Spoiler Warning: Beware spoilers for Shenmue and Shenmue II.
Happy twenty-fifth anniversary to Shenmue II!
The sequel to my favourite game of the Dreamcast era came along in September 2001, less than two years after Shenmue’s launch in Japan – and less than a year after the game launched here in the UK. By this point, though, it was already clear that the Dreamcast was on its last legs; Sega had announced earlier in the year that the Dreamcast would cease production.
Having been developed alongside the first game, Shenmue II was largely complete, and I guess there was a hope that launching the game would help Sega recoup at least a percentage of the money that had been spent on one of the most expensive titles of all-time. But you know the outcome by now: Shenmue II didn’t do anywhere near as well as its predecessor – selling, by some estimates, as little as 10-15% of the 1.3 million copies that the first game managed. An Xbox port, which launched just over a year later, did a little better, though… so at least there’s that!
Stepping into Hong Kong.
I picked up Shenmue II for the Dreamcast pretty much as soon as it launched. Even though I knew the Dreamcast was on the way out, I still really wanted to dive into the next chapter of what was, at that point, my favourite video game ever! And my first impressions of Shenmue II were very positive. Here was the next part of Ryo’s story, which took him far from home to the shores of Hong Kong.
By the time I played Shenmue II, I must’ve gone through the first Shenmue at least five or six times. It really was my absolute favourite game at that moment; a title that utterly transformed my relationship with gaming as a whole and showed me a glimpse at what the future of the medium could look like. I’d played Shenmue almost incessantly since picking it up in December 2000, so I was intimately familiar with Yamanose, Sakuragaoka, Dobuita, the Yokosuka harbour, and Ryo’s family dojo.
Concept art of Ren, Xiuying, Wong, and Fangmei.
That meant, when I sat down to play Shenmue II nine or ten months later, that I really *felt* the sense of stepping away from the familiar and leaping into the unknown – just as Ryo was doing. Because I’d spent so long wandering the streets of Japan with Ryo, getting immersed in that world, buying toys, going to the arcade, and getting home in time for Ryo’s curfew… going to Hong Kong really felt like I was leaving “home” behind and striking out in a completely new place. I don’t think that feeling would’ve hit me in quite the same way had I only played Shenmue once; it really took that familiarity from repeat playthroughs to make stepping into Hong Kong feel quite so odd and… different.
Although the gameplay is very familiar – thanks to being developed alongside the first game, by the same team, and for the same hardware – the setting of Shenmue II feels very different to the Yokosuka area that I’d become so at home in. Gone were the friendly neighbours and locals; people Ryo had known since childhood and regularly stopped to chat with. And in their place? Strangers, scammers, criminals… and a mysterious girl on a motorbike!
Ryo meets Joy for the first time.
Those first moments of stepping into Hong Kong felt tense, but also adventurous. I can vividly recall the first steps Ryo took along the Aberdeen harbour, rucksack still on his back, making his way into this strange, new place. The bedroom I’d become so familiar with was gone, replaced by a cheap flophouse by the harbour, and then… just when I thought I was beginning to find my feet after visiting a few of the shops and bars, Ryo got his bag stolen!
The opening act of Shenmue II really was intense.
The first Shenmue had quite literally redefined my relationship with gaming as a hobby. At a time when I might’ve begun to drift away as my life got busier, Shenmue came along and showed me what games in the 2000s could be; these intense narrative experiences that would be right at home on the big screen. Shenmue II didn’t feel as revolutionary, in that sense, because I’d been sitting with the first game for months already, and I’d already fully absorbed that transformation. But it was really only the second game I’d ever played to fully embody that style – the “F.R.E.E.” proto-open world thing.
The harbour at night.
Shenmue II’s Hong Kong felt densely-populated, even compared to the first game’s slice of Japan. Once Ryo got out of the harbour area and into Wan Chai, there were people *everywhere*, and even if most of them only had one or two lines, what was cool was that you could approach and try to talk to all of them. As in Shenmue, shops and restaurants that you had no need to visit and didn’t serve any narrative function could be entered at will and explored, and there was so much going on in Hong Kong’s cramped streets that the world felt *alive* in a way that, even today, many game worlds just… don’t.
I felt like there was a bit more diversity of environments in Shenmue II compared to the first game, too. While you really only got the rural area right at the end, each of the areas of the city felt distinctive – some were more modern, others clearly older and more run-down. The harbour had beautiful views across the water; the city streets were so built-up and vertical that you couldn’t see very far. There were luxurious hotels and arcades in some areas, literal ruins or people living on boats in others.
Kowloon.
Shenmue II also captured a moment in time. The Hong Kong of 1987 is very different to how it was even when the game launched; the handover in 1997 changed a lot for the city and its people, as did the clearing of the Kowloon Walled City. By the time Shenmue II launched, the way of life that some of the game’s characters had was already gone… and that’s something that I didn’t feel from the first game in the same way.
When Shenmue launched, I was engrossed by its Japanese setting – but also, I genuinely enjoyed playing through a depiction of the real world in the (almost) modern day. I didn’t see Shenmue as this ’80s nostalgia-fest – which I think you’d definitely get a lot more of if the game had been made in the 2020s. But because Hong Kong changed so much in the years between the game’s setting and its launch, it feels like it captured a piece of history, really – a world that just didn’t exist any more. And that’s a bit of an odd feeling, too, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on it all those years ago.
Arriving in Guilin.
Gameplay-wise, Shenmue II does what any good sequel should: it keeps what worked and expands upon it. The game plays similarly to its predecessor, with collectables, QTEs, mini-games, martial arts moves, and combat – but some of these elements feel more refined, or at least different. You don’t get to drive a forklift, but you can work a part-time job. You can gamble, buy and sell capsule toys, and make money. Money is arguably *more* important this time around – not only does Ryo need, for parts of the game, to pay for his lodgings, but there’s no pocket money from Ine-san to top up his wallet, and there are a couple of points where Ryo needs a certain amount of money to progress the main story.
Quick-time events have developed a bit of a reputation with some players in the years since Shenmue launched, and as the first game to popularise the mechanic, I think these games get a bit of a bad reputation. You have to try to cast your mind back to 2001; quick-time events took what would’ve been cut-scenes and found a way to make them interactive. This was revolutionary at the time, and even if some games have overused or misused QTEs over the last quarter of a century, I’ll always give Shenmue and Shenmue II a pass when it comes to their inclusion.
QTEs have become somewhat infamous, eh?
Shenmue II expands the series’ roster of characters. Ryo makes friends and allies in Hong Kong – Xiuying and Ren being, perhaps, the most noteworthy. The characters are diverse – Ryo can befriend younger characters, like Wong and Fangmei, as well as people his own age, like Ren and Joy, and even meet older folks like Guixiang and Jianmin. There are some incredibly memorable characters that Ryo will meet on his journey, and when it’s time to say goodbye to some of them… well, even all those years ago, I can remember how bittersweet that felt. Like, it was great to be progressing through the story – but sad that the likes of Xiuying couldn’t come along for the next chapter.
There are also some great villains and anti-heroes. I’ve already mentioned Ren and Wong; both characters get off on the wrong foot with Ryo, but become more friendly as the story unfolds. In terms of bosses and baddies, the one that sticks in my mind is the game’s biggest boss – figuratively and literally – Dou Niu. I remember that fight being incredibly difficult back on the Dreamcast, but the reward of beating him and advancing to the final part of the story was just… indescribably fantastic!
Yuan, Dou Niu, and Lan Di: a trio of villains!
Shenmue is a game I’ve always associated with the winter time and festive season; the first game takes place in December, and at points, there’s even some explicitly Christmas theming that you can encounter. But Shenmue II has more of a springtime flavour, I guess, although I wouldn’t say it’s quite so intensely tied to one specific moment in the year in the way its predecessor is. As in the first Shenmue, it’s possible to run out of time – though you almost have to deliberately choose to trigger the game’s bad ending, because both Shenmue and Shenmue II are pretty lenient when it comes to timing and running out the clock.
Ryo’s quest for revenge still feels just as relatable as it had in the first game, and it remains his driving force. But the story is incredibly well-written, and Ryo is challenged in his assumption that he can simply track down the murderous Lan Di and enact his revenge. Ryo has to learn patience – as exemplified by the book-carrying and leaf-catching mini-games that I just *know* some fans of faster-paced action games despise! But there’s more to Shenmue II than mindless action; the game’s story leans into the idea that Ryo isn’t ready for the challenge ahead, and that he needs to take time to slow down, hone his skills, and build up to that climactic confrontation.
Airing out the books…
It’s just such a shame that the Dreamcast’s demise meant that the story couldn’t be continued in the way it should’ve been. It’s also disappointing that, when a reprieve was belatedly granted and Shenmue III finally entered production… well, it wasn’t the ending that it should’ve been.
But this isn’t a forum to debate Shenmue III, is it?
To get back on topic, Shenmue II did exactly what I hoped it would do in 2001: it expanded the story, took Ryo to new places, introduced him to new friends and new enemies alike, and began to unravel some of the mysteries that the first game had so expertly set up. Many questions weren’t resolved by the time the credits rolled – and, in many ways, leaving Ryo and Shenhua in a mysterious, otherworldly, and magical cave felt like a cruel cliffhanger! But the way these storylines advanced felt satisfying at the time.
Ryo and Shenhua.
Because I played Shenmue II on the Dreamcast, there was no English audio available. And I think I’m remembering correctly when I say that this was the first time I’d played any game in Japanese. I know absolutely nothing of the Japanese language, of course – though with subtitles, the game was perfectly fine to play! But I wonder if that experience of playing the game in Japanese changed how I think about Shenmue II. In some ways, it probably meant I had to concentrate a little more; relying on subtitles meant I couldn’t look away, even for a second, lest I risk missing something important! On the other hand, I think that language barrier was another reason why Shenmue II’s world felt just a bit more different and “alien” than the first game’s had.
I don’t object to non-English media, of course, and Shenmue II was almost certainly the first video game I played that didn’t have an English translation. I guess folks from other countries are laughing at that; if your first language is anything other than English or Japanese, chances are a lot of games you were playing in the ’90s and into the 2000s weren’t in your native tongue! But for me, as someone who grew up in the UK and speaks English, that was just another thing that made Shenmue II a little… different.
I played Shenmue II on the Dreamcast where it only had Japanese audio.
Looking back on it now, a quarter of a century later, I don’t think Shenmue II is quite as big or revolutionary a title as its predecessor. But it continued and expanded on that wonderful story – and I really do wonder why so many people who played the first game didn’t come back for the sequel. Was it just the Dreamcast having already been cancelled? Were people – especially in Japan – already moving on to new hardware? Or was the first game even more of a niche thing than I appreciated back then? I guess the answer is a combination of those things, as is often the case!
Perhaps it’s because I played the first Shenmue over and over, but I feel the first game has more memorable locations than its sequel. There are places in all of Shenmue’s main areas that just stick in my mind or that capture a very specific kind of atmosphere. The cafe at the harbour, the car park in Dobuita, the candy store in Sakuragaoka, the arcade, and so on. Shenmue II, in contrast, has some absolutely beautiful and well-crafted locations, but I don’t think as many of them are “iconic” in the same way.
The stairs leading to Man Mo temple.
However, I’d also say that Shenmue II has by far the better character roster. Ren, Xiuying, Dou Niu, Wong, Fangmei, and more are all absolutely fantastic, deep characters, and compared to the first title… I just think Shenmue II takes the win on that front! That’s not to say that any of the first game’s characters are “bad,” but the way the story unfolds and these characters are introduced more naturally just gives the second game the edge.
There are some very memorable moments in Shenmue II. Obviously, visiting the mysterious cave in Guilin has to be among them; this was, for more than eighteen years, as far as Ryo’s story got. Moreover, it was the moment when this grounded story of revenge set in a realistic, modern-day setting took a turn in more of a fantastical direction. And that was truly an interesting development!
Ryo at the end of the game.
The long QTE section of ascending the Ghost Hall Building in Kowloon is also incredibly memorable – probably because of just how damn long it took me to perfectly progress through that particular challenge! Often if I encounter a similar section in a game – balancing on beams or boards, navigating narrow or dangerous elevated paths, and so on – it reminds me a lot of Shenmue II! I think I noted that in a review of a recent game – Indika.
In terms of narrative or character moments, Ryo realising that the person he’d been sent to track down – this famous martial arts master who he hoped would help him – was… shock horror, a *woman* is still pretty funny. It says a lot about Ryo, his expectations, and his biases – and I love how the story takes him to task for making such assumptions, particularly when Xiuying easily kicks his butt! Then there’s Ryo catching up with Wong on his boat-home, giving Fangmei a birthday gift, and the burgeoning friendships Ryo develops with Joy and Ren. There’s some great stuff here, and it’s beautifully brought to life in the game, making the world and characters feel real.
Ryo has his expectations challenged… and gets his butt kicked.
I still haven’t watched Shenmue: The Animation, but it’s on my list, and I hope to get to it sooner or later! As I think I said last time, when we celebrated the first game’s anniversary, I’ll be curious to see how well the story translates to a completely new medium. And having just started to dip my toes into anime this year, I’m definitely interested in continuing that by revisiting Shenmue and Shenmue II.
So I hope this has been a fun look back!
Shenmue II is a great game – and, even more so than its predecessor, is sorely underrated and underappreciated. The mystery of the mirrors unfolds, Ryo’s quest for revenge continues, and along the way, he meets some fascinating characters in a dense, lived-in world. I adored Shenmue II back in 2001… and I still appreciate its successes today, a quarter of a century later.
The cave at the end of the game.
Thanks for joining me on this retrospective. I really need to do more of these “video game spotlight” pieces; I have at least a dozen other games that I’d like to talk about in this format! If you missed it, I wrote up a similar 25th anniversary piece for the first Shenmue, which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Earlier this year, I also talked a little about the hoax trailer for a fourth game, and you can check out my thoughts on that by clicking or tapping here. And all of my other pieces about the Shenmue saga can be found by clicking or tapping here.
For me, Shenmue II is still where this story ended. Incomplete and on a cliff-hanger… a masterpiece of the Dreamcast generation that, for reasons beyond its control, wasn’t able to be continued. I have my doubts, but if – *if* – a fourth Shenmue game ever makes it to production… I’d still like to see how this story ends. Never say never, I suppose.
Shenmue I & II is available now for PC and PlayStation 4. Shenmue – The Animation may be available to stream on CrunchyRoll. Shenmue is the copyright of YSNet and/or Sega. Some images, screenshots, and artwork courtesy of Sega, YSNet, Shenmue Dojo, and Wandering Through Shenmue on YouTube. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, The Search for Spock, The Undiscovered Country, and Star Trek ’09.
Happy sixtieth anniversary to the Star Trek franchise! On the 8th of September, 1966 (or the 6th of September in Canada), The Original Series premiered with the episode The Man Trap. And I just wanted to take a moment before jumping into the review of Star Trek’s latest episode, some six decades later, to acknowledge that milestone. I also have a short piece that I wrote to commemorate the anniversary; click or tap here to check it out if you’re interested!
Okay, on to Orders of Magnitude – a completely different episode, in so many ways, to The Man Trap… but at the same time, the DNA of what makes Star Trek “feel like Star Trek” was present, I felt.
I’ve tried to go into every Strange New Worlds episode this season with an open mind, even when the latest “big swing” or genre spoof didn’t really hold much appeal. But Orders of Magnitude was the first episode since really the premiere where I felt a sense of real optimism before I even pressed “play.” Having seen a very brief trailer on social media (in vertical format, unfortunately), it seemed like the teased episode would be action-packed and explosive. And so it proved to be.
Uh, La’an? You okay there?
When a franchise has existed for as long as Star Trek has – telling close to 1,000 stories across six decades – there are bound to be stories that just… rhyme. And for me, I felt echoes of several familiar episodes, films, and character archetypes in Orders of Magnitude. On one side of the story was a fairly nondescript gang of mercenaries, holding members of the away team captive and forcing them to perform some feat of technobabble. And on the other? The latest in Star Trek’s long and storied history of “badmirals!”
Orders of Magnitude ran to basically an hour, including the opening titles, and the episode *needed* all of that time to make its two storylines work. When it became clear that Pike’s away mission to the crystal caves was going to be more than just a convenient excuse to give Admiral Reeger command of the Enterprise, I was a little worried that we were going to run out of time for both sides of the episode to really shine. And there were a couple of places back on the Enterprise where I would, in hindsight, have liked to have spent just a tiny bit more time. But overall, I think Orders of Magnitude worked well at balancing two powerful storylines for Kirk and Uhura.
This was a good episode.
Orders of Magnitude had a fantastic score. My number one rule for music in any episode (or film, TV show, game, etc.) is “do no harm;” i.e. the music shouldn’t be overbearing, tonally clash with what’s going on, or otherwise take me out of a scene. And most of the time, modern Star Trek does its music so well that I barely even register it while I’m watching! But this time, I felt the episode’s score was fantastic; there were tense pieces, mysterious pieces, dramatic ones, and exciting ones all at the right moments. When Kirk scrolled Admiral Reeger’s padd, taking those first steps to uncovering a mystery… the music absolutely elevated that moment in just about the best way possible.
Visually… I think it was a bit of a mixed bag, though. I loved the dark tone aboard the Enterprise, as set by the dimmed lights of the ship’s red alert status. Kirk’s radiation burns were suitably gruesome, and so was A’Sha’s injury on the planet. And the set constructed for the inside of the crystal cave was solid enough, although not particularly original. However, the exterior of the crystal cave was less impressive; a recycled location that we’ve seen before with a few giant crystals superimposed. Thankfully, we weren’t in that space for too long, but it was enough to be noticeable. Also on the visual side – or rather, the *lack* of a visual side – we saw nothing at all of the attack on Vaardan; the storyline’s inciting incident. And although the point of the story was that the ship was cloaked, we also saw nothing of the ship, its wake, or even the planet it landed on. Even the attack on the cargo ship near Argus II was fuzzy and only appeared briefly. I just felt we could’ve gotten a little more on the visuals/CGI side to add a bit more depth to this side of the story.
The away team.
Let’s tackle the away mission first, and then move on to Kirk and the badmiral.
Call me a cynic, but the second I saw Cadet A’Sha on the away mission, my first thought was “redshirt!” As Strange New Worlds had done with Ensign Gamble last year (and as Discovery did several times across its run), I suspected that our new Vulcan cadet might not be long for this world. That feeling only intensified when Uhura made her comment about how she insisted that A’Sha be invited to join the away team.
And it seemed, for a time, that I was about to be proven right – only for the episode to take a couple of last-minute twists with A’Sha’s story. After being injured and suffering some kind of crystal-induced ailment, Uhura worked overtime to save A’Sha – only for the cadet to decide, in the episode’s final moments, that life in Starfleet wasn’t right for her, after all. A logical reaction, perhaps, to nearly dying from crystal wounds on a random moon!
A’Sha has decided (perhaps understandably) that Starfleet isn’t right for her, after all.
Joking aside, I quite liked the direction this storyline took, and that it wasn’t as predictable as I feared it would be. Redshirts in Star Trek are a trope, of course – The Man Trap, sixty years ago, contained the very first such example – but it can be nice when an expected storyline has a twist or a surprise; something to keep us on our toes and make things feel a bit… different. A’Sha’s survival was the first twist, but her decision to leave Starfleet shortly thereafter was the second.
Obviously, A’Sha is not a particularly well-developed character. Her biggest outing, aside from this week, came in Off-Hour, where she worked with Scotty in the turbolift and transporter room. But she’s arguably the only Vulcan character in Strange New Worlds to have been played straight; the likes of T’Pring have usually been thrown into slapstick, comedic, or romantic storylines that (in my opinion) are not especially well-suited to the Vulcans, and rely on a joke or a bit that’s just been stretched way too far. So A’Sha has been a breath of fresh air, in that sense, and I’m sad to see her go.
A’Sha after being stabbed.
A’Sha also turned out to be an important character for Uhura, following up on an (admittedly too short) scene from the season premiere. Uhura, having been assigned to the role of mentor, has demonstrated arguably the most growth of any of the show’s regular characters (so far, anyway), going from a fresh-faced and unsure cadet back in Season 1 to a more confident and settled mentor of cadets by Season 4. If we keep in mind that part of the objective of this season in particular has been, to quote the show’s tagline, to “boldly go one step closer to where it all began,” then we can see Uhura’s arc as bringing her closer to her TOS role ahead of the show’s finale.
And, I would argue, Uhura’s arc is now pretty much complete – as capped off by her promotion at the end of the episode.
I want to spend more time with this incarnation of Uhura, of course! In fact, I’m not ready to say goodbye to any of these characters, yet, and I just know next season’s finale is going to be an emotional sucker-punch. But… if this is the final Uhura spotlight that Strange New Worlds has time for, then I think we can consider her arc well and truly complete. Strange New Worlds hasn’t always made good on its prequel status, but in Uhura’s case, it really did succeed. The show has shown us the character’s younger days in a way that made sense, taking her from a cadet with doubts about her abilities and her role in Starfleet through to a newly-promoted lieutenant. If there’s no time for anything else, and even if Strange New Worlds fumbles the ball with all of the other TOS characters, we’ll always be able to point to Uhura’s arc as a success; a way in which the show expanded the world of Star Trek in a way that made sense and felt good for her character.
Uhura’s promotion caps off an impressive character journey across all four seasons of the show.
This week, Uhura’s story excelled in two key ways.
Firstly, we see her taking a stand – even if that meant clashing with Captain Pike. You would never have seen Season 1 Uhura talking to Captain Pike the way she did in Orders of Magnitude, which just emphasises what we were saying about how far she’s come in her character journey. That confidence – partly inspired by Hemmer, early on – led to her taking on a very risky rescue attempt, butting heads with her own captain in the process.
Secondly, the way Uhura’s story subtly leaned into both her role as a communications officer and her knowledge of the Andorians and their sensitivities was fantastic. I don’t think someone like Captain Pike could’ve as easily gotten away with jury-rigging the mercenaries’ machine to emit a debilitating sonic pulse; it took someone like Uhura, who has those linguistic skills and that connection with Hemmer, to be able to pull off something like that in a way that felt natural and not like a complete deus ex machina!
The way Uhura took on the Andorians felt clever – and in keeping with her character and her role on the ship.
This led to a firefight with the mercenaries, and perhaps this was where I felt the episode dragged its feet just a little. Don’t get me wrong: it was cool to see badass Uhura kicking Andorian butt! But having gone to the trouble of setting up a more complex solution – the sonic attack – to then descend into a bog-standard firefight kind of took away from Uhura’s unique accomplishment and what we were just saying about how she was the only one able to pull off something like that. Any idiot could get in a firefight; Uhura’s skills were better-displayed when she used her technical and comms know-how to reconfigure the mercenaries’ machine – and I just think *that* would’ve been a better way to defeat the mercs.
That being said, there were some neat moments during the firefight, as well as plenty of tension, too. The only other thing that I didn’t like as much was the death of the mercenary leader; the whole “noooo!” thing while staring up at the camera (and not even *trying* to get out of the way or move at all) just… felt like a bit of a tropey way to end what had been an otherwise pretty good storyline for Uhura.
Just move out of the way, you daft bastard.
Speaking of the mercenaries… well, what is there to say? Bog-standard, bland, and really only noteworthy for being Andorians. I don’t think we learned any of their names, nor really what their scheme was beyond “general piracy and/or smuggling,” and while the gang served a narrative function as antagonists for Pike, Uhura, and the rest of the away team… I mean, I don’t think anyone’s going to come out of Orders of Magnitude desperate to learn more about this group.
And that can be okay. The episode already had a memorable antagonist on the other side of the story in Admiral Reeger, and as I said, the Andorians had a role to play in the narrative and played it just fine. All I’m saying is that there are better pirates, better mercenaries, better criminals, and better Andorians in Star Trek – and you don’t have to look far for examples!
The Andorian pirates/mercenaries weren’t the greatest or most-developed antagonists that the franchise has to offer…
Uhura’s promotion, which closed out the episode, was just wonderful. Everything about it, with Pike and Una setting it up, felt pitch-perfect, and I think it was great for Uhura to get that moment with the captain after their earlier clash. Pike clearly respected Uhura taking the initiative, and wanted to reward her not only for that one moment on the away mission, but really for her entire service aboard the Enterprise to date.
And as Strange New Worlds adjusts and repositions its characters ahead of the end of the show – and, in-universe, the start of TOS and Kirk’s famous five-year mission – that makes sense. Uhura is now basically where she needs to be, and as I said above: if we get no more spotlight storylines for this character, Strange New Worlds has more than done its duty as a prequel, taking her character from the fresh-faced cadet we met in Season 1 to the more confident, established bridge officer Kirk could rely on in TOS. A successful arc indeed.
Uhura gets shot.
Before we hit up Kirk and the badmiral, a brief diversion to two other characters: Dr M’Benga and Nurse Chapel.
This whole “Dr M’Benga wants to leave” storyline seems to have come out of nowhere, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m not making that up, am I? We knew, of course, that Dr M’Benga couldn’t remain as the Enterprise’s *chief* medical officer heading into TOS, and we also know that Dr McCoy will make at least one appearance in Season 5, thanks to a casting announcement from Paramount. But I’m just not convinced that his potential departure/demotion/disappearance needed this… soap opera quality, with Chapel getting all offended and sulky and Dr M’Benga himself seeming to connive and engineer his route off the ship or to a lower duty station.
Then there’s the question of how much sense it makes *in-universe* for this storyline to play out as it was set up by the end of Orders of Magnitude. One: Dr M’Benga “admitted” (though his confession was a lie) to abusing his position as a doctor to illegally drug a senior flag officer, compromising a mission in the process. And two: Admiral Reeger’s reputation is now in ruins, surely, so his ability to enact revenge is going to be stymied, at best, by the events of this episode. So we’re either looking at Dr M’Benga being struck off and having his medical license revoked for what he confessed to doing, or we’re looking at… nothing at all, because Admiral Reeger is going to suffer the fallout of his lies being exposed. It just feels like a bit of a contrivance and a complication, and one that – I would argue – doesn’t even serve a major narrative function. Dr M’Benga will continue to serve aboard the Enterprise in some capacity after Pike departs the ship, and I just don’t think there needs to be a massive in-universe explanation for why he ceded the role of CMO to Dr McCoy… especially not one so convoluted.
Dr M’Benga.
Admiral Reeger is the latest “badmiral” in a long, long line! In fact, I’m pretty sure that Starfleet has more evil, nasty admirals than it does genuine good guys, at this point! But that’s okay… Reeger made for a fun and occasionally complex antagonist for Kirk – though, as we’ll discuss, he wasn’t perhaps as nuanced as he could’ve been, and trying to give him not one but *two* backstories to explain his villainous turn and conflict with Kirk was, perhaps, a step too far given the amount of time we spent with him.
So let’s start with Admiral Reeger being a brand-new character. This is common in Star Trek for “badmirals” and other antagonists, of course – but because he’s a new creation for Orders of Magnitude, it means we’re introduced to him, spend time with him, and see his downfall all in the span of a single episode – or rather, two-thirds of an episode. And that limits how much of an impact a character like this can have. In this case, I think Admiral Reeger worked about as well as he could’ve, but part of me wishes that some part of his character or backstory had been established in an earlier episode.
Admiral Reeger: Star Trek’s latest “badmiral.”
We see both Ortegas and La’an seemingly reverent toward the admiral’s wartime service, and the Battle of Zeta Reticuli in particular. But because, again, this event is brand-new – and neither character spent much time in the spotlight this week – it doesn’t hit as hard as it could’ve. Past iterations of Star Trek got away with this because they were entirely episodic, but with the franchise having more ongoing arcs and storylines in its modern incarnation… I can’t help but feel an opportunity was missed, earlier in the season, to name-drop the admiral, the battle, or some other part of his story in a way that would’ve added something to this setup.
Is that an unfair criticism? Maybe. But given how Season 4 has taken diversions into a variety of different genre parodies and spoofs… I mean, I don’t think we would’ve really missed the soap opera fluff or the puppet silliness if one of those stories had taken a couple of minutes to set up something that would’ve been important this time. In fact… dumping one of those episodes entirely to allow both halves of Orders of Magnitude to be their own full story? That wouldn’t have been a terrible idea.
Doing more to set up Admiral Reeger wouldn’t have gone amiss.
But okay, let’s review the storyline we got rather than the one we might’ve preferred to get!
Admiral Reeger was a compelling character. But in the time allotted to his story, I think one backstory or the other – either the deaths of his family spurring him on to get revenge *or* the stolen valour/George Kirk angle – would’ve been a better call. Trying to cram in both left absolutely no margin for error, and given Reeger’s role as a foil for Kirk, I just don’t think the “family revenge” angle was sufficiently deep or well-explored. It felt more like a narrative excuse for Reeger to go off the rails – and a better-written story could’ve seen Kirk pushing his buttons in just the right way to make the lies and the cover-up a more compelling and exciting revelation.
That isn’t to say that what we got was “bad,” and I found Joe Morton’s performance in the role to be absolutely one of the best parts of the episode. But rather, given that this episode, in spite of its long runtime, had a lot to do… two separate backstories for Reeger (neither of which we actually got to see any part of on screen) might’ve been a bit much, and given where the story wanted to take Reeger and Kirk, the George Kirk/stolen valour angle would’ve been more than sufficient to explain his clash with Kirk – and Kirk’s insubordination.
The climactic clash.
Remember at the beginning of Star Trek: Discovery when Michael Burnham led what I’ve since termed “the moron’s mutiny” against Captain Georgiou? That was pretty awful… but *this* is how you write an insubordination-to-mutiny storyline in a way that makes actual narrative sense and doesn’t harm or ruin anyone’s characterisation! Kirk began to unfold a mystery involving Admiral Reeger, Dr M’Benga, his father, the USS Constitution, and the Battle of Zeta Reticuli… and it was utterly compelling stuff.
There was a sense, as Kirk’s story unfolded, that it was *he* as much as (or perhaps even more so than) Reeger who was personally compromised by what was happening; that Kirk’s determination to prove Reeger had stolen credit for his father’s actions was what drove him – not any sense of compassion, empathy, or concern for the lives of the people of Argus II. And that angle added some much-needed moral ambiguity to what was unfolding. Kirk had a personal vendetta here, almost as much as Reeger did – and the story was structured in such a way as to make you feel like neither man was wholly in the right.
Kirk and Reeger’s stories complemented and paralleled each other, in places.
I liked that Reeger wasn’t a completely typical “badmiral,” either. He wasn’t “evil for the sake of it,” he wasn’t a traitor, nor horribly corrupt; he felt more like someone out of his depth – a man promoted above and beyond his capabilities, and who didn’t really have any business commanding a starship. That gels with Dr M’Benga’s line to Kirk about Reeger’s promotion having more to do with getting him off the bridge and behind a desk rather than anything else. And I really felt that in Reeger’s characterisation.
I also liked the idea of Star Trek tackling this “stolen valour” idea in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever really seen before. Reeger had, for years, been taking credit for another man’s accomplishments – and both George Kirk and Starfleet at large had let him get away with it in the interests of overall morale. Reeger developed a personal legend – a legend that characters like Ortegas and La’an fully bought into – on the basis of a lie, and his determination to keep that covered up could have been a bigger motivating factor for him as the story unfolded. I liked what we got to see of it, and I liked how it made Reeger a different kind of “badmiral” than the likes of, say, The Undiscovered Country’s Cartwright or DS9′s Layton.
Reeger was a slightly different take on the “badmiral” idea.
However, I felt that Reeger’s arc seemed to take him from “war hero” to “war criminal” almost instantly; his decision to enact General Order 24 and order the total destruction of an inhabited planet seemed to come *very* quickly, when realistically, I think it was such a major turn that we needed to see more of Reeger’s slide into “madness” or obsession for ourselves. If you look at comparable characters on revenge quests or obsessions – like Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab, basically the archetype for this kind of character – their descent is always slower-paced. Other characters might even go along for (some of) the ride, sticking with a character on an obsessive quest for a time. But Reeger – partly because of the confines of the story – had to make that switch in an instant when ordering the destruction of the planet.
And this same issue recurred later, when Reeger – as we’d subsequently learn, under the influence of a drug – began ranting and raving on the bridge.
I felt echoes of Star Trek ’09 in the climactic confrontation between Kirk and Reeger – the physical altercation, the emotional outburst, and finally, Reeger being relieved of command all mirrored Spock’s role in that film, which saw Kirk ascend to command the alt-timeline Enterprise. As I said above, after six decades and a thousand stories, some are bound to rhyme!
This moment reminded me a lot of Star Trek ’09.
If Reeger had an obsession with the cloaked ship, so too did Kirk develop an obsession with exposing Reeger and proving his father was more of an upstanding officer – and there were parallels in the two mens’ arcs that bounced off each other really well. As I said above, this gave Kirk and Reeger enough complexity and ambiguity – at least, for most of the story – to keep things genuinely interesting. As Trekkies, of course we’re inclined to support Kirk over some random “badmiral-of-the-week,” but that didn’t mean that the way Kirk handled himself and his conflict with Reeger was perfect!
In fact, Kirk’s arc this time arguably sets up some of his other conflicts and run-ins with authority figures further along the timeline. There are several occasions in TOS and beyond where we’d see Kirk seemingly disobeying orders or striking out on his own – most notably, perhaps, in The Search for Spock, where he’d steal the refitted Enterprise.
Kirk accessed Admiral Reeger’s medical file without authorisation.
And that makes an interesting point of comparison between Kirk’s story and Uhura’s.
If Uhura’s story was about bringing her over the line; getting her from her younger, less-confident prequel version closer to the person we remember, Kirk’s was more to do with setting up a specific kind of self-reliance, an anti-authority streak, and – arguably – a single-mindedness that could veer into obsession, as we’d see not only in films like The Search for Spock, but in episodes like The Conscience of the King, too.
What I was a little surprised about – especially given that it was explicitly referenced in the “previously on…” compilation right at the start of the episode – was that Kirk’s brief tenure in the captain’s chair of the USS Farragut, and the destruction of a comparable pirate-raider ship, didn’t so much as get an oblique reference. I felt *certain* that Kirk would’ve drawn on his own experience in The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail from just last season when trying to make his case to Admiral Reeger… but if that was ever an idea, it either didn’t make it to the script or else ended up on the cutting-room floor. Which makes it all the more of an oddity, in some ways, to see a clip from that episode right at the beginning. Why bring it up if it ultimately wasn’t going to matter for Kirk’s arc this week?
Was it too difficult to connect Kirk’s experience on the Farragut to this week’s story?
One thing I noticed, albeit very briefly and only on a single star map, was that the cloaked ship that Admiral Reeger was tracking seemed to be flying rather close to the Romulan Neutral Zone. The Neutral Zone was prominently featured on that star map, and given that we know the Romulans use cloaked ships – and that, just a few years from now, Kirk will face off against a similar cloaked intruder – well… put the pieces together! Could this be yet another reference to the events of Balance of Terror, and to the burgeoning conflict with the Romulan Empire? Orders of Magnitude left things ambiguous on that front, and after A Quality of Mercy already delved deeply into that idea in Season 1, I’m sure that was the right call. But it’s interesting in any case.
If it isn’t the Romulans, who else could it be? The Klingons use cloaked ships, of course, but after a recent war with the Federation, would they risk being so aggressive again so soon? Otherwise, we have the Suliban, I guess, from Enterprise, but that’s about it. I suppose a pirate ship or something like that is a possibility – but then, why would pirates massacre an entire planet? Perhaps this is setting up something we’re yet to discover; I note that the Season 4 finale is titled “Tomorrow’s Enterprise,” and makes reference to “the future Kirk will one day inherit” in its blurb. So could that be another hint at the Romulans, Balance of Terror, or some other cloaked ship? It’s definitely a head-scratcher, eh?
Was the cloaked ship meant to be Balance of Terror’s bird-of-prey?
I’d be surprised if, after A Quality of Mercy already did so – and did it quite spectacularly – Strange New Worlds would return to Balance of Terror for a *second* time… especially if it’s another time-travel plot. However, after “but it was all just a dream” and other nonsense this season, I suppose anything’s possible, eh?
But we’re speculating about future storylines, and that’s not really a good use of our time!
Orders of Magnitude brought James and Sam Kirk together for the first (real) time this season, and I really enjoyed the way the brothers played off each other. Dan Jeannotte kind of drew the short straw in Strange New Worlds, especially when the show started bringing James Kirk into stories more frequently, but he was well-used here, as Sam added a lot of context to James’ quest to uncover the truth about what happened between their father, George, and Admiral Reeger.
The Super Kirk-io Brothers.
Kirk also got a bit of closure with La’an after the events of The Griffin Incident earlier in the season. I didn’t really like the way this storyline kicked off; Ortegas’ remarks to La’an felt completely wrong and tone-deaf given what happened between La’an and Kirk, and I was just a bit taken aback by the flippant way Ortegas brought up Kirk’s arrival on the ship.
However, Kirk’s line to La’an about how she “did stab [him]” felt suitably in-character for the Kirk we know and love, and I liked that line and the way Kirk kind of got his own back by stunning La’an with her own phaser. Again, if we’re talking about parallels between Kirk and Reeger, there’s another one on the “revenge” side, I guess! La’an having a lucky charm wristwatch, though, seemed to come out of nowhere, and it didn’t really serve any purpose – other than allowing Kirk to come up with a distraction to snatch her phaser. A bit of an oddity. Overall, though, I guess I’d say Kirk and La’an somewhat ended the awkwardness of their time on the USS Griffin, though they might’ve just set up *another* conflict or reason to avoid each other in the process. Not sure I like the implication of La’an – fresh off her breakup with Spock – being allegedly interested romantically in Kirk again, though; we finally dealt with that back in Season 2.
So, uh, are Kirk and La’an good now?
Most of the other characters got relatively minor roles this time, which is okay. I wasn’t clear whether Pike and/or Una knew what Uhura was planning to do when she began her feint to take on the Andorians; I read the scene as Pike *not* knowing, otherwise he might’ve volunteered to do something himself. And for Uhura’s arc, I think it works better if we say that Pike and Una didn’t know what she was planning.
Pelia was absent, which was a bit of a shame – I always like seeing her, and I think she could’ve been an interesting character for Kirk to consult or for Reeger to boss around. However, I liked the moment we got with Scotty this time – and his appearance in the skant variant of the uniform. He looked cute like that, and I think it kind of fits with his dress uniform kilt that we saw in Season 2 (or 3?)
Scotty in the skant uniform variant.
So let’s wrap things up.
Orders of Magnitude was an action-packed, exciting episode featuring a great “badmiral” as an antagonist. It had enough narrative similarities to Star Trek’s past to feel a lot more celebratory, at this milestone anniversary moment, than last week’s soap opera mess, and its Uhura storyline in particular did a lot to justify the show’s place in the timeline and prequel status. Even if we never get to spend another second with Uhura (and I certainly hope and expect that we will, by the way!) we can now consider her character growth and prequel arc to be complete.
