Warp Section

It looks like J.J. Abrams definitely plans on bringing us back to the Original Series as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott and Captain Christopher Pike are both characters that have been added to the roster according to IESB.net.

“Here’s what I know, yes the script was turned in three weeks ago and it is currently being ‘polished up,’” said reporter Robert Sanchez. “I’ve been told there are plenty of big name actors and complete unknowns that have been coming in and out of meetings regarding casting.

“So while it’s old news that the new storyline will involve a young Kirk and Spock, we have been told to expect to see Captain Christopher Pike and our favorite Scottish, miracle-working engineer Montgomery Scott, or as he is best known, Scotty originally portrayed by James Doohan,” Sanchez added.

I hope they find someone close to as good as James Doohan because if Scotty doesn’t sound like Scotty, I won’t be a happy camper. Montgomery Scott is the only character I enjoyed from the Original Series, and I was elated to see him in Star Trek: The Next Generation in an episode entitled Relics.

Personally, I still hate the idea that they are going backwards in Star Trek, rather than forwards, but I guess they didn’t do too well trying that either, with the last few Next Generation movies not turning into big blockbuster dollars.

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Daniel Craig, who recently was seen in one of the most popular James Bond movie ever, Casino Royale, has mentioned that he’d love to be part of Star Trek.

“I would love a stint in the TV show or in a film,” Craig recently told the World Entertainment News Network about Star Trek. “It’s been a secret ambition of mine for years.”

I, for one, am not too impressed with the idea of bringing a big name actor into Star Trek, unless it is for a small and short cameo. I think it is interesting that someone of his blockbuster power would want to do science fiction though. It says something about Star Trek as a whole. It is not just for unknowns or second string actors any longer.

The good thing though I guess about having someone like Daniel Craig in the movie is that it will bring people to see the movie, no matter what the movie is like.

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William Shatner is such a funny guy, and continues to push out blurbs to the media saying that he wants to be part of Star Trek XI, and even Leonard Nimoy has said he would come out of retirement to participate in such a movie. Both actors have been consulting and promoting the movie, and have spoken numerous times with producer JJ Abrams. I doubt that either actor will have any reasonable sized part in the upcoming movie as both are a little older now, and don’t really fit the same body type that they had back in their heyday.

Over on IGN there is an interview that says Abrams is writing them into the script.

They seem to be going in the direction of putting in [Leonard] Nimoy and myself. But in order to do that, it’s a difficult story to write. So they’re in the midst of wrestling with all of that.

Source: The Trek Movie Report

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Like a lot of teenage girls, I had pictures on my wall of the boys I liked — the teen idols and Hollywood heartthrobs who rocked my world. And you could totally tell by my pictures that I was a prime grade-A nerdling. Hanging on my wall I had:

• Harrison Ford as Han Solo and Indiana Jones
• River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones
• Sean Patrick Flannery as young Indiana Jones (sensing a trend here)
• and Wil Wheaton as Ensign Wesley Crusher

Seriously. I adored Wesley. He was one of my heroes. And to this day, I’m still having to explain to people why.

I think it had a lot to do with being the same age, and having much the same state of mind. I was one of those kids who was too smart for my own good. I’d been reading since I was five, reading science fiction since I was eight, and I used SAT words in normal conversation because I didn’t know any better. When other kids were building models of the Globe Theatre out of popsicle sticks for their Shakespeare projects, I rewrote Julius Caesar so it was set in modern Washington, D.C. Not because I was trying to show off, but because I thought it was cool. I often got along better with adults because the conversation was more interesting. I liked my parents. My interest was literature rather than tractor beams, but Wesley’s out-of-control precociousness was modeled after my own heart.

Wesley was one of those very rare instances when someone like me — grade A nerdling, as I said, and a bit of a social misfit — was depicted on TV in a positive light, making a positive difference on the world around him. (It should come as no surprise that I was also a fan of the TV show Head of the Class.) He wasn’t a nerd caricature. He wasn’t the butt of people’s jokes (except at endless SF conventions, alas). What Wesley Crusher’s presence on the Enterprise told me was, “There is a place for you in the universe, and everything’s going to be okay. Just hang in there and keep doing what you love.”

