 'Picard,' for continuity sake, but this was many years before that).

My other nitpick would be how there could possibly be one of the macroviruses behind a panel on the Bridge, we're getting into silly territory again, but then the whole episode is heavy on that emphasis so it's far from being the most troubling complaint. I suppose it was nice they threw in a reference to 'SNW' with Mariner saying something about 'the Pike thing we aren't supposed to talk about' being the crossover with 'SNW' Season 2 ('Those Old Scientists'). Mainly because it's relatively rare for the modern Treks to crossover or mention each other, which is quite strange when you think how much has been produced at the same time or in close proximity. Maybe that's the main reason: they're too scared of contradicting something or confusing the audience who may not have seen the other recent Treks, while if you know old Trek you're more likely to be aware of the things that are referenced, maybe that's a reason? In terms of change, we get a new addition to the battle in the opening titles with the Whale Probe from 'Star Trek IV'! See, that's funny, it's so incongruous and out of nowhere that each season you wonder what they'll throw in next, so it's a shame there'll only be one more season for me to watch. I wonder if they could have hired Tom Wright to voice T'Illups since he played Tuvix in 'Voyager' and that would have been a really fun connection, but it was actually only regular Nolan North who's done many characters on the series.

As for our characters, they do at least make a huge change by giving all but Rutherford promotion to Lieutenant, Junior Grade, or as Boimler describes it, the lowest of the middle-grade officers, they still do all the grunt work, but with none of the perks and are still lower decks. They had to reinforce that idea otherwise they'd be accused of changing the series beyond its premise. Because really, the point is that they have very little power and input into ship's life, but as 'DSC' found, you can't easily do that and still have good Trek drama and growth, unless you turn the character you're following into a superhero that's almost never wrong and all she touches turns to gold, thus destroying any real development (and we can date that wrongheadedness right back to the first Kelvin film with Kirk ludicrously promoted from Cadet to Captain!), but after three full seasons it's usually time for a series to shake things up a little and develop the characters in some new direction - leaving Rutherford to be the only one not promoted was a good idea for drama because now we're waiting for him to catch up, and of course Mariner's going to blanch at her promotion because she always wants to escape such things, but Ransom is either too dimwitted or overconfident to think he can be the one who makes sure she sticks at it this time.

On balance I'd have to say the promotion side of the story was much more satisfying and engaging than the welly-wanging of 'Voyager' faces, races and places around the ship - as much as I enjoyed seeing her in flight once again, and the excellent recreation of various sets from the series, there wasn't really anything to tie me in on that front. If I want to see Voyager I can watch the series, and will, so it's not enough on its own to justify excitement any more. I'd love it to have been up there with the 'DS9' tribute (and I believe they did something similar for 'Enterprise' in Season 5, which I've yet to see, and look forward to), but even 'Hear All, Trust Nothing' only just scraped into my affections for bringing back my favourite series and recreating it so lovingly. I didn't find this so loving, the holo-characters didn't carry the story at all (and if they had been voiced by the original actors it would have been a bit of a waste as written anyway), and they simply didn't explore the idea they were playing with, nor was it humorous enough with great in-jokes and detailed character knowledge - it's not like we even found out anything about the Voyager crew, but then, as so often is the case, they keep trying to allow for other series' to be filling in gaps in our knowledge in case they want to, but I wanted to know about these people's history post-series. There appeared to be another error with the Seven mannikin sporting the large Borg tech piece over her eyebrow when she'd moved to a smaller one by the end of the series (a mistake 'Picard' also made), but in this case she was in the silver catsuit so maybe it was period specific. The series is knockabout, but it's shown its potential on occasion and I just wish it had metamorphosed more into that regularly.