And for Kirk, while I don’t think he grew or changed as much over the course of his adventure as Uhura did, Orders of Magnitude established and/or cemented important character traits that will go on to be important further along his character journey in The Original Series and beyond, adding to that sense that Strange New Worlds is finally starting to justify bringing Kirk in for a prequel arc. His clash with Admiral Reeger furthers a “challenge to authority” character trait that we know Kirk has, and his willingness to bend and break the rules is something we’ve seen countless times in The Original Series, The Animated Series, the movies, and more.
Reeger and Kirk on the bridge.
I have not been Strange New Worlds’ biggest fan or cheerleader this season. In fact, I’m pretty disappointed with more than half of the episodes we’ve gotten so far, for a variety of reasons. I don’t think some of the “big swings” and genre spoofs have worked as well as they could’ve, and I don’t think the writing has been top-quality, either, unfortunately. So it’s great to be able to put my hand on my heart and say that Orders of Magnitude joins Off-Hour and Human Best Friend as one of “the good ones;” episodes from this season that I’ll happily return to for a re-watch in the months and years ahead!
Next week, Strange New Worlds promises “a genuine fantasy world” and “fairy tale” in Once La’an A Time. Could this be the moment where La’an gears up for an exit from the Enterprise, as I’ve repeatedly speculated? I guess we’ll have to tune in to find out! Though I confess, I feel echoes of Season 1’s The Elysian Kingdom already, and after such a solid, upstanding, and “Star Trekky” episode this week, I’m not thrilled about a return to the “big swings” and genre spoofs next time. But I’ll try to approach it with an open mind – and hope to have my doubts proven wrong!
The Enterprise in orbit of the crystal moon.
Thanks for joining me this time. I hope this review has been interesting. I’m aware of the fact that, over the season as a whole, most of the episodes I’ve favoured have been the action-packed ones, which I wouldn’t have necessarily expected a couple of months ago. But some of these other genre spoofs and pastiches haven’t worked as intended, at least for me… so here we are, I guess!
I’m glad that, after three of the last four Strange New Worlds episodes have been flawed, tropey, or otherwise just plain unenjoyable, the series has once again demonstrated that it can find its feet. Sure, it’s a bit late in the season, and Orders of Magnitude can’t wipe away some of the disappointments of prior episodes. But as a Trekkie, I sit down to watch Star Trek because I want to have a good time – not because I want to write a 3,000-word teardown of the latest ill-conceived or poorly-executed genre spoof. Orders of Magnitude has been, in that sense, a pleasant and refreshing change of pace!
See you next week for Once La’an A Time… and until then: Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Happy Star Trek Day, everybody! And a very happy *sixtieth* anniversary to the Star Trek franchise, which first aired on this very day in 1966.
I wanna start today’s celebrations by talking not about the sixtieth anniversary, but rather the thirtieth! In 1996, a young Dennis made the long trek by rail to Manchester. Why? Because Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry was playing host to Star Trek: The Exhibition, which was a travelling collection of screen-used props, model ships, a replica of the Enterprise bridge, and more. The Exhibition had stays around the UK, Ireland, and Germany from 1995 through to 1998, and some of its props and exhibits later re-appeared in Blackpool, in time for the 50th anniversary in 2016.
But that visit to Manchester… I remember it being magical! It was one of my first major outings on my own, taking two separate trains, and I remember being amazed at the full-size replicas, the props that had actually been seen on screen, and everything else that was on display. It was a truly wonderful way to celebrate the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary, and I remember it being just an incredible experience.
I visited this exhibition in 1996 to celebrate the 30th anniversary!
But the thirtieth anniversary was far from over! I bought a special edition of the Star Trek Magazine, which celebrated the milestone, and then there was the BBC’s Star Trek Night! That broadcast had quizzes, interviews with famous fans, and concluded with the UK premiere of Caretaker – Voyager’s first episode. If you’re an American, that might seem a little late, but remember that in the ’90s, the UK (and much of the rest of the world) was running at least a full season – if not two – behind the United States in terms of broadcasts.
There were two special episodes produced for Star Trek’s thirtieth: Deep Space Nine’s Trials and Tribble-ations and Voyager’s Flashback. Both are great episodes that are a ton of fun to revisit, even though I didn’t get to see them until a bit later! And lest we forget, 1996 was also the year of First Contact! Widely hailed as the best TNG film (though I might be tempted to disagree!) First Contact hit cinemas in November that year.
We got two wonderful crossover episodes for the 30th anniversary.
The thirtieth is, for me, Star Trek’s best and biggest anniversary; it was a real blow-out. By the time of the fortieth in 2006, we were kinda down in the dumps as Trekkies, sadly. Enterprise’s cancellation meant that no new Star Trek was being broadcast or even in official production, so there was no chance to repeat crossover specials or anything of that nature. And by the fiftieth in 2016, Discovery was still in early production, and we just got the one Kelvin timeline film – Beyond – in cinemas. Beyond’s premiere was rather bittersweet, coming after the deaths of Leonard Nimoy and the young Anton Yelchin. So the fiftieth – a half-decade of Star Trek – came at a time of optimism in some ways, but with only the one film premiering.
So where does Star Trek stand today, as the sixtieth anniversary lands?
Well, Strange New Worlds is currently on the air, with Season 4 more than halfway over. We’ve also had Starfleet Academy’s first season, a pretty solid video game called Across The Unknown, and the announcement of another interesting-looking game called Shadow Frontier. Not bad, for sure… but perhaps not as big or spectacular as I might’ve hoped for three or four years ago!
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiered earlier this year.
I would’ve liked to see more of an effort made to get some kind of crossover going – like we got for the thirtieth. Perhaps Pike’s crew could’ve linked up (somehow) with characters from The Next Generation era, or the Starfleet Academy kids might’ve been able to revisit the events of a fan-favourite story. There was potential to do something a bit bigger than we ultimately got from this new Skydance-Paramount corporation, and given Star Trek’s short-to-medium-term future… I’m a bit disappointed, to tell you the truth.
Every Star Trek show which had been in production at the time of the Skydance merger has since been cancelled, and I think we have to accept the disappointing reality that this modern incarnation of Star Trek did not do as well as the TNG era in terms of bringing in a wider audience. Streaming numbers aren’t always easy to come by, but neither Starfleet Academy’s first nor Strange New Worlds’ fourth seasons have cracked the top-ten most-streamed shows in the United States this year. And that’s a bit of a shame.
Strange New Worlds Season 4 is currently airing.
At the same time, though, I see reasons for optimism in Star Trek’s longer-term future. As I said, there’s at least one new, interesting-looking video game from a known developer in the works, and that has the potential to be bigger and more successful than any Trek game since 2000’s Elite Force. And there’s at least one new film idea being worked on; whether it’ll make it to full production is another matter, of course!
But after the previous Paramount corporation arguably mishandled Star Trek, I think there’s value in giving a new team time and space to go through a bit of a reset. I’d have preferred if at least one show could’ve kept the flag flying, of course, but given where we are right now… maybe a break is needed. If Star Trek can come back stronger – perhaps in time for the seventieth anniversary! – we might not consider the impending hiatus to be a bad thing at all.
An enhanced/upresed still from a 1960s TV advert promoting The Original Series.
Star Trek is still a unique offering in the sci-fi realm. Much of the genre in the modern day focuses on dystopias – civilisations where technology has gone awry, or where corporations and autocrats are in control. Star Trek’s vision of an enlightened future, where humanity has overcome many of its worst impulses and flaws, and where technology solves more problems than it causes, still makes the franchise stand out – even though some recent offerings have challenged that idea.
And there’s still a place for a franchise that looks ahead with hope and optimism. Not only is that something I’d argue many of us want and *need* to see in the entertainment space, but it’s also something that makes Star Trek different. In a growing, crowded genre, Star Trek still has something that helps it stand out from the pack. It’s going to fall on the shoulders of new producers, writers, and directors to take advantage of that properly – and in a way that, arguably, those of the recent streaming era failed to do – but I still believe that it’s not only possible, but desirable, too.
The world still needs entertainment with an optimistic tone and a hopeful approach to the future.
I first became a Trekkie in 1991. I wrote up a re-watch of the very first episode I can ever remember watching – The Next Generation’s second season episode The Royale – earlier this year. And I’ve spoken before about how Star Trek was a source of help, comfort, escape, and companionship to an awkward, nerdy, and lonely kid through the ’90s and beyond. Star Trek helped me navigate school, social life, adolescence, and more – and the franchise has been a near-constant companion to me for more than thirty-five years at this point.
I went back to watch The Original Series and its films as I began my journey as a Trekkie – culminating in meeting William Shatner at a fan event just this year. And, as The Next Generation’s spin-offs and films made their way to the UK from the mid-90s on, I religiously watched every episode and film that I could! I even began collecting The Next Generation on VHS, before making the move to DVD box sets in the new millennium. I’ve owned action figures, model ships, prop replicas, posters, kitchenware, clothing… the works. I’m a Star Trek fan through-and-through, and I always will be.
The Royale, from TNG’s second season, is the first Star Trek episode I can remember watching.
This franchise means a lot to me. I’ve supported Star Trek for most of my life, since before I turned ten years old, and for more than thirty-five of its sixty years of existence to boot. I’d love nothing more than to learn a new series is in early production, and that the new Skydance-led team has a concrete plan for where to take the franchise next. Films can be great and all… but for me, at least, Star Trek has always felt much more at home on the small screen.
Which is why, a decade ago, I was so excited for Star Trek: Discovery’s announcement and impending premiere!
Since Beyond was in cinemas ten years ago, we’ve had more than 200 episodes of new Star Trek across six-and-a-bit different shows, as well as a TV movie. Star Trek has tried some very different things in this era – new genres, new styles of storytelling, and attempts to reach out to different audiences and demographic groups. Not all of those experiments have been successful, thanks in no small part to poor decision-making on the corporate side, but if nothing else, I can say that I respect the efforts that were made, and the attempts to take Star Trek to new places while retaining what’s made the franchise so special to me for all these years.
Behind-the-scenes photo from the set of Star Trek Beyond.
Over six decades, Star Trek has introduced us to some wonderful characters, wacky aliens, and incredibly cool technologies. The franchise arguably “predicted” the likes of cell phones, tablets, wireless tech, digital record-keeping, real-time translation, and many more things years or even decades before the real world caught up! That’s pretty cool, if you think about it. And many designs for things like starships, communicators, weapons, and uniforms have become iconic; instantly-recognisable pieces of our shared pop culture.
Star Trek memes still circulate on social media, even if the shows that spawned them have been off the air for decades! The “Picard facepalming” and “it’s a faaake!” memes have gone on to have lives of their own, far beyond the Trekkie community, and I daresay most people would recognise at least one or two things from the Star Trek franchise wherever you go in the world, from Okinawa to Harare and Port Stanley to Tromsø. Star Trek is just… that big.
“It’s a faaaaake!”
As we look to the future, I think it’s understandable, for us as fans, to feel a little anxious, a little concerned, and even a little disappointed. Some shows seem to have ended too soon, without being given a proper chance to connect with their intended audiences, and with only one feature film allegedly in early pre-production, Star Trek could be about to enter a bit of a fallow period. But the franchise has taken breaks before, only to come back stronger, and with a new corporate team now in charge… I think it’s at least possible that conversations are going on about what to do with this iconic brand and where to take it next. A bit of a break might give everyone time to let those discussions play out – and to get some new faces into the room for the first time in a decade.
I will always do my best to support Star Trek – and that means hyping it up where I can, but also calling out and criticising failures or disappointments where I see them. When I used to do Twitter a few years ago, I remember one fan had words in their bio to the effect of “I never want to say anything negative about Star Trek ever!”, and for me… that’s just silly. If we give a brand unflinching, unquestioning loyalty, that isn’t actually helpful. Sometimes it takes a franchise’s biggest fans to hold producers and corporate leaders to account – to let them know that some decisions, whatever they may be, have gone too far in the wrong direction. And that philosophy is a core tenet of my website.
Representatives from across the Star Trek franchise at a recent Comic-Con panel.
So yeah, I’ll continue to support Star Trek! But I won’t hold back from criticising it, either, if and when mistakes are made. It’s easier, in some ways, to criticise an episode or two of a series when you know there are more episodes – and different shows – still in the pipeline. But if we’re back to only getting one film every few years, as happened with the Kelvin era and Star Trek’s last fallow period… it’ll suck ten times more if the *only* Star Trek content we get isn’t very enjoyable! But we all have to make decisions, as fans, about how best to support the franchise.
Six decades ago, The Man Trap graced American television screens, and introduced audiences to Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr McCoy, Sulu, Uhura, and Scotty. And all these years later, here we are, gathered together to celebrate a franchise that now extends to almost 1,000 stories across eleven mainline shows, a cinematic franchise, and more. Spin-offs have taken Star Trek to books, comics, board games, and video games – which didn’t even exist back in 1966! The fan community is still just as vibrant, passionate, and wonderful as ever – something I can attest after visiting two Star Trek conventions in the past couple of years! And even if cancellation is looming, and Star Trek might be less of a feature on our screens for a while, we still have that extensive back catalogue to revisit.
The very first shot of the USS Enterprise from The Man Trap, which aired sixty years ago today.
Thanks for joining me for this celebration of Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary.
Click or tap any of those links to check out those pieces.
All that’s left to say is this: Happy Sixtieth Anniversary, Star Trek! Here’s to many, many more milestones and celebrations. And, as always, Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Most episodes and films discussed above can be streamed on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available, and are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including all series, films, and properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount Corporation. Still frames from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and an old TV commercial were upscaled using A.I. tools. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of minor spoilers for some of the episodes on this list.
In celebration of Star Trek’s imminent sixtieth anniversary, I want to make a list of some great episodes! And I know what you’re thinking: “Dennis, you’ve done this before.” True. But this list is slightly different – I’m going to exclusively focus on episodes that I think are “hidden gems;” episodes you might overlook, episodes you might skip if you’re going back for your sixtieth re-watch of a box set, and episodes that basically no Trekkie is recommending as a starting point for new viewers of the franchise!
So that raises an obvious question, right? How do we determine what is and is not a “hidden gem?” I’m glad you asked!
Last year, I used IMDB’s episode review scores to put together two lists: the “top five” and “bottom five” episodes from each of the pre-Discovery shows. And I’m taking IMDB’s rankings as a starting point again. In short: if an episode is either in the top ten most highly-rated episodes, or the bottom ten most-disliked episodes from a series, I’m excluding it. That also applies if one half of a two-part story is in either the top- or bottom-ten. But the rules don’t end there!
I’m also going to exclude stories that are – in my *subjective opinion*, of course – well-remembered, “iconic,” or that have otherwise crossed over to become part of pop culture. In brief: episodes everyone remembers, stories with clips or scenes that have been meme-ified, and really any episode that I think an average non-Trekkie might look at and say “oh, I remember that.” I think that definition *has* to include series premieres and finales, which introduce characters and wrap up key storylines. And finally, I’m going to exclude crossover episodes, which I think are pretty memorable by default.
So that’s how we’re reaching our conclusion for what is and is not a hidden gem! Partly based on review scores from IMDB, and partly based on how subjectively “iconic,” easily-recognised, or memed on an episode might be.
Does that sound fair? I hope so, because that’s what we’re going with!
Behind-the-scenes on the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
What’s the point of this? Well, I want to celebrate the franchise’s sixtieth anniversary, but I think there are gonna be a ton of “bEzT sTaR tReK ePiSoDeZ eVaRrR!!1!” list-icles all over the internet this week, and many of them are gonna just pick the same fan-favourites: City on the Edge of Forever, The Best of Both Worlds, and so on. And likewise, some folks are gonna ironically recommend the likes of Spock’s Brain or Shades of Gray.
I just thought it could be fun to pick out a few episodes that might fly under the radar; genuinely good, enjoyable stories that might’ve been eclipsed by stronger episodes, or that just didn’t catch fire in the way some others did.
Captain Kirk.
I’m not putting any other limitations on my selections. Episodes will come from right across the franchise, and as long as they aren’t in the top- or bottom-ten from their respective shows, and don’t have iconic moments, famous memes, or other such things… they’ll be entered into consideration! I hope this’ll be a bit of fun, and maybe you’ll be inspired to return to a story you haven’t seen in a while, or even try out something brand-new.
I’ve picked fifteen episodes for this list… and hey, if you’re looking for a playlist for your sixtieth anniversary Star Trek marathon? Here ya go!
With all of that out of the way, let’s get into the episodes!
Episode #1: The Star Gazer Picard Season 2, Episode 1
Picard gives a speech.
Star Trek: Picard is awkward for this list, because at only thirty episodes in total, two-thirds of the entire series is excluded by default! But of the ten episodes in the middle, The Star Gazer leapt out at me. In my review of the episode from back in 2022, I described it as “one of the best episodes of live-action Star Trek that I’ve seen in a long time,” and I stand by that… with a caveat or two! After a disappointing end to Season 1, The Star Gazer took Picard and his new friends back to Starfleet in a big way, and not only that, but it reintroduced a villainous faction by giving them a truly terrifying new look.
After that, though… well, Season 2 kinda went off the rails! And as the first chapter of a ten-episode story, The Star Gazer isn’t gonna be the easiest thing to watch in isolation. The subsequent nine episodes put a pretty big downer on it, and that’s just unavoidable. If you can enjoy it on its own merits, though, I think there’s a lot to love here. A new version of an iconic starship, Picard seemingly back to his old self, and an updated take on one of the franchise’s biggest baddies that, at the time, I found to be genuinely shocking and quite frightening.
Episode #2: The Maquis, Parts I-II Deep Space Nine Season 2, Episodes 20-21
Commander Sisko.
DS9 has a ton of classic episodes, particularly involving Sisko, Garak, the Dominion War, and more. But if we’re looking for the real hidden gems, I want to pick out The Maquis. I think it’s an important episode – but one that’s easily overlooked both within DS9 itself and within the broader category of stories featuring the titular faction.
This was the episode that first introduced us to the Maquis – a faction that would reappear in DS9 as well as in The Next Generation and, of course, in Voyager. But being the first to establish an important faction is meaningless if the story isn’t good – and for me, at least, The Maquis has a solid, enjoyable story that really calls into question some of the Federation’s lofty ideals, and puts Sisko to the test. Star Trek has always done stories with big moral questions, and The Maquis absolutely fits in with the best of them.
Episode #3: Off-Hour Strange New Worlds Season 4, Episode 6
Here’s A’Sha!
Call this “recency bias” all you want, but Off-Hour is a solid and very “Star Trekky” episode in a season that, to be honest, has had more misses than hits. So I’m glad to be able to recommend at least one episode from Strange New Worlds’ fourth season, which, at time of writing, hasn’t yet concluded! Off-Hour is kind of an updated take on The Next Generation’s Disaster, putting the ship and crew into a dangerous situation and forcing several characters to work miracles to keep everyone alive.
The episode gave most of the show’s main characters something to do, meaning it feels more of an ensemble piece than a lot of modern Star Trek stories. Its core premise was suitably tense – even if that tension, for me, could’ve been dialled back a notch or two! And after quite a few Strange New Worlds episodes have notoriously taken “big swings” into a variety of different genre parodies and spoofs… it was just nice to get an episode that felt very much like Star Trek. If you dipped out of Strange New Worlds after the musical or the puppet episode… come back for one more try! I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Episode #4: The Ultimate Computer The Original Series Season 2, Episode 24
Dr Daystrom with Dr McCoy, Spock, and Kirk.
I had a hard time with TOS! So many episodes are either flat-out iconic in their own rights, or else they have incredibly memorable scenes or clips that I think would disqualify them from this list! But of all the episodes outside of the top-ten, The Ultimate Computer really stands out to me. What’s more, I think its core message and theming is *incredibly* relevant in 2026, some fifty-eight years after its original broadcast, as the world struggles with the rise of advanced A.I. systems and large-language models.
The Ultimate Computer is a “man versus machine” story, and a tale of how overreliance on technology can go horribly wrong. TOS made many “predictions” that have since come to pass: technologies like mobile phones, video calling, computer libraries storing all of human knowledge, wireless technology, iPads, real-time translation… the list goes on! But this depiction of a rogue A.I. feels like a timeless warning from the past, and given where we are today… it’s uncanny.
Episode #5: Face the Strange Discovery Season 5, Episode 4
Burnham and Rayner.
I did not care for Discovery’s fifth and final season, on the whole. But one real hidden gem amidst a generally disappointing story is Face the Strange, which sees Burnham and her new XO – Commander Rayner – forced to work together in the face of a weird time travel plot. Time travel is *also* not one of my favourite parts of Star Trek, usually, but I’m making an exception for the creative way it was utilised in Face the Strange.
Face the Strange feels like a bit of a diversion from the season’s bland and uninspired main storyline, which perhaps helps it stand out just a little bit more. I also enjoy the way Rayner comes across in this episode – as a relatively late addition to Discovery’s cast, Rayner needed the extra screen time that an episode like Face the Strange granted him. Again, an episode to try out if you had already checked out of Discovery before the fifth season.
Episode #6: The Royale The Next Generation Season 2, Episode 12
The Enterprise-D.
This is, admittedly, pure bias on my part: The Royale is the first episode of Star Trek that I can remember watching, all the way back in 1991! But hey, if this is the episode that turned me into a Trekkie, it can’t be that bad, right? I like the episode’s away mission plot, I like that this kind of sci-fi mystery is something silly and weird that only a Star Trek show would dare attempt, and I like the way the episode handles the characters on the planet and back on the ship. Is it purely a nostalgic pick for me? Maybe. But that doesn’t make it bad!
The Royale uses its setting well, and although the characters on the planet feel like cardboard cut-outs for the most part, the episode explains why this is – and even has time to consider the idea of a very different kind of alien life trying to make sense of humanity through our literature and art. There are some genuinely fun moments for the away team, as they explore a weird, almost surreal 20th Century setting that they weren’t expecting to find, and back on the ship, Picard and the crew work hard to help them. A solid, enjoyable, and easily-overlooked episode.
Episode #7: Macrocosm Voyager Season 3, Episode 12
The Doctor treating Captain Janeway.
Macrocosm sees Janeway and the Doctor fighting giant single-celled viruses that have taken over the ship! Cool, right? After an away mission goes awry and the ship is infected, it’s up to Janeway to save the day in what is genuinely one of the best action-packed storylines she gets across the show’s entire run. It’s a nice, self-contained story featuring a one-off alien race, a one-off antagonist, and a silly premise that has just enough of a basis in real science to make the technobabble seem believable!
There’s enough of a threat to Voyager that everyone feels in real danger, and while I will admit that the CGI macro-viruses probably haven’t aged especially well, there can be a charm to this kind of thing! I like when Star Trek depicts alien races that aren’t just part of the “nose and forehead brigade,” and these flying mega-viruses definitely fit the bill. A great episode if you want to see Janeway running around with a phaser, and the Doctor gets a moment to shine, too.
Episode #8: Where Pleasant Fountains Lie Lower Decks Season 2, Episode 7
Andy Billups.
I really need to get caught up on Lower Decks. Maybe you think this ruins my standing as a Trekkie, but I’ve only seen up to partway through Season 3 at time of writing! But of the episodes I’ve seen (that meet the criteria for this list), Where Pleasant Fountains Lie was the one I wanted to highlight the most.
I read part of the episode’s story – involving the USS Cerritos’ chief engineer, Andy Billups – as a metaphor for asexuality. Doing what Star Trek has always done, Lower Decks uses a sci-fi lens to shine a light on a real-world situation, and puts Billups in a difficult situation as he struggles with “fitting in” with his people. There’s plenty of comedy, and I think it’s also an interesting take on how some human societies exist outside of the Federation, which adds a bit of depth to the world of Star Trek. But it’s really that core message that I find the most interesting and relatable.
Episode #9: The Catwalk Enterprise Season 2, Episode 12
Reed and Dr Phlox in the titular catwalk.
Few episodes really manage to convey the dangers of pushing the frontiers of space travel in this 22nd Century era quite as well as The Catwalk. Because the NX-01 is a less-powerful ship than her namesakes further along the timeline, she’s less well-shielded and armoured, and that means that, when a dangerous interstellar phenomenon approaches, the crew has to take refuge in the only part of the ship that can keep them safe from the radiation: the nacelles.
There’s something weirdly almost “cozy” about that setup that I’ve always really appreciated. A community coming together, riding out a storm in a safe space… it just gives me the warm fuzzies, I guess! Of course, there’s more to the episode than that – and, naturally, things don’t go to plan. This is another episode with a one-off alien adversary who we haven’t seen return, and despite the uniqueness of its core premise, I think it’s one a lot of folks will have just scrolled past, especially on repeat viewings.
Episode #10: How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth The Animated Series Season 2, Episode 5
On the bridge of the Enterprise.
I’m cheating a tiny bit with this one; at a mere twenty-two episodes in total, it was too difficult to exclude both the top-ten and bottom-ten from The Animated Series! But ranked roughly in the middle – and, I would argue, easily overlooked – is How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth, which is a fun story that sees Kirk and co. facing off against an ancient alien who once visited Earth.
The Animated Series was “officially non-canon” for a while, and it was only when I bought the DVD box set that I watched it in full. The animation work is definitely a product of its time (and something modern Star Trek has even parodied, with a miniseries called Very Short Treks) but for me, there are some great episodes in this oft-neglected series. How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth was also the episode selected when The Animated Series won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1975 – so it has pedigree. And I think its core story is very “Star Trekky,” if you can look past the deficiencies in its animation.
Episode #11: The Wounded The Next Generation Season 4, Episode 12
Gul Macet with Captain Picard.
When you think of classic Cardassian episodes, I bet you don’t go to The Wounded first and foremost! Even in TNG, episodes like Chain of Command are much more likely to be memorable or draw your attention. But The Wounded marks the Cardassians’ first-ever appearance, and as such, it started the process of setting the stage for The Next Generation’s first spin-off: Deep Space Nine. We also see that through this episode’s massive expansion of Chief O’Brien’s role – O’Brien would go on to play a major role on DS9, of course.
The episode is also noteworthy for its introduction of Gul Macet – played by Marc Alaimo. Alaimo is best known for another Cardassian character: DS9′s Dukat. And you can kind of consider Macet a “proto-Gul Dukat,” I think! The Wounded is a kind of “Apocalypse Now” story, following O’Brien and Picard as they have to work *with* the Cardassians to stop a rogue Starfleet captain. It’s a great episode in its own right, and well worth a watch.
Episode #12: Terrarium Strange New Worlds Season 3, Episode 9
Lieutenant Ortegas.
I’ll be honest: I was surprised to see Terrarium ranked so low amongst Strange New Worlds episodes! For me, this is probably the best individual episode of Season 3, with a strong focus on Lieutenant Erica Ortegas and the lingering after-effects of the Federation’s conflict with the Gorn. In my review of the episode last year, I said that it was “intense, dramatic, emotional, and just fantastic,” and that really encapsulates how I feel. After having not spent that much time with Ortegas across the show’s first three seasons, her first real spotlight was genuinely exceptional.
However, I guess I can see why some fans might overlook it or choose to scroll past. When compared to the likes of Memento Mori or the two parts of Hegemony – episodes which also feature the Gorn – it’s not as action-packed or explosive. It’s also a character piece and a bit of a slow burn, in places. But as viewers and as Trekkies, I think we should be able to appreciate stories that aren’t just mindless action and fighting all the time, and slower, more introspective pieces about bridging a cultural divide and working together in the name of survival can be just as compelling and engaging.
Episode #13: The Magnificent Ferengi Deep Space Nine Season 6, Episode 10
The Ferengi and their captive.
Of all the episodes from DS9′s fantastic Dominion War arc, be honest: how many of you would’ve picked The Magnificent Ferengi for a re-watch? The episode is genuinely very funny, playing on DS9′s sillier and more light-hearted take on the Ferengi. It’s a great episode for recurring characters Rom, Brunt, and Nog in particular, as they join a mission of Quark’s to rescue Ishka (Quark and Rom’s mother) from Dominion captivity.
Naturally, nothing goes to plan for the Ferengi; the episode is almost a comedy of errors! But that’s what makes it so fun, and a guest-starring role for musician Iggy Pop was also a blast. The Magnificent Ferengi makes great use of DS9′s expansive secondary cast, ties into the sixth season’s Dominion War storyline in a new and unexpected way, and is a great example of how Star Trek can be hilarious when it embraces comedy and even slapstick. The Ferengi are indeed magnificent!
Episode #14: Night Voyager Season 5, Episode 1
Chakotay and Captain Janeway greet a guest in the transporter room.
Night is an episode of two halves. One side of the story explores something that few other Voyager episodes – or Star Trek episodes in general, come to think of it – really ever did: what does the crew do when there’s nothing to do and no planets to explore? We catch a glimpse of what life is like for the crew as they navigate a starless expanse with no interesting phenomena, alien spacecraft, or planets to crash-land on. And it really is fascinating!
But then the episode introduces one of Voyager’s lesser-remembered recurring aliens: the Malon. The Malon are another example of Star Trek shining a light on real-world issues through the lens of sci-fi: in this case, the financial incentives companies have to keep polluting, or to keep burning fossil fuels, despite knowing the harm it causes. It’s a great idea for a story: Starfleet shows up, offers an alien society a better, safer, cleaner technology… only to be turned down because of what it would mean for corporate profits. If only there was a modern-day industry that could benefit from this kind of metaphor, eh?
Episode #15: Assignment: Earth The Original Series Season 2, Episode 26
Gary Seven’s shape-shifting companion.
TOS has a lot of iconic moments, doesn’t it? But would you say Assignment: Earth or Gary Seven are among them? For me, this is an episode I will openly admit to regularly scrolling past when I re-watch The Original Series; I’m just not wild about time travel stories, as I think I’ve already mentioned. But that’s part of why it deserves a place on this list: Assignment: Earth is the definition of a hidden gem; an overlooked episode that has a lot of great qualities.
Firstly, it’s fun to see Gary Seven and catch a glimpse of a new faction that subsequent Star Trek stories did nothing with for half a century! But it’s also neat to see Kirk and co. in the 1960s, dealing with NASA. Remember that this episode aired shortly *before* the first moon landing, at a time when interest in NASA and space exploration was at its height. It’s another great example of Star Trek telling a “morality play;” in this case, an explicit warning against the use of nuclear weapons at a moment when the Cold War was raging.
Bonus Film: The Motion Picture
Admiral Kirk
I wanted to put one feature film on this list, and for me, no film quite embodies the “hidden gem” idea better than The Motion Picture. Fans tend to overlook Star Trek’s first film in favour of The Wrath of Khan, as well as other action-packed entries like The Undiscovered Country and First Contact. But for me, no film quite matches the tone of The Motion Picture, which has an ethereal sci-fi story that plays out like an extended episode of The Original Series.
This film is also where much of the aesthetic of Star Trek was created. Klingons with armour and forehead ridges, angled starship hallways, the warp core as a glowing upright tube, even metal Starfleet insignia on uniforms… so many things created for The Motion Picture have gone on to become inseperable from Star Trek, defining its visual language and identity. The film’s story is one of seeking out new life – even if that form of life is almost incomprehensibly different from anything Starfleet or humanity had previously encountered. Moreover, The Motion Picture brought Star Trek back and re-established it for a new decade – a decade which would eventually lead to more films and a return to the small screen.
So that’s it!
Producer Bob Justman with his namesake shuttlecraft and Gates McFadden.
Happy sixtieth anniversary, Star Trek! I hope this selection of “hidden gems” has given you an idea or two if you’re planning a Star Trek marathon to mark the franchise’s birthday. I know that’s what I’ll be doing on Tuesday!
As I said above, I really wanted to put together a selection of episodes that I don’t think will be featured on a lot of similar list-icles. Star Trek has almost 1,000 episodes and films to choose from, but fans tend to gravitate to certain ones more than others. Some episodes aren’t great or are just padding, sure, but there are some really fun stories that tend to get overlooked or overshadowed by more popular or better-remembered contemporaries. And I wanted to highlight a few of them this time.
I hope you’ll join me on the 8th for an article all about Star Trek and its sixtieth anniversary! And if you missed them earlier in the year, I have a few other celebratory pieces I’d like to recommend to you.
DeForest Kelley and Patrick Stewart in a behind-the-scenes photograph.
Click or tap any of those links to check out those pieces.
An original 1960s advert for TOS.
So I hope you enjoyed this list! It was fun to go back to these episodes, and it was also interesting to see just how many stories, characters, aliens, and more than I consider to be “too iconic” for a list like this one! I excluded quite a few episodes that would’ve been fun to discuss simply because I felt their status was a little too high, or else they had moments that crossed over into pop culture for one reason or another.
Thanks again for joining me on this exploration of a few “hidden gems” from the Star Trek franchise. There’s more Star Trek content to come here on the website; more Strange New Worlds reviews, more episode re-watches, more commentary, and who knows what else. But until then… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Most episodes and films discussed above are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available, and may also be available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including all films, TV shows, and properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount Corporation. Still frames from Deep Space Nine and Voyager were upscaled using A.I. tools. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, The Final Frontier, and The Next Generation.
At the start of 2026, I wrote that Strange New Worlds’ fourth season was almost certainly a top contender for my coveted “TV Show of the Year” award. But now that we’re seven episodes in, I can put my hand on my heart and say that, honestly? I’ve really only enjoyed two of them.
And, as you might’ve guessed, Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass ain’t one of the two.
I’m kind of in two minds about the episode – and, as we go along, I’ll talk about one way that I think its story could’ve been salvaged, because there was a genuinely emotional story for Captain Pike that I think should’ve gotten more attention. On the one hand, the deliberately melodramatic soap opera stuff was so tacky and awful that I’m left scratching my head as to who thought it was a good idea. (As well as who keeps allowing writer Dana Horgan to remain employed). But on the other, Pike’s arc had merit – at least in theory – and I’m disappointed that this story of grief, loss, and mental health wasn’t explored in more depth and in a better way.
Yep. We’re really doing this.
I’ve said this before, particularly with Discovery and Picard, but modern Star Trek has been shockingly bad with its depictions of mental health. There have been some genuinely well-intentioned ideas; storylines involving our favourite characters and their struggles that absolutely are worth exploring. But in almost every instance, the execution of these character arcs and narratives have been, in a word, atrocious.
And so it was in Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass with Captain Pike.
It was a good idea to revisit what happened to Pike at the end of Season 3 and explore how losing a partner – and mourning the life they could’ve led – was causing him pain. This is something Star Trek has always done: looking at real-world issues through the lens of science-fiction. In this case, Pike *literally* saw and experienced that alternate life, but if you take it as a metaphor, many, many people have gone through loss, grief, mourning, and reflecting on the possibility of a different outcome and a different life.
Captain Pike with his daughter.
Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass lets us see this from a different angle with La’an and Spock, too. Captain Pike is literally in mourning; grieving the death of not only Captain Batel but the nonexistence of his daughter, Juliet. La’an, though, is metaphorically “grieving” the end of her romantic relationship with Spock, understanding that their breakup was right for both of them, while still feeling that sense of emptiness and wondering what could’ve been.
Those storylines, had they taken place in a stronger, more grounded narrative framework, were absolutely worth examining. There was a point to be made about loss and grief, and how the end of a relationship can be devastating – even if it was the right decision. For La’an, as she potentially gears up for an exit from the Enterprise (in keeping with the season’s idea of “boldly going one step closer to where it all began”; i.e. moving characters into place in time for The Original Series), that could mean stepping away from the ship to help her move on from Spock (and Kirk, I guess). And for Captain Pike… well, we saw a tiny glimpse at the very end of the episode of how he’s still emotionally wrecked by what happened.
Captain Pike is still reeling from the death of Captain Batel, and the loss of their daughter, Juliet.
The soap opera story, though, completely ruined any chance of those narrative arcs being successfully explored, and I’m genuinely left feeling shocked at the stupidity of the show’s writers and producers – not for the first time this season, I should say. Did they *genuinely* think that this kind of overly-melodramatic soap opera spoof was the best way to examine complex themes of mental health, mourning, grief, loss, and more? What do they think this soap opera stuff added to the story? Could they not recognise that the tone of such a story is in complete contrast to its serious themes?
There are a couple of ways an episode like Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass could’ve been made to work. One would’ve been to lean fully into the soap opera stuff and treat it like a comedy story. Strange New Worlds has done several episodes with overtly comedic premises, and some of them have worked better than others, admittedly, but when they get it right, it works. Look at Human Best Friend earlier this season as an example: it leaned fully into its “Dude, Where’s My Car” and “The Hangover” inspirations, and what resulted was a genuinely fun, light-hearted story.
The soap opera plot detracted from what could and should have been the episode’s core themes.
Alternatively, if the focus of the story was to be on such serious things for two of the show’s main characters, then the soap opera stuff could’ve been limited to short vignettes; we could’ve gotten a taste of Trelane’s meddling but without turning nine-tenths of the episode into a tonally jarring mess.
For me, I think themes as serious as grief and loss really need a dedicated storyline – one that *isn’t* wrapped up in the trappings of Strange New Worlds’ latest genre parody. And I feel the consequences of both modern Star Trek’s cut-down, ten-episode seasons as well as the show’s imminent cancellation in the way two completely, fundamentally incompatible concepts were forced together. The result was a mess; an episode that didn’t know whether it wanted to be silly or serious, tried to be both, and ended up succeeding at neither.
Ortegas.
Two groups of writers and/or producers clearly had competing ideas. One was to revisit Captain Pike’s family from the end of Season 3, and explore these themes of loss, mourning, and how Pike’s imagined reality could be a metaphor for people in the audience who are going through similar grieving processes. And the other idea? “Let’s do a silly soap opera parody with all the dramatic musical stings, close-up shots, and overblown lighting! Won’t that be fun?”
And then, somehow – perhaps because the show only had a few episodes per season, or because cancellation loomed – some utter, abject*moron* decided to put both ideas together into one single episode. Is it a coincidence that both Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass and Level-Five Transporter Accident, with its appalling ending, share a writer? Hmm.
Trelane watches his masterpiece unfold…
If I’d been Strange New Worlds’ showrunner, and two groups of writers had approached me with these ideas, I’d have picked the more serious one. That isn’t because Star Trek can’t be silly, Star Trek shouldn’t do comedy, or even because I don’t like genre parodies. All of those concepts can work in Star Trek, have already worked in Star Trek, and can be a lot of fun. But having already had several overtly comedic stories across the show’s run, *and* with several other “big swings” into different genres already on the books just in Season 4… I think I’d have said “no” to the soap opera and insisted on doing a more in-depth look at the themes on Pike and La’an’s sides of the story in a more straight-laced setting.
There *can* be value in contrast; in juxtaposing a serious idea against an inherently silly setting. But doing that successfully requires finesse, and frankly, it requires a level of production and writing quality that I don’t think either Strange New Worlds or indeed modern Star Trek as a whole have demonstrated themselves to be capable of. Ambition is great! We should all endeavour to be ambitious in our writing and with our creative ideas. But there comes a point where ambition runs into the brick wall of reality, and for me… I think some of the show’s producers and writers need to recognise their own limitations.
