Imperfection (2)

 DVD, Voyager S7 (Imperfection) (2)

Probably the definitive Icheb episode, despite it being about Seven and how she deals with a seemingly unavoidable death from illness. It's as much about the crew's reaction to this as it is the event itself and is one of those thinking episodes, a good antidote after the more action-oriented season premiere, which explores various themes and ideas of the kind almost entirely missing from... yes, sorry, I'm about to denigrate the current state of Trek again, but this is exactly the kind of episode which shows to the full the kind of deep connection viewers could have with it, an emotional intelligence which is about as far from the effects-heavy melodrama and over the top emotionalism all too prevalent in the modern series'. It's understated and subtle so that a single tear carries much meaning, and finds the time to explore issues in a realistic manner. I can't help but think of the one episode in which Icheb and Seven both appear in the modern era: the only thing they got right with that horrific abuse of once-great characters was noting his cortical node was missing, and when they torture and murder him, referring directly back to this episode. We see in 'Picard' that Seven went on to have a long, though rather unhappy life in the years after Voyager, worse for Icheb, his life cut short. But none of that future rubbish should affect the power of this story of a person going through the stages of coming to accept death, while someone else is willing to do everything in his power to prevent it, even at the cost of his own life, a pointed redemption story of sacrifice, but one that has a happy ending insofar as it isn't the end, but then that was the point!

One thing that sticks out are some of the lesser used characters being given time for good scenes: B'Elanna wasn't a big part of 'Unimatrix Zero, Part II,' even while she was in the midst of the action, while Neelix was barely even seen, but here both have fitting scenes with Seven. It could be complained that they still only exist to serve Seven's story rather than having independent stories for themselves (we still haven't had a proper moment for Tom and B'Elanna yet and we're now two episodes into the season, you'd think they'd make time to check in on these friendships and partnerships that we'd been waiting for!), but that could often be the case, mainly because Seven was such a terrific and potent source of successful drama. It could also be complained that we'd just had a big Borg two-parter, so going back to them yet again was a bit much (apparently it was meant to be shown as the fourth episode of the season, which is why we have the Delta Flyer magically okay after it was destroyed in the Season 6 finale with no reference to that at all!), but I suppose these stories come along organically, they weren't necessarily plotting out the entire season, someone had this idea and they went for it, and in its defence, at least we weren't actually up against the Borg (other than in the sense of the finiteness of their technology, which in itself raises all sorts of questions: can full matured Borg ever really be saved if they're dependent upon a cortical node that can never be replaced except at the cost of another drone's life?), we visit a debris field to harvest for parts (a bit like 'Empok Nor,' without being as creepy), but that avenue is closed off by the Kazon scavengers...

I mean, really! Did they not realise how closely these pirates resembled Kazon? Not that it was a bad look, just that they were far too derivative, not one of Michael Westmore's better days! It did cause me to speculate whether their unfortunate resemblance to the recurring warrior gang species our heroes repeatedly encountered in the early seasons was what led Janeway to underestimate them and almost got her killed if it hadn't been for Paris' split-second beam-out! She holds one of the aliens hostage with a laser scalpel and not only does he take the risk to swat her away like a fly, Tuvok gets shot (and we never see him for the rest of the episode - I'll bet Tim Russ was annoyed they ignored any implication for his character's health, at least show him in Sickbay, but they probably didn't want to do anything to distract from Seven's situation), and Janeway's hand gets stepped on as she's about to be executed, a narrow escape. But at least it wasn't the Borg coming back for their technology as we know they can and do, even though, apparently, they don't bother repairing things. It was a little bit of a cop-out to say they couldn't replicate the node because 'it's too complicated,' but they had to remove all easy options from the table. Janeway shows her dedication to Seven by considering going in to extract a live Borg since the debris field didn't yield the necessary results. Aside from the danger to the entire ship, especially after just riling up the Queen so much, the Doctor is aghast that she could contemplate taking one life to save another (akin to his psychological episode in 'Latent Image'), though she famously had done just that in 'Tuvix.'

You could say she makes that kind of decision on a regular basis - even Icheb mentions how they risk the safety of the ship to respond to a distress call for strangers, part of the powerful argument he makes at the end to change Seven's stony mind from refusing treatment. One of the most fascinating discussions happens when Seven remarks on the mission Janeway's been on to get the crew home, and that it's been at the cost of various lives (mentioning a few, such as Lyndsey Ballard whom we met last season in 'Ashes To Ashes,' in a nice bit of continuity), which is true. But she also mistakes Janeway's motivations when she believes the only reason she refuses to accept her coming death is because she's an unfinished project and that she's failed her Captain because of that. There is an issue about different characters getting different treatment, but Seven required all the extra work Janeway gave her, she was the 'good shepherd' (another episode in itself!), who goes out for the one sheep lost from the flock, and I suppose you could say there was a greater investment in her than in the average crewmember, though I don't think Janeway would agree in the sense she cares for all of them and if any needed her special attention she'd more than give it to them. Was the journey home worth the lives lost, that's the question, but if they had simply settled on a planet there'd have been risks in that, too, there's also duty to consider and that those who died made a serious commitment to Starfleet, even if for some they never imagined it leading to extremes so early in their career in the same way a soldier goes to war, but doesn't expect to be killed in the first action they're part of.

Janeway's a good Captain, but it's surprising that even at this stage she hasn't learned she needs to trust her crew, not merely protect them: in the same way that Seven is more valuable to them all alive, the Captain of the ship is integral to their greater survival, even more in this particular case when she's essentially the matriarch of their community. So when she was all for going into the debris field alone, it was clearly in protection of her crew, but very unwise, so I appreciated Tom and Tuvok piping up to insist on accompanying her. It would also be good practice to bring a Security Team along, but that so often falls through the cracks on this series! I suppose it was so they didn't get 'redshirted' all the time as there were very limited crew numbers and they couldn't afford to be losing people every week like in 'TOS,' but having an Away Team without specialists seems mad. As it was, Janeway would undoubtedly have been kidnapped and possibly killed by the unspecified aliens - I loved the humour of the moment when Paris has beamed her and Tuvok back and basically orders her to take Tactical. She just complies with an emphatic "Aye, SIR!" That's the kind of humour that works, no undercutting the drama, not being a 'witty' smart-aleck, but acknowledging the uniqueness of the situation, yet also getting on with things because there's no time for Janeway to take offence or put Paris back in his place - it's obviously something he'd more likely do aboard the Delta Flyer since it's basically his ship in the same way the Defiant was almost Worf's ship, except when Sisko was aboard, who's presence would overwhelm everything!

The Doctor is one to be out in a difficult position throughout, and yet responds in good grace and, surprisingly, wisdom with all kinds of things to deal with, such as the thorny issue of a patient's wishes. Seven points out she shouldn't be treated differently to any other member of the crew in the sense her state of health is personal, with doctor/patient confidentiality important. It's not through a good sentiment she says this, as Icheb later shows her, she prefers to be independent and face things alone rather than admit her condition to the crew, part of his powerfully persuasive argument that shows minds can be changed with reason, while also accepting he does it in a passionate way: intellect and emotion together forging a strong battering ram to have at the wall Seven puts up when she believes there could be even a chance Icheb would be put at risk by giving up his node for her. The Doctor can't treat her before this because she as the patient refuses the treatment, and Janeway can't order her to take it because medical matters dictate the authority, but the key is that Seven can be talked round - actually, she wasn't talked round exactly, Icheb had to perform self-surgery in order to prove he could survive, and only then does he enter into his carefully constructed argument, flinging back her criticism about him being too dependent on her as motivation for wanting her to live, though I'm sure if she examined her reasoning she'd have to admit she was only saying that to make it an excuse for not putting him in danger.

It was lovely to see the motherly side of Seven again, as we'd seen before with Naomi (who strangely isn't there to see off the Borg children as they find new homes - let's hope they have a better time than Icheb did when he returned home last season...), a touching sendoff for her little brood of Borg, but also dealing with her 'teenage son' in Icheb. Throughout, their interactions are a joy: so often stilted and emotionless like a Vulcan Mother and child, yet also fierce and combative in a mirror of how Janeway and Seven interacted so much in Season 4. Icheb has really grown by this point, eager to stay with Starfleet and make it official, well thought-through ambitions. Rather than being dependent on Seven it's clear to see he's flourishing on his own, as he proves by making the selfless decision to do whatever he can to save her when she has given up. I imagine this would be a good episode to watch if you have an illness yourself, even if it's not a terminal one, since it's quite an inspiring story, the kind Trek used to do so well, showing how people can deal with real world troubles, perhaps one reason why it became so special to so many while the modern variations come across as mere entertainment without that special spark of reality and the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the characters through the distancing of them being like superheroes more than relatable people who act heroically and professionally.

It's especially rewarding to see Seven in a vulnerable position (and I don't mean lying on a Biobed in Sickbay in full view of anyone that walks in, without even a covering to go over her catsuit - you'd think there'd at least be a curtain or the energy field equivalent to allow her privacy!), not able to deal with the approach of death, an attitude we'll all have to go through (if we're fortunate and don't die suddenly without warning), needing time alone and taking out her discomfort in anger on Icheb. The Doctor was right in saying she needed to deal with it in her own way and with dignity. It's all so far from the tough nut hard-drinker rebel we saw in 'Picard,' and it's not because Seven is weak here, she's of very strong character, but even the strongest have to deal with things that shake them and there's a fascination in seeing that without resorting to cliches like a glass of whisky (quite apart from the message that sends to viewers!). She's vulnerable in a different way at the end, a healthier way when she sheds a tear for Icheb - not bawling, sobbing or otherwise making a fool of herself, but a dignified emotional reaction that also shows she's becoming more and more human with each passing season, more connected to the feelings that had been locked off within the Borg. She even has time to discuss the afterlife with B'Elanna, the half-Klingon's important scene when she, who used to be so riled up by this combative figure, gives her the compliment of saying Seven's legacy is that she's made an impact on every member of the crew, high praise indeed.