**

Strange New Worlds Ending With Short Season 5 - The State of Star Trek

 Strange New Worlds Ending With Short Season 5 - The State of Star Trek

With the news 'SNW' is to end with its fifth season, but not only that, a shortened, six-episode season, now seems a good time to take a look at Trek's health a year on from when I last did so. Things didn't look rosy even then, but now it's on life support waiting for the news to come down it's time to turn off the machine, with the caveat that some new medicine is to be attempted, though judging by recent medication the hopes of an improvement in condition would seem to be unfounded. Chopping through the overgrowth of my heavy-handed analogy with the machete of plainness: 'Starfleet Academy' is the last and only 'hope' (if we can stretch the meaning of that word!), for Trek's future, an idea that dates back to the 1980s and was a bad one even then. Certainly I never liked it when I heard about it and that was just for a film, now it's a whole series. But like it or loathe it, the current generation of Trek, the Third Generation as I like to deem it after 'TOS' and its film series, and the Golden Age Berman-era, could be coming to an end thanks to the business part of show business - these things seem to move like behemoth destroyers passing in the ocean, but the merger or buyout, or whatever the technical term for Paramount's new masters is supposed to be, is starting to take hold and it's mainly through the lack of commissioning of new Trek than anything concrete that suggests they might well be reevaluating its importance to their business, despite it being at the forefront of its plans when 'DSC' began as the poster child for CBS All Access way back in 2017.

For me, I'm at the point, and have been for some years, where I don't see Trek improving, and in fact have been more and more put off by its general lack of care in its own reality - it started with 'DSC,' then pulled back to a stage where things were going in the right general direction, but with 'SNW,' once again showed me their view of canon is a very loose and malleable thing. Where once history was carved in stone (with the potential for intelligent writers to do a bit of chipping where needed in order to give the slabs a smoother fit - it is fiction after all!), and any major deviation would be seen as an alternate timeline that needed to be dealt with or had its offshoot to follow (most notably the Mirror Universe and Kelvin Timeline), now they can just shift the Eugenics Wars a century later, have the Gorn be the main opposition years before 'TOS,' alter characters to the point of being unrecognisable (Chapel, Pike, Spock, maybe even Scotty, what little I've seen of him), and so the news 'SNW' is ending was good for me. I've found it to be worse than 'DSC,' something quite surprising, though it shouldn't have been when you follow the rule that each new endeavour tends to be a little worse than what went before, which is why I don't excitedly call for Alex Kurtzman's resignation like a politician brought into ill-repute: whoever comes along next could be even worse, as hard as it is to imagine, because at least some of Kurtzman's hires have worked out, to an extent.

It's sad to me to see 'TOS' so utterly disrespected, often forgotten its giant shoulders is what everything else is perched atop, now remade for a new generation with completely different attitudes, beliefs and interests, overwriting the Grandad of it all. But if you look at the other long-running franchises that's what happens, and I've probably said all this before that it was amazing Trek was so strong as it was when created by so many different people over such a length of years. 'Star Wars,' 'Dr. Who,' James Bond... It doesn't matter what it is, eventually new people are going to come along and put their mark on it, and there's a good chance they're going to either undo what was so great about it before, or so venerate it that they're scared to create anything meaningful. That's always the dilemma and is one of the main reasons so much pop culture is mostly regurgitated mush with little to impress or impart. From my perspective I've continued to buy the discs and watch new Trek, not out of a sense of enjoyment, or even keeping up with fellow Trekkers since I'm not in contact with any, but simply because it's available, and in the streaming world of today that's less common, so I will at least praise Trek for releasing the productions, and in a timely manner. Yet I'm still not in any great hurry to get the most recent releases - 'Lower Decks' Season 5 I'm very interested to see, but am currently reviewing the rest of the series and don't want to watch that at the same time, and 'DSC' Season 5 I am interested to see, as the end of the mostly poor series that started this whole era, but am in no hurry as I go through Season 2 of 'Prodigy' which has so many episodes and is similarly lacking in that spark of interest, so I only do one a week.