Behind-the-scenes during production.
Maybe a really exceptional writer-director-producer combo could’ve pulled this off. But clearly, no one in the Strange New Worlds writers’ room or on the production side is at that level.
This episode’s writers *certainly* weren’t.
I’m also hyper-aware of the fact that this is now the *second* episode this season – after Level-Five Transporter Accident – where the bulk of the story didn’t “really” happen. Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass’ ending isn’t as bad as “but it was all just a dream” (though let’s be honest: nothing could be as bad as that), but despite leaving the characters with most of their memories of what took place… it still scrubs those events from the show’s internal reality.
Again: that’s pretty fucking weird, isn’t it?
The Enterprise is now back to normal.
Maybe there’s supposed to be a point about making emotional connections through fiction, and how the emotions we feel when reading a book or watching an episode of television are no less real just because it was fiction that elicited them. That might be an idea worth exploring – but again, such a concept would require higher-quality writing, a planned narrative arc, and less of a tonal clash between the soap opera silliness and the characters’ real lives.
In a way, I like this idea a lot. My website exists because I find value in fictional worlds like Star Trek; spending more time in those worlds, with those characters, is fun for me and always will be. And I don’t deny the power of all forms of media to evoke strong emotions. The emotional reaction we have to an episode of Star Trek, a movie, a book… those are *real*, even if the stories and characters aren’t. And there’d be value in an exploration of the idea of exploring that kind of emotional connection.
But that isn’t what Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass was going for – and even if it had been, it didn’t work.
Dr M’Benga.
I feel rather sorry for Anson Mount. After being functionally absent for most of Season 4, his first real spotlight ended up being a tonally muddled episode where two clashing ideas just couldn’t be forced together cohesively. That means that what is objectively one of Mount’s best – and certainly his most emotional – performances in the role of Captain Pike came in an episode that’s honestly better left forgotten, for the most part.
Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass managed to hit the right emotional note with Pike… at the tail end of the story. And seeing him break down, expressing those emotions he’d been holding onto since the end of Season 3 genuinely hit me. But they didn’t hit as hard as they might’ve if the rest of the episode had been stronger and more grounded, and because Pike’s moment of emotion came right at the end of the episode, just as the credits were about to roll… I just don’t think it landed as hard as it should have.
Captain Pike breaks down.
If Strange New Worlds wanted to do this kind of story, examining Pike’s mental health and his emotional state after losing Captain Batel and Juliet, then it realistically needed to be part of a completely different narrative framework. Trying to squash genuinely complex emotional storytelling for the man who’s (allegedly) the show’s main character up against this bizarre and over-the-top genre parody didn’t work.
What’s more, it should’ve been obvious from the *concept* stage that these two ideas couldn’t work together, which is why I stand by what I said above: the people who came up with this idea, turned it into a complete script, and greenlit it for full production are stupid, idiotic people who shouldn’t be working in this industry! It was *painful* to watch parts of Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass because of how cringe-inducing it was… and that would be bad enough on its own, but when you add into the mix that there was an actual, genuine story worth telling that the soap opera pastiche shat all over? It’s unforgivably bad, to be blunt.
There was a story worth telling for Captain Pike (and La’an) that got buried by an unnecessary and over-the-top spoof.
I’m in favour of Star Trek trying new things. And I’m in favour of Star Trek trying out stories in radically different genres and with completely different tones. Part of the franchise’s appeal, at least for me, is its episodic nature, and that the Enterprise can warp away to a new planet, new aliens, a new adventure, and a new kind of story each and every week. I’m not saying “don’t do these kinds of genre stories,” and I’m not saying “Star Trek has to be 100% straight-laced and serious every single time.” That wouldn’t be fun.
But what I am saying, at least in this case, is that the genre parody fundamentally could not work with the more complex themes that the other side of the episode wanted to address, and by trying to force these two diametrically-opposed ideas together, what resulted was neither a successful homage to soap operas nor a clever and relatable exploration of themes of loss and grief. And frankly, that should have been obvious to all involved well before the episode even had a finished script.
La’an with Sybok. Sorry: “Sybok.”
Uhura’s story, seeing Pike as her father (for inexplicable reasons) was little more than a piss-take of similar soap opera plots over the years. And I mean… I get it. Two totally unrelated characters, who viewers have known for years, are suddenly revealed to be father and daughter or mother and son or long-lost conjoined twins. I get it. It’s a soap opera trope. But did it need to be such a big part of Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass? And what was the point of it for Uhura?
For Pike, this story tracks insofar as it set up his arc of confronting what happened to his family in the life he led and lost. But for Uhura… what are we supposed to get from this storyline? Am I missing something? She sees Pike as an important mentor figure in her life. Great. We knew that already. But given where Uhura is in her character journey – and the season’s stated aim of moving characters “one step closer to where it all began” – what are we gaining by putting her, of all people, into this soap opera plotline with Pike? I know it wasn’t real (and it was obviously not supposed to be real), but still. This was such a big part of the episode – and not just from Pike’s perspective – and yet we gained basically nothing from it.
What was the point of this story for Uhura?
I’m not from the United States (and I’m not a viewer of American soaps), so I confess that I didn’t know who actress Deidre Hall was when she was introduced as Counsellor Eleanor Chivers. If you’re in the same boat as me, Hall has played one of the main characters on the American soap Days of Our Lives since 1976, so bringing her aboard for an episode with this soap opera style was a genuine coup for Strange New Worlds. If you’re British, like me, I guess this would be akin to bringing William Roache (Ken Barlow on Coronation Street) on board for a guest-starring role.
Outside of the soap opera pseudo-reality, we didn’t get to spend too much time with Chivers. I liked her outfit, which I felt drew a little on TNG’s Dr Crusher for inspiration, being a similar length and colour, but obviously a bit more elaborate with its collar and the way it fastened. And I think it’s interesting that, at least in this era, the Enterprise has a counsellor on board.
Doctor (or Counsellor?) Chivers.
However, given last week’s (re)introduction of Dr Boyce – who, as the ship’s former chief medical officer, served as kind of unofficial counsellor to Captain Pike… well, bringing Counsellor Chivers into the mix as well might arguably complicate things. I thought, at first, we were going to learn that Chivers was one of Trelane’s creations, a fictional character he invented for the sake of his dramatic production. But Chivers is, apparently, a fixture aboard the Enterprise.
I think you could argue that it makes sense for Pike to seek out an *actual* counsellor, given where he’s at emotionally, instead of trying to talk to someone like Dr Boyce, Una, or Dr M’Benga, so it’s not necessarily a *bad* thing. And starships having counsellors is clearly not uncommon for Starfleet in this era; I think there was someone in that role aboard the USS Discovery, or at least I remember it being mentioned.
Funnily enough, I had Pike’s expression on my face for almost the entire time I was watching Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass.
I would’ve definitely liked to have spent more time with Pike and Chivers outside of the soap opera sequences; Pike’s breakdown in her office had all of the ingredients to be the kind of hard-hitting moment that his storyline needed more of, and Anson Mount genuinely gave an exceptional performance in that scene. It was just cut too short for an episode that wanted to do other things.
Within the soap opera reality, though, I don’t really know what to say. Chivers was – surprisingly, perhaps – the least-offensive of the soap opera fluff. Deidre Hall wasn’t hamming it up in the way that most of the show’s regulars were, leaving her character to feel like simultaneously the most-grounded and least-likely to be real at the same time. An odd mix… but then again, that’s Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass in a nutshell, eh?
Ethan Peck (left) and guest-star Rhys Darby on the set of Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass.
Season 1’sThe Serene Squall reintroduced us to Spock’s half-brother, Sybok – albeit only briefly – and ever since, I think a lot of Trekkies have been wondering whether Sybok would be back before Strange New Worlds comes to the end of its run. And as I was saying above with Pike and La’an and their complex storylines… I would not have chosen to bring back “Sybok” in this form, if I had been in charge! In this case, though, that’s for a different reason.
Pike’s story (and La’an’s too, to a lesser extent) needed to be more grounded and serious if the messaging was going to stick the landing. But Sybok, because he’s such a uniquely interesting character within the broader lore and canon of Star Trek… well, I think he deserved to be handled better. Being reduced to essentially a joke; a gag parodying the “evil twin” cliché from bad soap opera storylines… I mean, I think even Sybok – who was a part of what is usually considered the weakest film, at least of The Original Series era – deserved better than that.
The illusory “Sybok”.
Moreover, there was a chance for Strange New Worlds to explore the feud between Sybok and Spock – and perhaps between Spock and his father, Sarek, too – in more detail than we ever got in TOS or The Final Frontier. If I were making a list of potential characters and stories to return to for a potential “Captain Pike show,” I’m not sure I’d necessarily have picked Sybok. But having teased the character back in Season 1, I can see the value in revisiting him, expanding on his backstory with Spock, and going into more depth about their conflict.
Such a storyline could have set up the events of The Final Frontier, or at least leaned into Sybok’s “share your pain” philosophy that would be so important to the events of that film. And I’m left lamenting, really, that Strange New Worlds took nothing but this character’s name to do a very silly (and far too long) gag or bit with it. Once again… what was the point?
Sybok in The Final Frontier.
That last question – “what was the point?” – could really apply to 90% of the episode, to be honest. Previous genre parodies have (usually) made the case for themselves; even if I didn’t personally like the finished product, I could at least see what the writers and production team were going for. But in this case, I’m really struggling to see what the intention was in doing a soap opera spoof other than… to do a spoof.
And is *that* a good use of the show’s time when there are a mere nine episodes remaining, and fewer than fifty in total?
If this was Season 1 or 2, with Strange New Worlds potentially looking at a six-, seven-, or eight-season run, I still wouldn’t *like* this episode, but I think it might’ve felt less offensive. However, we’re now nine episodes from the show’s finale, and I just don’t think there was time to waste on a genre parody or spoof that not only didn’t have anything to say in and of itself, but that also ended up actively detracting from what should’ve been a powerful, emotional, and relatable arc for two of the show’s main characters.
Captain Pike.
With the exception of Anson Mount, who did well with Captain Pike’s emotional torment, the only other performer I could really single out for praise is Rhys Darby, who reprised his role as Trelane from Season 3’s Wedding Bell Blues. We’re sticking with the idea that Trelane is a kid, and Darby brought almost a sense of childlike wonder to the character, despite having phenomenal powers and abusing them to toy with the emotions of the crew.
I also found it interesting that Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass introduced another member of the Q Continuum as Trelane’s teacher/advisor. I wasn’t wild about the Q-inspired costuming, though: the judges’ robes that Q wore in The Next Generation were meant to be a copy of something from Earth in the mid/late 21st Century, and I felt that leaning on that idea for inspiration kind of misunderstands or muddles that. A very minor point, admittedly, and one that you might say is a nitpick. But I like Star Trek to be consistent with itself, and for me, this other Q wearing an outfit clearly at least partially inspired by those judges’ robes wasn’t right.
Oh, and if you missed it last season: yes, Rhys Darby’s character is the same Trelane as Kirk will encounter in The Original Series, and he’s a member of the Q Continuum. Spoiler alert for Wedding Bell Blues, I guess!
Rhys Darby is great as Trelane.
There were a couple of funny moments in Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass that successfully won a chuckle, or at least made me smile. Dr M’Benga having a disease as ludicrously-named as “space madness” was one of them, because it was just so utterly absurd and silly.
And it was also a funny bit to see Trelane and his teacher munching on buckets of popcorn as they watched Captain Pike wrangling with the memory of his daughter; neither of them expected that “storyline” in Trelane’s fantasy world, I guess. It was a funny moment, in any case.
But that’s really all the praise I have for this… well, this disappointing mess.
This was an admittedly funny visual.
Do I need to tell you, for the fourth or fifth time this season, that I can respect the commitment to the bit; that fully and whole-heartedly embracing everything about a genre in this kind of genre parody is, in some ways, commendable? Because I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot, of late!
Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass is the first episode, really, where I feel that everyone involved should’ve known that the core concept and storylines wouldn’t work. The hammy over-acting, the ridiculous dialogue, and the attempt to blend a full-throated soap opera pastiche with complex themes and long-running storylines for main characters was a genuinely bad idea. And I’d actually quite like to know how this concept made it all the way through the production process. How is it that no one – not one single person from this pretty accomplished group of television writers and producers – didn’t stop for a second and say, “yeah, this ain’t gonna work”?
Cast and crew behind-the-scenes.
Like Chonitons Through the Hourglass is saved from the title of “worst Strange New Worlds episode” by the existence of Subspace Rhapsody and the “but it was all just a dream” ending to Level-Five Transporter Accident. But that’s it. That’s the best I can say about it… and I guess that makes it the third-worst episode of the series.
Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass isn’t just a disappointment because its soap opera parody was over-the-top, hammy, and silly. Those things made me roll my eyes, sure, but as someone who isn’t a soap fan, perhaps that side of the story would never have been “my thing,” and that’s okay. Not every episode is gonna be a ten-out-of-ten for every viewer, especially with such narrative and genre diversity on display. But because the episode’s other side had an important and potentially powerful and emotional message about grief and loss… the failures of the soap opera fluff feel infinitely worse.
Dr M’Benga and Una.
I would’ve been down for an episode exploring Pike’s grief, either through a sci-fi lens or just… by playing it straight. And I liked the attempt to draw a comparison between Pike’s grief and La’an’s feelings about her second heartbreak. But those ideas got precious little time and attention in an episode that wanted to be something else – something fundamentally incompatible with those loftier ideas. The choice should’ve been to either massively reduce the soap stuff to a few small vignettes, drop it entirely, or else abandon the serious themes and lean fully into the parody.
I know what I’d have chosen, if I had the option.
Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary is in just a few days’ time, and we’re going into the anniversary with *this* as the most recent episode. That… would not have been my preference, I’m not gonna lie. And now that Strange New Worlds Season 4 is three-quarters done, there are still only two episodes that I can say I fully enjoyed and didn’t find glaring flaws in. It’s such a shame that this show – which I’ve said repeatedly has been my favourite of Star Trek’s modern revival – just isn’t on top form at the moment.
Next week, we’re going to get Orders of Magnitude – an episode which promises “an alien pursuit that grows far beyond its original orders.” Maybe that’ll be a better, more grounded, or more interesting story. Maybe it’ll be *orders of magnitude* better than a soap opera parody or an episode that ends with “but it was all just a dream.” We can but hope, I suppose.
Thanks for joining me for this review. I really don’t like being so negative about Star Trek, and especially about Strange New Worlds when there are so few episodes remaining. But… here we are, I guess. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for better things next time.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. Days of Our Lives is the copyright of NBC/Corday Productions/Peacock. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Over the past few days, I’ve been having a lot of fun with a game I didn’t even know existed until recently: Melody’s Escape 2. Long story short, I was looking at a bunch of different rhythm games and music visualisers; something that would work with the MP3s that I’ve accumulated over the past quarter of a century or so. And, especially after having a blast with the music-themed game Mixtape a few weeks back, I was on the lookout for something to make my music… a bit more interactive.
If you owned an original Xbox back in the day, you might remember ripping music CDs to the console’s internal hard drive – a console with a hard disk was unique at the time – and then listening to music while playing your favourite games. Some titles, like the Xbox releases of Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels, even had dedicated in-game ways to incorporate your own music into the experience. I’d love to see something like that in, say, Cyberpunk 2077 or the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, by the way!
But we’re already veering off-topic, aren’t we?
Melody’s Escape 2.
Melody’s Escape 2 is a pretty basic game, I guess. Visually, you have a single character who’s pretty much the definition of a blank slate, made up of little more than a few slabs of colour. And all you really do is press one of four buttons on cue – think Shenmue’s QTEs, but lasting the length of an entire song, and you’ve got the concept. But there’s something mesmerising about the game, and about experiencing my favourite songs in this different way that I just… well, I can’t put it down!
While admittedly quite simple, the game’s environments are visually beautiful. The sky is my favourite; there’s something almost ethereal or otherworldly about running through the clouds, but the grass and ocean are pretty, too. And Melody herself (I’m assuming that’s the name of the “character” in the game, anyway) has a surprising amount of personality, despite her basic, faceless design.
Hi, you must be Melody.
I love a game with customisation options, so being able to choose Melody’s hairstyle, outfit, and colour scheme – and change them at will, too – is a bit of fun. And I like that there are free downloads via the Steam Workshop to add new and different ones, too. Sure, there’s not a *ton* of customisation, but it seems like Melody’s Escape 2 has a community willing to dedicate time to adding more cosmetic content, and there’s a very detailed and well-written modding guide from the developer.
And yes: that’s “developer,” in the singular form, because – just like another game I’ve covered, Banished – Melody’s Escape 2 is made entirely by one individual! Belgian developer Loïc Dansart is the man behind Icetesy, and is responsible for both Melody’s Escape 2 and its predecessor from a few years ago. I love indie games, and I’m *always* stunned to see what one single dedicated developer is capable of creating.
Cosmetic options.
The same thing that appealed to me all those years ago – when I ripped some of my favourite CDs to my Xbox or ported my MP3 files into The Sims – is exactly what Melody’s Escape 2 gives me. Being able to rock out to my own music, or kick back with a slower-paced track, but via the medium of interactive entertainment. I guess that’s also what some folks liked about games like Guitar Hero; that sense that you’re not just a passive listener, but somehow participating in the music.
As someone who’s disabled and doesn’t get out much, least of all to something like a music concert or a nightclub, that’s not a feeling I get very often! I’m not particularly musical; a few piano lessons as a kid and an abortive attempt to learn to play the guitar are about all I can claim in that regard – as well as a D grade in my Music GCSE! But I’ve always found music to be incredibly powerful and emotive, and the right song still has the power to take me away – perhaps to a fantasy, or to a memory long buried.
A sepia colour scheme.
I guess you could make the argument that games like Melody’s Escape 2 – and yes, there are other titles offering comparable experiences – are designed for people who don’t have the attention span to just sit and listen! That these games are made for ADHD sufferers who need to be constantly stimulated. But… that’s not how it feels to me, anyway. And even if that were true, well… if someone struggling with a mental health condition or who can’t concentrate now has a way to help them enjoy music, why should that be a bad thing?
Melody’s Escape 2 also offers a challenge for people who want to “git gud” in the form of an “Intense” mode. That basically amounts to more buttons to press more quickly, and – as someone with arthritis – it’s something I haven’t even tried because I *know* I’ll be atrocious at it! But it’s worth being aware of that if a challenge is what you’re after, I guess. There’s a custom difficulty setting, too, for folks who really want to tweak the experience.
There are a range of difficulty options.
I have quite an eclectic taste in music, so I tried out a bunch of different tracks in Melody’s Escape 2. In terms of gameplay, I found that tracks with a strong, consistent bassline or drumbeat were easier to play than tracks which had bigger variations in tempo, long instrumental solos, or that jump around a lot. However, Melody’s Escape 2 isn’t limited to a single genre, or even up-tempo songs; I had just as much fun with slower songs as I did faster ones, and even instrumental tracks work well. So if you think the game wouldn’t work just because you don’t like heavy metal or trance-pop… don’t let that stop you!
I guess poor Melody – who’s modelled after a young, fit woman going for a run – probably wasn’t wild about some of my song choices! I mean, the last time I found a playlist I liked online, it was called something like “Grandad Rock.” Rude. But like I said, there’s something fun and relaxing about experiencing my favourite songs in this new way, so Melody’s stuck with me for the foreseeable future!
The game works with all kinds of music – not just modern pop or rock.
This isn’t my usual kind of game. But at the same time… I like finding these “cozy” experiences, and for me, that’s exactly what Melody’s Escape 2 is. It’s been great fun to run along these little obstacle courses with Melody, trying to hit the buttons in time to the beat of some of my personal favourite songs. I like that I can choose literally any song, and I’m not limited by a game’s soundtrack or a publisher’s licensing deals. And experiencing music in this more interactive way is just… soothing.
Melody’s Escape 2 also has a couple of visualiser modes – one where the game literally plays itself in time to any song of your choosing, and another that seems to work a bit like the old Windows Media Player skins from years gone by. I haven’t played around with those very much, yet, but it’s nice to have further options should I ever need a break from the obstacle course-QTE game!
Soaring through the clouds…
So that’s all for today. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this unexpected little title, and I just wanted to share my thoughts. If you like rhythm games, music games, or just want a new way to experience your favourite songs, it’s a title I’d happily recommend. The only caveat is that you have to own your own music; you can’t stream from sources like Spotify or YouTube directly into the game. But if, like me, you still haven’t made the switch to streaming, or you’ve accumulated a back catalogue of MP3s over the years… Melody’s Escape 2 gives you a new way to experience those songs.
I hope this has been interesting. Melody’s Escape 2 is something a bit different for me – but at the same time, it reminds me a lot of playing games on my PC with custom soundtracks or ripping CDs to my old Xbox console. That desire to bring my own music into my favourite games has been present for a long time, I guess, and just being able to listen to music in a different, calming, yet more interactive setting is a lot of fun.
Thanks for reading… and happy gaming, friends!
Melody’s Escape 2 is out now for PC. Melody’s Escape 2 is the copyright of developer/publisher Icetesy. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, The Next Generation Season 5, Generations, and Discovery Season 2.
After last week’s absolute travesty, Strange New Worlds needed a win. And while the bar for success after Level-Five Transporter Accident was so low that it had melted through the basement like Chornobyl’s elephant’s foot, I’m pleased to say that Off-Hour was a massive improvement – and, in my subjective opinion, of course, the second genuinely good episode of the season.
Note that I said “good” and not “perfect,” though – because, despite being infinitely better than last week’s abomination, Off-Hour dialled up some of its drama just a tad too high for my liking, and when I make the obvious comparison – to The Next Generation’s stellar episode Disaster – I find it to be the lesser offering for that primary reason. We’ll get into all of this in a bit more detail as we go, but I felt the long shadow of Level-Five Transporter Accident hanging over Off-Hour, as I genuinely feared the return of “but it was all just a dream,” or some other kind of pathetic cop-out as the narrative seemed to reach an impossible crescendo.
The Enterprise is about to experience a disaster!
There was also, I felt, a bit of a missed opportunity presented by Off-Hour’s unique narrative framework – something that, again, TNG did better some thirty-five years earlier.
None of this is to say that Off-Hour was in any way a “bad” episode; it’s probably my second-favourite of the season so far, and would easily crack a “top ten” for Strange New Worlds as a whole. I also appreciated several well-written callbacks to past iterations of Star Trek in this anniversary year – from The Cage to Court Martial and even a deep cut to That Which Survives, from The Original Series’ third season. Star Trek’s official sixtieth anniversary is in just over a week’s time, and I have to imagine that the writers and producers were at least aware that Season 4 would arrive sometime around then. Given that Skydance-Paramount as a whole doesn’t seem to be going overboard with the celebrations, it’s nice to get little references like that within the show itself – and we’ll talk about those in a bit more detail momentarily!
Who remembers Court Martial?
I would also be remiss not to tell you that this is the first Strange New Worlds episode I’m reviewing since meeting Ethan Peck and Christina Chong (Spock and La’an) at a recent Star Trek convention here in the UK. I haven’t written up a full piece about this year’s event; much of what I had to say would’ve felt repetitive, to be honest, after I wrote about my experiences barely twelve months ago. But if you join me later in 2026 for my annual “year in review,” I expect I’ll talk a bit more about Destination Star Trek then.
For the purposes of this review, well… it means I’ve personally met and shaken the hands of *three* of the principal cast, now! I met Martin Quinn (Scotty) last year, and it never ceases to be a strange feeling to look at someone on the screen and think to myself, “huh, I’ve met them!” But I’ll try not to let such things interfere with my analysis of Off-Hour – or, indeed, any future episodes going forwards.
And if you want to see what I made of 2025’s Destination Star Trek event, click or tap here! My thoughts haven’t really changed much after this year’s visit.
I got to meet both Ethan Peck and Christina Chong last weekend.
Okay, enough boring chit-chat about what I got up to at the weekend! Let’s get into Off-Hour.
When The Next Generation premiered the fifth-season episode Disaster, the writers and creative team took advantage of the chaos aboard the Enterprise-D to bring together character groups and pairings that we didn’t often get to see. What’s more, the story then plunged several of those characters into situations way outside of their usual roles or areas of expertise – and what resulted is genuinely one of my favourite episodes from the show’s entire run.
We got to see Worf delivering a baby. Geordi and Dr Crusher spent more time together than… well, practically any other story I can call to mind. Deanna Troi took the conn, and had to wrangle with Ro Laren and Chief O’Brien as the ranking officer on the bridge. And Picard got stuck in his own personal hell: trapped with three young children!
Disaster made creative use of TNG’s main characters.
Off-Hour could’ve used its setup to do something similar, but the only “unusual” character pairing we got was Scotty and Cadet A’Sha – and, really, *any* character pairing with A’Sha would be out of the ordinary because of how little screen time she’s gotten across the season so far! I don’t dislike the scenes we got with Uhura and Ortegas on the bridge, Una, Spock, and La’an in the lounge, or Chapel and M’Benga in sickbay – but given the unique premise of the episode, *and* the addition of characters like Dr Boyce to add another medical officer… well, I can’t help but lament, in a way, a missed opportunity.
When we look back at Strange New Worlds’ run to date, how many times have we seen Ortegas and Dr M’Benga interacting? Or Chapel and Scotty, Spock and Una, or Pike and Pelia? There were so many possibilities for pairing up or creating groups of characters who don’t usually spend any time together, and this kind of story provided the *perfect* narrative framework for doing so. But the characters mostly stayed in their established pairings and groups, and when I compare that element of Off-Hour to The Next Generation’s similar offering… I just feel like full advantage wasn’t taken of this concept.
A’Sha and Scotty formed the only uncommon character pair.
Partly, I’m afraid, the reason for that is that Off-Hour – like several Strange New Worlds stories (and many others in Discovery, Picard, and even Prodigy in recent years) dialled up the drama and stakes just a little too high. Dr M’Benga’s gruesome injury is the main culprit here, but the danger posed to the ship by the “warp slingshot” or “neutrio wormhole” or whatever we’re calling it is a big part of that, too.
And again, TNG’s Disaster is a great point of comparison. That episode had stakes and tension; there were injured characters and others were in mortal danger. But the way it communicated those storylines was ever so slightly less… melodramatic. Because of that, the story opened up, and it meant it was absolutely possible for an injured character like Picard to be stuck with some scared kids, or for Troi, on the bridge, to have to wrangle with potentially fatal decisions without the support of other senior officers. Dialling things back just a couple of notches worked wonders for Disaster, and it allowed the story more freedom to shake up TNG’s characters in fun and creative ways.
If any part of Off-Hour was lacking… well, there it is.
Dr M’Benga’s injury as shown on a padd.
Since I mentioned Dr M’Benga’s injury, let’s head to Sickbay next.
I’m sorry if this is going to sound crude or facetious, but when Dr M’Benga was almost bisected by the rolling table, I could only think of one thing: the parody of Signs from the beginning of the 2003 “comedy” film Scary Movie 3. I know, I know… cringe millennial humour, right? But honestly, when Chapel revealed the scan of Dr M’Benga’s injury… that thought almost made me laugh out loud. Does that say more about me than Off-Hour? I mean, probably.
Perhaps a more casual audience isn’t aware of this, but Dr M’Benga is a minor character on The Original Series, making I think three appearances on the show alongside Dr McCoy. What that means, for those of us who did know that, is that Dr M’Benga is basically immortal in Strange New Worlds. And that fairly typical “prequel problem” robbed this storyline of much of its dramatic tension, unfortunately. Plenty of stories can still be thoroughly enjoyable even when you know how they end, but because of Strange New Worlds’ place in the timeline, any TOS character is an odd choice to place in mortal peril. Compare M’Benga’s injury in this episode to Ortegas’ injury at the start of Season 3 as a case in point; Ortegas could have been killed off, just as Hemmer had been in Season 1. But M’Benga is unkillable – and that knowledge detracted from this storyline, at least a little. And maybe that’s why my initial reaction was to recall that dumb scene from a pretty awful early 2000s spoof movie instead of being gripped by the tension that the episode was going for.
Half of Dr M’Benga…
The preamble to M’Benga and Chapel’s story saw them get into an argument. And while friends having disagreements and arguments is something that happens every day… this one felt just a little bit forced. It worked in the sense that it gave Chapel an extra motivation to stay with Dr M’Benga after he was injured; she didn’t want to prove him right by walking away, as he’d called her out for having “one foot out the door.” But if we stop to think about that… did Chapel need that as an extra reason to stay by her friend’s side? Aside from Spock, and the complicated romantic relationship there, Dr M’Benga is by far Chapel’s closest friend on the ship. They have a history that extends way back before the events of the series, and we’ve also seen Chapel as being dedicated to her patients on numerous other occasions. I just don’t think the argument and the conversations they had about which of them might be leaving really added much to *this* specific storyline.
However, given that Strange New Worlds is in the process of shuffling some of its characters around ahead of next season’s finale, talk of Dr M’Benga potentially stepping away from the chief medical officer role is noteworthy. This episode (re)introduced Dr Boyce – the Enterprise’s very first CMO from The Cage – and we also know that Dr McCoy has been cast for at least one Season 5 episode. As I said above, Dr M’Benga would serve aboard the Enterprise during Kirk’s time – but not in the chief medical officer’s role, so some kind of exit, or partial exit, seems to be on the cards, and I think we’ve seen the beginnings of that here.
Is Dr M’Benga really going to leave the Enterprise?
I could appreciate, though, that Chapel got one of her best stories of the show so far – and that Jess Bush really got a chance to show off her range and put in an exceptional performance with this incarnation of the character. Even if the idea of Chapel being a bit “flaky” in her commitment to serving on the Enterprise felt less-than-developed as a premise, her dedication to saving her friend’s life when he was in danger was admirable, and we went through a range of emotions with her as she refused to confront what should’ve been a guaranteed death for Dr M’Benga.
The technobabble macguffin that saved both M’Benga and the ship was, perhaps, a tiny bit lacking in explanation; we got some fun lines between Chapel, Pike, Scotty, and Pelia, but it felt a bit lightweight given the scale of what these “super-neutrinos” were capable of doing. Perhaps a stronger story would’ve used the neutrinos for one role, but not both – and found an alternative way to either save Dr M’Benga or refuel the ship. Again, that comes back to my point about the stakes and tension being cranked all the way up; in a story with marginally lower stakes, the magical neutrinos wouldn’t have needed to do *everything*.
These neutrinos sure are useful, eh?
Sticking with characters that Off-Hour endangered who, realistically, we knew were never in any danger… we also have Spock.
Again, as with Dr M’Benga, Spock was just a really odd choice for this kind of storyline. I appreciated the callback to Court Martial with the ion pod and how it could be jettisoned; that isn’t the issue. When the story really wanted us to feel that a main character was genuinely in danger of losing their life, the writers chose literally the only character from that group who couldn’t die. Dr Boyce, Una, or La’an could all have taken on Spock’s role in heading for the ion pod; there was nothing about it from either an in-universe point of view or for Spock’s character arc that meant it *had* to be him. And any of them – or the likes of Ortegas and other non-TOS characters – would’ve felt in danger in a way that Spock simply never did.
There were some creative visuals on this side of the story – Spock and La’an’s slow, painful climbs across the hull were both impressive-looking and tense. The animation work used to represent the wormhole and the neutrinos was fantastic. And on the practical side, Spock’s painful radiation burns were particularly gruesome, as was the visual of him spitting up blood. But the show’s status as a prequel, and the decision to put the one character who we know couldn’t be in any real danger into this situation, rather worked against this part of the story.
La’an climbing over the hull.
La’an said it best herself: she’s “expendable,” at least in a narrative context! And given her concerns earlier in the season about her latent augment DNA, some kind of exposure to super-neutrinos or outer space radiation could be something that we follow up on in subsequent stories. Given that La’an had to go after Spock anyway, and her scene climbing over the hull was very similar to the one we’d just seen with Spock… I can’t help but feel that maybe other choices could’ve been made to make this storyline a bit more tense. Sending both characters out, one after the other, maybe even felt a tad repetitive – though I didn’t really notice that on my first viewing of the episode, to be fair.
La’an and Una had some great moments together in earlier episodes – particularly Season 1’s Ghosts of Illyria and Season 2’s Subspace Rhapsody, and I read their conversation here as a bit of a follow-up to that. That “big sister-little sister” dynamic hasn’t been as present with them lately, but it seemed to be back in play here. If – as I’ve repeatedly theorised this season – La’an may not be long for this world (or may be about to depart the Enterprise in some other way), then taking a moment to remind us of her friendship with Una is no bad thing.
La’an and Una.
Is Strange New Worlds paying Anson Mount by the line, or something? Is that why Captain Pike has been such a small part of the show this season? On its own, Pike’s relatively small role in Off-Hour wouldn’t be noteworthy. He spent a good chunk of the episode unconscious, but he got a good moment of self-sacrifice as he risked his safety to activate the Enterprise’s deflector screens, and then got a moment later in the story when he had to make the tough decision to jettison the ion pod. But given how Pike’s roles across the season so far have been pretty minimal… I dunno. I continue to hope for more Captain Pike in what we used to call “the Captain Pike show,” I guess.
On its own, it wouldn’t matter. Off-Hour had good storylines for Scotty, Chapel, and M’Benga in particular, and Star Trek has *always* done episodes where some characters were more in focus than others. It just feels like we’ve now had five in a row where Pike’s role has been fairly small, and given that the original appeal of Strange New Worlds – the reason fans like myself were clamouring for more from this version of the character after his appearance in Discovery’s second season – was Anson Mount’s wonderful performance… well, it’s become noticeable. And I’d hope that we’ll get to spend a bit more time with the Enterprise’s captain between now and next season’s finale.
We don’t seem to be spending as much time with Pike this season.
Pelia has been one of my favourite characters in Strange New Worlds since she arrived back in Season 2, and I’m so glad to see her in the kind of mentoring role that this younger version of Scotty needs. Although I wouldn’t call Pelia and Scotty a “rare” or “unusual” pairing in the way I described above, they’ve had precious little time together since Scotty came aboard the Enterprise, sadly, and I’m glad that Off-Hour went some way to remedying that deficiency. The whole point of doing a prequel story for characters like Uhura, Spock, or Scotty is to show how they grew to become the people we’re familiar with, and given where Scotty started – and his existing relationship with Pelia – that’s something I’ve felt Strange New Worlds hasn’t really done enough of.
But Pelia got a genuinely enjoyable storyline this time, guiding Scotty less on the technical side and more in terms of boosting his confidence – and that’s *exactly* what this younger version of the character needed. I liked Scotty’s callback to the USS Stardiver (the ship he served on in Season 2, before he joined the Enterprise) and how his conversation with Pelia gave him enough of a boost to play a role in saving the ship.
Pelia’s just fantastic, isn’t she?
The only downside to this part of the story, really, is that Pelia’s confidence-boosting didn’t really lead to Scotty actively *doing* anything differently. He’d already made the adjustments to the ion pod and to the bussard collectors; all he really had to do was have faith that the ship would hold together despite passing its safe limits. And that was important, don’t get me wrong – we saw the genesis of Scotty the “miracle-worker,” willing to push the Enterprise and squeeze every last bit of juice from her engines! But what I mean is that, for all of Pelia’s nice words, it didn’t really change anything that Scotty *did* – with some slight changes, Scotty could’ve listened to something Pelia said and that might’ve given him a final boost to… I dunno. Technobabble something about an extra ounce of power to the deflectors; something to help the ship when it passed that threshold.
But that’s really just a nitpick. This Pelia-Scotty storyline was fantastic, and it’s something I’ve been waiting to see from Strange New Worlds for basically a season-and-a-half at this point! Scotty, since coming aboard, has kind of eclipsed Pelia in several engineering stories, and because she’s such a fun character, that’s been a little disappointing. So I’m really glad to see her in that senior role this time. It was also fun to revisit Pelia’s cabin and see some of the random nonsense she’s accumulated over such a long life! That will never cease to be a fun space to spend time in.
This moment at the end of the episode was incredibly sweet.
A’Sha has been a bit of a non-entity so far this season. After what could’ve been a strong start in her initial scene with Uhura, she faded into the background quite quickly. But given the Strange New Worlds writers’ proclivity to put Vulcan characters into either slapstick comedy stories or soap opera-level romantic plots, it was a breath of fresh air to get a Vulcan who behaved… well, like a Vulcan, for once. And A’Sha’s scenes with Scotty this week were a lot of fun.
Even as the ship was in danger, A’Sha kept her head. She helped Scotty where she could, even coming up with the idea to turn off life support to non-essential areas of the ship, and later beaming him to just the right place to be able to make the modifications to the ion pod. I’m hoping there’s more to A’Sha than just being a “glorified redshirt,” like last season’s Ensign Gamble, but whatever may lay in store for the character, her scenes this week were pretty good – and by far her biggest outing of the season to date.
Here’s A’Sha!
I wasn’t a huge fan of the 24-inspired clock or countdown on the screen. It did hammer home that (most) of the episode took place in real-time, which could’ve been fine, but after the first couple of appearances it just began to feel a bit gimmicky, to be honest, and I don’t think it really added a lot. The episode was already tense and dramatic – arguably just a little too much! And adding a ticking clock didn’t really do much for me to ramp that up much further.
What I liked a lot better, though, were the 24-inspired split-screen sections. Some of these were better than others, admittedly; a few of them were little more than just side-by-side close-ups of characters. But when they worked, they really worked, and it’s a creative technique that we don’t often see in Star Trek. The moving “wipes” from one character to another, and how the screen wasn’t always a perfect 50/50 split were also fun visual effects, and that kind of thing definitely helps Off-Hour stand out.
One of the split-screen moments.
We mentioned Court Martial and the ion pod, and that was a fun callback. But one reference I never would’ve expected in a million years was to the TOS third-season episode That Which Survives. I don’t mean to be unkind, but is That Which Survives an especially memorable episode for you? Because it isn’t for me! So it was a ton of fun to get a deep cut to a random minor character from that episode: Lieutenant Rahda.
Rahda takes over the conn for the Enterprise’s beta shift (an earlier episode this season mentioned alpha and beta shifts, if I’m remembering correctly), and she’s the one who initially notices the problem of the warp-wormhole (or whatever we’re calling it). In That Which Survives, Rahda takes over for Sulu at the helm, so she kind of plays a similar role in both stories. It was a totally unnecessary callback – this could’ve been a brand-new character and she would’ve served the exact same function. But I love that Strange New Worlds went back to Star Trek’s past and pulled out a minor character like Radha for a moment like this. It adds depth to Star Trek’s world, and makes the franchise’s newest outing feel even more strongly tied to its first. In the sixtieth anniversary year… well, I love to see things like that.
Rahda appeared in a Season 3 episode of The Original Series.