I can’t stress enough what an important message that was for an angst-ridden teenage girl to have. So much better than, “You’re not pretty enough, you’re not thin enough, and your clothes suck.” I always thought it would be cool to hang out with Wesley. And I think it’s sad that no one who wasn’t a 14 year old overactive nerd in 1987 sees Wesley the same way I do.

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Season 5, Episode 2
Original Air Date: October 21, 1998

The episode begins with Seven of Nine trying to learn how to smile. The Doctor enters interrupting her. They go on an away mission together with Paris, to check out a nebula being born.

This episode is where the seed of the Delta Flyer is first implanted as Seven mentions that they should create a better more efficient shuttle. As the nebula creates it grows to fast, and they get stuck in the nebula. Voyager beams them out, but its a rough beam out. After they materialize the Doctor realizes his mobile emitter is damaged, and Torres transfers his program to sickbay.

Putting the mobile emitter on a console to diagnose what is wrong with it, the staff leaves and Borg tubes come out of the device and interface with Voyager’s computer.

Worried about his emitter, the Doctor wakes Torres to ask her when his emitter will be ready. She doesn’t know as she hasn’t even checked yet. Seven wakes up feeling a Borg presence, and leaves her cargo bay to investigate.

Harry Kim gets replaced by Chakotay as the on duty commanding officer. When confronted with the Borg thought by Seven, they brush it off as a problem with Seven of Nine.

A young man enters the diagnostic room to find something strange has happened. He approaches it with a tricorder and ends up getting too close. Two Borg tubules come out and get him in the neck. Power reroutes to the science lab, where the Borg have set up a forcefield.

With this discovery Voyager goes into red alert status. A group of officers go to the science lab and see that the Borg technology has created a drone using DNA from the young man that was too curious.

The drone grows quickly and becomes a boy of six years in a matter of hours. The Borg implants interestingly enough are from the 29th century. Making the Borg drone basically the most advanced Borg ever.

Seven of Nine ends up playing Mom to the newly created Drone, now a full adult and curious about what he should be doing. After teaching the Drone a thing or two, it quickly adapts to become a member of the crew, and makes Seven proud.

After accidentally contacting the Borg, the Drone has to deal with the fact that his race wants him, and Voyager knows that can’t happen. With his advanced technology the Borg would be an unstoppable force.

Fighting the voice of the collective, the Drone, who named himself One, upgrades Voyager’s shields and weapons, but it doesn’t help, as the Borg ship adapts. Teleporting himself over to the Borg Tactical Sphere, One fights the Borg and interfaces with the ship causing it to explode.

One survives, but is badly damaged. The Doctor tries to save him, but One stops him by putting up a personal forcefield. He knows that the collective will continue to pursue him, and so decides to let himself die. Seven of Nine cries at the loss of her wayward son.

There are some interesting plot points here, and some great character development by Seven of Nine, but otherwise the story is pretty useless. It doesn’t seem to bring them any closer to Earth, nor even really deal with the majority of the crew. There are many better episodes than this, but I can’t be the only one to like the idea of a 27th century Borg drone that can teleport himself.

I give Star Trek: Voyager Drone a 3.5 out of 5.

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Star Trek: The Animated Series has finally made it to DVD, and for around $50 USD you can buy a copy for yourself. The animated series ran from 1973-75 and features voices of nearly the entire original live-action series including William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett.

Including all 22 episodes, the show won a daytime Emmy in 1975 for Outstanding Children’s Series and includes the Peabody award-winning episode, “How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth.”

Bonus Features:

• “Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of STAR TREK: THE ANIMATED SERIES”
• “What’s the STAR TREK Connection”
• Show History

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It looks like no script has materialized yet for Star Trek XI, yet Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were supposed to have a complete draft ready for the end of October.

Producer J.J. Abrams does not seem to be worried at this point though.

“Well, [Orci and Kurtzman] are in the midst of it and it’s in progress,” Abrams told TrekMovie.com. “The idea is to start shooting somewhere around [spring], otherwise we are not going to make the [release] date that they have.”