It's long since I actively looked forward to new episodes of Trek, but at least I got to the stage where I was interested in rewatching the best bits of this era for the purposes of reviews, with 'Picard' Season 3 and 'LD' encouraging me to engage with them on that level, even if Season 4 was a step backward. After 'SNW' Season 2, which really was mostly a chore to get through, I don't anticipate its upcoming Season 3 at all. As far as I'm concerned that series has ruined the established characters, in so far as I would take it seriously at all - it's not going to dissuade me from going back and revisiting 'TOS,' the 'true' sequence of events, and for those that would say the original should be viewed as a crude or imagined view of history that has come down to us, or whatever personal way of justifying the differences, or pointing out its inconsistencies and suggesting we should accept changes because of that, I say I have no interest in following that weak logic. I'll watch it, but I doubt I'll ever have the desire to record my detailed thoughts in reviews because I don't want to think about it, it's too upsetting, much like 'DSC' and most of 'Picard' - it actually puts me off more Trek. And so I actually feel relieved Trek is lessening. It's disappointing the proposed streaming films have seemingly come to nothing - there's been no update or movement from that quarter, probably due to the terrible first attempt of 'Section 31,' another piece of Trek I'll probably watch at some point if I see it going cheap in a charity shop, but have no interest in watching for enjoyment's sake.

The whole concept was awful and by the response to it, it sounds as bad as could have been expected, the only relief being it wasn't a series! But I suspect that production, and the complexities of the merger and money matters, has put paid to the hoped-for streaming film concept and that 'S31' will be a mere anomaly. The downside is that that appeared to be the only outlet for more 25th Century Trek with the 'TNG' cast, and possibly other actors playing their characters from that time period as the 'current' point in Trek history (since it matches up with the actors' ages and roughly the same time has passed in the real world as in-universe), and when you consider the age of the actors from the 24th Century series', NOW is really the only time they were realistically going to portray their much-loved characters again. And that's a sad thing because, for all the many, many faults of modern Trek, one small positive has been having so many beloved characters return, however insubstantially, and in some cases it's felt like a return to the good version of Trek before it became fantasy melodrama for teens. Not in every case: for every sort-of Data, Riker and Worf, there's a doddery old Jean-Luc Picard or entirely altered Seven of Nine. While I never wanted the Seven series I was still interested to see what they might do with a one-off streaming film for the 'TNG'/'DS9'/'Voyager' cast and those hopes seem to be over.

Even had that happened I'm sure it would have been a weak version of Trek focused on running around spitting out 'witty' comic book dialogue, explosions, and little of substance, an emphasis on extreme ideologies and little to no development of the races and galactic setup of the Trek universe that has been crumbling ever since 'DSC' first appeared. It's a sorry state for a once-great empire, but Trek has gone the way of all Earthly empires, it was just a matter of time. And with the ending of my familiar companion piece, the Trek magazine, it marks another slicing off of the interest and potential to excite, but it says a lot that, while slightly sad from a nostalgic perspective, I don't feel any real emotion about the state of Trek because it's been coming to this for years. It does affect my appreciation of old Trek, too, I can't deny, in the same way new 'Star Wars' and 'Dr. Who' put me off the old stuff, I find myself less drawn to Trek than when it was a main focus in life. The old Treks will always be special and I'll keep rewatching them, but it feels like a more 'dead,' niche universe than ever before, even when there was no Trek being made post-2005, and the fact Trek is winding down is more of a relief as someone that doesn't really like what I've been given with this era.

Who knows if the two feature films that were supposedly planned, one for the Kelvin Timeline crew, one as an Earth-based origin story (?!), will even happen - if they were aiming for the 60th Anniversary next year then they'd have to rush things along. But again, I hope they don't happen. I'd have preferred if 'SNW' didn't even get its six-episode final season and just end at 4 which had already been green-lit for a while. And as for 'Academy,' it doesn't matter enough to me that the EMH is there, the setup holds no anticipation. With that pessimistic thought, and with likely only 'SNW' 3-5 and 'SFA' 1-2 on the way, the ones actually confirmed, I'll put the seasons in order of merit, best to worst:

Lower Decks S2 - still the best episodes

Picard S3 - best live action for getting 'TNG' together, moves up a spot after reviewing it and 'LD'

Lower Decks S3 - not quite as good as I thought, though still some good ones, especially the finale

Lower Decks S4 - better than S1, weaker than the others, but good redemption story