As the story unfolded, and especially as it seemed like both Dr M’Benga and the Enterprise were in mortal danger, I’m afraid I felt the hideous spectre of Level-Five Transporter Accident’s ending looming ever larger. If you read my review of last week’s episode, you’ll know that I felt the “but it was all just a dream” ending is probably the worst ending to an episode in the entire six-decade history of Star Trek, and when Off-Hour seemed to be writing itself into a corner, well… I began to fear the worst.
I didn’t think for a second that we’d get another identical “dream” story, but I did wonder whether – through some technobabble, perhaps – these super-neutrinos might rewind time or undo much of the episode’s story. Star Trek has done similar things on occasion, so it wouldn’t have been totally unprecedented. But after last week’s episode had so thoroughly shit the bed, I couldn’t *bear* the idea of another story being erased in any way, and as the tension ramped up and we got closer to the explosive conclusion… it was a real, genuine worry. The stench from Level-Five Transporter Accident’s ending will take time to dissipate, apparently.
The Enterprise in the wormhole.
When Strange New Worldswas first announced, and before we knew anything about who would or wouldn’t be joining the cast, I wondered if we might see a new version of Dr Boyce. Boyce was the Enterprise’s doctor – and Pike’s counsellor of sorts – in The Cage, but obviously the Strange New Worlds team chose to adapt Dr M’Benga instead. So it was a real surprise, then, to see Dr Boyce in this episode – and to learn that he’s apparently playing second fiddle to Dr M’Benga after returning to the Enterprise from a different posting.
I gotta be honest: this version of the character seemed a lot harsher and less personable than the Dr Boyce from The Cage, to such an extent that they almost don’t feel like the same individual. I think it’s possible that Dr Boyce might reappear either later this season or next season, so maybe we’ll get to spend a bit more time with him and reestablish that softer or more personable side, or there could be a conflict looming with Dr M’Benga. Given that M’Benga might be on his way out… Dr Boyce could have a role to play in facilitating that, perhaps.
Dr Boyce.
I did like Dr Boyce’s no-nonsense approach, though. He was calm and professional, even under pressure, and although he might’ve seemed quick to dismiss Chapel’s pleas to try to save Dr M’Benga, that came from an understandable place. M’Benga’s life was only saved by magical nonsense, if you think about it, and Dr Boyce had other patients in need of treatment, so his attitude makes sense. I still think that he didn’t have quite the same charm or bedside manner as he did in The Cage, but given the stressful situation, I could understand where it was coming from.
Again, as with the ion pod and Lieutenant Rahda, this was a fun callback in this big anniversary year. It was also nice to get some (admittedly belated) explanation as to why Dr Boyce was no longer the Enterprise’s CMO after the events of The Cage, as that filled in a little bit of backstory in between events we’ve already seen on screen. As above, this character’s role in Off-Hour could’ve gone to someone brand-new, but returning to someone from Star Trek’s past – someone quite important, in this case – worked well and was a fun little callback for Trekkies.
Dr Boyce, as he appeared in The Cage.
Speaking of callbacks, the damaged engineering being sealed off reminded me of a similar moment in Generations, shortly before the destruction of the Enterprise-D’s stardrive section. The engineer who sealed the room also had some pretty painful-looking radiation burns (and I have to assume that he, along with several of his colleagues, won’t have survived if they were sealed inside the irradiated engine room). This character was functionally little more than a redshirt, I guess, but it was nice to see engineering so lively and populated at the start of the episode; we’ve hardly spent any time in main engineering, really, even after Scotty joined the show, yet it’s such a fun space.
One thing that confused me was Dr M’Benga’s line about the temperature outside Sickbay being “-400 degrees.” Is that a Fahrenheit thing that I’m too non-American to get? Star Trek has (usually) used metric measurements in the past, and the temperature of outer space is famously -270° C. It just seemed like a very odd thing for Dr M’Benga to say – either he was exaggerating, delusional from his injury, or just… I dunno. It felt like a bit of an oddity, though.
A Dr M’Benga popsicle.
So that was Off-Hour. A good episode, but perhaps one that didn’t take full advantage of its unique premise.
Jess Bush and Martin Quinn were, for me, the standout performers this week. Both ran the gamut of emotions, taking their characters through very difficult and complex situations and journeys, and Scotty in particular has taken a massive step closer to the man we remember from The Original Series. There were several fun callbacks to Star Trek’s past, helping Off-Hour to feel just a little bit celebratory with Star Trek’s big anniversary right around the corner, and the episode put together a strong story… albeit one where the drama was just a notch or two too high for my personal taste.
Still, it’s one of the best episodes of the season without a doubt, and as things stand right now, I’d happily put Off-Hour in a hypothetical “top ten” of my favourite episodes from the entire show. After last week, Strange New Worlds desperately needed a palate-cleanser, and I’m pleased to report that Off-Hour successfully delivered on that.
Uhura.
I hope this has been interesting… and you aren’t *too* jealous that I’ve now met Christina Chong, Ethan Peck, and Martin Quinn! I definitely felt that there was a low bar for this week’s episode after *that* ending last time, but even with that in mind, I think Off-Hour was good.
Next week, Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass promises to trap the crew inside “a soap-opera reality.” So… Star Trek: Discovery, then? Jokes aside, I’m not sure if I like the sound of that premise, to be blunt. We’ve already seen episodes like A Space Adventure Hour and The Elysian Kingdom doing these kinds of “what if Star Trek… but different?” ideas, and they haven’t all worked as well as I’d have liked. However, I shall endeavour to go into it with an open mind, and if nothing else, I like the idea of Captain Pike potentially taking centre-stage again.
So hopefully you can join me next week for that review! Thanks for checking out my thoughts on Off-Hour, and if you missed them, you can find the rest of my Strange New Worlds reviews by clicking or tapping here. And maybe, sometime soon, we should return to TNG’s Disaster for a re-watch! Until next time… and Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, Picard Season 3, and Star Trek Online.
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to meet Denise Crosby at a Star Trek convention here in the UK! So what better way to celebrate than by returning to what is arguably Tasha Yar’s most iconic episode: Skin of Evil?
I haven’t written up a full article on this year’s Destination Star Trek convention, by the way; much of what I said last year about the organisation, great accessibility, and so on still applies, and I didn’t really want to repeat myself. If you join me later in the year for my “year in review” piece, I daresay I’ll discuss Destination a bit more then. And if you want to see what I made of last year’s event, you can find out by clicking or tapping here!
For now, suffice to say that it was wonderful to meet Denise Crosby, share a fist-bump, and pose for a photo. And that meeting is what convinced me to return to this episode for the first time in… well, a while, I guess!
Denise Crosby faces off against “Armus” at a Star Trek convention in the UK. Image: Destination Fan Events via Facebook
If you’re a Trekkie and a big fan of TNG, I daresay you already know the story of how Skin of Evil came about. In brief, Crosby became dissatisfied relatively early on, feeling that the character of Tasha Yar wasn’t being given much to do or getting much time on screen. As a result, she asked to leave the series while production on Season 1 was still ongoing; by January 1988, the script for what would become Skin of Evil had been drafted.
This is, in a very real sense, a landmark episode – not only for The Next Generation, but for Star Trek as a whole. We’d seen plenty of redshirts killed off before, and villains, too – but this was the first time that a *main* character had been killed (and stayed dead, so Spock doesn’t count!). Not only was that new for Star Trek, but it was a relative rarity in prime-time television at the time, too.
Tasha’s death was a first for Star Trek.
I’d argue that Tasha’s death set the stage for Worf to grow into the character we’ve come to know and love. Worf took over the security and tactical roles that had initially been hers; it’s hard to envision Worf’s subsequent development across both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine if he’d remained a roving presence on the Enterprise-D. Tying him down to a role that both suited his skillset and – arguably – kept him in a pretty narrow lane defined his character. And as Worf is the character with the most appearances in Star Trek (285, according to Memory Alpha), that’s kind of a big deal! In that sense, Skin of Evil arguably did more for Worf than for any other character – including Tasha Yar.
For her part, I think it’s fair to say that Denise Crosby quickly came to recognise that leaving the show was a mistake. As The Next Generation “grew the beard” and went from strength to strength, missing out on that must’ve stung. Crosby would return to the series in guest-starring roles as an alternate timeline’s version of Tasha Yar, and then as Yar’s half-Romulan daughter, Sela, for a pretty successful story arc. But Tasha Yar is not as big a character as she could’ve been, and I’ve always felt that there’s some regret from Denise Crosby because of that. Crosby has remained involved with the Star Trek fan community, though – not only making convention appearances, like the one I attended, but also producing the documentary Trekkies and its sequel, as well as appearing in the video game Star Trek Online.
Denise Crosby has returned to Star Trek on multiple occasions since Tasha was killed off. Pictured: Star Trek Online
I first came to The Next Generation (and Star Trek as a whole) during the show’s second season, so it was only when episodes of Season 1 were repeated that I would’ve encountered Skin of Evil – and Tasha Yar as a character. That being said, it must’ve been sometime in the early ’90s, because I don’t have a particularly strong memory of watching Season 1 and thinking “wait, who’s that character standing at Worf’s post?” So I think my younger self just kind of rolled with it! I also couldn’t tell you exactly when I first watched Skin of Evil or what I made of it… though I do seem to have a fragment of a memory, wondering why – with all the 24th Century medical technology present in the show – Tasha’s life couldn’t be saved and Dr Crusher simply pronounced her dead.
We’ll get into all of that in a minute, though, because I definitely have some thoughts about the way this episode implemented its main storyline!
One thing I really wasn’t sure of, all these years later, is whether – or to what extent – Tasha’s funeral would still hit those emotional notes. Knowing what’s coming in a story can rob it of its impact, and having seen Skin of Evil more times than I can remember… well, I just didn’t know how I’d feel, I guess. Tasha’s death on Vagra II was expected on a re-watch, naturally, and the shock of the moment wasn’t there. But in her funeral scene? I still teared up.
Tasha at her own funeral.
On the technical side of things, I’d forgotten just how great Skin of Evil’s musical score is. As the ship races to Vagra II we get a tense, tension-building piece of music. On the planet, and in scenes with Armus, the music conveys a very real sense of danger. And finally, at Tasha’s funeral, the music changes again to take on an emotional, almost bittersweet tone as Picard and the crew listen to her final message. Ron Jones, the show’s regular composer for Seasons 1-4, wrote the episode’s score.
This is my personal bias coming through, but I’ve always liked what The Next Generation did with indoor sound stages – especially in the first season. Some of these settings feel much closer in visual terms to planets and locales from The Original Series than even to places we’d encounter just a couple of seasons later. For me, there’s a real charm to the way Vagra II (and similar places) are presented; it’s something Star Trek literally hasn’t done for decades. And while it may be less “realistic” in an objective sense, with fairly plain, flat terrain, scattered rocks, and a clear stage backdrop that, in this case, was an incredibly basic colour gradient… I really like the way these places look. It’s a limitation of both budget and technology, as well as a product of its time – and I think if one of Star Trek’s modern shows saw an away team land on a planet that looked like Vagra II, we’d criticise it! But… I just find it charming in episodes like this one.
I like this overhead shot.
Skin of Evil also had some creative camera shots. The close-up on Picard, at the end of the funeral, lingered in such a way as to convey his emotional state, even as he didn’t really show a lot of emotion on his face. There was a great overhead shot of the bridge that we’d occasionally see in the show’s first season but very rarely thereafter. And some of the shots of Armus (and Riker submerged in the Armus goop) were also well-framed.
The wreck of the shuttle looked great on the surface of Vagra II. The damaged nacelles and the back section of the shuttle made for a striking visual effect when we first saw them – comparable, perhaps, to earlier Star Trek episodes like The Galileo Seven. The damaged shuttle interior, where Troi and the injured Ben spent most of the episode, was also brought to life well, and the red emergency lighting really set the tone.
The shuttle crash site.
We should also talk about the difficulties the team had in creating Armus, since we’re talking about sets and such.
The costume used to depict Armus’ humanoid form wasn’t compatible with the liquid that enveloped it, and the glue used to hold parts of it together repeatedly came unstuck during filming. The viscous liquid – a mixture of printer’s ink and a thickening agent – was infamously unpleasant to work with, not least for Jonathan Frakes, who performed his own stunts in the episode, including being submerged in the stuff.
It sounds like working on that side of the episode was more of a challenge than the crew expected, but I think the finished product works about as well as it could! I don’t think anyone’s out there hailing Armus as one of Star Trek’s best or most iconic villains – which is a shame, given his role in killing off a main character – but the way he comes across on screen, dripping, jet black, oozing, and unpleasant… it made for a suitably menacing and intimidating effect. Seeing Armus rise taller than Riker – the tallest of the main cast – hammered that home.
Armus.
Armus is, though, a pretty one-note villain, if you think about it. Partly that’s by design: if he’s an entity composed *entirely* of an entire alien race’s worst and most negative qualities, well… there isn’t a lot of room for nuance, I guess. And partly, it should be said, it’s because this single forty-five-minute episode had other things to do. Worf had to accept his new role and play a major part on the bridge when Picard, Riker, and Data were all away. We had a sequence in Sickbay trying to save Tasha’s life. And then the funeral, at the end of the episode, needed sufficient time to hit those emotional notes. There wasn’t more time, sadly, for Armus to be much more than he was.
That also means that the resolution to the episode’s core problem – the need to save the shuttle crew – felt quite abrupt. After Picard and Troi hit on the idea of basically making Armus as upset as possible to weaken his forcefield… that was it. We got a short conversation as Picard pushed his buttons, leading to a pretty stereotypical “roar of anger,” before the away team were all beamed away to safety. A bit anticlimactic, perhaps, given what Armus had done earlier in the story.
Members of the production crew on the set of Skin of Evil.
In some ways, Armus feels like a different take on a familiar character from TNG’s first season: Q. They exhibit some of the same traits – a need to be amused or to have attention focused on them, trickster-like, teasing qualities, and powers that go far beyond what Starfleet in this era was able to counter. But while Q, even in his first appearances, had both a curiosity about humans and even, dare I suggest, a helpful streak… Armus is purely malevolent.
I liked Troi’s line about pity; how this creature, powerful and deadly though it could be, was still a tragic and sad figure. Armus represents one of the oldest warnings about immortality, in one sense: how one would feel after aeons alone, trapped with no one to talk to or nothing to do. That isn’t meant to justify or excuse his behaviour, but it does go some way to giving it an explanation or at least some context. To choose a real-world parallel: Armus is akin to the criminal who comes from a troubled past. Their past doesn’t give them free rein to do the bad things they’ve done, but it can go some way to explaining why those things happened, where they came from, and even why we should pity, rather than *hate*, someone in that position.
Troi.
Troi was arguably Skin of Evil’s real star. This episode must be one of Marina Sirtis’ best and most challenging performances in the role, having not only to display very strong emotions, but doing so with no other physical performer to bounce them off. Every conversation Troi has with Armus, unlike those of the rest of the away team, takes place inside the shuttle with only Armus’ voice. It’s a tricky acting challenge, but Sirtis rose to the occasion wonderfully.
Troi was also the character who figured out how to beat Armus, laying the groundwork for the resolution to this storyline. It might’ve been possible, based on what we saw of their earlier conversations, for Troi to have single-handedly defeated Armus without Picard’s intervention; that’s a fun little “what-if” idea, I guess. But again, this was a good episode for both character and performer, and Troi really excelled – despite spending most of the episode trapped in a wrecked shuttle, barely moving.
This was a good episode for Troi.
At this point in The Next Generation’s run, we had seen Picard on a handful of away missions, but we’re also aware that he’s a very different kind of captain from Kirk – taking a much more hands-off approach, with Riker usually leading the charge. So to see Picard volunteer to beam down to the planet himself was something a bit different, and I think it emphasised the severity of the situation. As I said above, Picard’s ultimate role *might* not have been totally necessary, but as the captain, it makes sense for him to play a leading role in this kind of story.
Picard’s dedication to helping his crew – the away team, Riker, Tasha, and the survivors of the shuttle crash – was on full display, and it’s one of the best early-season indications of this, in my opinion. We also get to see Picard having to wrangle with the emotional toll of losing someone under his command, someone he personally recruited, as well as someone he’d become friends with, while also having to remain in control of his emotions and guide the rest of the crew. Tasha’s death was cruel, and they were all suffering – but there was still a mission at hand and two injured crewmates to rescue. Picard had to be the one to tell them to keep their emotions in check long enough to help the shuttle crew, and that can’t have been easy.
Picard in the Briefing Room.
I mentioned Worf above, and for me, Skin of Evil feels like *the* inflection point for his character; the moment the version of Worf we’re most familiar with came into being. With Tasha’s death, Worf is given her roles at tactical and security by Picard, and we see a flicker of emotion on his face at that moment as he absorbs both the loss of a friend and the responsibility of assuming her dual roles aboard the ship. Worf instantly puts his own stamp on things, though – declining to join the away team, despite clearly wanting to avenge Tasha’s loss, because he believed his skills were better-utilised on the bridge.
Worf feels like a natural fit for the security and tactical roles – though that’s admittedly with the bias of hindsight! As I revisit Skin of Evil, though, I can’t help but wonder what might’ve been – what other role or roles would Worf have found aboard the Enterprise-D had Tasha remained a part of the series? It’s another of those interesting “what-ifs,” eh?
Worf and Tasha together at the beginning of the episode.
I was also reminded of how, even a full season into the show’s run, TNG lacked a chief engineer! Geordi wouldn’t take over that role until Season 2, and Season 1 showed off a succession of one-off characters in the engineering role. In this case, we meet (briefly) Leland T. Lynch, who was responsible for recalibrating the ship’s dilithium crystals at the start of the story. Lynch was a very minor part of the episode, and didn’t return after Skin of Evil, but he’s just a reminder, really, of how – despite having a successful formula from The Original Series to adapt – The Next Generation was still finding its feet, even a full season into its run. As with Worf above, we’ve come to see Geordi as inseparable from his role in engineering… but that wasn’t where he started.
Although Engineer Lynch’s work on the dilithium crystals kind of feels like padding to stretch out the episode’s runtime a little, it did lead to one cool visual moment: seeing the Enterprise-D in flight but without its nacelles illuminated. This made for a fun and different look, albeit just for a moment, and the need to reach Vagra II added a little tension to those opening moments after the shuttle crash, too.
It’s Leland T. Lynch!
So let’s talk Tasha.
Skin of Evil is remembered not for Armus, nor Worf’s new role, nor even Troi’s struggle against Armus, but because it’s the episode where Tasha Yar was killed off. Although Star Trek had killed off Spock a mere six years earlier, that doesn’t really count because the next film brought him back to life again! So this was Star Trek’s first real encounter with death, if you think about it. Combine Tasha’s death here with Dr Crusher’s departure at the start of Season 2 (something caused by behind-the-scenes shenanigans), and it definitely felt like TNG was going through a shake-up.
This is something that Star Trek still doesn’t really do very often. If you remember my reviews of Discovery and Picard in recent years, you might remember me saying words to the effect of characters seeming to have “plot armour” even in seemingly impossible situations! And that’s because, to be blunt, I don’t think the franchise has *ever* done death particularly well. Spock’s was emotional and impactful… but was undone in the very next story. Jadzia’s, which came a decade after Skin of Evil, is arguably the most impactful… but others, like Kirk’s or Tucker’s, have proven incredibly controversial. And don’t get me started on redshirts and “glorified redshirts!”
Tasha Yar was Star Trek’s first major death.
So this moment… it still matters to Star Trek, even as we close in on Skin of Evil’s fortieth anniversary. This is the moment where main characters could no longer be considered safe, where someone other than a redshirt went on an away mission… and didn’t come back. A character fans had gotten to know over more than twenty episodes, who had relationships with practically everyone else on the Enterprise-D just… straight-up died. And the show made a creditable effort to celebrate Tasha’s life and legacy in a funeral scene that still hits hard all these years later.
The contrast between the dim, desolate surface of Vagra II and Tasha’s funeral – in a sunlit, grassy meadow – is stark, and the visual impact of the two sequences is incredibly striking. At first, the moment felt less funereal than Spock’s had done aboard Kirk’s Enterprise, but this memorial service was for a different character, and a different *kind* of character, too. In my head canon, Tasha chose such a bright, sunlit, pastoral setting because it represented everything she got away from when she escaped to join Starfleet. And there’s something about the bright blue sky, white clouds, and natural grassland that feels, well… heavenly, at least if you buy into western or American depictions of the afterlife.
The characters gather for Tasha’s funeral.
Skin of Evil needed this epilogue. If Tasha was going to be killed off – and not exit the show by some other means – then her death needed more than just expiring on a bio-bed in Sickbay. The funeral, and particularly Tasha’s own address to the gathered characters, was her swansong; the end of her time on the show. It mattered to those involved – the cast as well as the characters they played – but also to us as the audience. The funeral underlines that there is no technobabble solution – Tasha isn’t coming back and there will be no last-second reprieve. It allows us to bid a fond farewell to the Enterprise-D’s first tactical officer, and to draw somewhat of a line under the first iteration of the show’s principal cast.
Tasha Yar was always an enjoyable character. Her tragic backstory informed why she wanted to join Starfleet, and why she had the tactical and combat skills that she possessed, but it didn’t define her. She may not have been front-and-centre across Season 1, but just like most of the rest of the main characters, she had her moments, made connections with her shipmates, and took part in some iconic moments and storylines. Her loss in Skin of Evil would go on to define – and, I would argue, refine – The Next Generation going into Season 2.
Tasha at her post on the bridge.
And, of course, Tasha would be back! Yesterday’s Enterprise introduced an alternate timeline version, she returned again in All Good Things right at the end of the show’s run, and her daughter – Sela – was an important character, too. Tasha even appeared, albeit only briefly, in Picard’s third season, proving that her legacy and importance lived on well past the events of this one episode. She would prove important to Data in particular (thanks in no small part to their… y’know… *encounter* in the episode The Naked Now). And all these years later, we’re still talking about Tasha Yar and her place in the series.
So I think that’s all for now.
Thanks for joining me on this re-watch. It was fun to revisit Skin of Evil, even though I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a personal favourite episode, or anything! Skin of Evil is more so an inflection point; a key moment in the history of The Next Generation, moving one character aside and arguably making room for others to step up. Slimming down what was arguably a slightly overladen cast probably helped the series going into the next part of its run, and for Worf in particular – an incredibly important character in all of Star Trek’s history – this moment cleared a pathway for him to become the character we know and love.
Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary is upon us, and it was wonderful to be able to celebrate that milestone at a convention. Meeting Denise Crosby was a wonderful experience, and it’s what prompted me to step back to Skin of Evil and write this piece. I hope this has been interesting, and I hope it wasn’t too controversial a pick for a Tasha Yar episode to revisit!
Thanks for joining me, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available, and is also available to buy on DVD/Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including The Next Generation and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Next Generation Season 6, Into Darkness, Lower Decks Season 2, Discovery Season 3, and Starfleet Academy Season 1.
Well… uh… where to start?
Last week, I began my review of A Case of Chiaroscuro by telling you that I always try to keep in mind what an episode of Star Trek was intending to achieve – and how well it measured up to its ambitions – when writing my reviews. That doesn’t mean I’m being “objective” in any sense of the word, but rather than just telling you whether I personally liked an episode or not, I think it’s important – *especially* in a series like Strange New Worlds, which regularly dips its toes in different genres and styles of storytelling – to try to gauge what an episode wanted to be rather than merely make a snap judgement about the final product.
But I gotta be honest: I’m having a hard time doing that with Level-Five Transporter Accident.
It’s Captain Pike…
The Muppets, upon which the episode draws inspiration, is inherently silly. And if there’s one word I’d use to describe this week’s episode, it would be “silly.” I mean that in an almost entirely negative way, unfortunately, because while I can respect that Level-Five Transporter Accident knew exactly what it was doing and just went for it in the most honest yet unhinged way… the finished product was, to be blunt, a complete mess.
For a lot of Trekkies, and whatever wider audience might still be watching Strange New Worlds, this will undoubtedly be seen as the moment where the series “jumped the shark,” if it hadn’t already done so after episodes like Subspace Rhapsody.
As I said last week in response to the “film noir” black-and-white episode: I can respect the commitment to the bit. The writers, the director, the designers, the cast… everyone involved knew what kind of story they wanted to tell and they whole-heartedly embraced the silliness. There was even an *attempt* at a message, I think… about trauma and stress, the importance of talking it out, and, perhaps, how leaning into the absurd can be helpful. That messaging, however, was lost in a bumbling, childish mess of an episode, and an ending that utterly ruined whatever could’ve been salvaged.
There could’ve been a story about trauma, stress, and burnout.
When I write these reviews, I try not to come across as one of *those* Trekkies – the ultra-nerdy folks who hyper-fixate on the tiniest minutiae of “canon,” who can’t accept that Star Trek has a sense of humour, or who refuse to acknowledge that the franchise changes and evolves over time. I don’t want to gatekeep the fandom, rain on anyone’s parade, or sound like I’m insisting that Star Trek should always be uptight and taking itself 100% seriously. Episodes like that can be great, sure, but part of the franchise’s appeal has always been its light-hearted moments and its sense of humour, and the last thing I ever want to be accused of is taking Star Trek “too seriously.” There’s a place for comedy, joking around, and completely unscientific absurd premises in Star Trek… and there always will be for as long as the franchise exists.
But… even with that in mind, and even having appreciated the genuine successes of the likes of Human Best Friend a couple of weeks ago, or some of the more overtly comic offerings in Lower Decks, I’m afraid that Level-Five Transporter Accident was, for me, a bridge too far. There were a handful of interesting ideas in the mix – and I promise we’ll cover them as we go along – and in terms of the way the puppets themselves were designed, operated, and brought to life… I don’t really have much to criticise. But the story just didn’t do it for me at all, and any potentially salvageable moments were completely expunged by what is literally the most clichéd, “avoid-this-at-all-costs-even-if-it’s-your-first-time-writing-anything” ending.
The episode’s ending was probably the worst in the entire franchise to date.
I mean… “it was all just a dream.” Seriously? Is that the quality level we should accept from Strange New Worlds? Or *any* big-budget streaming series? If that’s the best thing this group of writers could come up with to end the story, then thank god Strange New Worlds is almost at the end of its run. I’ve talked before about the potential upsides to Star Trek getting a bit of a refresh in the years ahead, and that kind of absolutely pathetic, awful, clichéd way to end an episode absolutely hammers home the need for new producers, writers, directors, and creatives. I hope the new Skydance-Paramount team is planning to have a proper clearing of the decks.
I will return to discuss the ending a bit later on, but for now… let’s get into the weeds with Level-Five Transporter Accident as best we can.
This was the first Strange New Worlds episode where a big part of the premise – i.e. the Orions’ attempts to capture the Enterprise – felt derivative. Not just because we’ve seen this in Discovery with the Emerald Chain, or as far back as The Next Generation with Starship Mine… but because Strange New Worlds itself literally did a “pirates are taking over the ship” story back in Season 1. The Serene Squall had a very similar setup, minus the puppets, and again, as I said above, if we’re at a point of recycling pretty basic narrative ideas because no one can come up with anything better… it’s time to let someone else take the helm, you know?
Haven’t we already seen this story?
The Serene Squall also put Spock in a comparable position as the pirates’ captive, one of the only main characters aboard the Enterprise able to do anything, and talking about his personal life with one of his captors. It was just derivative and repetitive all around to see so many of those same points re-used this time. And that wasn’t the only “Spock recycled” aspect of Level-Five Transporter Accident, sadly.
It’s been clear for a while that Strange New Worlds’ writers have latched onto this idea that “these autistic-coded Vulcans are all stuck-up, stoic, and weird… isn’t that just hilarious?” And they seem to want to throw Spock (and other Vulcan characters) into one of two situations: slapstick/cringe comedy or soap opera romance. And both of those were present in Level-Five Transporter Accident. As I said last season (I think it was in my review of Four-and-a-Half Vulcans): if the writers don’t know how else to use Spock, or what other storylines could work for this incarnation of the character… just don’t use him in a major role. It’s okay! Star Trek is sixty years old, and between Discovery, Strange New Worlds, The Original Series, the movies, The Next Generation, and the Kelvin timeline, we’ve spent plenty of time with him! Instead of doing another tired, overused, pretty boring “Spock comedy” or “Spock love triangle” plot for the eighth or tenth time, respectively, just… don’t. Level-Five Transporter Accident would genuinely have been a better story if another character – La’an, Una, Chapel, Dr M’Benga, or even Scotty – had taken over Spock’s role.
Spock is taken captive by pirates. Again.
Spock’s break-up with La’an – or rather, hers with him – was fine, I guess, and not unexpected after events earlier in the season. It does seem to stack more evidence in the “La’an might not be long for this world” column; a theory I’ve been toying with since La’an (clumsily) brought up the question of her latent augment DNA in the season premiere. Giving Spock a romantic interest has – as I said above – completely run its course for me as an interesting storyline, and seeing Spock sleep his way through the Enterprise’s female crew complement hasn’t been the best part of the show by any stretch. So I’m fine with this relationship coming to an end.
Season 4’s tagline/motto is: “boldly go one step closer to where it all began.” And I think we can see Spock and La’an’s break-up through the lens of the show moving its characters around to get them closer to their Original Series roles. Other aspects of Level-Five Transporter Accident arguably work against that for Spock, but this break-up, and the way both of them handled it, was far from the worst part of the story. Did I roll my eyes when it looked like we were about to get another “Spock in love” or “Spock’s heartbroken” storyline? Yeah, a little. But the positives probably outweigh the negatives, and I did appreciate that both characters referenced the events of The Griffin Incident, noting that what happened aboard that derelict ship has been weighing on them. Whether that’ll set up something more for Spock, La’an, Kirk, or all three, I’m not sure – but I’m glad, at least, that such a traumatic experience wasn’t simply locked away, never to be mentioned again. If this conversation is all the follow-up we get, at least we can say we got *something*.
La’an and Spock have broken up.
Level-Five Transporter Accident was known as “the puppet episode” for more than a year, I guess, ever since we caught a glimpse of one of the puppets in a pre-season teaser clip. If Star Trek is gonna do an episode featuring puppets, it’s important that the puppets themselves look good – and I gotta say that they really did.
Paramount worked with The Jim Henson Company – famous for its work on The Muppets, Sesame Street, The Dark Crystal, and other puppet-focused projects. And this was a genuinely good choice; The Jim Henson Company is light-years ahead of any other puppet shop in the industry when it comes to creating something like this. And that partnership paid dividends – at least in design and aesthetic terms. All of the puppets – yes, even Pelia’s – looked fantastic, they all resembled the real-life versions of the characters they were supposed to depict, and the way they moved and (for want of a better term) emoted was exaggerated, but mostly in a fun way.
A puppet-maker creates the episode’s puppets.
The puppets themselves are not the problem with this story – and I know that sounds a bit weird, given everything we’ve talked about, but let me try to explain what I mean.
I felt that the puppets themselves looked fantastic, they moved well, were well-articulated, and although prone to exaggerated expressions and movements, that kind of thing *could* work if it had been part of a stronger story. Most of the main cast put in solid voice performances – though I would say that Christina Chong and Celia Rose Gooding in particular seemed to over-exaggerate just a bit too much for my ears. But a combination of great-looking puppets and a cast who’ve inhabited these characters for three-and-a-half seasons was generally pretty good.
They were let down, though, by a story that was just too wacky and silly.
Una’s puppet being worked on behind-the-scenes.
What might’ve worked better is if the *entire* episode had been done with puppets – Spock included, and any villains or aliens, too. And, just like last week with the black-and-white, or like Human Best Friend with its “atmosphere that makes you drunk,” some hand-wavey line of technobabble could’ve explained why everything looked like that. Or… maybe it didn’t even need that. Maybe just play it straight: do a regular Star Trek episode, just… with puppets. That would’ve almost certainly been better than what we got.
I almost feel like there’s no point in dissecting Level-Five Transporter Accident’s main narrative because of the absolutely pathetic “it was all just a dream” ending. But I suppose we should, if only to criticise what didn’t work, eh?
I liked this shot of the Enterprise from the shuttle’s cockpit…
Star Trek has done silly “the transporter done goofed” storylines before. Crossing over to alternate dimensions, fusing two characters together at the molecular level, and perhaps the most apt comparison in terms of both narrative and comedic tone: when The Next Generation turned Captain Picard, Guinan, Ensign Ro, and Keiko O’Brien into children. That premise is not a million miles away from what we got in Level-Five Transporter Accident, with the de-aged characters having to fight off a Ferengi invasion of the Enterprise-D. And the resulting episode is genuinely enjoyable; it was a fun premise that was well-executed.
I had Rascals in my notes ahead of Level-Five Transporter Accident because I wanted to use it as a point of comparison to show that Star Trek has always had this comedic side, and that similar premises have worked well in previous incarnations of the franchise. And when I read the blurb for this week’s episode, it was literally the first thing that came to mind. I thought it could be a fun comparison, but also a reminder to some of *those* Trekkies – the “nu-Trek” haters who seem to insist that Star Trek always has to be straight-laced and super serious – that the franchise has always done similar absurd ideas… and generally made them work.
Plenty of “transporter accident” stories have worked well in the past.
But I think Rascals now serves as a different kind of comparison: it shows how that kind of story, using a very similar setup, can work well in Star Trek… if you have the writing quality to back it up. And for me, Level-Five Transporter Accident absolutely did not.
I’m saying all of this because I really want two incredibly important points to come across in this review. One: I wanted to like Level-Five Transporter Accident. I wanted to enjoy the comedy, the inherent silliness of the premise, and to get a fun, light-hearted adventure with Pike and the crew. And two: I really gave the episode a chance to impress me. I went into it with an open mind, not pre-judging it or thinking I’d end up disliking it, and I’d even prepared, in my notes, points of comparison from Star Trek’s past to – for want of a better term – defend its honour against some of the lines of criticism that I could tell were going to come from certain corners of the fan community.
The tl;dr? I *really wanted* to come away from Level-Five Transporter Accident having had a whale of a time, and I hoped to be able to tell you that this silly idea, despite what some naysayers might think, had just plain *worked*. But I can’t. Because it didn’t.
Pelia was great, though. She’s always great!
There was enough of a technobabble excuse from Scotty, who had concocted a long-range beaming scheme, to make the core “everyone’s a puppet now” idea believable enough within our understanding of the Star Trek galaxy. Is it unscientific to a ridiculously silly degree? Sure. But so are a ton of things in Star Trek – from brain-stealing aliens and god-like tricksters to time-loop paradoxes and sexy ghosts – so I think we could have overlooked that in a stronger story.
I also felt, on Scotty’s side of the story, that his transporter-range-extension plot made sense. We know, thanks to Star Trek Into Darkness, that Scotty eventually developed something known as “transwarp beaming,” a way of massively extending the range of transporters that enabled someone on Earth to beam all the way to Qo’noS – a distance of dozens of light-years. So, if we look at the season’s core premise – moving these characters closer to their original incarnations – we know that Scotty’s work on long-range transporting is something that fits with his character. And after emerging from transporter suspension in the late 24th Century, he’d continue to work on it.
There was a believable enough core to Scotty’s story which this episode could have tried to build on.
That technobabble, and Scotty’s obsession with outdoing an old Academy rival, could have set the stage for a believable (or believable enough) “the transporter done goofed” story. And in addition, an episode of Lower Decks’ second season also saw a character turned into a puppet, only to have that process reversed so he could continue to serve aboard the USS Cerritos. So if you wanna be technical, we’ve already seen this kinda thing before. In “canon,” puppets can exist in Star Trek, and being turned into a puppet is not necessarily a death sentence!
But… all of that would’ve needed the main thrust of the story to be better, stronger, and more engaging.
And not to be undone with seconds to go right at the end with the “but it was all just a dream” cliché.
Several of the puppets.
After being puppet-ified, we get into the repetitive “pirate attack” and “Spock’s been captured” storylines from Season 1… only worse. The Orions were so one-dimensional, slapstick, and just plain *stupid* that they were impossible to take seriously as a threat to anyone, and while I can recognise that the way they were written is clearly drawing inspiration from the same slapstick comedy as The Muppets… it just didn’t work in this context. Even going back to the episode to re-watch it, knowing that it’s all just a dream and that they aren’t real people… they just don’t work as villains.
I’ve said a few times, when Strange New Worlds has done one of these “big swings” in terms of genre, that I can respect the commitment to the bit; that fully and whole-heartedly embracing the tropes of whatever genre of style of storytelling the show’s trying out is, in some ways, admirable. Even if I didn’t like the finished product, I can at least acknowledge that the writers and creative team totally went for it, and they jumped in head-first to this kind of Muppets-inspired slapstick comedy.
Puppet La’an beating up an Orion pirate.
But committing *so hard* to any “bit” means you import all of the genre’s weaknesses and flaws. Last week, that meant Strange New Worlds didn’t just get the black-and-white, the soft-focus close-up shots, and the smoke-filled alleyways of film noir, but the cardboard cut-out secondary characters and unnecessary melodrama, too. And this week, it means that the episode was plagued by ridiculously over-the-top slapstick baddies that came right out of children’s television, a paper-thin, repetitive story that the show has literally already done, and the most pathetic cop-out ending that would earn you a grade F even in a primary school creative writing class.
There were *some* positives and creative ideas, though – at least until the ending ruined all of them.
Pike’s assertion that the crew had to “think like puppets” if they were going to help Spock and retake the ship made sense in context, and I clocked pretty early on that the best way for the apparently immortal puppets to outmanoeuvre the Orions would be to turn off life support. The way it was executed – i.e. the slapstick fight on the bridge – went on a bit too long, but they got to the right answer even if it dragged out a bit.
Captain Pike floating in space.
There was creative potential in the “the puppets are basically unkillable” idea that parts of Level-Five Transporter Accident took advantage of. Pelia being sliced in half was simultaneously brutal and kind of funny, the unnamed navigator getting a hole blasted right through him (and then just staying like that for the rest of the episode) was also neat, and there was a genuinely beautiful – if admittedly absurd – moment as the puppet-ified crew floated in space, taking full advantage of their puppet forms to do something they’d never be able to do otherwise.
Star Trek, from its inception, really, told stories that had real-world parallels or messages that could be important. And I can appreciate Level-Five Transporter Accident’s attempt – however flawed and ultimately disappointing it may have been – to showcase how trauma and stress can impact even the most disciplined mind. This was the arc intended for Spock – to show how he’s been struggling, and how piling too much work on one individual, even if there seems to be a good reason for doing so, can lead to burnout and mental health struggles. We can debate whether *Spock* was the right character for this kind of storyline, but I think that’s all pretty much a moot point in light of the way the story ended.
A better story could’ve made more of the stress and burnout angle.
But as a broader point, I’ve always tried to support the Star Trek franchise’s examinations of real-world issues through the lens of sci-fi, and there were some ideas in Level-Five Transporter Accident that a stronger core story could’ve made more of. Spock isn’t just suffering because of workplace stress, but he’s still unsettled by what happened to him aboard the USS Griffin – a traumatic incident – and then, on top of that, his girlfriend dumps him. That sets the stage for Spock to be feeling down and just not at his best, before the stress of being the only one on the ship capable of operating anything at all pushes him over the edge.