The timeline for the production seems to be getting a little condensed as days, weeks and months go by and nothing happens with the movie. Production is set to start in the spring, with the movie hopefully coming out in the summer of 2008.

Abrams is fine with a later winter 2008 release date even though summer is usually the blockbuster period, and honestly, we all know that if Star Trek XI does not do decently the franchise will probably die out.

I feel though that a winter release might not be all that bad for Star Trek, as the summer of 2008 is already looking very crowded when it comes to big movies. Getting out of that release window might allow audiences to focus more on the Star Trek movie, rather than competing for numbers against a new Batman movie, and another movie from Pixar.

I am still not happy about their choice in plot for this next installment of Star Trek as they go back to before the Original Series once again. Didn’t they learn anything from Enterprise?

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Season 6, Episode 6
Originally Aired: November 1, 1992

Ms. Rogers gets an internship on the Enterprise, and my first thought is that she is really cute.

The captain and the doctor greet her in the captain’s office, and as Riker sees her, he does his “I’m going to get it on with her” smile and escorts her to her quarters.

She tells a story about her dogs to Riker and after he leaves, puppies appear. She then says that they can’t stay there and they disappear. Interesting addition to the crew, for sure.

In the sickbay, we watch as the Beverly Crusher, scans her and says she is in great shape. Bringing some tricorders to Geordi in the shuttle bay, we watch as she uses some form of telekinesis to stop a container from hitting Commander Riker in the head.

Then in engineering, the warp core basically blows up in her face, and she pushes back the deadly exhaust and returns the warp core to normal. Interestingly enough, Q appears and they know instantly why all kinds of things are going wrong.

He admits that Amanda Rogers is a Q. Well, at least she has the abilities of a Q.

I’d love to read a book where Q meets up with other races. I wonder how long a Klingon or going way back, a Gorn would deal with the Q that we all know and love’s attitude.

Q is there to teach Amanda how to control and adapt to her newly found abilities.

Best Line: Q talking to Picard - “Crusher gets more shrill with each passing year”

Picard and Q squabble about the potential training of Amanda about the Q and their race, finally “agreeing” that she must have a choice in how she wants to live the rest of her life.

Inspecting Amanda, Q decides that she should go to the Continuum. Amanda says no, and pushes Q into the wall. A very amusing scene, and probably not something Q is used to.

What are the Q? We are omnipotent, and there is nothing we can’t do. As a Q, you can have your heart’s desire at a whim.

Q quickly teaches Amanda how to draw ghost-like images from her mind.

The sub-plot of the episode deals with Amanda’s parents death. It seems they were Q and that they died on Earth thanks to a tornado. Odd that a Q could be killed from a tornado, especially when there are weather control systems on Earth.

Counselor Trio has her perm on, and looks ridiculous. Like a poodle died on her head. Deciding during supper that what Amanda wants is Riker, she teleports the two of them to a fantasy world, where he does not give the responses she wants. She then controls his emotions, making him love her. Unfortunately, it is a hollow victory, and ruins the fantasy for her.

In the end, Picard tells Q that he knows that Amanda’s parents were destroyed by the Q. He says that Amanda should know this information, and Q says that it doesn’t matter. If she is Q, she has to go back to the Continuum, and if she is a hybrid, neither Q or human, she will be destroyed. It is interesting to note that the option to have her powers removed is never brought up.

In the end Amanda saves a planet and thus Riker, but in doing so, she has to return to the Q Continuum.

This episode gives viewers an inside look at the Q, and their motivations. It is amazing the type of society that the Continuum has created for itself.

I give True Q a 3.5 out of 5.

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Season 6, Episode 12
First Aired: January 19th, 2000

The cast finds a planet with an odd orbit, upon further investigation, they get caught in a “gravimetric gradient” that puts them in orbit around the planet with no way to leave.

Entering the planet’s orbit causes an earthquake on the planet below, making an early society believe that Voyager is some god. They call Voyager “Ground shaker” as Voyager orbiting the planet is causing earthquakes.