Lower Decks S1 - not bad end, still the weakest of the series

Picard S1 - novelty that turns bad, and then worse

DSC S4 - slow, but the most Trekky

Prodigy S1 - plain average, but did have a good episode which is why I bumped it up one

DSC S3 - mostly inoffensive

SNW S1 - strong finale, otherwise nah, but it was a good finale so it goes up one

DSC S1 - switches with above, started with potential, soon lost

Short Treks - one good, some bad, most mediocre, it moves down a way as more irrelevant with the 'SNW' potential lost

DSC S2 - more bad stuff done to the 23rd Century, while its spinoff S1 at least had the finale

Prodigy S2* - mostly quite dull and time-wasting

SNW S2 - close to most boring, if mildly fun crossover

Picard S2 - the most boring

very Short Treks - actively offensive

*haven't quite finished yet

As you can see, there's very little change, though reviewing altered things slightly and relatively reliable 'LD' continues to take most of the top spots. Hopefully by next year I'll be up to date with 'DSC' and 'LD,' but here are my anticipation ratings:

Lower Decks S5: ***
DSC S5: **
SNW S3: *
S31: -
SFA: *

As opposed to my 2024 list:

SNW S2: **
LD S4: ***
DSC S5: **
Prodigy S2: **
Section 31: -
Starfleet Academy: -
25th Century, post-Picard: ***

'Academy' gets one star for having The Doctor, but really it's only half a star if that were possible. I may not even have seen it in a year's time as who knows when it'll even debut, let alone come out on disc, but I'm not in any way looking forward to it. Same for 'S31.' And of course there was still the possibility of post-'Picard' in some form back then which looks to be just about nonexistent now.

Who knows, perhaps 'Academy' will prove many people wrong, perhaps more streaming films will be announced, perhaps Kurtzman's time will be up and they'll immediately set to developing a new team that can guide Trek into success... But I doubt it. At least William Shatner still lives, amazingly!

Star Trek Monthly, Star Trek Magazine, Star Trek Explorer

 Star Trek Monthly, Star Trek Magazine, Star Trek Explorer (1995-2025) Magazine

How to sum up a tradition, no, an institution, a guide and  a familiar friend from the mid-90s to the present? It's tough, because reading this magazine, or its later variants has been a constant through my childhood on the cusp of my teens, across into adulthood and middle age and was the only regular connection to new Trek in the years when the unbroken run that I joined during the 90s ended with 'Enterprise.' To paraphrase the old trailer for Trek as a whole on the CIC videos, 'it has been my companion, my guide, my friend.' Maybe I'm being over the top, it is after all just a collection of words and pictures printed on paper and stapled or glued together. Yet it also represents an entire universe of content, both the filmed voyages of the various series' and films, as well as the merchandise, books and events surrounding the greatest entertainment franchise ever to be created. At the same time I don't feel sadness for the title's demise as I would have ten years ago or more simply because, like the fortunes of Trek as a whole, it had cooled my enthusiasm in recent times to the extent, like watching much of modern Trek, I read it more from habit than enjoyment. I suspect there are plenty of others who feel the same, no doubt part of the reason it had to close down, because if Trek was healthy and vibrant I'm sure the mag would have been able to be inspired by the source material to remain alive.

It's also true that readers consume media differently for the most part - I read Trek news off sites such as Trekmovie.com as soon as it comes out, while the magazine could take months to catch up to 'the latest.' For me I always found it valuable as an archive that marked the changes in Trek over the years, so it didn't matter it contained old news, it was a physical record of the life and times of Trek and I would never discard my collection of every single issue (even the ones heavy on 'Discovery' and 'Strange New Worlds'!). At the same time I had contemplated giving up on the magazine in recent years as I struggled to maintain interest in a divided, watered down franchise that no longer hewed close to the canon and excellence of its forebears, and consequently was difficult to inspire interest for me. As sad as the ending of an era was, I was ready to give up what had become a little too 'fan'-focused, a platform for ideological agendas, and a view that wasn't discerning enough, afraid of putting off viewers who may love the current crop Trek was putting out. As it turned out I kept some interest thanks to 'Lower Decks' coming into its own and 'Picard' Season 3 returning to a closer taste of the Trek I knew and loved, but right now the future for both TV and film looks shaky and uninspired so losing a magazine discussing such things isn't a hardship.