I loved that she respected her wish for solitariness, escaping from the Doctor by hiding in the upper level of Engineering, and finding excuse for her to remain there, as well as allowing room for discussion on what she thinks of post-death: she's the perfect character to be questioned about such a divisive topic since she went through some kind of experience in 'Barge of The Dead,' though she seems to remain uncertain of what that really was since she hopes there's something after death rather than having wholehearted belief. For Klingons it's about how honourable a death they receive, which is a sad thing to think of that a whole life could be good and honourable, only for a slip-up at the end to mean eternal damnation. It's these kinds of issues that don't get much time in modern Trek in general which is too busy being flippant and going after excitement than it is addressing the questions of human experience. It's not that they come down on one side or another, it's that they raise the question and leave it to the audience to ponder, a healthy approach, especially given Trek's 'science is all' attitude, because they clearly know science only goes so far in reality, it can't explain everything, nor can the faith in it one day explaining everything be a comfort here and now. In fact, B'Elanna's initial reaction to Seven's thought process is that she shouldn't be thinking of death at a time like this, when, on the contrary, on the verge of facing it seems to be the most important time to consider such questions.

Neelix is the other person Seven interacts with outside Janeway and the Doctor, the comforting attitudes of the Talaxian a warm and dependable friend that whether she admits it or not, is something she needs as much as the self-imposed tasks she uses to distract herself, even if the Doctor and Neelix have to use a charming little reverse psychology tactic to get her to play Kadis-kot. My favourite line was probably her polite, but dismissive acceptance of Neelix' kindness by saying she'll 'admire the flowers later,' in typical Seven style: flicking on or off a switch for things that would be natural to most people (like 'fun will now commence'). The same way she thinks it best to deactivate the Borg children's regeneration alcoves as soon as they've left the ship because they'll be a drain on the ship's power, when inactive they must be like leaving something on standby for us, only a minuscule drain - either she was trying to be especially practical or it gave her something to do related to her former charges that would help to cover dealing with the loss. Technology is very important in the story, obviously the key to survival being the cortical node, though it made me wonder if that means all Borg have a shelf life - their memories may live on in the Hive forever, but if repairs aren't considered worthwhile does that mean becoming Borg is a death sentence after all, as we used to think when they were introduced? Even if you become assimilated you're only safe for as long as this node functions? There's still so much we don't know about the Borg, and probably never will, but it's incredible they kept finding ways to peel back the onion with this race.

We also see the old 'leaving your Combadge behind' trick to fool the computer into thinking you're still in that location when in reality you've moved. This is actually a very promising reminder of the importance of the individual right to privacy as I've mentioned in other reviews, because clearly the computer is capable of detecting bio-signs so Starfleet could easily track each person, it just hasn't been programmed to do that, and in an age when digital ID cards are becoming ever higher on the agenda in order to track and give governments more control over their populace, it's a pleasing suggestion of Trek's superior moral use of technology once again. In other notes, it was nice to see Tom as a nurse, not something we so often in these later seasons, though you'd think the Doctor would have trained one or two other dedicated crewmembers by now! And Harry Kim doesn't get much, but he does call the Captain 'Ma'am' when she orders him to locate the Borg debris field - I don't think it's quite crunch time yet, Mr. Kim! Maybe that was the equivalent of a strong swearword in modern Trek that Kim was so surprised they would head back to a Borg location? The accolades go to Manu Intiraymi for his portrayal of a student who refuses to give up on his mentor, both Jeri Ryan and he showing what they're capable of in a number of ways, and if it hadn't already been long cemented, showing once again what a deep bond these two characters have - did I hear right that Seven was also going to take the Starfleet test Icheb was going for? It'd make sense.

***

Burnout Paradise Remastered

 Switch, Burnout Paradise Remastered (2020) game

On the GameCube I didn't discover many great serious racing games until some time after its lifespan, 'Burnout 2' quickly becoming a firm favourite as one of the first things I ever bought online with my new debit card - it turned into my number one game for the console, and one I played in multiplayer for years after (even, occasionally, to this day). It was mildly disappointing the series didn't continue on the platform, but I learned from the Nintendo magazine, NGC, I wasn't missing much. Even so, I always had it in mind I'd have liked to play further in that game's style (to the extent that in recent years I bought the original 'Burnout' which was either a launch game for the 'Cube or came out very early in its lifespan - though I admittedly have yet to give it a go), so when I was generously given a work friend's Nintendo Switch and looked through the copious list of of 4000+ games released, a new 'Burnout' was top of my list as an immediate pick up and play choice. It helped that I hadn't played a good car game for some time - 'Mario Kart Wii' filled the racing need earlier this year, but wasn't a serious racing game, and 'Starsky & Hutch' last year had some racing elements in an open world format, but still wasn't quite the same. 'Lotus Turbo Challenge 2' almost fits the bill a couple of years ago, but it was really 'Need For Speed Nitro' towards the end of 2022 that I last dove into this sort of game.

'Need For Speed' is a good comparison actually because 'Burnout Paradise Remastered' is much closer to that series than 'Burnout 2,' for better or worse. And I can think of a lot of the 'worse': the fact you have to spend so long driving to events, or even less pleasing, driving back from the countryside of White Mountain and Silver Lake on the far left of the map to get back to the main environs of the city where most of the events are situated. I understand the rationale behind it, it helps to learn the road routes and become familiar with the terrain and its hazards, but sometimes I felt like half my time was spent just driving back (without even a navigational aid like an arrow to show you where to go instead of having to check the map every time there was a fork in the road - more realistic, but less convenient), and while in the early stages I was simply enjoying the driving experience, before long it became an enforced chore. Chores were high on the list of hit points, too, as there are so many little accomplishments or lists of achievements to cross off that it could be wearying for the serial completist, to the extent I had no ambition to get all of them: I'd be satisfied with getting all the billboards and smashing all the fences (120 and 400 items respectively, even there!), unlocking all the cars and winning all the events, though ultimately I did dedicate myself to achieving 100%, at least in the main game (still leaving a number of challenges unbeaten), though was only able to complete 75% of Big Surf Island, originally extra material, but included from the start in this remaster (due to its requirement of completing online tasks which I wasn't interested in attempting).

Many hours were spent post completion of all events to track down the last billboards and smashes (both in a semi-hidden area of White Mountain), working out how to set off Showtime mode where you bounce around causing as much damage as possible, forcing myself to track down every last Super Jump I'd missed (which was the trickiest since it doesn't tell you which ones have been completed, to the extent I had to start noting down each one in a given area), and finally the Road Rules of beating or setting times and Showtime scores, so I had my money's worth! For those that absolutely adore living in this game world I'm sure they were happy to keep existing there and try to do absolutely everything, but although I enjoyed knowing the game so intimately by the end I was also relieved to finish. Still, it was somewhat dazing to find you were suddenly done (despite being a completionist I had to draw the line somewhere, so didn't bother with all the challenges which in any case don't count towards completion percentage), and, I suppose for want of a better word, 'free.' But it was designed as a self-contained world to game in, I can see that, which is why the emphasis on online gaming was so strong. I come to it from the perspective of someone out of a different time: up until a few years ago my most current console was the 'Cube, my most recent game on any system being 'Age of Empires III' for the Mac, so getting a Wii five or six years ago was the closest I'd come to modern gaming and naturally things have changed a couple of console generations down the line, but I remain a strict offline gamer with no interest in getting into all that so I can only judge this game from that angle and it was a major disappointment to me to find there was no local (split-screen) multiplayer option as I'd have got more from the title than I'm ever likely to without that. I understand why - it would be a technical challenge even for the latest consoles to open up an entire world for simultaneous play on the same machine, but couldn't they have cordoned off the 'tracks' to allow for this? Because there are tracks, despite the choice of routes and go-anywhere freedom, there are only a relative handful of endpoints to which you race, another aspect of the game that made it a little less universal in scope and a little more repetitive than it seemed at first.

While it's a game that only (only!), came out five years ago, and I'm coming to it at the very end of the Switch's lifespan (though it sounds as though Nintendo will continue their support for the original version even while Switch 2 rules the roost, so technically it's still a 'live' machine), it's also a remake of an even older game so I can believe technical limitations aren't necessarily showing off the Switch's capabilities to the full, even while it could well be more advanced than the original release, although I don't know anything about what differences there may be so I have to judge by what I see. And it did look very nice, the sharp shadows and changing colours of the sky as day and night cycle through (though I missed changing weather conditions from 'B2' - again, technical limitations may have been responsible), at the same time it's not quite as radically realistic as I might have imagined, almost more of a higher resolution version of 'B2's aesthetic. It moves very fast as you'd expect of a game with such pedigree behind it, but I rarely had that sense of exhilaration I used to feel from the earlier title. This is mainly down to the structure of the city and its roads where I found it all too easy to lose control and go into one of the series' trademark smashes - these still look impressive, but even there I felt like they weren't quite as satisfying as in 'B2,' though I'm quite prepared to accept this could be down to my own familiarity of the old game which I've played on and off for seventeen years, and the same can be said of my propensity to crash in this later version since I'm not as familiar with every twist and turn of track any more.

Where the technical advancements show themselves more fully are in the ability to stream a large selection of various music tracks (including the nostalgically appealing addition of past 'Burnout' music, much appreciated!), off the tiny cartridge (if you can call such a slim slip of plastic by such a clumpy name!), and cycle through them with a button press mid-game (though this function eventually became redundant and I'd have much preferred the ability to sound my horn, one of the fun little details in 'B2,' almost mitigated by the bikes being capable of wheelies!), and more especially (leaving aside the untapped online developments), the day/night system which can follow a 24-minute cycle or longer, even up to a full 24 hour period, or you can simply select what time of day you prefer. I have to admit that while in early play I enjoyed playing around with the music and time of day, eventually I switched off the tunes entirely and halted time almost exclusively to midday as having the best visibility of the road ahead, a crucial component in winning events! That left the addition of bikes to the playing field as the only major new addition that interested me on a practical level: for one thing they can go a lot faster and are more manoeuvrable, but I was also more prone to crashes since you're obviously far more vulnerable on two wheels than four. I loved the bikes, and found myself mainly sticking to them at first for sheer speed and fun, but they are kept separate from the main 'tour' in that you only have the checkpoint races against the clock of the 'Burning Routes' to notch up events to reach your full licence and then you're done (though I came full circle after everything else had been completed to do the Road Rules, both day and night, which gave a nice symmetry to the whole experience).