A more grounded story could’ve taken a different approach to stress, burnout, and mental health, and what resulted would’ve certainly been more impactful with its messaging. I guess you could argue that the ridiculousness of the puppet dream is part of the point; a character like Spock would only ever have such an absurd dream *because* of the mental health struggles he was going through, and that the way he was forced to play every role on the ship when everyone was puppet-ified was a manifestation of how he’d been feeling. But… well, a story like that needed stronger, more down-to-earth writing if that was the intention, and while I can respect the core idea, and I think there’s merit in Star Trek looking at issues like workplace stress, burnout, and so on, this way of communicating it was poor.
A tower of puppets…
What can I even say about “it was all just a dream,” though?
Literally *any* good points that Level-Five Transporter Accident might’ve been able to claim to have had simply evaporated; they went up in smoke as soon as Spock woke up. I had in my notes that there were some positive ideas in the mix, even if the story’s slapstick comedy and childish tone worked against them most of the time, but when the episode’s final scene revealed that none of it was even real? I was genuinely stunned by the sheer *audacity* of whoever wrote that, whoever approved that story beat, and Strange New Worlds as a whole.
If I’d been the show’s executive producer or showrunner, and you were the writer who showed up with *this* way of ending the story? You’d have been fired on the spot. This is the kind of narrative cliché that literal primary school children are warned to avoid. To see it as the honest-to-god ending to a brand-new Star Trek story in 2026 is… I mean, I don’t have the words for it.
Who in their right minds would’ve written an ending like this?
Actually, I lied. I *do* have the words.
Pathetic. Creatively bankrupt. Shoddy. Awful. Amateurish. Childish (though that actually feels like an insult to children, many of whom could write better than this). Appalling. Shockingly bad. Disgraceful. A sacking offence. Feeble. Worthless. Lame. Revolting. Disgusting. Lousy. A festering pile of absolute dog shit.
I want a refund on this month’s Paramount+ subscription. Paramount literally owes me my money back after presenting *that* ending as if it were a genuinely serious way to close out an episode of one of its flagship big-budget streaming shows.
Paramount, I want my money back.
This episode was co-written by Dana Horgan (whose other credits include Subspace Rhapsody, A Space Adventure Hour and Four-and-a-Half Vulcans) and showrunner/executive producer Henry Alonso Myers. And I *never* like to call out individual creators by name, but in this case I’m making an exception because of how shockingly awful that ending was. Unfortunately, Strange New Worlds has already wrapped production on both Season 4 and Season 5, so we can’t take their pens or laptops away from them. I just hope to god that neither of them was trusted to write another *line of dialogue*, let alone an entire story, after this absolutely pathetic abomination of an ending.
I shouldn’t need to do this, but let’s briefly recap why “but it was all just a dream” is such an atrocious way to end a story, for the benefit of both Dana Horgan and Henry Alonso Myers – who evidently slept through that lesson when they were in primary school.
This episode was co-written by Dana Horgan (left) and Henry Alonso Myers (right).
Firstly: it’s a played-out cliché. It’s arguably the *most* clichéd cliché to ever be a cliché in the realm of creative writing. Secondly: it’s a cop-out. It’s a cheap, nasty way to end a story when an incompetent, sub-par writer realises they don’t know how to get out of the narrative corner they’ve painted themselves into. Third: it completely undermines and invalidates *any* points in the story, because if it was “all just a dream,” why should I as the reader or viewer give a shit?
Fourth: it renders any advancement of character arcs or long-running storylines completely dead, because nothing we saw or read actually happened in the characters’ real lives. Fifth: it’s a complete betrayal of the audience’s trust. We were asked, in this case, to get invested in a silly story about puppets, but the ending comes across as *laughing at the audience* for believing it was real. It’s mean-spirited. And finally: none of the characters, Spock included, learned anything, grew in any way, or even experienced anything of consequence. Most dreams fade away within minutes of waking up, and none of the other characters even experienced these events.
So Dana Horgan and Henry Alonso Myers? Please don’t write another Star Trek script (or anything else, for that matter) until you’ve gone back to primary school and sat through that English lesson.
Me when I realised that they were really doing the “but it was all just a dream” cliché…
Look, I know how this review comes across. And if this is your first time reading any of my reviews, I want to assure you that I’m not usually this negative about Star Trek. Please go back to earlier seasons of Strange New Worlds to see that, or to my reviews of Picard, Discovery, and Lower Decks. I’m not a hater, I’m not a “nu-Trek” avoider, and I’m not someone who thinks that comedy has no place in Star Trek, or even that the franchise’s modern incarnation is substantially worse than Star Trek was during The Next Generation era. I genuinely wanted to have a good time here, and even when the episode felt too slapstick and silly for my taste… I could at least appreciate the earnestness with which it approached this absurd premise.
Until the ending robbed Level-Five Transporter Accident of any value it could’ve conceivably had.
I think I’d better wrap this up. Truth be told, returning to Level-Five Transporter Accident to take notes and map out this review was not a fun experience, and writing such a negative review just… well, it makes me sad, to tell the truth. There are only a handful of episodes left before Strange New Worlds – my absolute favourite series of Star Trek’s modern revival – will come to an end, so to get one like this that I so utterly detest… it’s just unfortunate.
Pike and the crew arrive to re-take the bridge.
I don’t know what the Trekkie consensus, the critics’ opinions, or a wider audience’s take on Level-Five Transporter Accident is going to be. I never read other reviews or expose myself to others’ opinions before writing my own reviews if I can possibly help it, and based on my track record across Season 4 so far, I think I’ve been in the minority in all four episodes! I liked stories that others didn’t, and I criticised episodes that others seem to have enjoyed. So… could Level-Five Transporter Accident surprise me by being everyone’s pick for the best of the season? I mean… who even knows any more!
If you did enjoy this episode more than I did, or if you feel my criticism of its slapstick comedy or its ending are unfair or unnecessarily harsh… that’s okay. All of this is subjective, at the end of the day, and there ought to be room within the Trekkie community for differences of opinion when it comes to what makes for a good or enjoyable story. I share my thoughts with you in that spirit, and it’s not my intention to stir the pot, start an argument, or add to the toxicity that exists within certain small corners of the fandom.
It couldn’t possibly be a visual metaphor, could it?
And hey, I hope you liked Level-Five Transporter Accident. I hope *someone* did, anyway! I want Star Trek to succeed because I want Star Trek to stick around, or at least to be resurrected sometime soon if a hiatus is coming up. The best way to guarantee that that can happen is if fans share their enjoyment and their love for this franchise, and I’m happy to acknowledge that some fan-favourite episodes – going all the way back across most of the franchise’s various shows – haven’t always been “my thing.” And conversely, that some episodes fans really don’t enjoy are fun for me!
At the end of the day, we’re still talking Trek. And maybe, just maybe, a wacky, wild, unhinged episode like Level-Five Transporter Accident will bring new eyes and new attention to Star Trek at a time when the franchise’s new corporate overlords are still deciding what to do and where to take it. That *could* be a positive thing. But… maybe that’s a little too much positivity after an episode like this one, eh?
Not my favourite episode…
Next week, Strange New Worlds will premiere Off-Hour – an episode which promises a “warp emergency” and “pushing the Enterprise to its limits.” Level-Five Transporter Accident certainly pushed me past my own limits, but I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that, after two weeks on the trot of generally unenjoyable episodes – and, to be blunt, four out of five so far this season that were weaker than I hoped for or that came with glaring narrative flaws – Off-Hour will be a return to form. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Thanks for joining me for this review. Here’s hoping next week’s won’t be anywhere near as negative. As always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. The Muppets and associated properties are the copyright of The Jim Henson Company and/or The Walt Disney Company. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Enterprise Seasons 1-4. Minor spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, The Motion Picture, The Voyage Home, The Next Generation, and Strange New Worlds.
I have kind of a weird relationship with Star Trek: Enterprise, and the show’s first season in particular. I can remember listening to the radio, sometime around the turn of the millennium, when news was breaking that a brand-new Star Trek series was going to be created. But my excitement at that announcement was almost immediately dashed upon learning that it would be a prequel! Yes, I’m one of *those* Trekkies – the “oh god, not a prequel show” Enterprise-avoiders!
Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you see my point. When Enterprise landed here in the UK in early 2002, I tuned in for the premiere, but after that, I really only watched the show sporadically while it was on the air, and I didn’t really consider myself a huge fan of Captain Archer’s adventures. It was only in the latter part of the 2000s, after Enterprise’s cancellation, that I became fully acquainted with the series; I purchased Enterprise on DVD to round out my Star Trek collection.
The NX-01 as it appears on a background graphic in Strange New Worlds.
I’m pretty sure that The Andorian Incident is one of the episodes I first watched on DVD; I don’t think I caught it on TV when it first aired, but I might be mixing it up with Shadows of P’Jem, its sequel/sister episode (that I hope to write up a re-watch of one day, too!). In any case, I came late to most of Enterprise, but I’ve since come to regret my snap judgement of Star Trek’s first prequel series. Enterprise told some fun, enjoyable, and very “Star Trekky” stories across its four seasons, expanded our understanding of the Federation and the wider Star Trek universe, and padded out historical events and first contact missions that other Star Trek shows only made oblique references to.
Enterprise is the show I point to whenever I hear fans (both inside and outside of the Trekkie community) use the expressions “no one’s asking for this,” or “who asked for this?” in response to a new series, film, or spin-off. If you’d asked most Trekkies in 2001 what kind of show they’d like to see, I doubt that many of us would’ve said “a prequel set a century before Captain Kirk!”, but Enterprise took that premise and did some truly wonderful things with it. It’s perhaps my biggest regret as a Trekkie that I didn’t do more to support the series during its original broadcast run, and that I misjudged it upon hearing little more than its premise.
Several of the main characters in a Season 1 promo photo.
I’ve been meaning to return to Enterprise for a while, and regular readers might have an inkling as to why! Almost a year ago, I had the immense pleasure of meeting Connor Trinneer – Enterprise’s Trip Tucker – at a fan convention here in the UK. Being able to shake his hand was absolutely fantastic, and ever since, I’ve wanted to dip back into Enterprise and write up my thoughts on a few of the episodes. This is the first time, in almost seven years of writing here on the website, that I’ve done one of these re-watches for Enterprise, if you can believe it! I guess I’m in danger of losing my Trekkie credentials, eh?
The Andorian Incident isn’t a “Trip episode,” though Tucker is featured as part of the away team to the Vulcan outpost of P’Jem, so I think it still works for a re-watch! This’ll be the first time, since I had the opportunity to meet him, that I’m watching any episodes of Enterprise, actually – it’s a series I enjoy, but I guess I haven’t found the time to sit down and watch any episodes for a while.
Connor Trinneer (left) at a fan convention in the UK in 2025. Photo: Trekking with Dennis
So that’s a bit of personal background for you as we sit down to re-watch The Andorian Incident.
The Andorian Incident was the first of ten Enterprise episodes to be directed by former Voyager star Roxann Dawson. Dawson played B’Elanna Torres for all seven seasons of Voyager, and went on to direct two episodes of that series, too. She worked on episodes across all four seasons of Enterprise, which helped to establish her as a television director; she continues to direct today.
After Enterprise, Roxann Dawson has gone on to direct episodes of The O.C., The Mentalist, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, House of Cards, and Foundation, among many others. It’s always nice to see the stars of Star Trek succeed beyond the franchise, and Dawson’s TV directing career really began with Star Trek; it was Enterprise where she first directed an episode of a show that she wasn’t also starring in.
Roxann Dawson on the set of The Andorian Incident with Jeffrey Combs. Photo: Star Trek Monthly via Memory Alpha
The Andorian Incident is the kind of episode that could really only work as a prequel, and saw Enterprise taking full advantage of its prequel status. At this early point in the show’s run, the Vulcans’ attitude towards their new human allies is still being established, but we know that Earth is very much the junior partner in this relationship. The Andorian Incident expands on that a little, and also sets the stage for something Enterprise would do a lot more of over its subsequent seasons: exploring contradictions within the Vulcans and showing how their High Command, in particular, was not always as friendly or peaceful as it appeared to be.
This episode is also notable for bringing the Andorians back to Star Trek after a long absence. Andorians appeared in The Original Series and The Animated Series, as well as in background roles in The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home, but they were essentially absent for the entirety of The Next Generation era, save for a couple of very minor appearances. Early ideas for this episode may have considered bringing in the Gorn, but the switch was made to the Andorians relatively early on – and I think we can all agree that that was a great choice! The Andorians went on to play a prominent role in Enterprise.
The Andorians have arrived!
In Journey to Babel – the TOS episode where the Andorians first appeared – their animosity toward the Vulcans had been established, and The Andorian Incident picks up that thread in a way that feels natural. This is our first look at the pre-Federation conflict between these two powers, and we get some interesting bits of lore and background that help build up the early days of the Federation – and both races’ roles within it. That’s exactly the kind of story that only a prequel (or a flashback, I guess) can really tell, which is what I meant when I said that this is a great example of Enterprise fully taking advantage of its place in the timeline and leaning into that.
The animosity between the Vulcans and Andorians needed to have more of a reason than “just because,” but if there was ever going to be a believable narrative pathway to get them – and Earth – to one day work together, it was incredibly important for stories in this era not to make out either faction to be irredeemably awful and villainous, and for me, I think The Andorian Incident stays on the right side of that line. That isn’t to say that the Andorians or Vulcans come across as particularly *nice*, but rather there’s room in the way their conflict is depicted to see how, one day in the future, humanity and Earth could help bring it to an end.
T’Pol with an Andorian soldier.
Let’s talk briefly about Enterprise’s other regulars – the ones who didn’t go on the away mission.
Hoshi and Travis don’t get very much to do in this episode; I think they really only get a few lines each. It was interesting, though, that Hoshi was the one selected to operate the transporter – Reed’s first-ever time transporting, I think I’m right in saying. You’d think that Enterprise would’ve had a dedicated transporter officer, or that the role would’ve at least been delegated to an engineer! Still, it gave us a couple of cute moments in the transporter room as Reed and his security team prepared to beam down.
This episode also saw Reed sitting in the captain’s chair, being left in command of Enterprise in lieu of Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker. Reed’s role is more notable, really, for how the away team discussed him – Archer and Tucker both agreed that Reed wouldn’t wait indefinitely before launching a potentially deadly rescue operation.
Reed got a turn in the captain’s chair… and a turn being transported.
Dr Phlox got a fun scene with T’Pol near the beginning of the episode. After agreeing to divert Enterprise to P’Jem, T’Pol shares a meal with Dr Phlox in Enterprise’s dining area, and Phlox philosophises about the nature of being an outsider aboard a human ship, as well as why T’Pol may be reluctant to appear at an important site to the Vulcans in the company of humans. It was a nice little scene, and I think it says a lot for T’Pol at this early point in the show’s run, as well as shows that she has a bond (of sorts, anyway) with Dr Phlox.
This conversation takes an interesting turn, with Phlox and T’Pol discussing the Vulcan motto “infinite diversity in infinite combinations,” and what exactly it means in the context of Enterprise’s mission. Unfortunately, in the years since The Andorian Incident aired, the word “diversity” has become a little contentious – even among some Trekkies – so I’m not sure how well a scene like this would land today! Still, as an homage to what Star Trek is and has always aimed to be, as well as an exploration of the Vulcans and T’Pol’s thoughts on serving aboard a human ship… I liked it. It was a cute scene, and Phlox helping himself to part of T’Pol’s meal showed a friendliness and familiarity between them.
T’Pol dines with Dr Phlox.
Since we’re talking about the start of the episode, I do want to flag up one thing that I don’t think worked especially well. The very short scene leading into the opening titles showed the Andorian squad’s arrival at P’Jem… but then later, after Archer and co. arrived, it was kind of treated as a bit of a surprise that the monastery had been invaded and attacked. I can’t help but feel that this little opening scene could’ve been cut or moved, making the revelation of the Andorians’ presence a surprise to us as the audience, not just the characters in the show.
It’s not the biggest deal in the world, sure. But, given how The Andorian Incident presented the away team’s arrival at P’Jem and encounter with the Vulcan elder, I think it could’ve been a bit more exciting or entertaining if *that* had been the moment where we learned what was really going on; a surprise ambush by the Andorians could’ve been a fun reveal instead of something we already knew was bound to happen.
The ambush.
I liked the design of P’Jem – inside and out – though I would say, unfortunately, that some of Enterprise’s early 2000s CGI doesn’t hold up quite as well a quarter of a century later! That’s not a problem unique to this series by any means; just look at the Star Wars prequels, which were also released around the same time, for plenty of other examples of CGI that just wasn’t quite ready for prime-time.
The biggest CGI/green screen offender, in my opinion, comes at the very end of the episode; Archer and co. stepping through the doorway into the Vulcan observation post has aged quite poorly. The exterior shots of the P’Jem monastery, the shuttle taking off, and shots of the NX-01 in space are all vastly superior by comparison. Is it the end of the world? No. And partly it’s because, in 2026, we’re watching on bigger, better screens; in standard definition in 2001-02, these shots probably looked a lot better! However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that a lot of similar shots in the movies and across the TNG era, which relied more on physical models, props, and even matte paintings, have stood the test of time a lot better. A subjective take, sure, but one I stand by!
Not a great visual effect, at least in my opinion.
In terms of physical sets and props, The Andorian Incident does a lot better. The monastery – despite being built entirely on a sound stage – manages to feel ancient, with a kind of “Mediterranean” vibe that reminds me a little of Ancient Greece or perhaps Italy. I really did get the sense, as the away team arrived, that this was an old, isolated, religious outpost – something absolutely crucial to keeping the episode’s biggest revelation a secret until the right moment.
Many of the statues, reliefs, icons, and other props also looked pretty great inside the P’Jem monastery, and again, that sensation that this is both an ancient and holy place was present throughout. The cobweb-covered transmitter was also a fun prop, and I liked Trip’s line about having “never met a radio he couldn’t fix!” Several props seen in The Andorian Incident were either recycled from episodes in the TNG era or would go on to be re-used in future Enterprise stories.
Trip meets another resident of P’Jem…
Jeffrey Combs is legendary within the Star Trek fan community! Combs has played nine different roles (or more, if clones, holograms, and alternate-timeline characters count separately) across four different series, including the iconic Weyoun on Deep Space Nine. And The Andorian Incident brings him back to play the role of Shran, the Andorian leader. Shran would go on to be another recurring role for Jeffrey Combs; his second-biggest after Weyoun.
I fear my judgement of Shran is coloured by his subsequent appearances; he’s just such a fun character, and his relationship with Archer develops across the show’s run in a truly entertaining way. In this first appearance, Shran seems to get off to a rough start – he’s almost Klingon-like in his aggression, torturing prisoners, beating Archer or ordering him beaten, and seeming to be completely unreasonable in his demands. However, the episode’s final moment reveals that Shran and the Andorians are right: there really is a listening post hidden beneath the monastery. And while that doesn’t mean that Shran was right in *everything* he did… it certainly reframes how we’re meant to understand his character.
This episode set up Shran for a recurring role.
Those final scenes show the beginnings of an understanding between Archer and Shran – and, by extension, between humanity and the Andorians. This is what I was talking about a moment ago: this is how we start to build a narrative pathway for the Andorians to become founding members of the United Federation of Planets. And it’s ironic – deliberately so – that humans and Andorians get off to such a rocky start! It doesn’t do anything to take away from or minimise the Andorians’ roles in episodes set a century later, like Journey to Babel. But it does add context, background, and – I would argue – extra believability to stories like that.
A good prequel does exactly this. It deepens our understanding of the way the Vulcans, humans, and Andorians interact, provides context that could explain lingering mistrust or ill-feelings, and makes sure we understand that there’s blame to go around. The Andorians were aggressive, mistrusting, and treated their prisoners awfully. But the Vulcans lied – to their enemies *and* their supposed friends – and used a religious site as cover for a military installation. I guess we can appreciate why Ambassadors Shras and Sarek had a hard time getting along!
Ambassadors Sarek and Shras with Captain Kirk a century later.
The Andorian Incident also does a lot to further the complex and occasionally tense relationship between Captain Archer and T’Pol. Having expressed her feelings about serving aboard a human ship earlier in the episode, T’Pol has to confront Archer’s doubts about her loyalty when they’re in captivity. She disagrees with Archer’s plan to have Reed lead a rescue mission to the monastery, but makes it clear that she will obey his orders – even if those orders, in her view, put Vulcan lives and a Vulcan holy site at risk.
At this point in the show’s run, T’Pol hasn’t had many opportunities to demonstrate that she’s a team player, and given his contentious relationship with the Vulcans in general, we can kind of understand Archer’s point of view here. It’s not always easy to step back and completely set aside dozens of other episodes which add to the Archer-T’Pol dynamic or to T’Pol’s evolving relationship with humans – both of which are parts of her character arc that Enterprise handled well. But if we *try* to keep in mind how early in the series this takes place, and how much growing Archer and T’Pol still have to do to fully trust one another, I think the scenes between them work. We feel Archer’s barely-concealed resentment toward the Vulcans in moments with T’Pol and while being “interrogated” by Shran, and we also feel T’Pol’s righteous indignation at Archer’s implication that she’d go against his orders or side with the Vulcans against him.
T’Pol and Archer.
For Tucker, The Andorian Incident is a chance to show off his friendship with the captain – I like some of their little moments of banter together both before and during the away mission – and his technical prowess. We don’t get a complicated sequence of him repairing the old transmitter, nor a lot of technobabble about what’s going on, but just the fact that he could take ageing, decrepit technology and get it to work well enough to send a signal back to the ship is impressive. Tucker is very much in the Scotty mould: a miracle-worker!
Tucker is also the one who figures out the layout of the tunnels at the P’Jem monastery, which later enables Reed and his team to get the drop on the Andorians. The scene of the large Vulcan relief exploding was incredibly cool, and it was brought to screen exceptionally well. It’s not totally unique in Star Trek, of course – see The Final Frontier’s jail-break scene, among plenty of other similar moments – but I really liked it here. And it was a fun excuse to return to one of the Star Trek franchise’s ubiquitous underground caves and caverns! Seriously, a lot of planets seem to have something like that, eh?
The Vulcan sculpture gets blown up!
One thing Enterprise did well, especially in these early episodes, was conveying that sense of exploration; that space really was “the final frontier,” full of wonders and dangers to encounter. And for me, The Andorian Incident is among those stories. We continue the trend of seeing humanity as the junior, less-experienced partner to the Vulcans, hammered home by the fact that Archer and co. don’t even know who the Andorians are. And we get the sense that space is bigger and more dangerous than they could’ve expected, as seen by the Andorian attack on a seemingly-peaceful Vulcan monastery.
At the same time, The Andorian Incident is a great prequel: linking up with events in The Original Series in a big way, doing a lot to establish the Vulcan-Andorian conflict and cold war, while also setting the stage for a more peaceful future and the founding of the Federation. We also learn that there’s clearly more going on with the Vulcans than meets the eye, while giving T’Pol her clearest opportunity yet to demonstrate – to us as the audience as much as to Archer – that she’s on the side of Enterprise and the humans, even if that brings her into conflict with the Vulcan High Command. This arc would pay off in a big way in the seasons ahead.
Archer discovers the listening post.
I’d forgotten just how abruptly The Andorian Incident ends. Although the story started here would be picked up later in the season in Shadows of P’Jem, the final moments of this episode seem to wrap up very quickly. We don’t see Archer and the away team returning to Enterprise, nor Shran’s ship departing the planet. The Vulcan listening post is exposed, Shran is handed the sensor data, and then… that’s it. While this storyline will be continued, the episode itself kind of just ends, and that’s a bit of an odd feeling.
All in all, though, I like The Andorian Incident. We met Shran for the first time, Archer and T’Pol shared a blanket, and the Vulcans turned out to be sneaky little so-and-sos! It’s a fun episode in its own right, as well as an important one for Star Trek’s fictional history. It’s one of the episodes that really justifies Enterprise’s prequel setting and place in the timeline, stepping back in time to add context and detail to historical events but without treading on the toes of stories set a century or more later. That isn’t always easy to get right – and Enterprise could mess this up, too – but when it works… it works.
A fun episode of Enterprise.
I hope this has been a bit of fun. I’d been meaning to revisit Enterprise for a while, even before I got to meet Connor Trinneer, because it’s been a while since I last sat down and just enjoyed an episode or two of Enterprise. And in Star Trek’s big sixtieth anniversary year – and Enterprise’s landmark quarter-of-a-century milestone anniversary year, too – it seemed like the right moment! Here’s hoping it won’t take *another* seven years for me to get around to doing another one of these re-watches!
If you missed them, I’ve done a few other re-watches this year. When Starfleet Academy was on the air, I went back to revisit The First Duty – the Academy’s first big on-screen appearance in The Next Generation. Then I re-watched The Original Series’ second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before. And I’ve also re-watched The Royale from TNG’s second season, which was my personal “first contact” with the Star Trek franchise. Earlier this year, I had the fantastic opportunity to meet William Shatner – Captain Kirk himself – at an event here in the UK. And, as I’ve noted a few times already, I met Enterprise’s Connor Trinneer last year at a Star Trek convention.
Click or tap any of those links to check out those re-watches and other articles, and stay tuned! I’ll have more to say about Star Trek before long. Thanks for joining me for this re-watch, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Enterprise is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The entire series is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Enterprise and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, The Search for Spock, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, and Lower Decks.
I think I ought to start this week’s review with a bit of an explanation of how I try to approach new episodes of Star Trek. On the one hand, I’m obviously going to tell you whether I personally enjoyed the story, the character moments, the presentation, the score… all of that *subjective* stuff. But I also try to keep in mind, when writing a review, what an episode was aiming for and how well it measured up to those objectives.
That’s why I can look at an episode like last week’s Human Best Friend and say that I truly enjoyed its sense of humour, its pastiche of films like The Hangover, and its genuinely well-written character moments – and why, conversely, I’ll tell you that the otherwise outstanding horror offering The Griffin Incident came with a glaring narrative flaw. I’ll even admit – however begrudingly – that Season 2’s Subspace Rhapsody was competently made, musically solid, and even had some solid characterisation… even though I will literally never watch that absolute travesty ever again!
I considered doing all of the still frames like this… but don’t worry, I thought better of it!
Why did I start my review of A Case of Chiaroscuro with that explanation-come-caveat? Well, the truth is… I *really* don’t like watching black-and-white films and TV shows. I realise that’s a horrible generalisation, and there are some exceptions – Christmas films, like Miracle on 34th Street, for instance. But, generally speaking, I just struggle to get immersed in black-and-white media, and *modern* productions which deliberately use black-and-white – as A Case of Chiaroscuro does – almost universally feel gimmicky and silly to me.
Again, this is a *subjective, not objective* take – but I wanted to be up front about my bias here, because my general dislike of black-and-white has undoubtedly coloured (pun very much intended) my thoughts on A Case of Chiaroscuro.
A Case of Chiaroscuro was a faithful recreation of the kind of ’30s and ’40s noir movies that inspired it. Not only in terms of its use of black-and-white, but the entire episode’s visual style and presentation all drew from that source, as did its score. Narratively, A Case of Chiaroscuro also leaned heavily on noir and melodrama from a bygone era. And regardless of whether I *liked* that in a personal sense… I respect the commitment to the bit.
A shuttle in black-and-white.
However, more so than any other story so far this season – and really, any other story in Strange New Worlds, save, perhaps for Subspace Rhapsody – A Case of Chiaroscuro felt like “a bit.” Its noir inspiration was *so* omnipresent in everything from the set design and music to the soft-focus close-up shots and narrative melodrama that it feels less like an actual story within the Star Trek universe and more like a pulpy television serial. It was hard to take A Case of Chiaroscuro as seriously as I wanted to – because, by turning the dials all the way up and not just drawing inspiration from film noir but actively copying as many aspects of it as possible, the episode imported all of what I’d consider to be the genre’s flaws.
By choosing to employ an outdated kind of storytelling – not just the black-and-white, but a melodramatic narrative with over-the-top twists and turns and cardboard cut-out secondary characters who didn’t feel like real people – A Case of Chiaroscuro feels… vintage. But that isn’t a good thing in this case, if we’re talking about an episode of Star Trek that I want to watch and enjoy. Most of the episode didn’t just look dated, but it also *felt* out-of-date; TV serials and movies like this were past their prime even sixty years ago, when The Original Series was on the air. And while there absolutely are interesting points in A Case of Chiaroscuro that I can wholeheartedly say that I enjoyed… the final product is simply too gimmicky for my personal taste.
The collaborator.
I concede, though, that A Case of Chiaroscuro knows exactly what kind of story it wants to tell, and sets out to tell it earnestly and successfully. I can absolutely see this being considered a highlight of the season – and perhaps even of Star Trek as a whole – for Trekkies who have a fondness for these kinds of mystery-thriller noir stories. And, as I’ve said before, it’s to the credit of the former Paramount corporation that the executives were willing to greenlight a project like this, to spend a not insignificant amount of money on scripts and sets, and to – for lack of a better word – allow Star Trek to be “weird.” I can’t think of many other big-budget streaming productions that would’ve so wholeheartedly embraced the kind of genre-shifting that Strange New Worlds has done… and, for all of the many, many flaws and failings of the old Paramount, I think they deserve at least some kudos for giving the thumbs-up to a story like this one.
So… another “big swing” in Season 4, then! Adventure, horror, comedy, and now film noir… and we still have the puppet episode yet to come. I think this season will go down in the history books for just how many different ideas the writers brought to the table – and I can appreciate the diversity, the semi-episodic storytelling, and the willingness to go to places Star Trek hasn’t always gone before. Even if the results, on this occasion, weren’t “my thing.”
The city on Mat’Aar XII.
Let’s concentrate on the part of the episode which I liked… or at least the part I felt wasn’t as weak as the main story.
Back aboard the Enterprise – but still in black-and-white – we have La’an’s investigation of a mysterious signal. The probe – little more than a macguffin to kick-start the episode’s two main storylines – may have been tampered with, or at least La’an believed so.
I liked the way that the episode framed this, and the way the story convinced us as the audience that what we were seeing was nothing more than La’an overreacting. Even the little recap at the beginning of the episode, which went back to last season, showed how La’an might be succumbing to paranoia. And, as her storyline unfolded, A Case of Chiaroscuro tried very hard to convey to us that La’an was seeing things that weren’t really there.
La’an investigated some missing data.
This made the ultimate reveal – that the probe *had* in fact been meddled with – hit a bit harder. I still don’t think that this storyline was executed perfectly; both Spock’s dismissal of La’an’s concerns and Chapel’s confession felt rushed. But that’s a consequence of this being the B-plot of an episode that had its attention elsewhere. Had we not already got a major La’an storyline already this season, I might’ve said I’d have liked to see this B-plot fleshed out into its own episode. But, that limitation aside, I liked this storyline.
Firstly, the Vulcan cadet – I’ve now learned her name is A’sha – finally got something plot-relevant to do after her introduction in the season premiere. Maybe it’s this episode’s noir tone and double- and triple-crosses, but I can’t help but wonder if A’sha is going to turn out to be a spy or something! But maybe that’s too much of a reach based on her limited screen time. In any case, it was nice to see her on the bridge and for her to get something to do. Modern Star Trek hasn’t always handled its secondary characters especially well, but it’s nice to get *some* conversations and interactions outside of the main cast; it populates the Enterprise and makes the broader world of Star Trek feel more lived-in and real.
La’an with Cadet A’Sha.
I wasn’t wild about the speed with which Spock dismissed La’an’s concerns – though, in a noir-style story, it made me question whether *he* might’ve been complicit in… whatever may or may not have been going on, so I guess that’s not all bad. I do wonder, though, what recent events – including last week’s argument in the bar and now this dismissive reaction – might mean for La’an’s relationship with Spock.
We also got a bit of a follow-up to last week’s episode as Ortegas and Scotty were seen hanging out together. I wondered, when they seemed to be in the same quarters, whether this might be another hint at some kind of romantic relationship, but La’an stated they’re “friends now,” at the end of the episode – and I think that’s how we’re meant to read it. In any case, it was cute to see them together after their adventure, and I appreciate how Strange New Worlds retains these character relationships and moments that it develops.
Scotty and Ortegas are friends now, after last week’s adventure.
Scotty gave us a great line of technobabble about how he was keeping tabs on the Klingon ship, and that was both fun and very “Star Trekky,” for want of another term. I felt Dr M’Benga’s line about why everything was in black-and-white was a bit hand-wavey earlier in the episode, as technobabble goes, but Scotty’s was definitely more in line with what we’ve seen before. Not sure why he was keeping it a secret from the ship’s security officer, of all people, but I guess it worked as an excuse for La’an to chase leads and catch up with other members of the crew.
One thing I didn’t really like, though, was Scotty’s line about being “trapped in a transporter buffer;” a reference to his ultimate fate and the TNG episode Relics. If this had been a one-off, I wouldn’t have minded (I think), but so far this season, La’an has called back to The Search for Spock and Dr M’Benga made another reference to Relics just last week. Occasional callbacks to past iterations of Star Trek – or calls forward, I guess, to these characters’ fates and ultimate destinations – are okay, but they really ought to be *occasional*. Otherwise they come across as heavy-handed and overwhelming… and it just isn’t necessary and stops being fun. A single line like this is great; a nod and wink to long-time Trekkies. Too many just feel like navel-gazing, self-referential fluff… or just a plain lack of originality, I guess. And because we’ve had several of these lines in earlier episodes – one of which already featured Scotty – this one was a bridge too far. On its own? Totally okay. But after seeing several others already this season, I felt it crossed that invisible line between being a playful in-joke and becoming excessive.
Don’t call it “foreshadowing”…
The conclusion of this storyline sees Chapel confessing to being the one who interfered with the probe and deleted its data. Though, as I said, this felt kind of rushed, it was nice that in this kind of storyline, the ending was difficult to deduce and there was still time for a twist. I think both Chapel and La’an got good moments of characterisation here: Chapel didn’t just let La’an think paranoia was overtaking her, instead confessing even though doing so could’ve had real consequences for her, and La’an chose loyalty to a friend over following the letter of the law.
For both characters, those are positive things – and while not “out of character” by any stretch, it’s still good to see both of them doing the right thing and choosing friendship, not blind rule-following. Chapel’s decision to delete the incriminating data felt understandable, even though I wish we’d gotten a longer scene explaining it, and La’an’s choice to keep the issue between them said a lot about her character. If, as I’ve theorised, we could be seeing the beginning of the end for La’an – either aboard the Enterprise or, y’know, alive – moments like this will be all the more important.
Nurse Chapel with La’an in Sickbay.
La’an got this week’s secondary story, with the main focus of A Case of Chiaroscuro being on Una. But these two stories were thematically linked, and that made these two otherwise disconnected parts of the episode feel a bit closer together. La’an had to wrangle with her own paranoia and consider whether she was imagining things, or whether there actually was an issue with the probe. But the end of this story saw her choosing to do the right thing by a friend, even if that ment bending the rules.
Una’s story ends in a similar way. She chooses to bend the rules – in this case actively, whereas La’an’s was more passive, I suppose – to facilitate the rebels’ plan on Mat’Aar XII. But both characters had to deal with intrigue, mysteries, and ultimately, both had to decide whether to do the right thing – or what the “right” thing even is when faced with complex and nuanced situations.
Una’s storyline was similar, in thematic terms, to La’an’s.
Before we get further into the main thrust of the mysteries on Mat’Aar XII, I want to talk briefly about the Klingons.
A Case of Chiaroscuro wasn’t really a Klingon episode. The Klingons were present, sure, and they played a significant narrative role – but the bulk of the story was focused on the main characters and the intrigue on Mat’Aar XII. But the episode did something for the Klingons that I think is kind of important – and that I approve of!
I’ve said, on the record, that I felt Enterprise’s “Klingon-augment virus” storyline was one of the show’s weakest, and that the change in prosthetic makeup for the Klingons in between TOS and The Motion Picture simply did not need to be called attention to nor given an in-universe explanation. Thankfully, modern Star Trek has walked away from that idea, and we’ve already seen Klingons in Strange New Worlds with the more familiar design. That continued here – even with the character of Kor. Kor is a Klingon who tangled with Kirk in The Original Series and returned in three episodes of Deep Space Nine, too.
Kor with his band of Klingons.
In Kor’s TOS and TAS appearances, he sports the original Klingon aesthetic, but this was updated for DS9. So if you want to be fussy about it, now we have a contradiction! But I don’t really see it as a contradiction at all. Just as when Kor appeared in DS9, prosthetic forehead and all, Star Trek was kind of drawing a line under TOS and updating things without drawing attention to it. And I read this prequel version of Kor in much the same way. Some parts of Star Trek… well, they can (and should) be ignored. Some stories didn’t work, some aesthetic changes could be made as new technologies and higher budgets allowed, and this is the result.
And hey, if you want to be picky and make everything in Star Trek fit? Let’s just say that Kor contracted the virus in between his posting to Mat’Aar XII and his run-in with Kirk!
I felt that Demore Barnes’ take on the character of Kor was one of the best parts of this weaker side of the story. Barnes – who you might recognise from Supernatural, Hannibal, or Twelve Monkeys, among other high-profile TV roles – was absolutely excellent in this villainous role, showing us a nuanced take on a Klingon leader that didn’t just rely on anger, aggression, and murder. In this kind of noir-inspired story, that’s how a villain should behave. Was bringing Kor into the show a bit of cheap nostalgia bait for Trekkies? Well… maybe. And I could entertain the argument that *this* version of Kor doesn’t fully line up with the way the character behaved in TOS and DS9. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the performance or Kor’s role in the story!
I enjoyed this new take on the established character of Kor.
The Klingons, in their original incarnation some sixty years ago, were famously meant to be metaphorical stand-ins for the Soviet Union, with the Federation representing the United States or the broader western alliance. And A Case of Chiaroscuro called attention to the “cold war” that exists between the Klingons and Federation in this time period. That little connection was neat, and the lines referring to it were well-delivered.
But in this story, the Klingons felt less like 1960s Soviets and more like 1940s Nazis with the way their occupation of Mat’Aar XII came to life. Roving gangs of collaborators, uniformed soldiers, symbolic armbands, and propaganda messages being broadcast all linked up to create a really unsettling feel to the entire city; even seemingly “safe” spaces like the bar or the office felt like they could be raided or interfered with at any moment.
Una in the doppelgänger’s office.
The sets and stages used to create Mat’Aar XII were genuinely very well done. I got a “Paris in World War II” kind of vibe; that this city was very much under occupation. The ’40s-style barrage balloons, the spotlights, and the art deco-style architecture (which was mostly seen in CGI establishing shots) all added to this sensation, as did the claustrophobic street set with its archway checkpoint. The white steam or smoke – another hallmark of films from this era – was well-used, too. As I said above, every aspect of A Case of Chiaroscuro leaned into this film noir style, and that extends to the way the sets were designed. The city was undeniably atmospheric.