Everything ends, Trek will be no exception, and in a world which seems to be wrapping up anyway the trivial things of TV shows and magazines no longer carry the weight they once did to my young mind. I used to hope I'd be alive long enough to see the end of 'DS9' and 'Voyager,' and later, 'Enterprise,' as silly as that sounds, though it was hard to imagine life beyond thirty, but now I'm past all that and if I never saw more new Trek I could... live with that! (Okay, I do still want to see the final season of 'LD,' but after the Season 4 dip even that is anticipated less!). The achievement of the magazine is its longevity and I will miss hearing from the old actors and having that ongoing tribute to the greats of the past, following them until they were in the grave, encapsulating their lives - it's amazing to me that William Shatner has outlived the mag while most of his costars are no longer with us. It served multiple purposes, providing me with news on the future of Trek before I had any access to the internet, it was written by good writers that seemed to care about their subject matter, and it has been a most valuable resource for someone that was always fascinated by not just the storytelling, but behind the scenes details. Perhaps more than all the other features, however, what most excited me for many of the years I bought it, was the chance to see what like-minded (or not, in some cases!), people thought about something when I had very little connection to peers with the same interest. Communicator, otherwise known as the letters pages, was my favourite section because of that.

Back in the time of 'DS9' and 'Voyager' it was also thrilling to read synopses of forthcoming episodes that I may not see for months, if not a year or more, and by then I was fully invested. In retrospect I came to realise my enjoyment had been mildly spoiled by having the excitement of knowing this character was returning, or hearing the idea for that story long before actually viewing the episodes, but it really was exciting to have that burst of information, and increased the anticipation. In the early years it was also a monthly magazine (hence the name Star Trek Monthly - logical as a Vulcan), so I was filling up on knowledge of the wider franchise, getting to know 'TNG' of which I'd only seen certain episodes, reinforcing knowledge of the others I had seen, including the films, and generally enhancing my experience. Because Trek back then was something you grew into - maybe you were turned on to it by seeing some episodes (for me it was 'TOS' in the early 90s with my Father), which then led you to a greater interest where you wanted to experience that world more and more, and for a child or young teen it was a big commitment to spend money on a monthly magazine (even if for much of that time I was given a subscription or partial subscription by a grandparent which continued for many years - I didn't actively subscribe direct to Titan until relatively recent years), since saving up for the videos to actually be able to rewatch or see episodes I'd missed, was the main priority, so you can tell from that how much I valued the magazine that I would spend precious money on it even while collecting videos (primarily 'DS9').

In fact the magazine was responsible for really injecting the idea of collecting all the videos into reality when it advertised Mr. Benson's offers on Buy One, Get One Free which is really what launched my video collecting in earnest - for a schoolboy, to suddenly have the option of essentially getting videos half price, even for a limited time, was an opportunity not to be missed (Quark would've been proud!). It also began my collection of Trek novels as in the early years they would have an annual giant-sized 100-page issue which came with a free book. While the novels in general I've found to be quite poor on the whole, there have still been some well worthwhile entries in the series, and even when they weren't brilliant it was still a thrill to get a free book and be able to experience Trek in a different medium. Due to the variable quality of the books I never got into collecting them in a big way, though I still have tens of them on my shelf and collected every numbered 'DS9' novel in later years thanks to ebay, etc. So the magazine wasn't simply something to read, it was a gateway into the Trek world that informed me on so many areas, reviewing merchandise and books, models and videos, and while I didn't have the money to pursue all these avenues, nor did I really want to as only 'pure' Trek was what I was most interested in, it was all fascinating to see unfold before me.