There's no racing other bikes or mixing and matching different vehicles in races (like in 'MK Wii'), and only after Burning Route completion did I feel forced to get into the game proper and go through all the car events. I'm not complaining about the bikes, I just wish they'd been more integrated into the whole, but even the side objectives of smashing billboards, for example, are removed for bikes, leaving the feeling this is practically a separate game within a game, and then you have to go and do the real 'work' of car driving from the ground up, the ponderousness of the lowest level four-wheeled vehicles early on being a bit of a comedown after the speed and agility of bikes (technically there are a load of extra cars to play with since the bonus material, like Big Surf, is available from the start, but I stuck to the unlockable path as it was meant to be played). It's also odd that, while you see your biker, that's the only person in the game: no pedestrians, no cyclists, and even more noticeably, no drivers - in 'B2,' while you never saw any casualties, you could still see the shadowy form of a human being within all the vehicles! I wouldn't want them to show horrific, real injuries or anything like that, but you do feel a bit like vehicles are merely robots, and while I wouldn't really expect people (unless they had the ability to leap aside - again, I don't want a game where you run people down, or anything of that kind!), that is the sort of development I might have imagined in a much more advanced game engine. But this is all part of the style they're going for, though I did feel the arcade nature wasn't quite as prominent as in 'B2' where you would have huge neon arrows showing you where you could go, and it was more about ramping up to extreme levels of speed.

Due to the stop-start nature of crashes I felt there was less emphasis on dangerous driving, the hallmark of the series, with boost power easier to achieve (you no longer have to always wait until the meter fills to maximum, for example), and the feeling the balance between speed and care wasn't quite strong enough to create the lift-off I needed to get close to the kind of experience I had on 'B2.' Another side of that is the necessity to have half an eye on the map showing the various roads, because it's easy to miss the right turning and have to spin back around because otherwise you'll never catch up. In fact I found it best to pause at the start of a race (and sometimes during it), to check the full map in order to work out the best route to take, another way it became stop-start gaming. Most annoyingly (and I'm aware this may sound petty!), pressing '+' to go into the pause menus doesn't immediately take you to the world map, you then have to tap 'L' a couple of times to get there, which takes a few seconds, and in a game that's all about speed this seemed a bit of a clunky interface to me, nor are there any satnav options to guide you so you can concentrate on the basic twitch gaming of racing. I'll allow it is impressive that opponents go off on different routes, and so can you, and there are shortcuts to take and all that, but having to pay so much attention to the map takes it perhaps too far into realism (again, it could just be my reaction to knowing 'B2' so well).

The control scheme was something else I had to acclimatise to - I'm so used to jamming 'A' to accelerate in every racing game ever, and now I have to hold 'ZR'? I was using the official Pro Controller which was much more comfortable to handle than the tiny Joy-Cons that come attached to the machine, and this being my first Switch game I liked the weightiness of it and the signs of historical Nintendo development, changing the old 'Z-Trigger' from the N64 to two extra shoulder buttons below 'L' and 'R,' to make 'ZL' and 'ZR,' so I was right at home in the terminology (and maybe there is the option to assign buttons differently on the Switch itself - there was certainly no sign of that in-game), but I did find it slightly less comfortable to hold than the classic 'Cube Controller, and the rumble effect seemed much diminished compared with that, too. But 'A' only selecting and 'B' for boosting...? It definitely took some hours for my mind to get used to a very different setup, too often hitting 'Y' which spins you round in a handbrake turn, though I will praise the Pro for it's long battery life which allows you to use it cordless without worrying for quite a while. While I'm talking gaming history in the Controller, I also have to mention the game manual, or in this case, lack of one - this was a new copy of the game so I'm taking it Switch titles don't come with any physical material, and that's a shame as flipping through a manual has always been part of the experience for me and there were aspects of the game I could have done with straightening out, such as the Showtime option which I had to look up online to find out how to access (hit 'L' and 'R' in general play), and while there are optional tips spoken by a slightly irritating DJ throughout, reading material would have been preferable and more in-depth.

'Need For Speed' has been mentioned and I have to say that a big part of not being wowed by 'BPR' as a whole is that I feel I've experienced games very close in approximation thanks to the former series - even those tend to blend together for not developing all that much, but nothing has impressed me as much as 'Most Wanted,' before or since, in crafting a large open world environment and a sense of control and speed. It's been a few years now since I played that so I may be misremembering, perhaps 'BPR' is bigger, but the impression I have is that that was huge and the addition of the police chasing you, exhilarating. In comparison I often found myself going through the motions of completion, ticking off this event or challenge, adding a billboard or a new car to my tally, but after the early thrill of biking, never quite feeling I'd taken off. My thoughts are mixed on whether you should be able to simply select the next race and instantly appear at the starting line or whether the local knowledge gained through travelling is worth all the extra time, but there didn't seem to be that wide a variety of events: you have the standard Race, the Stunt Run where it's all about scoring points and avoiding accidents at all costs once the timer's run down to keep the score going, Marked Man where you have to reach a finish line without being battered into destruction by evil black cars, and Road Rage where you get to do the same to everybody else.

Showtime was quite a fun late addition to the package for me, but even that had the impression it was merely a time consumption as you had to get a score for every road in the game world, rather than something particularly challenging since some roads don't have a score to beat, and those that do are usually beaten on first attempt - I know this is really meant for online competition, as are the times for each road, but it seemed typical of the game's attitude to play that everything was more about ticking a checkbox more than it was about real challenge. Showtime was a fun experience just for the wholly different nature of play, despite its relative ease (though even there before playing I imagined it would be like the Crash mode in 'B2' where you'd have a run up to a particular line of traffic and try to hit it at just the right angle, speed and timing to cause the most chains of damage), and there were plenty of events throughout that took multiple attempts to win, I'm not saying it was all easy, but it was more of a bloated, unfocused experience rather than a finely tuned or crafted difficulty curve for the development of your skills. By its nature of being freeform and tackling objectives in any order, there isn't that sense of progression you get in a more structured environment. It's difficult to be too critical because it is an achievement and has more detail and sense of reality than 'NFS' - I enjoyed the screaming, groaning, roaring engines (perhaps in a few years games like this will be the only place to hear the primal evocation of engines as creepily silent electric cars become the norm on our roads?), the crunching crashes and the honking of traffic, but I can imagine still more additions to make the world more real and engrossing without events being boxes to tick.

My favourite part was undoubtedly the Road Rages since that's the time I felt I had the most freedom to simply smash and charge about in total anarchic chaos with targets speeding around you all over the map - getting on one of those motorways was a great tactic as you repeatedly slam opponents against the barriers with the merest tap and wiggle on their rear, all while they try to do the same to you. This would make an excellent multiplayer game, whether hunting a human player down or just 'passing in the night' as you each attempted to rack up the higher score. Marked Man was fairly fun, but more difficult as the AI was very good at knocking you over. The only other event is the Burning Route where you have to win a time trial with a specific vehicle - collecting all the cars added a fun element, either they're trophies for winning or they're set free somewhere on the map and if you smash them up you get to add them to the collection (slightly annoying they don't come sleek and shiny and have to go through a repair shop, but you are picking them up from a Junkyard, I suppose!). If all this wasn't enough there's that entire other island to do a whole load more events, its own collection of billboards, fences to smash, jumps, cars to win... I certainly wouldn't complain about lack of content, my total times of Paradise City with cars, with bikes and Big Surf came to around eighty hours across two months' playing! I think I would complain that much of it does seem repetitive, because it is, and not just due to this game, but to the various similar titles I've spent many hours on before this. I just don't think a completely open world was necessarily playing to the series' strengths, but I'm glad to have been able to find that out for myself, and while I can't imagine really going back to it to do everything again, perhaps the occasional bike ride on the open roads at sunset will tempt me.

***

Unimatrix Zero, Part II (2)

 DVD, Voyager S7 (Unimatrix Zero, Part II) (2)

A Borg Queen's holiday. After Janeway challenges her to visit the sleep haven Borg dream of, goading her she might experience individuality herself, she does, like the serpent entering Eden, and she does meet an innocent whom she plans to corrupt. But the problem with Janeway's jibe is that the Queen appears to already be an individual, that's the point - we don't really know enough about them, even now, to say exactly what the Queen's function is or much of anything about her, but it does seem to be her will that guides the entire Collective which is what turned the Borg from a hive colony of insects into something perhaps a little less alien. It can be debated whether her addition to the mythos was wise or not, the Borg, despite being one of, if not the most popular Trek race, at least as far as villains go, yo-yoed up and down in danger and threat even in the parent series, 'TNG.' I wish we could have found out more about the Queen - sometimes that can mean she becomes too approachable, moving out of the shadows, no longer a creepily unknowable enemy, but she could also be more horrific seen in the full light. I don't think Susanna Thompson's version was the best (in any case this episode marked her final role in Trek, her fourth character and either third or fourth appearance as the Queen, depending on if you count 'Dark Frontier' as one or two episodes), she didn't have the sliminess of Alice Krige's original, nor enough intensity - even when she reacts to Janeway by unthinkingly thrusting out a hand with which to throttle her, gaining control before it closes round her neck, it's still quite mechanical. I felt they shouldn't have shown her talking to herself, better to hear her thoughts and express them on her face, at least when she's alone as I can imagine physical speech would be distasteful to her, but we don't get enough insight into the Queen and her manners for more than a surface level evaluation.

Even with being indoctrinated by modern Trek's aesthetics with its cinematic widescreen and oodles spent on shiny floors and high definition detail I found this episode a terrific reminder of just how beautiful and detailed Trek was in that era. It may be constrained in its boxy format, but it's expertly produced in every area and has so much more depth to its characters even in a typically action-focused season opener. New Trek would be trying to carry this kind of large scale drama every week (on its limited and limiting ten-episode schedule), but rarely does it succeed. I wouldn't say "Unimatrix Zero" Part II (as the title appears on screen - I'd never noticed before that the Part II is outside the quotes), was a solid gold example of Trek at its best, it's a functional conclusion to the big Season 6 finale, about as good as that was, but as I said, it looks excellent and it deals with a few people very well, namely Seven, Janeway and Chakotay. With only forty-five minutes (okay, forty-two to be exact), it doesn't have time to give everyone meaningful moments or even dialogue (Neelix only appears since he's apparently been given a station on the Bridge merely so we can see he's still there!), but it has just enough of those scenes: the Doctor prodding Seven about her connection to Axum, then wistfully looking at her face once she's entered regeneration; Paris coming in to Chakotay in the Ready Room, an impression of what things might be like if he was First Officer and Chakotay was Captain; Seven getting to the realisation she does care for Axum and that they'll probably never see each other again...