Parts of A Case of Chiaroscuro reminded me a little of A Piece of the Action from TOS – the “gangster episode” where Kirk and co. visit a planet whose inhabitants were inspired by a book about 1920s Chicago. Some of the costumes, sets, and vehicles – all inspired by the first half of the 20th Century – gave me that feeling, and even the Klingons’ disruptors seemed to resemble Tommy guns! Obviously, A Piece of the Action was, itself, drawing on stories from the ’30s and ’40s for inspiration – G-Men, Invisible Stripes, and others – and there’s a difference between the kind of noir story present here and the simplified gangster/crime drama of that older episode. But, as I’ve said before, it can be nice when Star Trek stories… rhyme.
I liked these establishing shots of the city, and how atmospheric they felt.
The main storyline’s central conceit was that Una is the exact doppelgänger of Mat’Aar XII’s resistance leader. And… I gotta be honest: I hated this and the stupid way it was “explained.” Basically, Dr M’Benga says that “well, space is big so we all have doppelgängers,” and that hand-wavey line is the only explanation offered for this really contrived setup. I admit that I don’t see an easy narrative pathway to tell this exact story without having Una share the exact same look as the resistance leader, but the way it was handled left a lot to be desired.
As I said in my review of The Griffin Incident: this is Star Trek. And in Star Trek, we like our technobabble explanations! You don’t have to be 100% scientifically accurate. You can make something up and then invent fancy-sounding technical words to fit. But in Star Trek stories, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that major narrative points receive more of an explanation than we got in A Case of Chiaroscuro. It was just a weaker narrative setup than the story deserved.
The doppelgänger’s corpse.
Once you got that out of the way, though, A Case of Chiaroscuro was a good episode for Una’s character journey. Her story intersected with her Illyrian heritage – something that we learned about in Season 2 – and gave her an arc about “doing the right thing” even if that meant breaking the rules. For a character who’s usually portrayed as a by-the-book kind of officer, this was a turn – albeit one that makes sense in context.
One thing I didn’t really follow, on this side of the story, was whether the Prime Directive should’ve been applied to Mat’Aar XII and its inhabitants. The planet’s own technology looked like it was from the 20th Century, with only the Klingons in possession of what might reasonably look like 23rd Century tech. But, despite being undercover the entire time, none of the away team mentioned the Prime Directive even once. Does it cease to apply when a planet meets another interstellar power, maybe?
So I guess the Prime Directive doesn’t apply…
To get back to Una, there was a lot of noir-style intrigue on this side of the story, as Una’s doppelgänger appeared, at first, to be a collaborator, then a rebel leader, and the episode did a reasonably good job of making it difficult to know who she could fully trust. Most of the Mat’Aar XII inhabitants felt fairly two-dimensional – which, let’s be honest, is kind of a hallmark of many films of the era A Case of Chiaroscuro is mimicking – but the question of which one of them betrayed Una’s doppelgänger still felt like an open one as the story progressed.
One thing I don’t really like in Star Trek – and *especially* in modern Star Trek – is just how many alien races are literally identical to humans! There aren’t enough “alien-looking” aliens in Star Trek’s galaxy, and while this was a contrivance during the early days of The Original Series with all of its budgetary and technical limitations… it’s something I wish modern Star Trek would dump. On this occasion, given that Una needed to be an exact lookalike of this rebel leader, I guess you can say the story wouldn’t have worked. But the episode itself even referenced this, with Uhura wondering aloud what the native population of Mat’Aar XII look like. It’s just something that, in older shows – and TOS in particular – I could overlook, but I don’t think it really fits modern Star Trek or a modern sci-fi setting any more, and I’d rather see the franchise invent more aliens who look truly otherworldly and different. With a few changes, we could’ve said that Mat’Aar XII was a human colony under occupation, or… something.
Mat’Aar-ians.
That issue also extends into Uhura’s storyline. After being arrested by the Klingons for not showing her ID, Uhura was taken to a Klingon facility to be tortured. But despite having access to 23rd Century scanners, tricorders, and some kind of brain-alyser, the Klingons never found out that she wasn’t actually a Mat’Aar-ian. How’s that possible? Even human-looking aliens, surely, have different DNA or other identifying markers? That’s how sensors and tricorders across Star Trek are able to differentiate between different races.
As an aside, though, I actually really liked the design of the Klingon torture device. It was a retro throwback – and, in this case, I mean that as a positive thing! I suspect that, if the episode was in full colour and trying to employ a more modern visual style, something like that would’ve looked dated and out-of-place, but in this kind of story, the brain-alyser looked pitch-perfect! There’s something about its simple design that just felt like the perfect TOS throwback, and it looked great.
The brain-alyser.
To wrap up Una’s story, I thought the ending was pretty predictable; I clocked what Una had done – planting the macguffin bomb thing on the collaborator – long before the episode revealed it. But at the same time, it says something about her character that she’d get so involved in this planet’s cause and crusade for freedom. Una bent (or broke) the rules in order to help the people of Mat’Aar XII in their fight against the Klingon occupation, despite knowing that doing so could have massive consequences. She took a risk, but it always felt like a calculated risk.
Dr M’Benga referenced his service in the Klingon War – something that’s become a defining trait of his character, especially in more recent seasons. The show’s writers clearly like this idea of “the doctor who’s also a special forces killer,” and they’ve really latched onto that. I would like to see Dr M’Benga in different storylines, though, as I feel his arc with the Klingons and his backstory from his war days has been reasonably well explored, and with limited time remaining to do anything else… well, time’s a-ticking, sadly.
Dr M’Benga.
That being said, Dr M’Benga was a great choice to involve in a story like this, not least because of the Klingon element. He managed to be a mentor to both Una and Uhura at different points, offering advice, making note of how the Mat’Aar XII resistance was operating, and kind of serving as an exposition device for us as the audience, too! His war service felt like a natural thing for him to bring up in the context of the story, and while there were some contrivances – like how he could instantly recognise Kor, for example – they’re minor enough to not be bothersome.
Dr M’Benga guided Una, keeping her from making too many mistakes, but this was still Una’s story first and foremost, so we didn’t get any gratuitous scenes of him massacring legions of Klingons, or using his special forces background as an excuse to take the lead. Again, given the kind of story this was, and who it was centred around, that worked pretty well. From an in-universe standpoint, Dr M’Benga has told us many times that he wants to leave his past behind him, so again, his taking a back seat makes sense, too.
Uhura and Dr M’Benga.
Celia Rose Gooding put in a great performance as Uhura this week. This younger version of the character is still, in some ways, finding her feet – and this mission took her far outside her comfort zone in more ways than one. Uhura’s friendship with Dr M’Benga was on full display, and the two characters played off one another exceptionally well in those supporting roles for Una and the noir-intrigue story.
However, I didn’t really feel like Uhura was ever in any real *danger,* even when she was literally facing the Klingons and their torture machine. Partly this is because Strange New Worlds is a prequel, and we know, in the backs of our minds, that Uhura will make it off-planet, back to Starfleet, and resume her career (relatively) unscathed. However, for a storyline involving literal torture… I think the episode could’ve made more of it. Perhaps Uhura will reference this experience in a future episode; I didn’t get the feeling, though, that this was an “Ortegas with the Gorn” or a “La’an’s DNA” type of situation, where a character’s storyline in one episode is clearly being set up for something more. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that front!
Will this storyline lead to anything more for Uhura?
A couple of final points before we wrap things up.
This is at least the second Strange New Worlds episode where ships (or a shuttle, in this case) have literally been within visual range of one another, but – for no other reason I can discern than “because plot” – the adversary’s ship doesn’t notice or detect our heroes. In this case, a Klingon battlecruiser just wasn’t aware of either the probe or the shuttlecraft until the shuttle passed through the planet’s sensor grid. I know that, in prior Star Trek stories, the range at which sensors are effective can vary a lot depending on the needs of the story… but even with that in mind, this feels like a real stretch.
For the third episode in a row, Captain Pike had very little to do. I think I said this last season, too, but one of the main appeals of “the Captain Pike show” that fans – myself included – were clamouring for back in 2019 was Anson Mount and his incredible take on this character. We’re now a mere twelve episodes away from the end of the show’s run… and I kind of want to get a few more stories with Pike before the curtain falls. Star Trek has always done spotlight episodes where one or two characters are in focus – and this episode was very much an Una story, with supporting roles for Uhura and M’Benga, and a B-plot for La’an. And that’s great! But with limited time remaining, I’d like to spend a bit more time with the Enterprise’s captain.
Captain Pike hasn’t had much to do for several episodes now.
As the dust settles, I’m left with one feeling more than any other: A Case of Chiaroscuro just isn’t an episode I’m in a rush to revisit, and as and when I return to Strange New Worlds in the future, it’s an episode I’m more likely to skip than sit through. Despite its earnestness and the way it fully embraced its film noir and mystery inspirations… it just wasn’t for me. Partly that’s the black-and-white; a gimmick that felt, well… nothing more than gimmicky. But it’s also, at least in part, due to some outdated and two-dimensional tropes among the secondary characters, the melodrama that the episode imports directly from its source material, and the simple fact that this genre is quite a niche thing nowadays.
That being said, I tried very hard to give A Case of Chiaroscuro a fair shake, and not pre-judge it based solely on the fact that it was going to be in black-and-white. And, as I said above, I respect both Strange New Worlds’ creative team and the leaders at Paramount for creating a story like this and getting it across the line in a way that stayed largely true to the kinds of stories that inspired it. It’s something very few other franchises would attempt, and – at least in that sense – it’s a very “Star Trekky” thing!
A Case of Chiaroscuro stayed true to its noir inspirations.
Next week, Strange New Worlds is going to serve up a Level-Five Transporter Accident – the (in)famous “puppet episode” that was teased in pre-season marketing. I honestly don’t know what to expect from that one; I like that they went to the Jim Henson Company to get proper puppets made, and there’s a potential tie-in, I guess, with an episode of Lower Decks that could be interesting. It’s certainly going to be another “big swing” after this week’s noir-style story.
I hope this has been interesting! As I often say: please keep in mind that all of this is just the *subjective, not objective* take of one old Trekkie. If you liked A Case of Chiaroscuro a lot more than I did, feel it’s irredeemably awful, or just don’t agree with my take… that’s okay! There’s plenty of room in the Star Trek fan community for differences of opinion and respectful disagreement.
Thanks for joining me for this review, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The first part of this review is free from major story spoilers for Mixtape. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.
I’d really been looking forward to Mixtape. The game’s trailer looked great, I liked the art style, and I’m generally a fan of narrative adventure titles. But what appealed to me the most about Mixtape was the game’s ’90s setting and its promise of an eclectic soundtrack featuring some of my favourite bands and some of the era’s best-remembered hits. I was ready for a nostalgic punch to the gut, and Mixtape delivered.
I always try to approach any title that I’m reviewing without having read or listened to any other critics’ opinions – I fear that doing so risks colouring how I approach any piece of media. But the maelstrom that Mixtape got caught up in a couple of months back proved inescapable, and some of the criticism of the game’s perceived “lack of interactivity” and status as a so-called “walking simulator” did cut through.
Mixtape.
I’ll level with you: that line of criticism is valid – but only if you think that a game *needs* non-stop button-pressing and complicated combos to be fun. Mixtape is a game I would categorise as a “narrative adventure;” as the player, you follow a very linear story featuring three main characters, and you play through a series of connected levels, quick-time events, and mini-games – the interactivity levels of which do vary. If you’re a player who wants to be constantly challenged by difficult gameplay, and your reason for picking up a control pad is to “git gud” at a complex title that requires a lot of either button-mashing or complicated combos… perhaps you’ll bounce off Mixtape quite early on. Even if the story might be something you’d vibe with, I’d understand if the gameplay – or, let’s be blunt, the *lack* of gameplay – would turn you off.
However, that wasn’t my take on Mixtape, and I had a genuinely fantastic time with this game.
I’ve said this before here on the website when discussing other titles, but I’m someone who’ll happily play through basic, bog-standard gameplay if I’m caught up in a story. Not only does Mixtape have a truly compelling narrative, but I also really liked its animated, almost stop-motion art style; I found its main characters incredibly relatable, and gosh, does the game have a *fantastic* soundtrack!
The game features around two dozen songs from the likes of Rainbow (pictured).
So there’s that important caveat: if you hate “interactive movies” or “walking simulators,” and you want a game that offers more interactivity than mini-games, QTEs, and a bit of environmental exploration, Mixtape might not be for you. It might still be for you, though, if you’re after a game with great characters, a relatable narrative, an incredible soundtrack, and a nostalgia overload for players of a certain age – or players who *wish* they lived through that mid-90s era. This game isn’t going to be for everyone, I suspect, which is probably why opinions are split! But if you’re the kind of person with whom the story connects, and if this slower-paced narrative adventure is your style of game? I think there’s a *lot* to love in Mixtape.
I’d go so far as to put Mixtape on my list of contenders for the coveted “Game of the Year” title at the annual Trekking with Dennis End-of-Year Awards!
Could Mixtape be a “Game of the Year” contender? Come back just before New Year to find out!
I would give one caveat, though, about the story Mixtape tells. This is a story about teenage characters having “one last hurrah” before finishing school and going their separate ways. It leans into tropes of the genre that you’ll have seen in dozens of films, not only from the ’80s and ’90s, but really in any coming-of-age title from the last forty-some years. When you stack up an objectively low-stakes story with some melodramatic teenagers… well, you’ll either feel that whack of nostalgia and remember your own schooldays – as I did – or maybe you’ll cringe!
For me, these characters and their stories genuinely hit close to home. We’ll get into more detail about that if you stick with me to the spoiler-ific part of the review, but suffice to say that I think each of them represents not only a character archetype from this kind of coming-of-age story, but a truly relatable part of a teenage experience that a lot of us will share. There were moments in Mixtape that, I’m sure, are curiously American – and as a Brit, I wouldn’t get all of that. But there were plenty of things that reminded me very strongly of my own youth, my own schooldays, and my own “last hurrah” with friends as we parted ways, knowing it would be for the last time.
The game’s trio of main characters.
In that sense, Mixtape really did hit all of those nostalgic notes; its story is genuinely bittersweet. I don’t think I was quite expecting it to resonate with me quite so strongly or quite so emotionally, especially for such a short experience. But it did. Mixtape isn’t a game I’m going to rush to replay; it’s linear, and once you’ve tried the mini-games, explored the levels, and experienced the story, the only reason to go back is to go through it all again. But like any good coming-of-age movie – St. Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club, The Graduate, or even Bend It Like Beckham – it *is* a story I’m going to want to revisit one day. I can already feel that.
And there are some songs, too, that I think I’m going to forever associate with moments, levels, or characters from Mixtape.
Mixtape is a relatively short experience. My playthrough clocked in at just shy of three-and-a-half hours – but I think that Mixtape, at £16/$20, is priced fairly for such a short title. The game ran well, without any crashes, bugs, or framerate issues on my PC, and I didn’t have any trouble with adjusting the settings to my liking. In terms of difficulty, I managed the game in one hit, despite having arthritis which affects my hands and fingers, and while I wasn’t perfect at every mini-game or QTE, the game was more than forgiving enough to let me progress.
Skateboarding.
I think I’ve said all I can without getting into narrative spoiler territory. If you want to know if I recommend Mixtape, the answer is a categorical and definitive “it depends!” If you like narrative adventure titles, ’90s nostalgia, and great music, it’s an enthusiastic “yes.” If you want games with a great deal of interactivity, and story matters less to you than engaging gameplay, perhaps it won’t be your thing. If you think of Mixtape as a three-hour movie with some interactive sections… well, you can answer the question of whether you think that sounds like something you’d enjoy. But I reiterate what I said a moment ago: this game won’t be right for everyone.
Spoiler Warning: This is the end of the spoiler-free section. There are narrative spoilers for Mixtape – including the game’s ending – from here on out.
I’m the wrong side of forty years old, suffering from arthritis and other health issues that make me feel even more decrepit, and my schooldays are so far behind me by now that I can’t even glimpse them over the horizon any more! So why, then, did Mixtape make me feel like a teenager again for those three-and-a-bit hours? Am I just a pathetic middle-aged person, desperately trying to reclaim any semblance of youth? And did Mixtape offer me that escapist fantasy for a short time? Or is there something deeper… does this game truly embody what it means to *feel* young?
I’d love to offer Mixtape to younger players – folks in and around the age group of the game’s protagonists – and see what they think. To them, Mixtape might feel like an old person’s idea of what “being young” is, or its ’90s setting might make them feel like I do when watching films from, say, the ’60s or ’70s. Maybe Mixtape feels the way it does to me because this was my coming-of-age moment, too.
I wonder what younger folks will make of Mixtape; is it just a game for people my age, or is its story timeless?
I’ve written about this here on the website before, but 1999 and Y2K were “my years;” that was the end of my schooldays, the beginning of “adulthood,” both in a legal and, I suppose, a practical sense, and the ’90s as a whole were my adolescence and teenage years. Mixtape doesn’t tie itself to one specific year, but I get an early-to-mid ’90s vibe from the game. I think a ticket stub was dated 1993 at one point, so it might be set a year or two after that. I guess that makes me a bit younger than the game’s protagonists – but I lived those years, you know? I… I *feel* the era that Mixtape is bringing back to life. And because it coincides with a similar period of my own life… the game brought back all kinds of memories that I just wasn’t expecting.
And I feel… well, I feel a lot of things, to be honest. Partly I feel old: knowing that that part of my life is so long gone as to be someone’s idea of a “cool vintage setting” for a story! Partly I feel kind of pathetic: I’m this old dinosaur pretending to be young and hip again by going through this story. Partly I feel like these characters, relatable and fun as they were, just aren’t me anymore: I’m looking in from the outside at teenagers doing teenage things, and I just don’t fit in with that age group. And partly I feel like I’m seventeen again: like someone’s dad banning them from a party, or not being able to scrounge up enough pennies to buy a few beers are the biggest – and only – problems in the world. That carefree moment of youth when teachers and parents are the obstacles to fun, and nothing else matters but your friends. That’s Mixtape in a nutshell.
Mixtape made me feel 17 again.
And that sensation… I don’t think I was prepared for just how well Mixtape captured it, bottled it, and then smashed me in the face with it over and over again!
I remember what it felt like to be a teenager, desperate to go to some big party. In the rural area where I grew up, there were so many farmers’ kids at school that there’d always be someone willing to volunteer a field for us to throw a party – and we’d set up a boom box, play tunes, drink way too much, smoke cannabis, and just… be free. That feeling… I mean, I haven’t felt it in a long time. A long time. Until I played Mixtape, and all those memories and feelings came flooding back.
That’s testament to the power of media, and to interactive media in particular. I stand by what I said above: Mixtape is not the most interactive game out there. But the interactive elements that it brings to the table are a huge part of what makes it work and what makes those feelings hit so hard; I don’t think you’d get it in the same way if you watched a video of someone else playing the game, or a compilation of cut-scenes. The interactivity – actually taking part in the kids’ journey – is what makes it work and what makes it hit as hard as it does.
The slushie-making mini-game.
Let’s talk characters!
Cassandra is probably the character who came closest to my own teenage experience: her overbearing parents seemed to be trying too hard to keep up appearances and cut her off from her friends and the things that she enjoyed. It was an exaggerated portrayal, and far from my own in some respects, but I felt her sense of entrapment; that she didn’t have the freedom to do what she wanted, that her parents wanted her to follow a path they’d chosen. And that sense of rebellion, of wanting to do the opposite of what’s expected of you – a typical teenage thing, I guess!
Cassandra’s arc was genuinely fun to watch unfold. Flashbacks showed her meeting her friends for the first time, her genuine wish to branch out and find her own path, free from the demands and expectations of her parents… and she got arguably the most complete story of all three characters, as her arc with her father actually ended with at least the beginnings of an understanding between them, and she also resolved her conflict with Stacey.
Cassandra got arguably the most complete arc.
Slater reminded me *so much* of several people I knew when I was in school – the typical directionless, unbothered, seemingly “chill” guy who considered himself to be deep and thoughtful. Maybe that’s harsh, sorry! But I’m looking at these characters now with the (questionable) benefit of decades of life experience, so some of the things they come out with – Slater especially – just feel so… naïve and childish. The words make sense, and I can absolutely tell that they’re serious and sincere. But when they’re said in relation to something so small in scale and so fundamentally meaningless as a teenage party… the philosophy definitely wears off!
And I think – I *hope* – that Mixtape is self-aware when it brings these characters to life. Yes, there’s an earnestness to Slater and his philosophising about friendship and life… but there’s also an awareness from the developers, I think, that this is a teenager, right at the start of his journey, who isn’t gonna feel that way forever and who might look back on saying things like this and, well… cringe a little! I know I do when I think back not only to the people Slater reminds me of, but to my own words and actions in those days – words and actions not unlike Slater’s, in some cases.
Slater’s ‘stache.
That brings us to Stacey, the game’s main protagonist and the character you spent 95% of your time playing as. I thought, for much of the game, that Stacey’s arc was going to involve realising that her dream – to go to New York and become a professional mixtape-maker – wasn’t practical, and that there was value in sticking with her friends, even just for a little while longer. That seemed to be her trajectory, at least for parts of the game. So it was a surprise, I admit, that the game ended the way it did.
The ending didn’t “rob” Stacey of her arc, nor deprive her character of something big and meaningful – and there’s something positive, in a way, about seeing a young person pursue their passions and their dreams with that almost naïve optimism that you only have when you’re seventeen! But it does mean that Stacey kind of begins and ends the story in the same place – her last night in town, bidding everyone goodbye, ready to strike out on her big adventure.
I’ve been there – I’ve been Stacey in that moment. And I’ve also been the friend left behind when others are moving on and going their own way.
Stacey – a.k.a. Rockford.
This was another thing that punched me in the gut with “the feels.” That sense of a chapter of your life coming to a close – and not only that, but the *first* chapter, your schooldays, the only kind of life you’ve ever really known… it’s a truly strange sensation that I think only hits a person once in their life. And Mixtape made a creditable recreation of how that moment, that “one last night together,” really feels. We approach that feeling from Stacey’s side, but as the story unfolds, we also get it from Cassandra and Slater, to varying degrees.
I liked Stacey’s repeated fourth-wall breaks, and how she’d directly address the camera when introducing and explaining the various songs on the game’s soundtrack. Combined with some of Mixtape’s other fantastical elements – soaring through the sky, watching a baseball stadium appear out of nowhere, and so on – I think it worked exceptionally well, and it added to the sense that, despite the very real feelings the game brought up, it’s a fantasy as much as anything else.
Stacey regularly broke the fourth wall.
Mixtape also has something to say about the reliability of memory. Dreams, memories, and power fantasies all seemed to merge together – not only in flashback sequences, but even in levels and story moments set in the present day. We see characters soar through the sky, ride on the back of a dinosaur, make fireworks explode in time with the music, or float through a series of disconnected video clips. And none of this is presented as weird or unusual in the context of what was otherwise a very simple and grounded real-world narrative – which means Mixtape is deliberately leaning into the way we – especially as younger people – process thoughts, memories, dreams, and fantasies.
In a worse game or a worse story, it would feel jarring to go from a grounded, normal story about three teenagers about to graduate from school to Harry Potter-style flying cars, or floating through a void of images and video clips. But Mixtape makes that weirdness… work. I don’t want to say that it “shouldn’t” work, because a good enough story clearly *can* bring together the ordinary and extraordinary in a cohesive way. But the way Mixtape makes it feel so natural and so effortless… it’s really something to see. I really, truly adored this way of experiencing the story. It reminded me, again, of being a kid or a younger person, looking out of the window of the car and imagining flying through the air or sprinting along at high speed.
Flying home…
I am not the best gamer in the world – I wasn’t when I was younger, and I’m definitely not now that arthritis is afflicting my hands and joints! So I appreciate that Mixtape isn’t a game with stupid difficulty spikes, or that punishes anything but frame-perfect button-presses in quick-time events. There were a couple of places where I didn’t get everything right – Cassandra’s softball game, for instance, and it took me a few tries to hit all of the targets in the rock-skimming game, too. But even then, Mixtape didn’t punish failure, nor send me back to the start of a level as I feared it might. Instead, I could progress through the story at my own pace, enjoying the moments and the narrative without really needing to worry too much about making mistakes or missing essential button-presses.
That style of gameplay – let’s call it “casual,” for the sake of simplicity – is not everyone’s cup of tea, and I totally get that. I could see people wanting the game to implement a more difficult mode where timings matter more and where mistakes are costly. Maybe, if you ask nicely, developers Beethoven & Dinosaur will consider it in a patch or update! But speaking for myself, I’m just not that kind of player, and I found Mixtape‘s difficulty, accessibility, and forgiving gameplay to be just my speed. I came for the story, not to punish myself trying to “git gud” at frame-perfect button-presses.
Stacey with Cassandra.
Mixtape’s explorable environments weren’t huge, but they were beautifully designed and well laid-out. They also had just the right amount of content for their size; they felt neither overstuffed nor too spread out and sparse, making walking around and examining things feel worthwhile. In terms of visuals, all three characters’ rooms looked… well, like typical teenagers’ rooms from that era. Like my old bedroom, or bedrooms of my friends – only a little larger, I guess, since this is set in America! Slater’s loft, in particular, reminded me of the attic bedroom of a friend of mine; a hangout spot that was conveniently located five minutes’ walk from our school, and where we spent a ton of time playing games and kicking back.
I liked the way the game indicated which interactions would advance the story and which would expand it – that kind of thing gives players the choice to dive deeply and explore a game’s world or to push through. Personally, because I was getting so into the story, I was happy to explore every nook and cranny, and I enjoyed practically all of the flashbacks, vignettes, and even just lines of dialogue from Stacey upon encountering an item in the level. These things added a ton of detail to the world and the backstories of the main characters.
The white markers indicate optional interactions.
And on the subject of voice acting, Mixtape once again excels. Bella DeLong was fantastic in the lead role as Stacey, incredibly convincing as that kind of teenage character. Max Korman, Jessica Ma, Monique Thomas, and JB Tandena round out the major voice roles, and all of them did a great job at bringing their characters to life in a realistic, believable way. Given the game’s subject matter and art style, it might’ve been tempting to go over-the-top with some of the voice direction; I’m glad that Mixtape stayed on the right side of that line.
These were all compelling and interesting characters in their own ways, and voices that matched the tone that the game was going for was always going to be vitally important. In a narrative adventure like this, the story lives or dies on the strength of its characters, and a big part of getting me invested in these characters is the voice acting. I’m pleased to say it was excellent across the board.
The main characters.
I suppose, for a game called “Mixtape”, we should actually talk about the soundtrack, eh?
It’s not a new thing for games to use popular songs in their soundtracks. Nor is it unique to Mixtape for a game to set a level or an action sequence to music. A memorable example for me would be Control – if you’ve played that game, you’ll know the level I’m referring to! But it is pretty unusual for a game to lean so heavily on its soundtrack, making the songs integral to the narrative itself, and incredibly important to the main character in particular.
Stacey is set up from the start as being incredibly passionate about music, and this extends to the way she introduces all of the songs in the game. Not only does she turn to the camera, breaking the fourth wall – as we discussed – but she explains why a song is relevant to the passage of gameplay or the narrative moment that we’re seeing or playing through. It heightens and elevates the soundtrack to draw attention to it in this way. And it goes without saying that the song choices were pitch-perfect.
Stacey lives for music.
Mixtape was more eclectic with its music than I thought it might’ve been, so if you were worried that you won’t enjoy the game because you don’t like ’90s pop/rock songs… don’t be! There’s way more to it than that, and even tracks that I’d probably skip if they came up in a playlist worked well or at least felt in keeping with the narrative moment that they were part of. And really, there weren’t any songs on the game’s soundtrack that I actively disliked. There were a few forgettable numbers, sure; songs I’d never intentionally seek out or choose to listen to. But there were – to use some popular slang – plenty of bangers, too.
Two sequences really stand out to me – probably because they paired two songs I genuinely adore with two fun gameplay sequences.
The first is the softball one: Stacey introduces Stan Bush’s The Touch as being the only sports-themed song she knows, but it really was just pitch-perfect for that moment. The QTEs were hard, sure, and I struggled with the analogue stick-and-button combo a lot of the time! But the soundtrack was great, and managing to land the perfect hit, then seeing a piece of the baseball stadium rising from the ground? It was magical.
The softball mini-game. I sucked at it!
Then there’s the desperate race to get to Cassandra before her dad finds her. Set to John Paul Young’s Yesterday’s Hero, this entire sequence – which was perfectly timed to coincide with the song, by the way – felt like it came straight from the kind of coming-of-age movies that inspired Mixtape. I think that song is now gonna be forever tied to that video game sequence – running, jumping, and sliding with Stacey as she battled to make it in time to save Cassandra from her dad’s wrath. It was… beautiful. Touching. And just fantastic all around.
Aside from the sequences and levels we’ve already discussed, Mixtape had some other fun games and mini-games. The skateboarding mechanic, while not exactly as in-depth as something like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, was a lot of fun – and, again, another nostalgia blast. The skateboarding sequence with the explosions was incredibly fun and memorable, too! And what other game could make painting a door so… fun? I loved that you could stylise the door and then have it show up in future vignettes and chapters of the story, too.
The painted door… or at least my effort at it!
The drunken stumble through the video store was hilarious, and I felt Mixtape captured a character’s inebriated state in a way few games ever really manage to! Then there was slingshot shooting, rock-skimming, and even moving a couch that were all a ton of fun, creative, and just neat little mini-games. They aren’t necessarily things you could build an entire game around, but they work well as pieces of a larger whole. Not so keen on the kissing mini-game, though – but that’s just me!
I particularly enjoyed the slushie machine mini-game, and how the exact combo of slushie flavours would then show up in the subsequent cut-scene. I know it’s such a small thing, but it really was fun to mess around and experiment with different colours, seeing how the cup came together.
Taking a photo of Cassandra.
And, of course, we have to mention the dinosaur theme park experience! One of the kids’ fondest memories involved sneaking into this abandoned Jurassic Park-inspired theme park, and messing around. The ride was the highlight, but I also enjoyed the camera mini-game, and how you could actually get some pretty creative shots, despite the limitations of the ’90s digital camera. The camcorder mini-game, in the final act, was in a similar vein, and I liked how you could film different partygoers and make these little vignettes.
So I think that’s everything I wanted to say.
Mixtape isn’t gonna be the right game for every player. But it’s confident in knowing what kind of game it wants to be – a narrative adventure. It’s bold with some of its storytelling choices and character beats. And it leans heavily into nostalgia and that sense of being a teenager again, going through that final goodbye before everything changes. And it absolutely *nails* that feeling in a way I just wasn’t expecting.
I thoroughly enjoyed Mixtape.
I had a great time with Mixtape, and it’s a game I’ll be happy to recommend – to a certain kind of player! And speaking for myself, it’s a game I can already tell I’m going to want to return to every once in a while. It’s like a good film, in that sense – I don’t want to watch The Breakfast Club or St. Elmo’s Fire every day, but sometimes, when I’m in that nostalgic mood… I really enjoy them. And Mixtape is the interactive version of that kind of story.
Earlier this year, I reviewed Pragmata and Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown. But if you want to check out titles a bit more similar to Mixtape – at least in some ways – I hope you’ll consider taking a look at my reviews of Indika and South of Midnight. If you liked Mixtape and you’re on the hunt for something to play next, I think either of those could be good choices. Click or tap the links to read my reviews of any of those titles.
And I still have several games in my pile that I hope to get around to in the next few weeks! If you’re interested in reviews of the likes of inKonbini: One Store, Many Stories, Mouse: P.I. For Hire, or Kioku: Last Summer, I hope you’ll stay tuned. I can’t *promise* reviews of all of them imminently, but they’re on my list, so to speak. Thanks for reading, and I hope this review has been useful, interesting and/or enjoyable for you! Happy gaming!
Mixtape is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Mixtape is the copyright of Beethoven & Dinosaur and/or Annapurna Interactive. Some promotional screenshots courtesy of Beethoven & Dinosaur/Annapurna Interactive. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for The Original Series and The Search for Spock.
In the lead-up to Strange New Worlds’ fourth season, much was made of this idea of “big swings” across the ten episodes; i.e. that there’d be episodes in completely different genres, with the show jumping from one to another and trying out completely different styles of storytelling. And after last week’s ghost story? Well, Human Best Friend was *definitely* a “big swing!”
At its core, if you strip away all of the drunkenness, partying, and other fluff, Human Best Friend is a character piece that saw Scotty and Ortegas bring their (short) feud to a climax and then figure out a way to work together. That side of the story genuinely worked well – though I would caveat that, at least a little, by saying that the setup to this feud was both short and felt pretty arbitrary in the first two episodes of the season. But I think Human Best Friend will be most remembered for its lightheartedness and sense of fun – and I really did have fun with this story!
L-R: Rebecca Romijn, Celia Rose Gooding, and Anson Mount at a Season 4 promo event. Photo: TrekMovie
I don’t think any individual moment or scene in Human Best Friend eclipsed the high points in either Valles Marineris or The Griffin Incident, by which I mean both of those episodes had genuinely fantastic highlights – the visual beauty of prehistoric Earth, or the shocking twists and turns aboard the wreck of the Griffin. But, as you’ll know if you’ve read my reviews, both of those episodes also came with significant weaknesses. Valles Marineris was so overstuffed with ideas that it didn’t manage to do justice to the “dinosaur episode” idea that I felt had been teased in pre-season marketing, and The Griffin Incident came with a fundamentally unsatisfying lack of an ending. In contrast, while the high points of Human Best Friend may not soar quite as high as its two immediate predecessors, it comes with basically none of their flaws, either, making it a better all-rounder – and, I would argue, the first genuinely *good* episode of Season 4.
What was nice about Human Best Friend when compared to a lot of modern Star Trek – including in Strange New Worlds itself – was that the episode didn’t need to have some giant existential threat hovering over the Federation or the whole galaxy. Even the final act’s bomb plot really only impacted a couple of characters – and it never felt like a true threat (for reasons I’ll elaborate on later). This is something I’ve said before when talking about modern Trek: you don’t need to put the entire galaxy in danger to tell a story that’s worth following. I got invested in Scotty and Ortegas’ quest to locate their missing shuttle because it was… fun. And I know Star Trek’s streaming era is coming to a close, but I hope that’s a lesson that the franchise can truly take to heart one day.
The Enterprise with a Rodaxian starship.
Human Best Friend might’ve found a stronger foundation to build upon if we’d heard more about this conflict between the Enterprise’s different shifts before. I don’t remember Strange New Worlds so much as mentioning “alpha shift” and “beta shift” until this episode – though there have been similar references in other Star Trek stories, on occasion. We also don’t know any of the characters who might be part of any of the Enterprise’s other shift rotations, so again, there just wasn’t much to this idea that “those guys got shore leave, so we need it too.”
Where the setup worked, though, was in showing how several members of the crew seemed tired and overworked. Some of this felt a tad exaggerated in the opening montage at the bar; Chapel breaking a glass and La’an and Spock seemingly having some kind of “domestic squabble” seemed to come from nowhere. What might’ve been stronger, perhaps, would’ve been to lean into what happened last time and use *that* as the excuse to divert to a shore leave planet; a couple of lines in Pike’s log could’ve said something like: “After the shocking tragedy aboard the USS Griffin, I’ve determined that a short diversion on the way to our negotiations will give the crew some much-needed shore leave…”
We could start from basically the same place, but without a few moments at the beginning that felt just a little contrived. Is it a huge deal for the episode? Not at all – but worth mentioning, I feel!
This scene didn’t make for the strongest narrative setup.
Star Trek has always included planets and aliens that, to be blunt, don’t make a ton of sense if you think about them too hard! And the shore leave planet of Cesnar in Human Best Friend, with an atmosphere that makes you drunk? It’s the latest part of a storied tradition of Star Trek being weird and wacky, and in that sense I really liked it as a concept!
It’s also interesting, if you think about it a bit more deeply, that both the planet of Cesnar and the wreck of the USS Griffin from last week’s outing are both settings that cause changes to characters’ mental states. In this case, it was clearly explained from the start that the planet’s unique atmosphere is to blame; The Griffin Incident didn’t come up with an in-universe reason for its ghostly shenanigans. But it’s still noteworthy, I feel, that – despite “big swings” in terms of tone, style, and genre – we got two episodes in a row that both rely on the same “mind-altering” underlying premise. It’s a way for both episodes to feel connected, like their stories conceivably take place in a consistent setting.
Both this episode and The Griffin Incident saw characters affected by mind-altering macguffins.
Sticking with Cesnar, I felt that the sets used to depict the planet and its luxury resort were… fine. But they weren’t spectacular, and there were a couple of places where either set redresses seemed pretty obvious – like the bar – or where sets used to depict the inside of the resort didn’t really line up with the exterior, which was a wholly CGI creation. Several of the hotel rooms just looked kinda… generic. If Strange New Worlds was a modern-day series – or this episode was supposed to involve time travel to the 2020s – I’d have just rolled with it. But this futuristic 23rd Century luxury resort on a planet with a funky atmosphere that causes strange effects looked a lot like a modern-day three- or four-star hotel, with a few Enterprise sets redressed for good measure.
The exterior shots which established Cesnar were pretty good, though, and I thought the creations matched the planet’s “Risa but with more booze” idea. There were some creative CGI moments in the story; I particularly liked the shot of the missing shuttle parked on top of a skyscraper, semi-obscured by a billboard. That kind of method of “hiding” something was truly in keeping with the episode’s inebriated characters! It was both a great effort and also kinda silly, which I appreciated.
The “lost” shuttle.
We’ll cycle through the other main characters first, then come to Scotty and Ortegas in a moment, since their storyline was the main focus of the story.
Captain Pike getting a tattoo was a fun idea. I wish we could’ve seen more of the tattoo he was getting on his arm, as I think the glimpse we got looked really neat – and I can see that kinda thing being something fans would want to recreate (either impermanently for cosplay or perhaps even more permanently!) And in an episode where drunken shenanigans were a big part of the story for most of the characters, it was fun to see Pike joining in, and not locking himself in his room with a padd and trying to get some work done.
It’s a relative rarity, in Star Trek as a whole, to see characters off-duty – captains even more so. Some of my favourite moments with Picard came from stories like Captain’s Holiday, where we got to see some of the things he actually enjoys doing in his time off. And though it was completely different in tone, I got some of that from Anson Mount’s take on Pike this week. Here was the captain, who’s been so focused on his ship and his job – going all the way back to his first appearance in The Cage, where he lamented the weight of command – finally just… letting go of it all, even if it was just for an evening. I liked it.
The captain’s tattoo.
Uhura got a pretty typical “let your hair down and unwind” sub-plot. Literally: her hairstyling in this episode was pretty fun! Her mini-arc took her from “but I like working and I’ve got so much to do!” to “let’s just party!” and it was pretty well-executed. It was basic, but for something that wasn’t the episode’s major focus, I think it worked quite well. And her costume in this story was great, too. I liked the kind of “retro” rave aesthetic that her design leaned into.