My connection with the magazine eventually extended to contribution - no, sadly not of the paid kind, but as 'Enterprise' began to wind down and questions were asked about the state of Trek after that had been less successful, as had the last 'TNG' film (the first I ever saw in the cinema), STM started a feature where readers could send in story ideas and generally constructive input for where Trek could go. At least a couple of my entries were published (although one, titled 'Prism,' an episode idea for 'Enterprise' tying in the Changelings that had been sent out to discover the galaxy, was wrongly credited to an 'Ashley Stone, Staffs' which I was disappointed to see). A couple of my letters also found their way in, the last of which came during the latter years, during the early 2010s when my sister had crafted some excellently naive renditions of the 'TNG' crew in cake form which I was so impressed with I had to send photos. Around this time, perhaps earlier, I also had the odd illustration published, too, so I was very pleased to have been able to be recognised by my favourite magazine in those ways. My final connection to the mag came in the last few months when I happened to sell a couple of 50th Anniversary Kirk and Spock bookmarks on ebay to a certain Lisa Herrera in Canada (which then got lost in the post thanks to the Canadian postal strike at the time!), but foolishly failed to realise this was the name of a columnist in the mag who wrote about mainly vintage collectables, and which I loved reading. It was only after our business had finished I happened to notice her name on the feature and wished I could have realised so I could thank her for her great column!

Larry Nemecek was another great contributor who was there not from the beginning, but not far off, a terrific archivist and behind the scenes expert, whose column 'A Fistful of Data' was a great source of smoothing out canon conundrums, a fascination and strong interest I wholeheartedly shared with him. He's exactly the sort of person I'd love to have a decent conversation with on all things Trek for being so knowledgeable and so deeply interested, and interesting (if you've ever heard him on a podcast you know he's got so much to say he barely has time to get it out, bouncing from thought to thought!). But while the magazine provided some relief from the lack of new Trek in the late 2000s and 2010s with only the variable modern film series representing proper filmed Trek, it gradually became less frequent. During the time of the new TV assault with 'DSC' it became the sole official magazine, something I'd assumed was a new era, although reading the feature with comments from past Editors in the final ever issue I found out it was always official, it's just that prior to this it'd always kept its British identity with the unique approach to humour or the solidarity of always getting new Trek well after Americans. But it changed to become more comfortable to that audience taking on the mantle of the only title still going and I thought at first this may give it a lot of potential for expansion and a strong future, perhaps going back to monthly, having greater access, etc, but in the event it just became Americanised in spelling and reference and no longer felt like the more homely, relatable publication it'd been in earlier years.

There also seemed to be a shift in the demographics to appeal more to a comic book aesthetic of variant covers for superhero collector types from the mainly Marvel cinematic boom, just as Trek also appeared to be aiming for that audience more than the traditional, thoughtful sci-fi enthusiast. Add to that the physical size of the mag shrunk over time, going from sensible staples where you could easily open the mag and have it stay open, and a nice feel to the paper (I don't quite know how to describe it, but it was matte and not too thick or heavy, just right), to being glued in a spine (which will surely disintegrate over time), so you couldn't always read the central part of pages so easily, needed two hands to keep it open, and the apparently 'high quality' grade of paper was too thick, and worst of all, glossy, so any light nearby would mean having to adjust the pages to read them! All this may sound like nitpicking, but the feel, texture, size, shape, layout and design all contribute to the pleasure of reading a magazine (something you don't have in the cold, efficient world of digital). Oh, and I forgot to mention the pictures were often too dark as they started to rely on screen captures from episodes or films rather than high quality photography as had been the staple for the majority of the magazine's life. All this combined with the disillusionment over Trek's new direction to make it all less desirable, and needless to say they hadn't given away a free book in years as budgets got tighter and the world sadly moved away from the print medium. I'll continue to use my collection for reference and in fact I'm in the process of re-reading them all in order, as well as going back over recent years to read features or interviews that contained information about seasons I hadn't seen at the time, but have now caught up with. To paraphrase Dr. McCoy: 'you know, the magazine's really not dead, as long as we remember and read it.'

Star Trek Monthly: *****
Star Trek Magazine: ****
Star Trek Explorer: **