I've said this before since seeing 'Picard,' but it's such a joy to go back and witness how wonderful a character Seven was before she was twisted and ruined by that recent series - in this we get to see what a naturalistic, fully human Seven would be like, and Jeri Ryan's performance is subtly different, more feminine, more relaxed, but not in a hard drinking tough guy boozer way as they turned her into. It's what you'd want to see her become had the series gone longer or turned into a film series: losing much of the formality and constraint of her Borg nature, as much as I like to see that, being more honest to herself and others, less concerned with struggling with and hiding emotion, and this from someone who can't stand how openly emotional modern Trek characters often are. Here it's not a departure from the character, but a fulfilment and her interactions with Axum seemed very truthful and pleasant, far from the dark route they took the character down in 'Picard' where identity politics took over and brought a once great character crashing down - even in Season 3 when she's pulled back into line as a Starfleet officer she goes back into a more constrained attitude rather than a genuine development from her 'Voyager' days, but it just shows you can't always go back to playing a character from long ago, especially if it's been such a long time.

One character who is more of a secondary presence in this, but was also noteworthy, was B'Elanna, one of the three with Janeway and Tuvok who go through the invasive transformation into assimilation by the Borg. She's subtly altered with a vocal processor that makes her more Borg-like than the others and she's mostly in the background, but I liked when we see blunt force still works best in fighting Borg, mirroring the way Worf dealt with them in 'First Contact,' and since they're both Klingons it makes sense (more than Janeway's weedy half-elbow bump as she halfheartedly comes to be captured by Tuvok and other drones). Paris never says her name once, but we know it's her he's most concerned for. It's good to have another Klingon along for the ride, too, with Korok a worthy ally - easy to forget that Klingons were rarely seen on this series since they were so far from home space, and I liked that he comes to their aid, taking over the Sphere he's stationed on. There is a question of how that happened, whether there were a lot of other liberated drones, and how they were able to hide their rebellion from the Queen who would surely be aware if a ship went against her will, and activate its self-destruct. But at least it mitigates the issue of Voyager being able to go up against a full Borg Cube alone and still surviving, one of the weakest flaws of the story. Having the Sphere gives them a touch more credibility, but only a little.

The idea of sending three Starfleet officers in to be assimilated was itself a bit of an undermining of not just the Borg, but some great characters that have gone before: Picard had an entire episode to unravel his deep trauma of the experience (in an era when they didn't give over time for such things), and more recently Seven had been given practically the whole of Season 4 to reverse her programming, so it does seem too convenient our brave trio could so easily be converted and then saved - at the end of the episode we see B'Elanna (who really deserved a scene with Paris - a big missing piece), and Janeway are at the stage of pleasant recovery where they can drink coffee and chat, and this is only forty-eight hours after their escape. Tuvok's said to need more time since he was actually taken over by the Queen, but it looks like they're well on the way to mending. As I thought about it, while it does add yet another straw to the camel's back of Borg looking weak and ineffective after they'd previously been portrayed as the ultimate threat, I also realised this is a different scenario to what we'd seen before: it didn't have the supreme psychological torture that Picard went through as a man used to kill so many of his own people against his will, and in Seven's case she's spent most of her life as a drone before she was liberated so it would be a much bigger process to learn how to not only be human, but to be adult (hence why she seems like a teenager in so many of her early episodes). Janeway, B'Elanna and Tuvok were all fully independent adults with strong wills who weren't forced into anything. The invasive surgery was the worst part for them and it was fortunate they didn't have an eye removed or something like that, it was more physical discomfort than anything else and they were acting under their own wishes.

Tuvok is a slightly different case since he was attacked mentally, which is quite ironic considering he should have the strongest block as a Vulcan, but perhaps that also made his mind more potent a signal to the Queen and if she'd tried to control the others it would have been easier. It was also the neural suppressant failing in Tuvok's case, again perhaps because of his superior Vulcan brain cutting through it and making itself a target. It would have been nice to see the characters go through more detailed and lasting rehabilitation, but I'm sure they moved on with the next episode and never mentioned it again as that was the series' way, to its detriment. Not that we needed scene after scene of them showing pain or trouble adjusting, just an acknowledgement of the toll it took to go through such a drastic change. Something that did stand out after so many episodes of modern Trek is the easy professionalism that pervades character actions, most clear in the moment Seven shows reticence in the idea of going back in to Unimatrix Zero to update the rebels and Chakotay says if she has a problem with any of them she needs to put it aside. Not encouraging her to discuss it with him, it wasn't the time, not suggesting she could wait until she's ready, but just do it whether it's uncomfortable or not. And even better, Seven promptly agrees and gets on with it. I loved seeing that and I miss such straightforward attitudes in Trek. That, and the casual 21st Century way they talk are two of the biggest things that prevent modern Trek from succeeding for me and it's a joy to get back to the heyday when it was seen as a period piece with its own unique style and mores.

Going in to the Borg's den cuts both ways as we see Tuvok compromised and thus the Borg have Voyager's access codes which means, if they couldn't already devastate the tough little ship, now they can. But of course a hulking great Cube should have not a jot of trouble from one inferior vessel anyway, it seems the Queen was merely toying with them since she keeps threatening Janeway she'll destroy the ship, using it as bait or a potential hostage perhaps, but never simply ordering her big bad Borg boys to turn around and swat this fly! Instead Voyager can catch up with impunity, take potshots and get away. It was necessary for the story, but I do sometimes wish they were able to keep the Borg's incredible sense of power because otherwise it does belittle and demean the serious threat they were supposed to pose. Saying that, shouldn't they have had Tuvok essentially demoted from his position in order to go on this mission - change all the codes, have a subordinate who works for Tuvok take over his duties and role? The same goes for the hierarchy: Tom says he's basically First Officer, but shouldn't there actually be one nominated by the Captain, especially since they're going into such a dangerous situation! I can only assume time was of the essence, they didn't have it to sort out all these details, and Voyager is used to acting on the fly anyway since although it's a Starfleet ship they've been operating without backup for the past six years and Janeway doesn't always follow protocol to the letter - perhaps a sign of the more casual, not-quite-Starfleet situations of our current era of Trek, in embryonic form?

I hate to blame 'Voyager,' my second favourite Trek for any of the misdemeanours of the modern age, but you can trace certain things back, and even further, though sometimes it can be as minor as a precedent through so many episodes having been made that later producers and writers decide to expand on, but I can't help but notice the Starfleet crew that is actually a rebel group or not actually in Starfleet, or don't act like they're in Starfleet is a trope of modern Trek. Certainly the idea of destruction on a massive scale is something seen more regularly in modern Trek as they try to constantly up the stakes. Here, I was mixed on the Queen's horrific determination to sacrifice tens of thousands for each single rebel Borg on a ship, but it's hard to see a Borg vessel go up in flames and be sad about it when you consider the damage they do. Maybe we needed a more personal image of what was happening, like when one of the drones in the Queen's own area wakes up. Yet it still has an impact because we know these are basically innocents who could be rescued and rehabilitated - if Seven can spend her puberty, adolescence and adult life as a drone and she can be freed from it, then anyone can, that's the great message of that character, for all her struggles and backward steps, but that was the joy and fascination of watching her on the series, so seeing thousands of potential victims for recovery like her go up should have an impact.

The Queen telling Janeway to go to Unimatrix Zero as her diplomatic envoy and get the rebels to cease since they're now individuals and can be given a choice between death or servitude turns into Janeway saying the Queen won't go because she might get a taste of that individuality herself, which could have been interesting to explore, though as it is we only get that little exchange between her and the young boy when he asks, like a child would, wouldn't she like to be with her parents - we learn her parents are with her, assimilated into the Collective. It's the closest we ever come to the Borg Queen having a past and something personal other than rage against humans or cunning deviousness and I wish they could have expanded upon that, it was a nice idea for her to have that scene and always Trekky to find common ground with even the most implacable foes. Other notables were hearing a couple of facts about Tuvok as he tries to focus when under mental attack, and one is that his daughter was born in the city of T'Pol, or that was what it sounded like. Sadly, the 'Enterprise' producers weren't doing some very early setup, it was actually T'Paal, but it would have been a nice seed to throw in if it had been intentional as they'd have been in the early stages of working out what the fifth Trek series would be (for example, we know Dominic Keating was held off from a role on 'Voyager' as they wanted him for Reed). There's also the odd mention of Species 8472 from Axum who suggests he might try and contact them to see if they'd help against the Borg, but I don't see them caring in the least for petty internal differences.

The Queen rationalises Janeway's appearance in human form in their holographic communications as humans being so vain, but of course the reality was that it would save a lot of time and discomfort in makeup, both for Kate Mulgrew and for the makeup artists so it made sense, and it would have been a shame for the whole episode to have featured the Captain of the series as bald and ugly the whole time - even Tuvok mistakes her for a man from behind when he goes to nerve pinch a Borg drone! I imagine the conversation at the end when Janeway tells Seven to remind her of this day if she fails to recognise what Seven went through as a drone, could easily be the actress' comparing notes on the rigours of such extreme makeup and costume, but it sends the episode out nicely with understanding and a poignancy for Seven. I could wish for more with the rest of the cast, but it would be difficult to have many more resonant end scenes and wouldn't have been such a neat and tidy conclusion if so. It's just a pleasure to go back to when Trek was great since it's come so far away from that, and while I've been concentrating on the better examples of the current era for the last year or so, even the best of it doesn't hold up to old Trek, so although I've already done reviews for this season I felt it was worth finishing out 'Voyager' with extended versions that also reflect on the state of Trek then and now.