We know that Uhura can dance – and likes to dance. Just look at Star Trek V: The Final Frontier for an example of Uhura’s dancing being plot-relevant! And her scenes this week felt like they naturally followed on from last season’s Wedding Bell Blues and What Is Starfleet?, which also gave us some off-duty moments with Uhura.
A relatively minor part of the episode, but a good one nonetheless.
Uhura likes to party.
Una got even less of a “story” than any of the others, really – we really only saw her singing on stage. But you know what? I love this entire sequence, and the callback to it during the closing credits!
I’m a big Bonnie Tyler fan – she passed away just a few weeks ago, may she rest in peace – and her music was just such a perfect choice for this kind of moment. First of all, props to Paramount for licensing a *modern* (okay, modern-ish) pop song for an episode of Star Trek for once, instead of relying on out-of-copyright trad-pop numbers! But also… Klingon power ballads? It just makes so much sense that you almost wonder why it’s never been tried before!
Una on stage.
We’ve had Klingon opera for a long time. And, thanks to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, we also know that Klingons have a penchant for Shakespeare! But this warrior culture would surely have more than one musical genre, right? Power ballads are just a great fit for the Klingons, and it kinda makes me want: 1) a full recording of this song as an MP3, and 2) an entire album of Klingon covers of power ballads! We could have Livin’ on a Prayer, Don’t Stop Believin’, It’s All Coming Back To Me Now… I mean, you’d buy that album, wouldn’t you?
I liked how Una’s singing also connected back to her role in the Short Treks mini-episode Q&A. If you’ve forgotten, Q&A was a flashback to a young Ensign Spock’s first moments aboard the Enterprise – and it ended with he and Una singing while stuck in a turbolift. I wish Star Trek had done more with Short Treks… there was a lot of potential in it as an idea! But these sequences with Una, short though they were, harkened back to that and felt in keeping with her character.
Scotty and Ortegas liked Una’s performance, too.
Dr M’Benga got a turn playing bartender, and again this was a short but fun sequence. It reminded me of The Cage, in a way, where Dr Boyce played barkeep and counsellor to Captain Pike – though obviously with a very different tone. There was also a fun little callback to The Next Generation, where Data presented Scotty with a drink with the line: “it is green,” which M’Benga also said here.
I think too many references or callbacks like that could overwhelm a production, so I’m glad Strange New Worlds doesn’t overdo it! But for long-time fans, small moments like that go a long way to tying different parts of Star Trek together. It’s now canon, if you want to be fussy about such things, that Scotty was *twice* served an unknown green alcoholic beverage!
As above with Pike, it was fun to see Dr M’Benga – who’s usually quite serious – letting his hair down, having fun, and not even caring if he messed up or smashed a bottle.
Joseph M’Benga: bartender.
Chapel’s bingo sequence was funny – but I didn’t really get the aliens she was facing off against. They looked like Vulcans at first, but then seemed to have Ferengi-like teeth, before going almost vampiric when they became hostile. I actually would like to know more about those aliens, because even in such a short appearance, they made a pretty big impression!
Otherwise, though, Chapel being hyper-competitive in such a completely low-stakes environment made for a fun little set-piece, and seeing her carried out of the room as La’an’s group and the bingo players descended on one another was… I mean, it made for a funny visual presentation, and was one of those laugh-out-loud moments that Human Best Friend managed to do really well.
Who else wants an entire spin-off focused on this character and her friends?
La’an’s story was interesting. Maybe you’ll say I’m overreaching with this, but I felt the Cesnar atmosphere seeming to heighten her inclination towards violence actually furthers a theme we’ve been seeing this season – and, I would argue, going back to Season 3 with her Romulan turn, too. Obviously this was more in focus last week, where La’an succumbed to… whatever was going on aboard the wreck of the USS Griffin, fully giving in to a violent streak that she fears is part of her latent augment DNA. But this time, we saw her also losing her composure, thanks to the atmosphere, and once more going down that violent path.
My theory for this season, by the way, is that this “augment DNA” storyline will – somehow – lead to the end of La’an’s time aboard the Enterprise. It seems too much of a coincidence that it arose now, with the show moving “one step closer to where it all began.” Lest we forget, La’an has left the Enterprise by the time of Kirk’s five-year mission.
Am I right about La’an?
If I’m right, La’an’s story this week furthers her overall arc across the season – losing control, giving in to violent impulses, fearing what that might mean, and potentially seeing her dormant augment genes “awaken” somehow. If that isn’t part of the plan, though… I think it could’ve been a lot of fun to put La’an in a totally different situation. Maybe she could’ve sung karaoke with Una, been at the bar with M’Benga, or partied with Uhura. But I’d have done something a bit different, if I had the choice!
La’an is another workaholic, like Pike, M’Benga, and so on. But she’s also the security officer with a traumatic Gorn past. I’d have liked to put La’an in a totally different – and much softer – mini-story, something that saw her relaxing and unwinding in an unexpected way for her character. Maybe she could’ve had a spa day, or something like that! You see what I mean, right? It would’ve been a twist on what we might’ve expected – but, as I said, I think there are bigger reasons for her to be shown in this kind of light given her potential arc this season.
La’an prepares to steal Scotty’s shirt…
That brings us to Spock… and Kirk.
I’ll level with you: I did *not* see the “Kirk actually isn’t a hallucination” twist coming! And I was totally prepared to sit here and write about how it wasn’t exactly strong world-building to say that Spock’s opinion of Kirk is at least partially based on a hallucination that he had on a shore leave planet. But then we got a last-second twist: that Kirk actually was really there all along, and that Spock simply believed that he was hallucinating him because of the effects of the planet’s atmosphere. This was creative, clever, and – for me, anyway – it worked really well!
Spock’s other hallucinations – that Scotty and Ortegas were plants – was such a stupid non-sequitur that it made me laugh out loud both times it appeared. I didn’t think the episode would actually depict both characters *as* plants, but it was such a dumb and ridiculous visual that it caught me completely off-guard. Oh, and Spock “mind-melding” with a plant – complete with a spin on the typical mind-meld line – was another genuinely funny moment. I guess there’s still a tiny bit of room for “Spock comedy” in Strange New Worlds, after all.
“Are you both plants right now?”
If La’an’s role this week continued a theme that’s part of her season-long arc, so did Spock’s. If we use that tagline again – that Season 4 is going to “boldly go one step closer to where it all began” – then establishing the Kirk-Spock bond is going to be part of that. We saw their first canonical meeting last season, and we’ve since had a couple of episodes where that friendship is strengthened. Spock referenced their mind-meld from the end of Season 3, and I liked this continuation of their friendship.
In my review of New Life and New Civilizations, I said that it would feel kind of underwhelming if Strange New Worlds was going to say that Kirk’s close, brotherly bond with Spock was nothing more than the lingering after-effects of a Vulcan mind-meld. So I’m glad that this season is building on that, referring to it where it makes narrative sense, but not leaning on it as the exclusive reason for Kirk and Spock becoming so close. Though you could argue, I guess, that their friendship being partly built on a misunderstanding (that Spock thought he was hallucinating when he wasn’t) is no better! It’s a sitcom cliché in a way; a character says something aloud, not expecting or realising that the person is really there and able to hear it all. But I still think it’s better than a mind-meld, and for a one-off comedic storyline that *probably* won’t come up again in a big way, I think we can give it a pass. It made me laugh, anyway.
Kirk and Spock.
So that brings us neatly to Scotty and Ortegas – the main duo that Human Best Friend focused on.
As I said above, and in my review of the season premiere, I kind of felt that Scotty and Ortegas’ rivalry pretty much came out of nowhere. They were never friends before this season, sure, but I just didn’t feel they’d spent enough time together on screen to really justify that kind of rivalry. I even speculated, when reviewing Valles Marineris, that the writers might’ve been setting up a “rivals-to-lovers” kind of storyline, with Ortegas and Scotty following Pike and Batel, Spock and T’Pring, Spock and Chapel, Spock and La’an, and others to become Strange New Worlds’ next power couple. That seems not to be on the table any more – though I suppose this new friendship could still blossom into something more.
The arc they got over the course of Human Best Friend was a fairly straightforward “enemies become friends” plot, complicated only by the weird goings-on on this strange alien world. It played out almost like a comedy film, in parts, with even the rivalry between the two characters coming over as less-than-serious. Given that we want to see both Ortegas and Scotty as protagonists, letting the story unfold in a way that neither of them seemed annoying, unfair, or like they were instigating things was definitely the right call.
The episode’s co-protagonists.
We got the comedy cliché of “two characters who hate each other wake up next to each other,” and that made for a fun start. At first, it seemed to reinforce my “enemies to lovers” theory from a couple of weeks ago! But it definitely gave both Scotty and Ortegas a genuinely fun adventure, starting out with a hangover and no memories of the night before… I mean, we’ve all been there, right? Remind me to tell you one day about the time I woke up next to a dumpster!
I also really liked Scotty’s shirt. We talked a bit about costuming with Uhura a moment ago, and her costume was definitely neat. Dr M’Benga and Una also got some fun outfits. Scotty’s shirt was *definitely* a modern-day thing – you couldn’t get away with calling that anything other than the kind of silly shirt people would wear nowadays! But it was a fun design, it suited him, and Martin Quinn wore it well. I liked the “outer space” theming, and again, as with a recording of Una’s songs or Pike’s tattoo, I could see the shirt being something fans would want to own and wear at conventions!
Do you want Scotty’s shirt as much as I want Scotty’s shirt?
Scotty and Ortegas’ quest took them across the resort, and gave us those little vignettes with all of the other members of the crew. Their initial goal – to deliver the letter to Pike – was so incredibly basic, but it worked really well as an excuse to explore the resort and see what everyone was up to. Then when they had to locate the missing shuttle, the tension did ramp up a notch or two – and this is where we got to see a bit more action, albeit that Human Best Friend kept that same lighthearted and comedic tone.
The mystery of who took the shuttle fed into both characters’ dislike of one another, and it was pretty creative how each of them could be both in the wrong and in the right at the same time; the blame for the missing shuttle and the potentially compromised negotiations seemed to fall on one, then the other, then both of them. And this was in keeping with the episode’s core message for Scotty and Ortegas: that insecurities led to this dislike of one another, that they were each overreacting to perfectly understandable behaviour from the other side, and that they’re not only on the same team, but they even come from similar backgrounds. Star Trek has done stories like this before, but the way it was handled here was particularly smooth – the writers really seem to have thought of everything to make this “rivalry-turned-friendship” arc stick the landing.
Both characters felt well-written and got enjoyable arcs.
I think I’m right in saying that Scotty’s family and background weren’t ever explored in The Original Series and its films, so there’s plenty of scope to pad out the character with new revelations without treading on the toes of what came before. The same is true for Ortegas – she’s still, really, the main character we’ve spent the least amount of time with across the three-and-a-bit seasons of the show so far. So giving both of them effectively the same Starfleet background (only from opposite angles) was a creative idea and a fun way to help them find common ground.
We tend to look at characters and see them fully-formed – of course Scotty’s an engineer, so he must’ve *always* wanted to be one. And for Ortegas, because she’s so natural and skilled at piloting, we just assume that it’s – for want of a better term – her “calling” in life. But I think it humanises both characters, and makes them feel more real and more well-rounded, to know that they didn’t start out just knowing, innately, where their skills were best utilised.
We have to remember, sometimes, that we’re dealing with younger versions of familiar characters.
How many folks reading this review right now started out thinking that you’d want to be a teacher or a chef or a professional golfer – only to come to the realisation that it wasn’t right for you, or that the “dream job” didn’t align with your skillset? And how many of us started a job, changed jobs, changed again, and took a while to settle? I don’t want to say those things are “universal” – I know a few people who knew what they wanted to do in life from the age of ten and went on to achieve it! But I think it’s fair to say that I know a lot *more* people who had an idea, tried it out, didn’t stick the landing for whatever reason, and ultimately moved on to something else.
I know I’ve done that more than once in my life.
And I think there’s something about saying that Scotty had dreams of being a pilot, or that Ortegas once aspired to be an engineer that really makes both of them feel more like real people. Sure, it’s a bit of a convenient way to push them closer together for the sake of this one episode, and that’s a point of criticism I’d expect some long-time Trekkies to make. But for me, I just really liked the way this came across; even though it’s arguably not the most original storyline, it was well-executed. And anything that adds to the depth that these characters have is a net positive.
Back aboard the Enterprise… and finally friends.
All of their chasing around and bickering back-and-forth eventually led to them making it back to the Enterprise in time for the peace talks that served as little more than the background to the episode. But it also set up one last twist: the bomb aboard the shuttle!
I’ll be honest: I kind of rolled my eyes a little when I realised that Scotty was holding a bomb. I mean, it just seemed like such a clichéd way to take this kind of “frenemies” storyline to an extreme – and I was also *convinced* that it would be revealed to be just another of the Cesnar Grand’s illusions before the credits rolled. I was still sure of that even as Scotty and Ortegas flew their shuttle away from the Enterprise and Pike tried to give his speech to the delegates.
So when it turned out that Human Best Friend was playing this final act about as straight as possible, under the circumstances… well, I was surprised! It seemed like such a trope, but both Melissa Navia and Martin Quinn played their roles so earnestly that I actually really enjoyed this way of ending their story and bringing them closer together. And on a second watch, knowing what was going on? I think it works even better.
The shuttle explodes.
On the visual side of things, I wanted to highlight the cute little Animated Series-inspired clips that played near the beginning of the episode as part of the Cesnar Grand’s advertisement. The animators were clearly leaning into The Animated Series for inspiration; we even caught sight of an Edosian, which was really fun to see. Again, I like when Star Trek harkens back to its past in small ways – especially in this big anniversary year. A few years ago, Very Short Treks even showed off some TAS-style mini-episodes, which were a lot of fun.
The main character from the Cesnar Grand, though, seemed to be set up as some kind of big antagonist-slash-ally… but nothing ever really came of that. In fact, the character – who could’ve been fun if we’d spend much time with him – just felt like a bit of a non-entity in the story. He clearly pulled the strings behind the scenes, setting things up so that everyone would get the right kind of shore leave experience: be that something cathartic, some relaxation, or just blowing off steam. But as a character in a story, I just didn’t really get much of anything from him, to be honest.
An Andorian and an Edosian in The Animated Series style.
So that was Human Best Friend.
A fine addition to Strange New Worlds, and an episode I’ll happily revisit when I want a self-contained Star Trek story that doesn’t take itself too seriously! It’s definitely a “big swing” from the time travel adventure of the season premiere and last week’s spooky ghost story, but that’s in keeping with what we’ve come to expect from Strange New Worlds, isn’t it? The show is happy to be more episodic, to dip its toes into different genres and different kinds of storytelling. Or, as in this case, to enthusiastically jump into this kind of unashamedly comedic story.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I sat down to watch Human Best Friend, but I found a lot of things to enjoy. Some sub-plots – like the instigating diplomatic negotiations – didn’t feel fully fleshed-out, and I can see that being a point of criticism. But as a character piece looking at Scotty and Ortegas, it was genuinely well-constructed and well-written. And plenty of smaller moments throughout the story, from beginning to end, literally had me laughing out loud.
Lieutenant Ortegas.
Next week, we have an episode titled A Case of Chiaroscuro. Some of you might’ve already been able to watch it; the episode allegedly “leaked” prematurely on some international Paramount+ platforms a few days ago. This episode is, if I’m remembering correctly, a “noir-inspired” story, and the blurb seems to hint at Una being involved with a world under Klingon occupation. Sounds interesting, and another “big swing” after this week’s comedy story! I hope you’ll join me for that review, too.
I hope you enjoyed Human Best Friend as much as I did. On the whole, it’s my favourite of the three stories we’ve seen so far in Season 4 – not because it’s exceptional, or anything, but because it was focused on its two main characters and stayed consistent in tone. Star Trek can be funny, Star Trek has always been funny, and it’s nice – every once in a while – to see our characters let their hair down and have a bit of fun, even when things don’t go *entirely* to plan.
Thanks for reading, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The first section of this review is free from major narrative spoilers for The Mandalorian and Grogu and The Mandalorian Seasons 1-3. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.
It doesn’t feel like too long ago that I sat down to watch The Rise of Skywalker for the first time – the last Star Wars film I had the displeasure of sitting through. Since then, the franchise has focused on streaming, with shows airing on Disney+ that have been – in my subjective opinion, of course – more miss than hit. The Mandalorian and Grogu is Star Wars’ first trip to the movies in almost seven years… and having not really vibed with the show it serves as the final chapter of, I didn’t exactly have sky-high expectations.
At about the ninety-minute mark, I paused The Mandalorian and Grogu to go to the bathroom. And that trip was probably the most fun I had while watching the film. After The Rise of Skywalker, I’d have said that the bar for the worst Star Wars movie was so low it had melted through the floor, Chernobyl-style, deep into the basement. The best and kindest thing I can say about The Mandalorian and Grogu is that it wasn’t quite *that* bad; for all the flaws this film has, it has not eclipsed The Rise of Skywalker for the title of “worst in the franchise.” But that is hardly an achievement.
Three promotional posters.
The Rise of Skywalker failed for myriad reasons, but none more so than its writer and director had absolutely no idea where to take the story or how to end it. The result was two films’ worth of plot haphazardly crammed into a single picture – one of which was desperately trying to overwrite character backstories and whole chunks of plot from The Last Jedi. This isn’t the same failing that The Mandalorian and Grogu has.
At its core, The Mandalorian and Grogu is meaningless and uninspired, desperately trying to lean into the aesthetic of Star Wars, but without seeming to really understand what made any of it work in the first place. It’s a boring, trope-laden, aggressively bland film; the cinematic equivalent of jangling keys in front of a baby. Hardcore Star Wars fans might be interested in some of the minute details and additions to the franchise’s wider lore, but the main narrative of the film just feels like fluff. The Mandalorian (the character) still feels like one of those silent protagonists from a 1980s or 1990s video game; the kind of guy who runs through a bunch of samey levels, shooting whatever moves, for the very flimsiest of reasons (that you probably had to read about in the manual).
The title characters in a promotional still.
This was the same criticism, by the way, that I had of The Mandalorian’s first few episodes; all the way back in 2019, I described Mandy as “an emotionless helmet-wearing slab of nothing” who seemed to act not because of any discernable character trait or motivation, but at the behest of a room full of TV writers who were desperate to move the plot along. And even the word “plot” is being generous – most of The Mandalorian, as well as practically the entirety of this new cinematic adventure, feels like a series of barely-connected individual action sequences. To continue our video game analogy: these are side-quests to keep the player character busy in a title that doesn’t have enough actual narrative content to stretch for even just a couple of hours.
I don’t sit down to watch a film *hoping* to have a bad time. I paid good money to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu, and I wouldn’t have done so if I was absolutely convinced that it was going to be another stinker. I genuinely hoped that Star Wars’ latest trip to the cinema would be an improvement; that the writers had been able to come up with an ending to these characters’ stories that might’ve even made the preceding three seasons of the show feel better in hindsight. And, to be honest… I kinda feel like Star Wars is overdue for a win! The divisiveness of The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker, and several of the streaming shows has done perhaps irreparable harm to the fan community and the brand, but a new film had the potential, at least, to get everyone on the same page once again.
Director Jon Favreau during production.
The version of the film I watched was advertised as “IMAX” resolution. But… it wasn’t. The film uses a variable aspect ratio, where some sequences are basically in 16:9 widescreen and others are in 2.39:1 theatrical/anamorphic – i.e. the standard you’d get for most films. This was *incredibly* jarring, especially because some scenes are incredibly short, so the film jumps from one aspect ratio to another and then back again in quick succession. If you choose to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu, I think you have the choice to disable this, effectively “cropping” those non-IMAX “IMAX” scenes and putting the entire film in a standard theatrical letterbox. I highly recommend you do that, because the not-even-properly-IMAX ratio adds absolutely nothing of consequence to any single frame.
The Mandalorian and Grogu makes use of some pretty neat physical props and puppets – something I will continue to praise the modern Star Wars franchise for, especially when compared to the janky CGI of the prequel trilogy! But for a big-budget film coming from Disney, the first Star Wars cinematic adventure in almost a decade… there were some pretty poor CGI moments in The Mandalorian and Grogu, too. If you stick with me to the spoiler-y part of the review, I’ll point out a couple of my least-favourite CGI misfires.
At least Baby Yoda is an actual puppet…
The Mandalorian and Grogu is not a good film. But it isn’t a total failure of storytelling or filmmaking, either. It’s just forgettable, bland fluff. No characters are memorable, no events are interesting, it relies on contrivances and tropes to move its very bare-bones story along, and it’s a film that takes basically no risks with its narrative, its characters, or its world.
With that being said, I can absolutely see The Mandalorian and Grogu being the “best film of 2026” for a very specific subset of viewers. If you absolutely *adored*The Mandalorian, its spin-offs, and its characters, the film is basically more of the same. If this slice of Star Wars has been your jam since it debuted in 2019, there’s a reasonably high chance you’ll enjoy its cinematic adaptation, too. And, hey, I hope you do! Just because the film wasn’t my speed, that doesn’t mean it won’t find support from folks who were bigger fans of the series than I ever was.
Up next, we’re going to get into spoiler territory and talk about The Mandalorian and Grogu’s story in a bit more detail. If you haven’t seen the film yet, and still want to head into it un-spoiled, I hope you’ll consider bookmarking this review and coming back later! My official recommendation, such as it is, would be to wait a few weeks until the film inevitably hits Disney+ and you can watch it less expensively. At £16 here in the UK (at time of writing), it’s a pretty tough sell, at least in my opinion.
Spoiler Warning: This is the end of the spoiler-free section. There will be spoilers for The Mandalorian and Grogu – including the film’s ending – from here on out. Spoilers are also present for Jedi: Fallen Order, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Narratively, I felt that The Mandalorian and Grogu suffered a very similar problem to parts of the show it’s based on, as well as The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi – that being that the “main story,” such as it is, isn’t really a single cohesive thing. In The Mandalorian, Mandy would get sidetracked, starting a job, then having to go somewhere else to fix his spaceship or track down a contact who’s supposed to lead him to another contact… and so on. Obi-Wan Kenobi – probably the worst piece of Star Wars media to exist, eclipsing even The Rise of Skywalker – was likewise a series of lightly-connected action set-pieces, as “Young Old Ben” left Tatooine to track down the missing Leia.
The Mandalorian and Grogu sees Mandy working for the New Republic, helping them track down some of the Empire’s remaining leaders in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi. He’s given an assignment by his nameless handler (or maybe she had a name, but she was just so bland and forgettable that I’ve forgotten it already?) to track down a faceless Imperial commander. But first, before he can do that, he has to do a favour for the Hutts, because they’ve promised information! And we’re only a few minutes into the film and we’re already starting out with this side-quest story idea.
Captain Whatshername.
I genuinely feel that The Mandalorian and its cinematic sequel would’ve worked better – and perhaps even worked *well* – as a video game. These kinds of storylines can feel a lot more engaging in interactive media, where you, as a player, are in control of the protagonist. Look at one of my favourite recent Star Wars stories as an example of this: Jedi: Fallen Order. That game unfolds similarly to The Mandalorian and Grogu – you go to a planet, meet a character, start a side-mission that takes you partway to your goal, then go somewhere else and do something else, and eventually make it to the end of the story.
But what works for a video game doesn’t always work for a film. Getting sidetracked or doing barely-connected, action-packed levels is fun… *when you’re in control of the character* and when you’re part of the action. But a film doesn’t have that interactivity, so you’re stuck watching a character go through this series of loosely-connected events that just… aren’t as much fun to watch as they might’ve been to play. Perhaps writer and director Jon Favreau missed his calling; the kinds of stories he seems able to tell would just work way better if they had that interactive element.
Mandy the Mandalorian.
In order to advance its plot, The Mandalorian and Grogu relies heavily on cut-down sequences and contrived moments. After figuring out (thanks to Jabba the Hutt’s weirdly buff son) that the crime lord he came face-to-face with a few minutes earlier is the same Imperial officer he’s meant to be arresting, Mandy and his nameless pilot/sidekick (or maybe he had a name, but he’s so bland and uninteresting that I’ve already forgotten it?) decide to launch a full-frontal assault on the man’s heavily-guarded mansion.
Do we get to see this attack being planned? Nope. Do we see the attack itself? Barely. What we get is Mandy storming in, guns ablaze, in another action sequence that’s basically the same as the film’s opening act. It just felt so incredibly rushed; something this important to the story seemed to be planned and executed in a heartbeat. And why? So we could get a car chase scene that reminded me of the one in The Rise of Skywalker? Is… is that *really* the best we can do?
Aww, they’re having a nice day out at the beach. Cute.
I’ve talked about this before, but Star Wars *desperately* needs to move on from the so-called “Skywalker Saga” and the characters that inhabited it. That was one of the things I really hoped for from The Mandalorian back in 2019, when the show premiered. But The Mandalorian very quickly brought the Jedi and the Force back into play, as well as Luke Skywalker, Boba Fett, and other major characters from the past. And this time, rather than finally leaving all of that behind to tell a *unique* story, The Mandalorian and Grogu introduces us to the son of Jabba the Hutt.
To be clear, I think that Rotta the Hutt was one of the film’s more interesting characters, and the one who came perilously close to having a point and a message that went beyond “look at the shiny shiny!” There’s something fascinating, in theory, about a character who feels trapped by the legacy of an infamous parent or illustrious forebear, and wanting to strike out on one’s own is something that can be relatable. When Rotta came to realise that the crowd at the fighting pit was just as happy to jeer and chant for him to be killed as they were to cheer for his wins, that was probably the closest that The Mandalorian and Grogu managed to get to a genuinely heartfelt or emotional moment.
Ever wanted to see a weirdly buff Hutt?
I also liked the idea of showing a different side to the Hutts. In practically every piece of Star Wars media, we’ve seen Hutts as nothing more than corrupt gangsters; their grotesque slug-like appearance reflecting the depravity within. So to take a member of a reviled and deliberately ugly species and give them a completely different spin and a different kind of characterisation is a good idea. It’s probably the only genuinely good idea in the film’s conception. It wasn’t executed especially well, because The Mandalorian and Grogu prioritised other things – brain-dead action set-pieces, for the most part. But I can appreciate that there was a genuinely interesting idea there, and I might even be tempted to say that I’d have liked to have seen more of Rotta’s story.
But – and here’s where the film’s overreliance on Star Wars’ past trips things up again – did Rotta have to be the son of Jabba the Hutt for this story to work? Jabba’s not a character in the film; he’s long-dead by the time these events take place. We have two Hutt characters in The Mandalorian and Grogu – the twins, who I think were introduced in either The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett. Why not give Rotta a more direct connection to them and forget the name “Jabba?” Oh, that’s right: because modern Star Wars can’t escape the shadow of its original trilogy, even for a second.
The Hutt twins.
Capturing Commander Coin at his mansion was too quick and too easy. But so was Mandy and Rotta’s escape from the fighting pit. After realising they needed to team up, a lucky accident involving a weird electric monster of some kind short-circuited the digital fence penning in the monsters, and they all escaped into the crowd. This was… not great, let’s be honest. It’s a contrivance, but it’s such a basic one that it felt fundamentally weak and unsatisfying. This moment could have seen Mandy and Rotta realising they needed each other; that working together was going to be key to their survival and escape. Instead, the writers realised they’d got stuck in a narrative dead-end and magicked up a solution out of nowhere.
Even the lead-up to the fight was overladen with tired clichés. Mandy wants to track down Rotta, but because this is a video game story, he has to first track down “Lord Janu.” But Lord Janu, despite operating his crime syndicate out of a downtown bar, doesn’t take kindly to people… trying to do business with him? So everyone has to attack Mandy as soon as the name “Janu” is mentioned. It’s the kind of thing that, once again, you might overlook in a video game because it got you a fun boss fight, but it just doesn’t make much sense in-universe and it doesn’t work well for a film.
Lord Coin/Commander Janu/who even cares?
As The Mandalorian unfolded, I felt Grogu – a.k.a. Baby Yoda – was a bit of a contrivance in himself. Grogu seems to swing wildly from “helpless toddler” to “overpowered Force-wielder” depending on the needs of the individual scene or set-piece he’s currently part of, and it makes it really hard to get a read on what kind of character he’s even supposed to be. I like the idea, in theory, of someone like Mandy having a young apprentice that they have to train; that Grogu is new to all of this and still learning the ropes. But the way it’s been handled – both in the show and the film – leads to some just plain weird contradictions.
Grogu can, for instance, heal Mandy’s wounds with the Force, lift Rotta the Hutt with the Force, or use the Force to pacify a rabid dog-like animal. But he can’t handle *basic* instructions like, “no, don’t press the missile button twice.” I’m not a parent, so I don’t know exactly how young childhood development works. But to me, Grogu seems either too overpowered for his developmental stage, or too developmentally delayed given the impressive things he can do. I get that we’re dealing with an alien species that clearly ages at a different rate, but the contradictions are too extreme to make the character feel at all believable. When it was a seemingly instinctual thing – that Grogu was using the Force innately without really *intending* to do so, as in his first couple of appearances – that might’ve just about passed muster. But when he clearly has powerful abilities that he can control, his otherwise weak and helpless presentation, and his inability to do basic tasks or follow simple instructions, doesn’t make much sense.
Grogu.
I will give credit to The Mandalorian and Grogu for – somehow – avoiding the worst fan theory on the internet: that Grogu is, in fact, a time-travelling Yoda. I genuinely feared that this was gonna be the way this character’s story would end; that somehow, some way, he’d *literally* turn out to be Baby Yoda. Thankfully, that was a bridge too far even for this iteration of Star Wars.
However, you could tell from the very on-the-nose, not-at-all-subtle imagery in Grogu’s sequences on the Hutt planet that the film was leaning into Yoda in a huge way. The mud hut Grogu constructs for Mandy is very similar to Yoda’s Dagobah hut, the stick he uses is reminiscent of Yoda’s own walking stick, and even the boggy, swampy setting reminded me a lot of those scenes in The Empire Strikes Back. Rather than coming across as respectful homage, though… it just felt like a blatant, shameless rip-off, done for no other reason than to say to fans, “hey! Remember how good Star Wars used to be?”
‘Member how much fun Star Wars used to be?
I almost wrapped up this review without actually talking about Mandy the Mandalorian – y’know, the title character? Mandy is such a non-entity in both his own show and his own film that I literally do not know what to say about him. He wanders around, shooting and punching things for the barest of reasons, stumbling through the plot, reading all of his lines in a bland monotone, never emoting, never explaining, and just… doing nothing at all. When he got injured and poisoned and seemed on the verge of death, I didn’t think “oh no!” and I didn’t even think “good, finally we can get rid of this clown.” I just felt absolutely nothing at all; no reaction. Mandy could’ve died, and I guess the film might’ve been able to claim it had made a point about parents making sacrifices for their kids, or something – even though that isn’t really what Mandy did. But at least it would’ve been *something* – and a definitive ending for the character, given that the film is supposed to bring this chapter of Star Wars to a close.
But The Mandalorian and Grogu couldn’t even do that, of course. Gotta leave that door cracked open for a sequel for when Disney runs out of other characters to strip-mine, eh?
Mandy’s best moment arguably came when he was stripped of his helmet by the Hutt twins, robbing him of some of his honour or standing in the Mandalorian community. Except… we’ve already done this before in the series, where Mandy had a whole storyline of having to “atone” for removing his helmet. And, to cap it all off, the Hutts *gave him his fucking helmet back* all of three minutes later because… plot armour has to be literal, I guess?
Wait, that might be the wrong helmetless Mandalorian…
I mentioned earlier that some of the film’s visual effects weren’t spectacular, so let’s briefly touch on that. There were a few moments when Mandy and Grogu visited “the 90’s New York planet” (whose name I’ve already forgotten) where Disney’s fancy AR wall just wasn’t especially well-integrated into the sets around it. This is also a problem I noted in Obi-Wan Kenobi, though I would say things have slightly improved since then.
While I’ve praised The Mandalorian and Grogu for its use of physical props and puppets, CGI continues to be a weak spot for the Star Wars franchise. Several of the film’s alien monsters, especially in the fight sequence with Rotta and Mandy, didn’t look especially believable, and there were moments with Rotta himself and the other two Hutts that just weren’t at the level I’d have expected from a film with a budget well north of $150 million. There were also a few odd moments where Mandy’s alien pilot/sidekick’s mouth seemed not to move in sync with his voice lines; the same issue plagued the Hutts at several points, too.
Behind-the-scenes during production.
The Mandalorian and Grogu was a boring, uninspired film that achieved next to nothing. Its world was populated by paper-thin, intensely forgettable characters, it arranged a series of action scenes into something barely resembling a plot, and the only time it even came *close* to having something meaningful to say, it quickly dumped all of that for the next brain-dead fight sequence or lingering shot of an unimpressive CGI creature.
Unlike The Rise of Skywalker or The Phantom Menace, which stick in my memory for all the wrong reasons, The Mandalorian and Grogu is already fading. It’s just pure fluff; the absolute definition of “content for content’s sake.” The film says nothing, delivers nothing, goes nowhere, and doesn’t even introduce anything genuinely new to this long-running fictional world. I would say that The Mandalorian and Grogu will be a contender for my “worst film” award when I hand out some imaginary statuettes in December (something I do every year, so I hope you’ll join me for that!) but honestly… I’m already forgetting about the film *now*, having seen it twice in the span of just a few days. I doubt I’ll even remember it exists in four-plus months from now.
It wouldn’t be Star Wars without X-Wings, right?
I continue to hope for better things from Star Wars, but the franchise has really been on a downward trajectory for close to a decade already. Disney spent a ton of cash to buy the rights to this IP, in the full expectation that it would be a license to print money. But The Mandalorian and Groguhas been a box office bomb; the worst-performing film in the franchise to date, eclipsing even Solo: A Star Wars Story from 2018. There are fewer and fewer bright spots in Star Wars, unfortunately, and relatively few things I can say I’m genuinely looking forward to any more.
Perhaps this’ll have to be the subject of a longer essay one day, but… do you think maybe Star Wars needs another break? Novels, comics, and video games could keep the franchise alive for its hardcore fans, but maybe it’s time to take the cinematic franchise and the streaming shows and just put them on the back burner for a while until someone has a genuinely good idea for what to do and where to take things. I know that there are new Star Wars projects in various stages of production… but can you honestly say you’re *excited* for any of them? At best, I’m mildly curious to see whether the next film, the next show, or the one after that might actually bring something new to the table. The Mandalorian didn’t, and nor did its cinematic adaptation.
So that’s all for today. I didn’t enjoy this film, as you can tell! If it’s the final chapter in The Mandalorian saga, as has been promised, well… all I can say is that I hope whatever Star Wars does next will be an improvement. Thanks for checking out my review. Click or tap here to read some of my other reviews and articles about the Star Wars franchise… and may the Force be with you, I guess.
The Mandalorian and Grogu is available to stream now (for a fee) on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and other video-on-demand platforms. The Mandalorian and Grogu will likely be available to stream on Disney+ later in 2026, and will also be available on DVD/Blu-ray later in 2026. The Mandalorian Seasons 1-3 are available to stream now on Disney+. The Star Wars franchise – including The Mandalorian and Grogu and all other titles and properties discussed above – is the copyright of Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series Seasons 1 and 2, The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home, The Next Generation Seasons 1, 2, and 7, Deep Space Nine Seasons 1 and 4, Voyager Season 7, and Discovery Season 2.
Last week saw Strange New Worlds’ fourth season get off to a bit of a lacklustre start, to say the least. An overstuffed story with too many things on the go at once didn’t have the space to do justice to “the dinosaur episode” concept that pre-season marketing material had teased, so I had hopes that this week’s outing – The Griffin Incident – would be a significant improvement.
Going into Season 4, we’d seen a couple of tiny clips from the episode as part of pre-release trailers and teasers, but nothing to really gauge what kind of episode The Griffin Incident was going to be. When it was revealed that this was going to be a horror-inspired story, my curiosity was genuinely piqued! Depending on how we count things, Strange New Worlds has done horror or horror-adjacent episodes about half a dozen times up to this point in its run, and some of those episodes – All Those Who Wander from Season 1 most notably – have been exceptional. So there were reasons to be optimistic heading into this “ghost story.”
Hold on to your dookie… it’s about to get spooky!
As always, I’d like to give a caveat. Everything we’re going to get into today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one old Trekkie. If you disagree with me on the strengths and weaknesses of The Griffin Incident, if you don’t like my take on Strange New Worlds in general, or we just have different opinions on what makes for a fun Star Trek episode or a good horror story… that’s okay! The Star Trek fandom is big enough for a wide range of opinions to peacefully coexist, and there’s no need to get into an argument.
Okay, so what did I make of The Griffin Incident, then?
This is a bit of a toughie, to be frank. On the one hand, I spent close to fifty minutes on the edge of my seat, engrossed in a horror mystery that took me right to the edge of my personal comfort zone, with jumpscares, gore, a fantastic soundtrack, great cinematography, and some wildly unhinged (in the best way possible) performances from some of the show’s main cast! But on the other, The Griffin Incident broke what I consider to be one of the fundamental rules of storytelling within Star Trek by failing to provide an in-universe explanation for what happened aboard the titular USS Griffin.
The USS Griffin at the end of the episode.
The Griffin Incident was, in a sense, a bit of a “bottle episode,” using only a couple of guest stars and no new sets or filming locations; the action took place aboard the Enterprise sets. But working within that limitation, I have to give credit to the set designers, artists, and camera crew for coming up with some incredibly creepy and creative ways to make the familiar seem strange, unsettling, and genuinely frightening. The Griffin Incident, in that sense, reminded me a lot of All Those Who Wanderfrom Season 1, which likewise took advantage of existing sets to tell a horror story. Or, going back even further, we could point to episodes like Voyager’s The Haunting of Deck Twelve, DS9′s Empok Nor, or TNG’s Starship Mine as examples of spooky or creepy stories which mostly relied on their shows’ main stages and sets.
When you have to work with sets that aren’t really designed with horror in mind, figuring out how to make them feel intimidating, unsettling, or spooky is a genuine challenge. It’s never as simple as “just turn the lights off,” or “mysterious blood stains;” episodes like The Griffin Incident have to do more if we, as the audience, are to buy into the idea of being trapped aboard a derelict starship where terrifying things are unfolding. And that comes from a combination of things: set dressing, to take existing sets and “spookify” them. Camera work, using established horror techniques to ramp up the tension. Focus, by keeping certain creepy characters just far enough out of focus that our imaginations run wild. Sound design, including the use of familiar sounds, silence, and unexpected noises. This goes beyond just “bumps in the dark!” And finally, music. The score has to learn from old horror films and episodes to really elevate the tension and fear factor.
For me, The Griffin Incident did all of those things phenomenally well.
The episode made wonderful use of light, darkness, the camera, sound, and more.