Soon they realize that the planet has a tachyon core, which allows the planet to step out of sync with normal time. For every second that goes by on Voyager, a day goes by on the planet.

During the episode we get to watch as the society quickly progresses. They focus on how Voyager’s arrival effects the society as it evolves.

They send their holographic Doctor down to the planet, and their intention was to leave him down on the planet for three seconds or a bit over two days for the planet, but they are unable to retrieve him and he is left on the planet for three years.

Once the Doctor has returned, Voyager attempts to leave the planet, but stops when they realize they are not getting anywhere and are causing horrible earthquakes on the planet.

Eventually, a space ship from the planet docks at Voyager with two astronauts inside. They begin scouting Voyager, and everyone looks as though they are stuck in time. When the two astronauts transition to Voyager’s time, one of them die. The surviving astronaut, gets to know everyone, and decides to go back to the planet to warn everyone that Voyager is peaceful because his planet begins shooting the ship. They send a torpedo up once every three or four days their time, but it only takes a few seconds between shots for it to hit Voyager.

Once getting to the ground, the missile shots stop. A few seconds later, two ships come up and using some advanced technology, they are able to move Voyager from orbit of the planet. The astronaut teleports over to let Voyager know his message was received, and that a temporal compensator allows his people to enter normal time without leaving their own for short periods of time.

A relatively good episode, but totally self-contained, Star Trek’s specialty. I really enjoyed watching the society advance so far, so quickly. Interestingly enough, Voyager must have came right when they were in their primitive tribal time, what a coincidence.

I give Blink of an Eye a 3.5 out of 5.

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A movie, mini-series or full on multi-season series I could get behind.

I have read the Section 31 novels, but even before then I knew that the black ops group, Section 31, would make a great series. Maybe not a whole multi-year series, but even just a mini-series, or a movie or two would do well in my opinion.

A new ship, either a recognizable design or a new design, crewed by Section 31 agents. You could set it during Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and have them interact with some of the events during that time. Even so much as tying them into the actual episode story line, making people go “so, that’s how they got out of that mess. And they thought it was Data, or O’Brien that did it.”

I wouldn’t want the whole mini-series to be like that, but one or two missions would make it interesting. Watching agents infiltrate ships, to talk to various characters, check up on crews of ships, make deals with alien governments that the Federation can’t know about.

The dark underbelly of what it is like in the Star Trek universe. Some of my favorite episodes have been when they deal with the alternate universe. While way over the top usually, it does put an interesting perspective on how things could be. Delving into Section 31 would make for another interesting perspective.

They would have to have cloaked ships, while against the Treaty of Algeron, cloaking devices have been used by the Federation in a few points in time.

The type of people involved in Section 31 would be interesting, as only a certain type of person makes a good agent. Also, a story on someone getting drafted into Section 31 would also be interesting. How do they deal with the person’s family, friends and co-workers?

I don’t know why Paramount has not tried to capitalize on such a great group. They have used Section 31 in various episodes of Star Trek, but I think it is deserving of its own plot line.

Appearances (from Wikipedia):
Star Trek: Enterprise

• “Affliction” – Section 31 calls on Malcolm Reed to halt development of a cure for a disease afflicting the Klingons
• “Divergence” – Continues “Affliction”’s story
• “Terra Prime” – Reed’s Section 31 contact provides information to help the Enterprise crew infiltrate a Martian colony

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

• “Inquisition – Introduces Section 31, which uses a holodeck simulation to gauge Julian Bashir’s suitability to join.
• “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” – Section 31 calls upon Bashir to carry out a mission on Romulus
• “When It Rains…” – Bashir realizes that the disease affecting the Founders is a Section 31 creation
• “Tacking Into the Wind” – Miles O’Brien suggests that Bashir lure a Section 31 agent to Deep Space Nine
• “Extreme Measures” – Bashir and O’Brien capture a Section 31 agent

Section 31 Novels (not affiliate links):
Section 31: Cloak (Star Trek)
Section 31: Rogue (Star Trek The Next Generation)
Section 31: Abyss (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Section 31: Shadow (Star Trek Voyager)

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