***

Old Friends, New Planets

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (Old Friends, New Planets)

A few problems, a few disappointments, but on second viewing I really rather enjoyed this season finale, it was a worthy cap for the fourth year, right down to the mysteriously upbeat and exciting end credits music that suggests Tendi has some Big Plan now that she's been recalled to Orion by her sister, it recalled what works about Trek. Yes, as often is the case it is riffing on past Trek, most clearly 'Star Trek II,' the perennial favourite of riffs, with a Genesis Device (or 'GD,' as Mariner abbreviates her imaginary First Officer, like she's Tom Hanks in 'Castaway'), an old-style Bridge for Mum's former ship, the USS Passaro, and a beautiful lingering shot of the forming of new life in the blackness of space after the GD's detonation, not to mention recreating actual shots from the nebula battle when Mariner and Nicholas Locarno face off in an ion storm. I think I originally came to it with certain expectations, such as there being more to the addition of Sito Jaxa and Wesley Crusher (he's becoming almost ubiquitous in this late stage of new Trek, what with this, a recurring role on 'Prodigy,' and his brief cameo appearance in 'Picard' Season 2 - who'd have thought!), than there is in reality, with only the one scene set on the grounds of Starfleet Academy thirteen years ago (was that Boothby in the background?), to show Mariner was a contemporary (well, she was a first year Cadet, a bit behind the others), and looked up to Locarno and his Nova Squadron gang.

What was special about that scene, other than bringing together three characters once again voiced by their original actors, with Robert Duncan McNeill as Locarno, Wil Wheaton as Wesley and Shannon Fill as Sito (there's even a little interview with her on the Blu-ray, which was nice), was actually getting to see Joshua Albert, the lad killed in the illegal flight manoeuvre, so that added to the canon. It was also lovely to see the old Starfleet Academy as it was always portrayed in the 90s Treks, 'TNG,' 'DS9' and 'Voyager,' just one more familiar element that makes 'LD' ring true, at least visually. I was fairly comfortable they didn't overdo it with the flashback scene, either, as while it might have been nice to have more scenes (much like Riker back in 'The Pegasus' during 'These Are The Voyages...'), they had to fit it into the existing 'The First Duty,' and doing much more than what they showed might well have upturned the balance of it all. As it was, a nice little moment that neatly tied in this obsession Locarno has with inexperienced young officers looking up to him and allowing him to lead them. I hadn't remembered this aspect of the story at all, that the whole point was the lower deckers of each race's ships were in collusion with Locarno and had enabled him to take them over. I'm not sure it really adds up in the sense that we see lots of ships in this 'Nova Fleet' (again, I'd not thought of the connection before, but the symbol Locarno uses would appear to be the Starburst manoeuvre that caused all his troubles in the first place!), yet we saw each ship destroyed when it encountered his mysterious vessel across the season, unless it was meant to fool watchers into thinking that, and actually it was prepared debris.

My one big problem with the story is no redemption for Locarno (and that he doesn't survive to meet his 'twin,' Tom Paris - enjoyed the exchange between Rutherford and Boimler about how they look alike, with Boimler refusing to see it!), an outright villain whose only apparent motivation was to refuse to learn from his past mistakes and instead multiply them into an even greater magnitude, to create a force more powerful than Starfleet or any other power... by having a Genesis Device... which is actually Ferengi in origin, so that must mean anyone can make them? And the fleet is all held together by... his magnetic personality? That idea worked in 'TNG' because it was from the perspective of one young Ensign, Wesley learning to tell the truth through conflicted loyalties, but it's much more difficult to accept Locarno, especially in this slightly mad stage, of having the influence to corrupt all these other races. I suppose his appeal was in the idea of an alliance where everyone was equal, but how would that work, how would anything be decided? As we saw, it simply didn't, the others quickly taking umbrage when they see it as him ordering them into the storm after Mariner, and it all breaks down from there. But it's always best to keep in mind that this series is about taking the tropes or oddities of Trek to new extremes - it happened, that's all you can say.

If the overarching plot of the season didn't live up to its early mystery (and I was mostly more relieved it didn't turn out to be a plot from either Badgey or Peanut Hamper!), I found this finale to be better as an episode in its own right. Mariner gets to be the action heroine she shines as, while the other characters support their Captain - it's too big a story for it to be about individual little plots for our four main characters, and if you look at most old Trek finales you'd find it was the same: they tended to reserve the last episode for big, dramatic sweeps and less time for character scenes. Instead, the characters are more supporting to Captain Freeman as she 'goes rogue' (again?!). I think perhaps it would have been better to make it much more about stopping Locarno than rescuing her daughter, since that's the professional Starfleet way, but if she could also accomplish the secondary goal then she would. There's lots to like, and what works at least as well as the Trekferences (which were relatively sparse compared to some episodes - young Mariner mentions being excited to learn about The Preservers and The Xindi, Boimler throws in the Maquis when Locarno's claiming his is the first 'unaligned' fleet in the Alpha Quadrant, but that's about it, unless the cylindrical corridors with conduits running along the sides aboard Locarno's station, were a deliberate visual reference to similar ones in 'Voyager'), are the 'Deckferences.' Okay, I just coined that one, but I mean the references to this series' lore itself: like Rutherford's beef with Livik who got promoted before him (then demoted so Rutherford could have the pip, ridiculously!), or them hashing out their differences in the Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens holoprogram!

It's totally whimsical and ridiculous that everything would stop so the two Engineers can find common ground in the middle of a crisis (a veiled laugh at the kind of silliness rife on 'DSC' perhaps?), yet it entirely fits with this series and crew, and we'd seen it before. Another Engineer, the Chief himself, Billups, gets to remind us of the Scottys of Starfleet and how they get riled up by any slight on their ships, rolling up his sleeves at Tendi's sister, D'Erika's assertion the Cerritos is a measly support ship! It was also great fun to have Dr. Migleemo (best line of the episode from Tendi: "Fluff your down!"), all tiny hopping bird psychologist of him, against this hulking green muscle woman (a she-hulk, you might say...), defeating her thanks to allergies! 1. I don't think there'd be allergies in the 24th Century, everyone would have overcome such things, and 2. he doesn't actually defeat her in the end since her bulk collapses on him, squashing the poor fellow, considered a win on the Orion side, but it did amuse, and was just so Migleemo to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like that! That Tendi sacrifices her Starfleet career to help her friend, was touching, offering herself up to her sister in exchange for a battleship with which to take on Locarno's fleet. My theory is Tendi won't be out of uniform for long, she'll be running the family business and then she can allow herself to come back, otherwise the final season's going to be a very different prospect! Another bump in the plot is this battleship: it does seem hard to believe the Orions would have the resources to build gigantic, powerful vessels, tougher than Starfleet's own (and we've seen how these things never work out well - just look at the giant Mirror Universe Klingon ship in 'Shattered Mirror' on 'DS9'...).

At least the bulk was its only real use, the Cerritos towing it to be a battleship battering ram. Again, not sure about the reality of a hole being 'smashed' through an energy shield for a few seconds (allowing Freeman and a dedicated team to swoop through in the Captain's Yacht!), surely the whole thing would deactivate, it's like an electrical field, you can't have bits that work and bits that don't, it's all or nothing. Not that it matters, I expect Trek has done the like before and to be honest I found all the shots of ships majestically soaring and arcing about, lancing Phasers splitting the darkness of space, bubble-shaped shields... all of it was simply beautiful and makes me long for the live action aesthetics to simply follow these well and long established visuals, it's bizarre so much Trek has kept to the 'new way' of 'DSC' for so long, I suppose for consistency, but there's a consistency that trumps the relative handful of modern live action episodes, and 'LD' shows how it could and should look. There's also a happy ending with Freeman off the hook thanks to establishing diplomatic relations with the Orions for the first time, Tendi going back to them making me think of Rom and the Ferengi - I assume more Rules of Acquisition have been added to the canon of 285 since here we get the 289th (shoot first, count profits later - although it doesn't sound like a Rom kind of saying!), Mariner accepting she's been acting badly (although I wasn't a fan of her "let's get drunk," at the end...), and even Locarno getting the newly formed planet named after him (even if that sounds a little unfair, but I did like it being mentioned it's because his genes are part of it - does this mean he could come back somehow, I wouldn't put it past them?).

We learn a little more of Orion culture with the 'barter by combat,' another pretty silly idea, but it's fun, and its silliness is the point. I like that they now have a word for using the Twain/Clemens program for ironing out disputes, calling it 'Twaining,' and I like that there are, on occasion, attempts to question questionable things, like when Mariner stole the Passaro Locarno wonders how she even got the engines online, which was a good point (she'd somehow got hold of her Mother's command codes for this old ship - handy that!). Flying a starship with a Joystick coming out of the Command Chair was ludicrous, but was obviously meant to invoke memories of Riker doing the same with the Enterprise (one of the few silly things about 'Insurrection,' the last great Trek film). There are always going to be some things it's hard to explain away, like when Freeman says the crew don't have to support her decision to go against orders - what if someone didn't wish to sacrifice their career by going along with it, would they be booted off the ship in an Escape Pod? It also irked me slightly to see an Andorian ship like we're still in the 22nd Century: Vulcans, Andorians, etc, they're all part of Starfleet, they shouldn't commonly have their own segregated ships and crews so I don't know why they keep doing things like that, it doesn't make sense unless in specific cases.

The supporting cats of characters has grown nicely so that you almost forget Billups or Migleemo aren't in the main credits as regulars, but we even see Goodgey, apparently working aboard ship, which was fun, and obviously tying Livik back in after 'I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee,' which they didn't need to do. Obviously the big one is Fill as Sito since she was part of the episode 'Lower Decks' on 'TNG' that was the inspiration for this entire series, so it's nice that they acknowledged that (they just need to do a specific 'Lower Decks' tribute episode now where they bring back Alexander Enberg and the rest so they really can eat their own tail!). If anything you could complain that the genuine main cast of the credits, like Ransom, Shaxs and Dr. T'Ana, don't have all that much to do, but we get moments, as we do for Kayshon or T'Lyn (continuing her excellent Vulcanness). I will continue to reiterate that Season 4 was one of the weaker, but it still has a lot of pretty good stuff even then, and it is sad the series was cancelled with Season 5 as I'd have loved them to keep going for the simple fact that for the most part they get Trek right, and what I don't like is easier to ignore when that's happening, so I look forward to starting the final season (tonight!), and eventually writing reviews for that.

***

What We Left Behind

 YouTube, What We Left Behind (2019) documentary

'You've seen The Original Series and The Next Generation, now you can watch The Best Generation.' That's my favourite quote of the documentary because it's so true. There's been so much Trek in the time since this was released, more main cast deaths, and a continually changing world, so it's a strange point at which to see it for the first time. With the most up to the minute news from 'Starfleet Academy,' the next Trek series to come, we learned Nog only made it to Commander and The Sisko never returned from the Celestial Temple, or that seems to be the suggestion (historical records can be inaccurate, of course, and that is set almost a thousand years into the future...), the point being that the ideas this team of writers came up with in their day of returning to the world of Deep Space 9 has already been overwritten by the current crop, and presumably they feel just mentioning 'DS9' characters or events qualifies as a sort of service to the fans, not realising the damage they do by nailing such things down. But that's the Trek world we're living in now, where so much of what made Trek great has fallen away to be replaced by... well, we can see them making a doc in another twenty years with exactly these kinds of comments being read out as they did about 'DS9' in this very doc, and I don't want to hi-jack myself in a review of this specific production by bemoaning how bad things have become (my other favourite quote which really stood out for today was 'officers don't want a commander who's their friend, they want someone who's going to keep them alive' - and I know that's not necessarily mutually exclusive, but it is a big issue with modern Trek!), but it's tough not to go there when this doc reminds you so potently of how far, far beyond all those distant stars, and Trek that came after it, that was: D. S. 9. (And even though I disagree with the viewer comments they read out, I appreciated Ira's response that he was pleased it made an impact with those people, even though it was a negative reaction - something we could do with more today in the ever greater polarity of 'sides').

I'm not sure I was really in the know about backing docs when this was being advertised - I knew about the production itself, it took some time and obviously they got the word out to back it, and docs... well, I can often take them or leave them, however great it is to see these actors, writers, producers, etc, the whole shebang, but if I'd known how difficult it was going to be to get a copy I probably would have put down the hard, cold latinum and ensured I had my name in lights (well, the end credits), if nothing else than to get a hard copy. But it never seemed possible to get a European region version of the disc and while I've always been on the lookout in all the familiar places it never happened for me. So it was with great glee I recently discovered Shout! Factory had generously put the entire doc up on YouTube as a freebie and it's with that I send them grateful thanks for the chance to finally see the most important Trek doc in recent years, perhaps ever! While the series has been given comparatively shortest shrift in the modern Trek era (and in some ways that's a good thing as it's a bit risky when those people meddle with something they don't fully understand), this doc is a hugely fitting tribute to what is not just the greatest Trek, but my favourite series in any world (and that includes space, too). It punchily runs the gamut of so many gears and cogs that made up the series that when they mention it not being eight episodes during the end credits, I thought that might actually be about right to do the series justice.

On the other pylon, there's always the danger they might spend more time on the more controversial topics which they're forced to breeze over, some of which I didn't appreciate, some of which I did. Some of which appeared to be bizarre reinterpretations based on current ideological fervour. But I'm not going to get too much into criticising what I have to consider one of the best Trek-related productions of the last twenty years, despite the vast output we had in the last few especially. This is that famed love letter to Trek that has been bandied around (it was this, it was that - primarily and controversially said of the 'Enterprise' finale, which I also love!), and it all came from Ira Steven Behr, still fighting the good fight even to this day (or that day), protecting the corner, going to bat, holding the baseball, whatever analogy you want to use. Now much of the novelty and anticipation had evaporated by the time I got to see this - I knew we were getting Rene Auberjonois and Aron Eisenberg before their deaths, I knew Avery wasn't coming back with new comments as he felt he'd already said what he had to say on the subject, and I knew several of the writers gathered together to 'break' the beginning of a Season 8 that will never see the light of day. So it didn't surprise me in that way. I was surprised they had Max Grodenchik sing the intro when it surely must have been written for James Darren to reprise his Vic Fontaine, but maybe he was too ill or tied up (another one we've lost since this doc was released), not that Max doesn't sing it beautifully, he does.

But there's so much they couldn't fit in - maybe for me the biggest missing piece was Barry Jenner as Admiral Ross, I could be wrong, but I don't even remember the casting directors mentioning his name when they were giving a rundown of the many extended cast (some of whom were only in three episodes, but it shows how integral they were!), and it wasn't until his picture came up at the end that I suddenly was surprised there hadn't been any discussion of the best Admiral in Trek. What I did love as much as I hoped I would, were the ideas shooting back and forth as all these great writers who made it with 'DS9' and have gone on to be powerhouses in their own right, were happy to come back together and hash out a new story. I'm aware there's an extended version of this on the physical release and this is perhaps the one bonus I feel the absence of, only being able to see the doc itself, but I'm not too sad, we do get a lot of them. I think there's always a danger in thinking the people of the past could Make Trek Great Again, as it were, not remembering they aren't the people they were then - I mean, just look at what happened with Bryan Fuller, he managed to singlehandedly create the genesis for so many problems that have helped lay the groundwork of all this current era! So I don't look to the big names as a guarantee they wouldn't take it off in their own direction (just listen to Ira when he talks about what he'd have done differently with Garak at the time, for an example!), but what worked with this exercise was recreating the little band they had back then and just going for it as if they were back then, not necessarily making it for the 1999-2000 TV season as it was, but continuing twenty years later in the now.

It showed they still had it where it counts and if they want to do more 'DS9' go right ahead, you have my blessing if this segment was anything to go by. With the caveat it would have to be done like that, of course! More than anything the doc is an emotional tribute - this isn't always a good thing, there's far too much throwing our guts all over the place in our time, but what I mean is, they got the tone just right, as much as modern Trek fails to on that score. Of course it's a delight to see these old actors, for example, after all these years, and most of them have aged exceedingly well, but already this doc is a few years old so it's a product of a different time, stuck in amber, and that gives even more perspective to its making and makeup, it's not the latest new thing in Trekdom. But it is a finished, slick, successful piece that uses humour and lightness alongside the serious in the same way the series did. Look at Andrew Robinson basically playing Garak as a human in his first scene where he sets the stage: it's an absolute delight and straddles the line between light and shadow, reality and fiction, drawing you in like the opening to a Shakespeare play. I'd have liked to see the whole cast together, I didn't feel we really got that (again, I think that may have been one of the extras), but whenever we saw a group of them it was so lovely. And you can tell, just as the series was a passion project, essentially the equivalent of a low budget concept, the art they wanted to make rather than some Thing of The Week (although I wouldn't lay the burden of modern TV's dreary penchant for serialisation at the series' door - it had the perfect blend of continuing arcs and individual sci-fi concepts that made it work far better), and so was the doc itself.

Like Auberjonois at the end, I'm not sure what else I can say - it is disconcerting to hear actors using offensive language for whatever reason when you really only know them as their characters, but they are people in real life. I was going to take notes and make comments on the doc in more detail, but I found myself simply being drawn in to the doc, not needing to distract myself by stopping and starting. It's a lovely thing to have done, and in the same way 'The DS9 Companion' is the best behind the scenes book I've ever read, this doc is just about the ideal companion piece, another staked out flag (maybe one of the ones on Jeffrey Combs' slalom which Avery Brooks told him to ski down?), that connects our time to that past where for so many years it was the best thing being made. I collected every video for a reason, you know! It reminded me I need to get back into rewatching the series again, no greater tribute needed.

****

The Quick and The Dead

 TV, The Quick and The Dead (1995) film

The golden rule with Westerns is don't watch them post-1960s, but to my detriment I broke that rule with this film. Since Gene Hackman's death earlier in the year they've been showing a lot of his films and I'm often open to seeing what he's done, even if it is a Western made during the 90s. But they may as well have called it 'The Dull and The Nasty' since there aren't any positive characters and very little redemption. I will say I liked the theme that came through with Hackman's character, the big bad boss of the town, claiming he keeps order - no law, just order, so a kind of totalitarian control as he sees fit. And at the end, Sharon Stone's character tosses her Father's Marshal badge to Russell Crowe's priest with the injunction that now the town has law, so there was something there thematically, but it was only a sliver in the grand scheme. The trouble is there's no good role model character, and that's one reason why I don't like what the genre became: it's all relative, there may be avenging angels, and I'm sure some of Clint Eastwood's characters could be called heroic (Bronco Billy!), but for the most part it's about lecherous, leering types or vengeance-driven vigilantes, from those films I've seen, a grotesquerie of the toothy unclean shoved in your face, often apparently meant in a humorous way.

Take the nasty old lech who preys on the young girl, who must be only twelve or thirteen, maybe fourteen at best, grooming her to the point he has his way with her later in the film. I can see this is held in disgust by Stone's character and becomes added motivation for her to kill, but it has an inhumanly comedic angle to it at times as if we're meant to find it funny rather than disturbing. The same with many of the other members of this kill or be killed competition that have descended on this outpost town to win a suitcase full of money. I'm not sure what the object of it all was, maybe Wells Fargo put up the money hoping as many varmints in the area would kill each other off and they'd have an easier time sending their coaches through, but motivation isn't the film's strong point - the main one is Stone's revenge on Hackman for malevolently forcing her child self to kill her Father when he 'allows' her to try and shoot down the rope holding his neck in a noose, and being a child untrained in guns can't help but kill him. This is obviously what has led her to become an expert gunman (gun-woman?), and adds more reason to why she was so horrified at seeing Crowe strung up, able to shoot the rope and save his neck. But what became of her after her Father's death, she's obviously grown up full of hatred, bent on destroying Hackman, so not only did he waste her Father's life, but hers too, not a very optimistic place for the film to come from or go.

There's very little to like about her character, I assume she wanted to simply do a kind of female Eastwood who comes and goes with the wind, exacting her form of justice and disappearing again. The film could have taken a more memorable direction towards the end when she and Crowe, allies against Hackman, are forced into a duel to the death and she loses - if she really had died it might have had more of an impact to show that revenge leads to destruction for the person trying to carry it out, but I suspected it was all a trick, and so it proved in typical Hollywood fashion (complete with the town blasting into explosions all around, since it's believed a big explosion at the end of a film impresses the audience and makes it more profitable - that kind of template thinking that makes a film fit to a mould rather than be artistic in its own right). They could even have had the pair turn on Hackman's men and prevent them from enforcing what are changeable rules anyway, an alternative to the binary 'one dies, one lives' plot. Crowe is supposed to be a sympathetic character, the closest we have to a real hero in that he was once partners in crime with Hackman, but has since eschewed violence after he killed a priest and now believes he can never find redemption and get to Heaven, a false notion since even the worst sin can be forgiven if admitted to God and asked for forgiveness, so maybe he wasn't an actual priest as he doesn't seem to know even basic Biblical teaching.

He isn't really a hero since he isn't able to control himself and does kill when he has no other option - it's made to look in his first duel as if it was all instinct rather than choice, and that he's bewildered about what he's done, but it just serves to make him look weak and unable to stick to his principals - more realistic perhaps, but hardly inspiring, and when most of the characters behave like cartoon characters it doesn't really fit. We later see he's able to shoot two of Hackman's goons at once, on opposite rooftops, without aiming, so he and Stone could easily have dealt with them instead of going through with their duel, which didn't add to the believability! He's also unable to control himself when Stone drapes herself all over him since tomorrow they die, so again, if he is meant to be a priest he really doesn't know what he stands for, and lets it happen. I was excited to see Woody Strode's name in the opening credits, and Kevin Conway - the former was in many a Western of the past, my favourite role of his in 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' and I can see why they'd want to tie into the past like that - it shows even back then nostalgia was a factor in film decisions, but he only gets one line and maybe a couple of seconds of screen time, so that was disappointing. And Conway, whom I know as Emperor Kahless in 'TNG,' I never recognised out of his Klingon makeup, so that came to nothing, too!

What it comes down to is a bloodthirsty desire on the filmmakers to show violence and display the nastiness of human nature, the very opposite of what I saw in Westerns of the past which emphasised the battle to overcome such nature or to step in and deal with injustice (which does happen to a certain extent, I suppose) - whether that's realistic or not isn't the point, these are films after all, not reality, we're telling stories to entertain and hopefully come away refreshed and happy, not to wallow in ugliness and destruction. Director Sam Raimi was certainly capable of depicting the highest heroism since he went on to do the 'Spider-Man' trilogy in the following decade, but this film was far from a heroic effort. I imagine it was done on the cheap - even if they built an entire frontier town so they could blow it up, it's not going to be all that expensive, and no doubt the bulk of the budget went on the star names. And it worked: I saw Hackman's name and against better judgement gave it a go, only for it to follow the usual pattern of the 'modern' (1994+?), take on the genre. There's always a chance they can create a successful entry, I like 'Dances With Wolves' and 'The Last of The Mohicans,' a couple more Western-leaning productions of the early 90s, although they could just as easily be considered historical adventures. Perhaps it was the simple morality tales that filmmakers of more recent decades turned their nose up at? If so it was their loss and I'll stick to the traditional greats of the Western genre, for all the novelty of seeing Russell Crowe (whom I didn't even realise was acting as early as that), and Gene Hackman acting together on film.

*

The Inner Fight

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (The Inner Fight)

Likeable story, good twists, too much swearing, some fun little humour jolts - about what you'd expect for the average episode of this series. Throw in a special cameo at the very end, like Spock in the last scene of 'Unification I,' and it's a well-rounded package. On the downside, however, is the reveal of the season-long arc as Nicholas Locarno is shown to be piloting the mysterious attacker ship that's been nobbling vessels from various races over the course of the episodes, and while we're still in the dark about motive or means, I remember being rather disappointed by the whole angle. For one thing, it's a sad thing to find Locarno never learned from his mistakes, and much like Raffi in 'Picard,' has become a failure and given in to baser instincts. That's not apparent in this episode so I won't go into it this time, but we know he left Starfleet and became a pilot for hire, so that's not the usual story of redemption we'd hope and expect from Trek (well, used to, anyway). But this isn't really Locarno's story, it's Mariner's as we finally discover the secret of her rebellious nature and what prompted it all - only talking to a Klingon warrior whom she thinks will either shortly kill her, or be killed by her, as soon as the 'glass storm' of sheer knife shards raining down (love to know how they explain that scientifically...), is over. So she uncharacteristically opens up, and fortunately Ma'ah (Jon Curry in his third appearance in the role, along with a few other characters that have previously appeared), is a wise warrior and a careful listener to be able to bring her inner fight out into the open.

It rings so true that a Klingon would recognise someone with a divided inner nature and I'm sure he does a far better job than Migleemo would have, often portrayed as a fluffy idiot. I wasn't quite sure why Mariner had suddenly started acting more recklessly (shades of B'Elanna Torres in 'Extreme Risk' responding to news of the Maquis being wiped out by the Jem'Hadar - in fact it's not a million miles away from that story since Sito was Bajoran, killed by Cardassians, we believe, in one of the kind of incidents which created the Maquis in the first place), unless it was being reminded of Locarno in a recent episode which brought her memories of the Nova Squadron incident flooding back. Her bitterness over Sito dying on a mission wasn't entirely believable, but at least it gives us some depth to the character she was lacking and that we've seen added to her friends over time with Rutherford's rough pre-implant years and Tendi's shame and guilt over her Orion heritage. And it was possibly the most serious and heartfelt scene the series has done, as far as I can remember, since this is meant to be a comedy and they don't go out of their way to work towards character motivation and the kind of Trekky development we used to expect. But whether it fits or not, it was a fine scene and Mariner becomes something much more than a carefree rebel, even leading her to what could be the first genuinely rousing speech of modern Trek - many have tried (Burnham, Picard, etc), but none have rung true, while Mariner's exhortation to all these disparate races to work together to escape the hostile planet was in no way forced and entirely fitting and organic to events.

It's lovely to see all these familiar Trek races, especially the lesser used ones of recent years (or decades!), such as Cardassians and Bynars, and was like the 'Voyager' episode 'Flesh and Blood' in which a gang of holographic representations of Alpha Quadrant races are on a planet together, only this time it's in the flesh... and blood. Purple blood, when it comes to the Klingons. Not quite sure why they did the old 'Star Trek VI' trick of having that colour since I think every time since then (unless it's been on this series, perhaps), Klingon blood was shown to be red and it's been put down to the 'atmosphere' or something along those lines to suggest why the pink or purple colour came about. In real terms it was so the film could get a 'PG' rating, but I always liked the idea that Klingons had this garish blood running through their veins in the same way Vulcans and Romulans have green and Bolians and Andorians have blue - it fits. I didn't appreciate Ma'ah burying his face in the Bird-of-Prey Captain's blood, but that was the worst culprit of the episode and we don't actually see anything gory happen, it's all off screen (same with the Tremble-lizards and the 'Jurassic Park' theme of the teaser which really only served to demonstrate Mariner's reckless state of mind at this time).

It's questionable why a BOP would be shooting down a clearly marked Federation shuttle since the Klingons are allies, and I also found it strange Ma'ah says Mariner won the Dominion War since it was his people who played a decisive role, especially towards the end when Klingon ships were the only ones invulnerable to the Breen shield-sapping weapon and carried the major heft of the fighting for some time. But he clearly wasn't around for the war since he wishes he'd had the chance to fight Jem'Hadar, although I suppose he could mean that literally, in personal combat, but even then it would be odd for him to suggest the Federation won the war - it'd be more in keeping with Klingon bravado and bragging to claim credit, just one more sign I think that the writers aren't necessarily keeping up with the nuances of the history they're adding to, unless I'm forgetting something about him (was he too young, it was only a few short years before?). The BOP could have been a rogue ship, I suppose. Still, it was a rather risky tactic to bait it into swooping down and blasting the installation (which looked like the forest antenna building in 'Return of The Jedi,' perhaps intentionally), since it could just as easily have dove down without stopping, though I do love the visuals and sense of weight and speed when we see it drop through the clouds, a truly beautiful classic design that never gets old. It was all so the temporary alliance of aliens could jump onto the hull and somehow squeeze inside, an unlikely solution to their predicament!

The B-story gives Captain Freeman a chance to show she's not as dimwitted as she sometimes appears, cunningly making a show of her apparent stupidity at going down to a planet which resents Starfleet and stumbling around ineffectually, while Billups goes down as a bounty hunter to get the information on Locarno's whereabout, using the planet's bias against them, clever psychology. Because there are certain people that need to be brought back to Earth. Because of... the threat... from the mysterious ship? Yes, perhaps best to hand wave the motivation for the whole story away and just enjoy the joke that of the four Trek celebrities they mention, Seven of Nine, Beverly Crusher, Thomas Riker (confirming he survived a Cardassian prison camp in the Dominion War), and Nick Locarno, it's the unloved Locarno whom the Cerritos gets tasked with tracking down! As Tendi, asks: "Who?" The other gag I particularly enjoyed was the Balok's puppet creature so famous for being the last, glaring image in the end credits of 'TOS' for many episodes, one of those iconic faces that have endured for almost sixty years, like the Gorn and the 'green woman.' Well, we get all those in this episode (although the Gorn may not have been a Gorn, difficult to tell with those included for background colour), especially the green women. The joke is that Freeman assumes the short, ugly creature is a puppet until she finds out otherwise! Okay, it's only a simple subversion of expectation, but out of the blue like that it worked nicely.

They go to Mudds, which you'd assume has some connection to Harry Mudd, or else why bother, though there's no update on his legacy. I enjoyed Ransom telling the story of an example of Mariner's recent strange behaviour when she jumped out of a shuttle to fight a Borg only to find it was just a pile of junk - we didn't need to see it, it's easily imagined and all the more humorous for it! Then there's Rutherford discovering his Starfleet trousers have pockets when he never realised, a joke about how the actors always wanted pockets but never could have them (apparently, with the Cerritos' uniform at least, they were always there!). Even Mariner using the two-handed hammer punch when fighting her Klingon opponent was lovely to behold and it sounded like she was grunting Kirk's name with each strike! I also loved the attention to detail on the 'venom suits' at the scientific outpost, which looked like a cross between the environmental suits of 'TOS' and the sleek, 'modern' version first seen in 'First Contact' - it could also be seen as a comment on how there's a uniform for every occasion in modern Trek. Ma'ah was very true in his way of demeaning Federation antics as a desire 'to solve puzzles and mysteries,' something he may not be impressed with, but which Mariner's friend, Sito, gave her life in protection of. It sums up the different cultures well, while also jabbing home the point, which is exactly the Trekky way of doing things in the old days, and something I miss in the new stuff. Having Mariner and Sito Jaxa be friends ties up the whole series in a neat circle since it was obviously inspired by the episode of the same name, 'Lower Decks,' in 'TNG,' so if they weren't making any more it suggests a nice way for the series to wrap up, directly connecting with a character from that inspiration, and as the next episode would prove, even giving us flashbacks to that time. Some of the decisions may seem a little odd, and I may not have loved the conclusion to the arc, but I can still appreciate it for what it was, and look forward to the final season, too.

**

Caves

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (Caves)

We've got one of those 'mixed' episodes where they have some fun, but it's somewhat undermined by the series' excesses in the language, gore and inappropriate humour stakes, otherwise it had the potential to have been another good one. As it is, it does at least improve on being a one-note joke: caves are seen in Trek a lot so Mariner comments on how she feels like she's been in this cave a hundred times, and it's like a third of their missions are in caves and so on and so forth. Caves were obviously a big part of Trek, mainly in the 80s and 90s (and even into the 2000s), when the famous 'Planet Hell' set was built for 'TNG' and continued to be revamped and reused for 'DS9' and 'Voyager,' so it's only fitting that this key piece of Trekness got its own episode, this being a comedic approach to Trek tropes. It's always fun when they bring in familiar elements like this and it had become something of a joke for regular viewers (in retrospect, not particularly in the moment), but at the same time they often did an excellent job disguising the set in various ways: altering the floor to be sandy or adding plants; making use of the upper level more; creating different lighting effects; smoke; constraint breeds creativity and as it was mostly the same people working in production they brought a steady stream of innovation to money-saving production budgets - 'Enterprise' took it even further with more elaborate sets, but there's something quite reassuring and comforting about beaming down to yet another cave, and after all, Trek being practically a series of stage plays, the setting itself could often be mere extraneous detail (see 'Spectre of The Gun' for the ultimate in that idea - it may not be a cave, but the point stands!).

It helps that we get all four of our characters alone together as if to prove they can still do those kinds of stories, and while it's a bit funny they'd all be assigned to this specific mission and no one else, who's to say it wouldn't happen? There are plenty of other things to level that criticism at... Take Steve Levy, the Cerritos' resident conspiracy theorist who always comes up with the wackiest ideas about what's 'really' going on. I find it hard to believe that anyone in Starfleet would be that suspicious or disbelieving, but then I think of people like Lieutenant Reg Barclay, the poster child for Starfleet officers that don't measure up to the social standards you'd expect, but make up for it with their skills in other areas. Levy isn't in the same bracket of characters like Raffi or Rios from 'Picard,' he's more in that Barclay vein so I was glad we at least got to know a little more about him, key being that he's a maths genius, that's why they put up with his 'crackpot with dangerous beliefs' persona. Obviously it's meant to be an amusing comment on the many who are taken in by internet misinformation, he even admits he goes on forums and makes stuff up, but I just feel like the world Roddenberry created wouldn't suffer from the same problems we do of having a surfeit of information and uncertainty. The difference is that we know we can't necessarily trust the organisations who have power in our lives, be they governments or corporations, but greater knowledge hasn't made people more intelligent, it's merely confused.

Having Steve Levy as a joke we can laugh at is a bit unkind, in keeping with modern Trek's more cynical attitude, but at least Rutherford and he do bond to some extent thanks to, well, Levy actually being right for once! Is this meant to placate the conspiracy-lovers in the audience or merely to turn the tables on expectations (it's clear even he didn't expect to be correct when predicting those wily old shapeshifting Vendorians from 'TAS' are behind it all with their 'morality test'!), either way I'm not entirely sure what the writing was trying to say - Boimler himself confesses he's not sure what lesson he's supposed to learn from it all: not to yell at Levy so much? I'd have preferred a more concrete idea of compassion for those with easily led minds instead of this impression of having a whipping boy upon which to show how much superior 'we' are who go merrily along accepting whatever we're told has been proved, but even in Trek we've seen numerous people in power who've been untrustworthy or have had nefarious agendas and even the very Federation itself is secretly supported by an underground society that is the stuff of conspiracies in Section 31. I suppose the answer to all this is that the so-called 'perfect' world Roddenberry reinforced for his 24th Century in 'TNG' had already been torn down long ago, undermined even within the series that spawned it, and Utopia once again crashes and burns because it's the impossible dream. The important thing is that there's some kind of understanding between Rutherford and Levy, and not to either entirely denigrate and leave room for questions is the more Trekky way.

Oddly enough, the least unpleasant flashback story of the four was actually the one featuring Dr. T'Ana when she and Rutherford were stuck in a cave where he gave birth to a cave baby. How many Trek connections can you spot here? It's a bit like 'The Passenger' from 'DS9' where a criminal passed on his consciousness to Bashir when dying, only this time the dying alien woman's touch creates a clone baby within him and he becomes a man who has to give birth (as in Trip in 'Unexpected' on 'Enterprise'). A relief they didn't actually show Rutherford being cut open with the laser scalpel and it soon becomes about T'Ana softening to this bouncing cave-baby and even to Rutherford, having complained she hates both babies and Engineers! There's even a surprising lack of swearing from her. No, they save most of that and the gore for Mariner's story when she recalls being stuck in a cave with Delta Shift, the gang with chips on their shoulders because they feel like they work on a different ship always doing nights and barely seeing anyone. I would've thought there must be some shift rotation and these wouldn't be permanently assigned to night duty, I'm sure we saw examples of some of our main characters sometimes working at night, like Harry Kim being in charge on the Bridge. The sci-fi side of it wasn't the issue - it's one of those chroniton fields as we'd seen in 'Timescape' where Picard reaches out for fruit and his hand withers, only here 'LD' has to take it beyond the bounds of good taste so that Mariner and her team are cracking up as their bones age too much for their weight, or even worse, one of them loses his already damaged leg.

I don't find that kind of humour funny, the 'gross-out' style of comedy just doesn't sit well with the optimistic tone that was Trek's hallmark, one of the reasons it simply doesn't feel very Trekky nowadays. And again we have yet another Starfleet officer displaying a bad attitude when Mariner's order is defied - it does get rather tiresome that such things are so common in modern Trek, and while I'll give this particular series credit for following the trend less fully, it still has its problems that prevent it from ever completely being the thing it's trying to ape, while yet often doing so well in many areas. I was expecting Tendi's story about being trapped in the Turbolift for hours post-rage virus on her first day aboard the Cerritos in the very first episode, a story she keeps trying to tell and is repeatedly interrupted or shot down, to be the key to their escape, so I'm glad that expectation was avoided as it seemed so obvious. Instead they put a nice little bow on proceedings by letting us see that this cave with the sentient moss (which speaks in the voice of one of those booming entities from 'TOS' - I didn't realise Jerry O'Connell (Ransom) was both the moss and a Vendorian in this, he doesn't often do other characters), is actually another Vendorian test and it was they that blocked communications (another trope of cave storytelling, as Mariner points out early on, rocks always beat centuries of technological progress - true!).

Adding to the lowered tone we have wee jokes and once again we see our people doing something to excess: namely drinking (hence the wee jokes when they're trapped in the Turbolift...), but I did at least appreciate they mentioned they thought they were imbibing Synthehol, which as we know from our 24th Century lore, is able to simulate the intoxication effects without the side effects, allowing a much higher level of control where people can snap out of the fug if they choose, except Mariner being Mariner she switched it for real alcohol. She says the catchphrase "Cerritos strong!" but I thought that came about in response to the Pakled encounters which would have occurred later in Season 1? Maybe they put it in deliberately for people like me to notice and speculate about? I'm starting to become Steve Levy! Maybe there wasn't all that much to the story and I'm not sure you could even say they really delved (delved!), into the cave trope sack all that deeply when you consider how many episodes there have been with people trapped in caves, let alone ones where they simply visited a cave (out of interest: how many are there, someone must have worked it out by now?), but it ends happily and has a nice reinforcement of their friendship.

The story isn't riddled with needless Trekferences, yet they manage to squeeze in their fair share (like Boimler's list of Levy's silly theories: Wolf 359 wasn't planned, Q exists, Picard isn't a hologram, Voyager's EMH is...), the delightful angular grey backpacks with the black straps so common in 90s Trek, Mariner saying Levy believes they're all trapped in the evil Mirror Universe, the Vendorians admitting they had nothing to do with the Klingon civil war, Rutherford says there are no natural stairways or hidden passageways from secret societies, even the grey alien lady's body disintegrating was reminiscent of Changelings when they die and desiccate, and even the Grafflax reminded me of the kind of overgrown predatory CGI creatures from the Kelvin Timeline films. Phasers get a new use as T'Ana vaporises the baby's poop bag, but can Tricorders really be used to translate and speak in an alien language? I'd have thought you'd need to tie it into the Combadge, but Rutherford didn't seem to do that. I also hate wheeled vehicles in Trek, they make no sense, just use a forcefield! I will say that sometimes reusing the voices of main cast members was a little jarring, with the lead Vendorian sounding exactly like Captain Freeman, and maybe they overuse Fred Tatasciore on this series - granted, most of the other characters didn't appear, so maybe they needed to save some money, but at least try and sound different! I'll give Fred credit where it's due: I never realised he was Levy and this was his third appearance after 'No Small Parts' and 'Trusted Sources,' I like that they bring back members of the crew: Asif (Asif Ali), was also on his third episode (Ali also doing the Grafflax' Tricorder voice), as was Karavitus (Artemis Pebdani), they've gone long enough they can refer back to characters and episodes and it's normal because so much time has passed now.

**