The lights aboard the USS Griffin weren’t just “off,” there was an ethereal glow to a lot of the scenes set aboard the derelict ship. And computer panels and displays used a shade of green that, in some films and horror stories, is associated with ghosts or supernatural phenomena. In past iterations of Star Trek, that same shade of green is often used for the Borg – another faction with a definite fear factor! There was an almost sickly feel to parts of the USS Griffin: the medical bay and the hallways in particular. Scenes set in these locations, through little more than changes in lighting, conveyed a real sense that something wasn’t right – that spooky shenanigans were afoot.
There can be something inherently unsettling to seeing usually bustling places abandoned or deserted. This is the explanation behind the “liminal space” idea that’s become popular online, and has even translated to big-budget horror films like this year’s Backrooms. Seeing spaces that should be populated left empty and abandoned makes the hairs on the backs of our necks stand up; it’s an instinctual thing, I guess. And, again, this feeling was present in the deserted hallways and rooms of the USS Griffin – elevated by the lighting and an absolutely fantastic musical score.
La’an in the USS Griffin’s deserted engineering room.
From the moment the trio boarded the Griffin, we were also treated to some fantastic cinematography and camera work. The way the camera would linger over certain shots, or keep spooky ghostly figures just out of focus behind whoever was in front isn’t earth-shattering stuff for the horror genre, but it was pulled off absolutely pitch-perfectly here. The production team had clearly watched plenty of horror films for inspiration, and managed to recreate established techniques to really convey that sense of dread, unease, and fear.
The combination of these techniques – lighting, cinematography, set design, and the camera – would still have fallen flat, though, were it not for music and sound design. The Griffin Incident used silence to great effect, but also brought in recurring noises from everyday life that – thanks to the inherently creepy setting – became genuinely frightening. Hearing a baby cry or a wind-up toy in motion wouldn’t even register most of the time, but these became almost motifs for the episode’s intensely frightening story. And the score, once again, was just perfect for this kind of spooky episode.
“Sam” hears a noise.
I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror, and supernatural stories in particular really give me the creeps! Past Star Trek episodes – including in Strange New Worlds – have occasionally caught me out with a jump-scare or frightening moment, but I think it’s fair to say that The Griffin Incident is unmatched anywhere in the franchise for its unsettling, haunting, and downright creepy atmosphere. From the first moment the away team boarded the USS Griffin, that sense of dread and fear set in… and didn’t let up again until they made it back to the Enterprise.
We got some interesting character moments in The Griffin Incident for each of the three primary characters. I’ll cover each of La’an, Kirk, and Spock in turn.
For La’an, The Griffin Incident seems to further a storyline that last week’s episode raised – but didn’t have enough time to do anything of consequence with. For some context, I felt La’an’s scene with Dr M’Benga and Nurse Chapel in Valles Marineris was little more than clunkily-worded exposition; the worst part of an episode that was already disappointing. But there was scope, I felt, for that storyline to be expanded upon.
What’s going on with La’an?
The Griffin Incident feels like the next chapter of an unfolding La’an story. I’m not one to speculate or theorise (okay, that’s a *blatant* lie) but if I were, I’d stand by what I said in my review of Valles Marineris: that this storyline involving La’an’s recessive augment DNA is, somehow, going to lead to the end of her time on the show. The tagline for Strange New Worlds Season 4 has been “one step closer to where it all began;” i.e. that the season is going to bring the characters on the show closer to where they were at the start of The Original Series. Only… La’an is one of several characters who isn’t serving aboard the Enterprise by that time.
I won’t dedicate too much time to theory-crafting, because the truth is that I really don’t know precisely where this storyline will lead. It could conceivably lead to La’an’s death; Strange New Worlds has already killed off Hemmer, Captain Batel, and others across its three-and-a-bit seasons so far. Or it could see La’an take a leave of absence, quit Starfleet altogether, go rogue and have to be taken out… the list goes on! But this idea – that La’an’s latent augment genes could be becoming more active – is clearly tied to her arc this season, and with this season beginning to set the stage for the end of the series and a transition, of sorts, to TOS, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing the first steps down a path which will lead to La’an’s end… one way or another.
Could this “augment DNA” storyline be La’an’s swansong?
Kirk and Spock were both able to push past the supernatural nonsense of the USS Griffin, at least to an extent. Spock drew on his inner logic, and Kirk – despite hallucinating wildly – managed to repeatedly tell himself that the noises he was hearing weren’t real, and retained more of his sanity than La’an did. But La’an, by the story’s climax, had been fully claimed by whatever was aboard the USS Griffin, and I think it was implied that that was tied to her augment heritage and DNA. As happened last season, when she was briefly given Vulcan DNA and turned into a Romulan, La’an’s recessive augment DNA seems to have caused her to have more of a reaction to the Griffin and whatever was going on there.
That’s my read on her side of the story, anyway.
La’an was also the one who decided that the group should split up (which, let’s be honest, is a bit of a horror cliché, but I think we can overlook it!) This saw Spock left alone in the abandoned sickbay, and later, Kirk alone on the bridge. La’an seemed to be taking on a leading role, at times, offering suggestions and, while not exactly giving orders, certainly taking charge of the situation in those crucial early minutes. I like this, at least in theory, less for what it does for La’an than what it says about these younger versions of Spock and Kirk. If we return to the season’s promise to take us “closer to where it all began,” we’re seeing Kirk and Spock before they were captain and first officer, and I think I’m right in saying that they’re all the same rank as of this episode.
Kirk, Spock, and La’an aboard their shuttlecraft.
La’an’s storyline also saw her uncovering parts of the story of the USS Griffin’s security officer, Lieutenant Harper. The episode leaves it open to interpretation, I guess, how much of what La’an saw of Harper’s logs was real and how much was illusory, but I think there must’ve been at least some truth to it. We’ll get into a bit more detail about this when I talk about my biggest dislike from The Griffin Incident, but for now, suffice to say that this was an interesting idea that I don’t think the episode managed to make the most of.
Harper’s logs depicted a “descent into madness” that mirrored La’an’s own – though it was ambiguous whether she was the only one affected on the ship, whether she might’ve been immune, at least at first, or whether any of the things she reported actually happened. As I said, we’ll cover this in more detail later on, but for me… this side of the story started out very strongly, but didn’t end spectacularly. If a storyline is going to tease us with an engaging and horrifying mystery, that’s fantastic! But it needs to have an ending. And Harper’s story… doesn’t.
The “ghost” of Lieutenant Harper.
I did like, however, the makeup and costume that brought Harper back to “life” in her scenes with Kirk and La’an. The grey, cracked skin and moulded, decaying uniform made her look truly unsettling and spooky; somewhere between a ghost and a zombie, perhaps. Combined with all of the cinematography and lighting stuff we talked about earlier, I got the sense that Harper – or whatever entity was using her form – was almost constantly watching the away team, ready to materialise at any moment. For this kind of story, that’s exactly what the audience should be feeling!
Let’s move on to Kirk.
Kirk’s story bridges a gap between something we learned last season and what we’d eventually see in The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock: the birth of David Marcus and Kirk’s relationship with him. In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk didn’t immediately recognise David, but did know who he was when he confirmed his name. The Wrath of Khan makes it pretty clear that Kirk was an absent father – by Carol Marcus’ request. With David being a baby in this era, it doesn’t tread on the toes of canon to say that Kirk might’ve visited Carol and David, attempted to maintain some kind of a relationship with them for a time, and even, as we see in the episode, treated David to gifts and messages.
Kirk works on his message to Carol and David.
This is the kind of thing that, in my opinion, modern Star Trek hasn’t always done particularly well. If you’re writing a prequel, or a story which otherwise has to fit in with an existing, long-running franchise, there’s a balance to be struck between doing something new and ensuring your story doesn’t retroactively change things. Moments in The Griffin Incident with Kirk showed that he had an interest, at least in the beginning, in being part of Carol and David’s lives, which I think is actually an improvement for his character. One of Strange New Worlds’ producers, in a pre-season interview, said something along the lines of wanting to transform Kirk into less of a “deadbeat dad,” and while I never really interpreted Kirk and David’s relationship that way in The Wrath of Khan or The Search for Spock, I think you can make the argument that doing something like this is a net positive for Kirk’s characterisation.
When you’re writing a prequel to a well-established story, it’s not difficult to come up with moments that seem to “foreshadow” events which transpire further down the timeline. La’an’s line to Kirk about how his son would die “at the end of a blade” – referencing the famous scene in The Search for Spock – really did hit me, though, because it was such an unexpected callback (or call forwards, I guess). It was an impactful line referencing one of Star Trek’s most brutal and unexpected character deaths, and on a first viewing, not knowing that La’an was about to say it? It really landed.
This moment was brutal.
One character I feel that Strange New Worlds has sidelined and hasn’t fully taken advantage of is Kirk’s brother, Sam. When Sam was introduced as part of the crew back in Season 1, I felt it was a good idea – a way for the new show to include someone connected to Captain Kirk but without making Kirk himself so prominent. But I think it’s fair to say that the writers have favoured Jim over Sam in stories where a Kirk has been present! The version of Sam Kirk that we encountered this time was a fiction; a completely illusory character created from his brother’s mind. But it’s still the most significant time we’ve spent with Sam in… ages, really, and we got a few interesting moments from those sequences.
Firstly, I thought it was interesting how the brothers talked about their father and how he’s been absent from their lives. I can’t help but feel it clashes a little with a line from Star Trek ’09, where Spock Prime told JJ-verse Kirk that his father watched him become captain of the Enterprise… but, thematically at least, it was in keeping with Kirk’s storyline in The Griffin Incident, as Kirk contemplated his own role as David’s father and contrasted it with his own memories of his father’s parenting skills.
The Kirk brothers.
Sam Kirk also got one of Star Trek’s most genuinely gruesome and brutal deaths, being sucked out of a hole in the Griffin’s damaged bridge. Seeing his intestines ripped out through the hull breach and then his body ejected into space was shocking stuff – and by Star Trek standards, at least, exceptionally graphic and visceral.
This theme of visual brutality was present throughout the episode. We’ve talked about the makeup used for Harper – and for numerous other ghostly apparitions, particularly in La’an’s engineering scene – but there are two other powerful moments that have really stuck in my mind. I think you’ll probably guess which ones they are!
“Sam” got one of the most genuinely sickening and gory deaths that Star Trek has ever attempted.
First we have Captain Pike.
Anson Mount’s performance as the illusory version of Pike was truly fantastic; he could go from the regular version of the character to this unhinged maniac in a heartbeat. And his smile – or grimace, really – when staring down Spock was menacing. It reminded me of Heath Ledger’s take on the Batman villain the Joker from 2008’s The Dark Knight. There was something so truly unsettling seeing Pike’s instantaneous switch from the captain we all know and love to this dark, twisted vision… and Mount was exceptional at pulling it off.
Then we come to the moment of sheer unhinged brutality. Taking Pike’s love of cooking – long-established in the series – as a starting point, this illusion of the captain slices through his own fingers as if they were carrots or spring onions… and it was truly gut-wrenching stuff to watch. The prop used to represent Pike’s hand in that scene was fantastically detailed, and I think using a physical prop rather than trying to do something with CGI was absolutely the right call for this moment. It was gruesome, shocking, and bloody… and – again, by Star Trek standards – really sickening and unsettling to watch.
Captain Pike’s fingers…
Then we come to Spock.
We’ll start with Spock’s brutal moment, then talk about the rest of his storyline. Spock’s moment of visceral, bloody insanity saw the pointed tips of his ears sliced off – apparently not by any physical entity, but by Spock himself while his mind was controlled by whatever was happening aboard the USS Griffin. I kept expecting the camera to pan away or for the scene to fade to black before the illusory T’Pring made her “incisions;” the fact that we had to sit through the whole thing was, once again, exceptionally shocking and painful viewing!
The subsequent revelation that Spock injured himself – while under the sway of whatever happened aboard the Griffin – was equally shocking. Though it seemed obvious that T’Pring was just an illusion… there were moments, especially early in Spock’s storyline, where I just wasn’t sure what was going on. Could an entity (like Q, for instance) have beamed T’Pring to the wreck of the Griffin? It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility! The fact that The Griffin Incident could set up such a mysterious storyline is testament to the quality of the writing (in the first, like 90% of the episode, anyway… more on that later) and I was absolutely gripped.
Spock.
I was pleased to welcome back Gia Sandhu as T’Pring for this week’s outing. More than that, though, I was positively *thrilled* that we got a Spock storyline that didn’t rely on a love triangle, his romantic life, or some other kind of cringeworthy “Vulcan comedy” idea. I said multiple times last year that the writers seemed to have latched onto this idea that “Vulcans are all stoic and stuck-up, isn’t that hilarious?” and didn’t really know what else to do with Spock. It had gotten so bad that I genuinely wanted Spock to take a back seat if those were the only kinds of storylines that Strange New Worlds was going to throw him into.
There were brief hints at Spock and La’an’s relationship this week; a line in Kirk’s log, and a kiss between them near the beginning of the away mission. But for the most part, Spock’s romantic life wasn’t in focus – and when it was, it was *finally* played straight instead of as a joke. The illusory T’Pring brought up Spock’s insecurities – his half-human heritage, how she perceived him as lesser than other Vulcans because of his “emotional” side, and so on. And it was far and away more interesting than pretty much any “Spock comedy” storyline has been in the show so far. I might even be tempted to say that this was Spock and T’Pring’s best storyline in all three-and-a-bit seasons of the show to date.
Finally, a Spock and T’Pring moment that doesn’t rely on cringe humour!
What I think could be interesting for Spock and Kirk – we’ll have to see next week, or in subsequent episodes – is whether *this* away mission is going to be one of the inciting incidents in establishing their bond. We’ve seen glimpses in pre-season trailers and heard from producers in interviews that Season 4 is going to bring Kirk and Spock closer together – again, that “one step closer” idea from the season’s tagline coming into play. I was admittedly a bit surprised that the final act of The Griffin Incident didn’t so much as put Kirk and Spock together, let alone give them time to talk about what happened and share their experiences. But maybe that’ll come next time.
Kirk and Spock were both injured during this mission – Kirk more gravely than Spock, but even so. They both experienced hallucinations and other intense psychological effects from whatever happened to them aboard the USS Griffin, and bonding over a shared traumatic experience is an established way of setting up characters as friends. Or more than friends, if Strange New Worlds is bold enough to go full Spirk! I’m going to be very interested to see how the ramifications of this week’s adventure are handled for all three of the main characters; Strange New Worlds is semi-episodic insofar as most episodes offer a self-contained adventure, but characters grow, change, and develop over time, as well as retain what happened in previous episodes. If The Griffin Incident and its traumatic effects are just dropped and never mentioned again, I think that’ll be a bit of a black mark against it; if these events build up Kirk and Spock’s friendship or contribute to whatever’s happing with La’an, I think we can view it more favourably.
But that’s the hard thing about reviewing individual episodes before we know how the season as a whole will unfold, I guess!
Will these events strengthen the bond between Kirk and Spock?
I mentioned at the beginning that I felt reviewing The Griffin Incident was tricky because, as much as I enjoyed the vast majority of the episode and its horror-tinged story, it came with a pretty glaring flaw. In short, practically every other Star Trek story that I can call to mind does *something* to explain what happened, resolve its mysteries, or at least provide a definitive-feeling ending… but The Griffin Incident, despite setting up a truly engaging mystery, left things completely unresolved as the credits rolled.
I’ll give a few examples from past iterations of Star Trek, so we’re all on the same page.
The Doomsday Machine, from Season 2 of The Original Series, doesn’t tell us exactly who built the planet killer and why… but we learn enough about the automated weapon over the course of the story to understand its purpose, the threat it poses, and the necessity of stopping it. The Whale Probe, from Star Trek IV, likewise has an unexplained origin, but we understand what Kirk and the crew must do to save Earth in the future, and why they need to undertake their mission. The D’Arsay Archive, from The Next Generation Season 7 episode Masks, presents the crew with a problem to solve and mysteries to unravel, and despite the D’Arsay never being seen in person, we get a satisfactory resolution to the story.
La’an at the end of the episode.
There are many other stories like these across Star Trek’s six-decade run: the nebula aliens from Voyager’s The Haunting of Deck Twelve, the Sphere in Discovery’s second season, the Ennis and Nol-Ennis from Battle Lines in DS9′s first season, the neural parasites, the Conspiracy parasites, the infections from The Naked Time and The Naked Now, the Crystalline Entity… all of these, and many more, were never given full, in-depth explanations about their origins, their species, their overall objectives, etc.; some are still unknown decades later. But we understood their roles in the stories they were part of, and each of these stories and episodes received a proper ending.
That contrasts with The Griffin Incident. In addition to not even pretending to make up a technobabble explanation (negatively-charged ions was pretty much all we got, and that was right at the start), the episode just… ended. As soon as the trio were beamed away from the USS Griffin, La’an snapped back to normal, and Kirk and Spock were already most of the way there, pretty much. The episode provided neither an explanation for what happened nor a resolution to the story… and that’s unsatisfying in a fundamental way.
Who are these entities? What caused La’an, Kirk, and Spock to hallucinate?
I don’t want to go so far as to say that this lack of ending or explanation “ruins” The Griffin Incident, because – as mentioned – I enjoyed the preceding fifty-plus minutes of the story. But I’m afraid that the ending – or lack of ending, really – does taint the finished product. We got absolutely no explanation for what happened to either our away team or to Lieutenant Harper and the crew of the USS Griffin. Was it a disease or a pathogen, akin to what happened in episodes like The Naked Time or Genesis? Was it an unseen, aggressive alien messing with everyone, like a particularly sadistic Q? Was it technological, like a radiation leak or nano-bot infection? Was it a genuine ghost, spectre, or spirit? No character so much as offered a word of technobabble to explain it… and in some horror stories, that might be okay.
But this is Star Trek.
Star Trek has always been about heading into the unknown, exploring strange new worlds… and trying to make sense of it all. In the episodes and films I used as examples, we don’t always get a fully fleshed-out, down-to-the-millimetre explanation for everything. Sometimes our characters encounter aliens or phenomena in space that are too ancient, too incomprehensible, too different, or too… weird to really have a proper explanation. But in all of those stories, they at least *try* to figure out what happened, and don’t do what Pike did at the end of The Griffin Incident: hand-wave all of that away with a “space is weird, don’t even worry about it” kind of line.
“Meh, it doesn’t matter what happened. Maybe Division 12 can figure it out, but who cares, really?” is basically Pike’s attitude at the end of the episode.
As I said above, this is an exceptionally unsatisfying way for a story to end *in the Star Trek franchise,* even if such an ending might work just fine in some other sci-fi or horror series. Starfleet sets out to uncover the unknown, and in almost every other story in the franchise – of which there are 1,000 already – they achieve that, one way or another. That doesn’t mean we need to get into the weeds with the minutiae of every alien race or weird space phenomenon, but it does mean that, somehow, a story like this needs to end with either some kind of explanation for what happened or at least with the defeat of a clearly malicious adversary.
The Griffin Incident did neither.
Instead, the story ends with all three characters starting to get back to normal and process their experiences. And there were some genuinely great moments in this final act. I liked how each of Kirk, La’an, and Spock were paired up with a different main character for their epilogue. La’an got a mentoring moment from Captain Pike, which, deficiencies in the plot aside, was a nice moment for his character and hers. Spock got a rare scene with Chapel that was neither sexually charged nor ridiculously cringeworthy – again, a net positive for both of them. And Kirk got far and away the best of these little epilogues with Uhura.
Spock’s ear being healed by Nurse Chapel.
Season 3 gave us some interaction between Kirk and Uhura, particularly in the episode The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail – but this epilogue, I feel, did a lot for their relationship. Uhura calls Kirk by his first name for what I think is the first time, and if we’re looking at the story (and the season as a whole) from the point of view of bringing these characters closer to their TOS depictions, that’s a great thing. Kirk and Uhura were clearly on good terms by the time of The Original Series, establishing a firm friendship that saw them get through many different adventures together! Setting up how that began is an interesting idea with these younger, less-experienced versions of the characters.
But the epilogues, for all they brought to the table, still left things open-ended, as emphasised by the final shot of the episode: the ghostly form of Lieutenant Harper in the window of the wrecked USS Griffin. And, as I said, the lack of either a coherent explanation for what happened – alien entity, possession, infection, etc. – or the defeat/destruction of Harper and the Griffin leaves The Griffin Incident feeling unfinished and just unsatisfying.
The final shot of the episode.
As with La’an’s ongoing arc, though, perhaps it’s possible that we’ll revisit the ending of The Griffin Incident later in the season, or even next year in Season 5. If that’s the case, and if the mysterious Division 12 has found something to explain what happened… maybe we’ll be able to revisit the episode with the benefit of hindsight and cross out this line of criticism. I’m not holding my breath for that, given the way Strange New Worlds’ episodes have been structured… but you never know, eh?
A few final thoughts before we start to wrap things up.
This is the second time (after the fantastic episode Terrarium in Season 3) that “Division 12” has been mentioned. Are we going to learn more about this mysterious outfit later in the season, or at least before the series comes to an end? It feels suspiciously like Strange New Worlds is trying to drop hints at something to come, especially given how easy it would’ve been to say something more generic, like “the Starfleet science department” instead. I also wonder, unfortunately, whether this Division 12 might be tied to a story idea that, because of the show’s cancellation, we’re never going to get to see.
“Sam” floats in space… dead.
The “future leaders’ summit” was an interesting idea, and I appreciated that The Griffin Incident found a more natural-feeling way to include Kirk, as well as to set up the whole “there’s no immediate help” thing that was so crucial to the episode. It provided a solid way for the episode to get started, and all three characters feel like they could conceivably have been part of something like that – perhaps recommended by their captains, or else volunteering off their own backs.
Among several things left on the table were: was the shuttle really destroyed, or was that just another illusion? Did Spock actually learn the real fates of the Griffin’s crew – were they stabbed and beamed into space as the sickbay computer indicated? How did Pike and co. determine that it was safe to beam the away team to the Enterprise, given the conditions aboard the USS Griffin? Why did all three members of the away team have visions or hallucinations of the same Enterprise away team, and why weren’t any characters “duplicated,” or appearing to be in two places at once? Was that just for the benefit of us as the audience, to sell the illusion that Pike’s away team was real?
The Pike illusion…
So that was The Griffin Incident.
A huge improvement on last week’s outing… most of the time. The unsatisfying lack of explanation or a proper ending does, I’m afraid, put a bit of a downer on the final moments of the episode. And that’s such a shame, because not only was this Star Trek’s best and most terrifying horror story ever, but it really wouldn’t have taken much more than a couple of lines of technobabble to completely negate that.
Imagine if the episode ended with Spock saying something like this: “I have determined that a leak in the Griffin’s warp core caused the entire ship to slowly flood with negatively-charged ions, which affected the mental health of the crew – and, in turn, us as well.” Boom. Mic drop, science-y explanation delivered, and we could move on with our lives! Or, alternatively, La’an could’ve said something like this: “Lieutenant Harper’s logs showed that the Griffin visited Beta Sigma IX, where a member of the away team was infected by an unknown virus. I think this virus must’ve spread throughout the ship and compromised the crew. Residual viral spores then infected us – until the transporter cured us when we beamed back to Enterprise.” Again, we technobabbled our way to an explanation and a proper end to the story.
There’s something behind you, La’an…
Despite the fundamentally unsatisfying way The Griffin Incident concluded, I can’t lie: I had a lot of fun with the rest of the episode. We got a genuinely unsettling and frightening ghost story set aboard a derelict ship, deliciously evil illusory versions of several familiar characters, some absolutely brutal gore, an interesting idea that could bring Kirk and Spock closer together, and what feels like another step down a difficult path for La’an as she wrangles with her ancestry. There are plenty of wonderful things that the episode brought to the table, and while the lack of a proper resolution does put a downer on the story as a whole… it isn’t fatal, by any stretch.
Next week, Strange New Worlds is going to give the crew shore leave in Human Best Friend, and I’m already intrigued by both the concept and the episode’s title! I hope you’ll join me for a review of that. And if you missed it, I’ve already reviewed Valles Marineris and every episode from Seasons 2 and 3 of Strange New Worlds. Click or tap here to check out any of those reviews. As Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary approaches, I’ve got a few more ideas for articles and essays, too, so I hope you’ll stay tuned. Earlier in the year, I wrote about the very first Star Trek episode that I can remember watching: click or tap here for that. And if you didn’t know already, I had a wonderful experience in May, when I got to meet William Shatner – Captain Kirk himself – at Comic-Con: click or tap here to check that out.
Thanks for reading, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. Some still frames used above have been adjusted for brightness and ease of viewing. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The first part of this review of Disclosure Day is free from major narrative spoilers. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.
When I looked ahead to the cinematic experiences I hoped to enjoy in 2026, few stood out more than Disclosure Day. Steven Spielberg is a director whose films I’ve thoroughly enjoyed for decades, and not only was this a return to the science-fiction genre, but it was also something of a passion project. Spielberg has, apparently, been enamoured with UFOs and “little green men” for years, so Disclosure Day was the culmination of a long-held aspiration.
The trailer for Disclosure Day looked fantastic, too. An incredibly engaging mystery seemed to be on the cards, with government agents, alien abductors, and plenty of action to boot. I was genuinely looking forward to Disclosure Day, and I had high hopes for an enjoyable sci-fi UFO mystery-thriller.
And… I’m sorry to say that I came away pretty disappointed.
A trio of promotional posters.
As you can see above, this review is in two parts. I’ll try to briefly explain what I did (and didn’t) like about Disclosure Day without getting into narrative spoilers in this first section. And if you stick with me to the second section, we’ll talk about the story in a bit more detail. If you haven’t watched Disclosure Day yet, and want to avoid spoilers, the end of the spoiler-free part of the review is clearly marked. Feel free to bookmark this page so you can come back after you’ve seen the film, if you want!
Okay. Let’s talk about what I did and didn’t like.
Disclosure Day was a bit of a mixed bag in visual terms. There were plenty of well-done moments, and 95% of the time, I’d say the film looked good. It doesn’t have a particularly distinctive or unique visual style, and there aren’t going to be any UFO or alien designs that people are going to consider “iconic” in years to come… but it was solid enough most of the time.
Promo photo of Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day.
However, there were some visual misses – and they crossed the line into the dreaded “uncanny valley,” where people, animals, and aliens just didn’t look quite right. They weren’t realistic enough in terms of things like fur, hair, skin, or eyes… and it was incredibly jarring. Because these CGI creations were intended to be hyperrealistic, and because they were close enough that they didn’t look outdated or video-gamey, somehow that made it worse, if that makes sense! I just got the impression that more of Disclosure Day’s $115 million budget should probably have been spent on animation – or, failing that, the film could’ve used trained animals, puppets, and prosthetics to get a genuinely better and more believable visual effect.
Because some of these CGI misfires came at points that were incredibly important to the plot, they really dragged me out of Disclosure Day right at the moment where I *should* have been the most invested in the story. Because the film was a bit of a narrative mess, the story needed all the help it could get – and where the visuals and CGI should’ve been primed to assist… they fell way short of the target.
One of the CGI critters.
Although I consider myself a sceptic when it comes to things like UFOs and giant government conspiracies, I’m happy to set real-world considerations aside when it comes to sci-fi and movies. Disclosure Day ain’t a documentary, and I’m perfectly happy to suspend my disbelief and go along for the ride – just as I am with other mysteries, conspiracy thrillers, and sci-fi titles. But I found Disclosure Day to have a weak, muddled story, one where characters didn’t speak or act at all naturally, and where the core premises seemed to trip over one another.
Disclosure Day wanted to tell a story about a cover-up and the race to tell the whole world the truth about UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors. And I can see a world where that kind of story is a fascinating, thrilling adventure. But because of the way Disclosure Day went about it, with so many ideas and concepts haphazardly thrown together… not only did none of the individual story elements work, but the big ideas at the film’s core ended up falling completely flat.
Two posters advertising the film.
I don’t like to come across as “picking on” individual actors or performers in any of my reviews. An actor’s performance is always at least partially helped or hindered by the quality of the writing, direction, editing, and other elements in a movie; look at 2019’s Cats as an example, which has an all-star cast but still flopped hard. So believe me when I say that this line of criticism is a rarity for me. But I felt Colin Firth was horrendously miscast in Disclosure Day, and he was not at all convincing as the head of this supposedly off-the-books American black-ops organisation.
Firth is British, and made no effort to change his voice or to appear in any way American, and that’s just such a weird and jarring choice – especially considering the point that Disclosure Day desperately wanted to make about cover-ups in the United States government. A British villain is also a bit of a Hollywood cliché nowadays, and I can’t help but feel that this role would’ve been so much better and more impactful had it been taken on by someone else.
Colin Firth felt miscast here.
One area of Disclosure Day that definitely deserves praise is John Williams’ score. Williams – a long-time Spielberg collaborator – never disappoints, and his score was intense when it needed to be, mysterious, and emotional. Towards the end of the film in particular, I found that the music really managed to elevate some otherwise really disappointing scenes, and it definitely succeeded at getting the emotional tone across.
There were also some clever stunts, action-packed car chases, and solid camera work and cinematography throughout the film. Despite the aforementioned CGI that I disliked, the rest of Disclosure Day looked pretty good, and there were a few particularly creative camera shots which managed to convey the idea that something was hiding just out of sight, or that characters were in more danger than they appeared to be.
Director Steven Spielberg during production.
I think I’ve said as much as I can without getting into narrative spoilers. If you want to know whether or not I recommend Disclosure Day, I’m afraid that the answer is a very reluctant “no.” I regret paying to stream it, quite honestly, which is a rare thing for me to say, and at time of writing at the end of July, it’s certainly the most disappointing film I’ve seen so far in 2026.
If you’ve already seen Disclosure Day (or you don’t care about spoilers), then stick around. Up next I’m going to talk about the plot in a bit more detail, and cover some of the specific areas where I felt Disclosure Day came up short.
Spoiler Warning: There are major story spoilers for Disclosure Day, including the ending of the film, from this point on.
Disclosure Day’s story suffers from one issue more than any other: there are too many elements and narrative threads present, and several of them seem not to be serving the main themes and ideas that the film wants to convey. I get the sense that Spielberg – who both directed and co-wrote the film – had all of these ideas about alien abduction, UFOs, government conspiracies, astral projection, crop circles, alien technology, and so on… and just kind of threw them all into a single story. Disclosure Day would’ve worked so much better if several of these ideas were cut back or cut out entirely, allowing the film to have more of a tight focus on its characters and core conspiracy idea.
The two main characters we meet in the film – Margaret and Daniel – both have some kind of connection to the aliens. And there was merit in the idea of watching this unfold over the course of the film; that we’d slowly unravel this mystery at their pace, discovering the truth as they discovered it. But the way this was handled, by granting Margaret in particular these weird “superpowers” of language, empathy, and basically mind-reading… it came across about as well as any unexplained superpower might. Margaret seemed to have the perfect skill at just the right moment to advance the plot, and it felt like she was being guided not by the unseen hand of a benevolent alien, but by the unseen hand of a writer who was out of their depth and had to invent new powers on the fly.
Margaret.
At key points in the story, Margaret was able to use knowledge from people’s minds and memories to basically give her the narrative equivalent of a “get out of jail free” card – literally breaking Daniel out of Wardex’s custody. And these powers weren’t established very well; she seemed to just pull them out of thin air, and then everyone around her acted strangely.
In the scene I just referred to, Margaret takes on the appearance of the wife of Scanlon (the head of Wardex). And by appearing as this (presumably) deceased individual, she’s able to just walk over to Daniel, break him out of custody, and even bring his backpack full of illegally-obtained evidence. She repeats this trick on half a dozen other agents who are tasked with stopping her. In order for this moment to be believable, we have to accept that not only can she do this – that she possesses this awesome power – but that everyone around her believes it, even though they still seem to know, deep down, that the person they’re seeing in front of them isn’t actually their loved one. Sure, it might be a shock for a few seconds to see a deceased partner or parent… but aren’t these supposed to be trained operatives? I had a hard time buying that *all of them* would just let her walk away because she has this party trick.
The crowd parts, and Margaret and Daniel just… drive away.
The same problem occurs at the film’s climax. After storming the TV station building, Scanlon and his team are ready to do anything to stop Margaret from revealing the truth. Until she picks up a magical macguffin and turns the power back on, at which point Scanlon apparently just gives up… and his team literally just walk away. That’s the culmination of this big fight, this conflict that’s been running for the entire length of the film. The villains just sit down, walk away, and let the heroes get on with it without, I dunno, firing their guns, breaking the cameras, arresting people, or whatever else shadowy government conspirators are meant to do at moments like that.
It was just so profoundly odd to sit there and watch the whole Wardex team, sans Scanlon, literally give up and walk away when they still had time to act. Stopping the truth from going public was the entire point of their organisation, and at the moment when they could have done something more to further that goal, they just… leave. Forget about “does that make sense in-universe,” because for a story, a narrative we’re supposed to be invested in? It’s massively unsatisfying. And it comes across like the writers realised they’d backed themselves into a corner and just kind of went “well, what if the Wardex agents all just… fucked off?”
Scanlon takes a seat and his team just… walks away.
For most of the film, I would’ve said that Disclosure Day did a reasonable job of avoiding the worst UFO and alien abduction clichés. There were oblique references to “seventy-nine years ago” (i.e. 1947, the year of the Roswell UFO incident, assuming the film is set in 2026), but that was okay. But the film’s final act leaned heavily into Roswell and other big UFO conspiracy events, and not in a way that felt natural. Perhaps a stronger story could’ve harkened back to these conspiracies and clichés, but for a film as muddled and narratively weak as Disclosure Day, I’m afraid this came across as desperate rather than anything else.
The same is true of the design of the aliens themselves. “Greys” have been a part of UFO lore for a long time, with some folks genuinely believing that this is what aliens will look like when we inevitably meet them. Whether you buy into that or not, I think we should be able to agree that the “grey alien” design feels pretty bland and trope-y in 2026, and a big-budget sci-fi film should be able to come up with something better and more original. Spielberg has already introduced us to a unique-looking alien in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but the aliens he brought to screen this time were basically unchanged from his earlier film Close Encounters of the Third Kind – some fifty years ago. I just think that both Spielberg personally and the sci-fi genre as a whole can do better than that when it comes to depicting alien life.
A “Grey alien” in 2026’s Disclosure Day…
…and a similar “Grey alien” from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.
All things considered, I think this ambitious story tried to bite off more than it could chew. Some elements – like crop circles or astral projection – could and should have been removed while Disclosure Day was still in the scriptwriting stage, and clichés like “two strangers who share a connection that only magical macguffins can reveal” should also have been cut out. The core idea of the government covering up UFOs – and UFOs, therefore, being a metaphor for all of the things that our governments hide from us or decline to tell us – is a genuinely interesting one, both on a surface level and more deeply. But a lot of the extraneous fluff got in the way and harmed that core message.
The film’s religious angle also seemed to go nowhere. Jane – the main character through whom this religious message was supposedly being conveyed – had a few moments of wrangling with it near the start of the film, but then both she and this idea fell by the wayside pretty quickly. Again, there’s the kernel of a good idea here: what would it mean for the world’s religions (Christianity in particular, I guess, since this is an American film) if alien life were revealed to exist? And would people worship benevolent aliens as akin to “gods” if they possessed sufficient powers?
This threatened to be an interesting concept for the film to examine… for all of five minutes.
Disclosure Day pretends to set out to answer these questions, but quickly abandons them. The argument of “should we cover up the truth” is seen through the lens of “religion is good for people, even if it isn’t true,” and that’s a conversation that’s absolutely worth having. But realistically, if the film wanted to approach that topic, it needed to be the main focus – not a half-arsed side-story.
The film relies heavily on one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs outside of its main three (or even just two) characters, and we get very little characterisation for most of them. There are clichés aplenty, too, like dead wives and jealous boyfriends, and some incredibly convenient characters who happen to say just the right thing at just the right moment. Where else would we find, for instance, a nun who happens to be open to the idea of extraterrestrial life?
Here she is.
I wanted to like Disclosure Day. I like Steven Spielberg’s films – not all of them, but even some of his supposed “lesser” titles, like The BFG or Ready Player One – and I like the idea of a UFO mystery-thriller. Spielberg has pedigree in the sci-fi world, so I didn’t sit down to watch Disclosure Day hoping I’d hate it or wanting to have a bad time. I wouldn’t have paid good money to stream it if that were the case!
Unfortunately, though, the film’s trope-laden story, odd narrative choices, uninspired visual style, and more all came together to make a picture that I just did not enjoy. Even more disappointingly, I feel like I can see the barest bones of a good film buried deep beneath the surface. Excavating that version of the film would’ve taken major rewrites and a massive amount of work, though.
I hoped for better things from Disclosure Day.
So that was Disclosure Day. Will it be eclipsed before December by an even worse film? Or have we found the first genuine contender for 2026’s “Worst Film” award? Every year, I like to hand out some made-up trophies and imaginary statuettes, so swing by just before New Year to see whether Disclosure Day makes the cut!
I’m a sci-fi fan and a Spielberg fan, so I hoped that Disclosure Day would be my kinda thing. It wasn’t, for the reasons I’ve tried to lay out in the review above, but I hope my take on the film has been of some interest, if nothing else. If you like film reviews, stay tuned! I’d like to take a look at titles like Supergirl, The End of Oak Street, and Digger over the weeks and months ahead. And I have reviews here on the website of a few other titles from earlier in 2026, including Iron Lung, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. Click or tap the links to read any of those. Thanks for reading, and see you… out there!
Disclosure Day is available to stream now (for a fee) on platforms like YouTube and Amazon Video. The film will be released on DVD/Blu-ray at a later date. Disclosure Day is the copyright of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Next Generation, Voyager, Generations, Discovery, and Starfleet Academy.
And we are back! Strange New Worlds’ fourth season has officially landed on Paramount+, so it’s time for a review of the season premiere. Unlike last time, Season 4 didn’t begin with a double-header, so there’s only one episode to get things started. I think I prefer it this way; Star Trek can be a binge-worthy franchise, but I personally prefer to give new episodes a bit of room to breathe.
As I did for Seasons 2 and 3, I’ll be following along with Strange New Worlds for weekly episode reviews, so I hope you’ll join me over the next couple of months.
As always, an important caveat before we get into the meat of the review! Everything we’re going to talk about today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one old Trekkie. If you hate my take, think I’ve missed something important, or don’t share my opinion of either Valles Marineris or Strange New Worlds as a whole… that’s okay. There’s enough room in the Star Trek fan community for differences of opinion and polite disagreement.
A new season of Star Trek is beaming in…
The start of a new Star Trek season always feels like a cause for celebration, and there are definitely aspects of Valles Marineris that I can say that I enjoyed. But I’m afraid that I didn’t really think that this episode was an especially strong one, narratively speaking, and that’s really for one main reason: there were too many ideas, too many characters, too many storylines, and too much going on at once. The episode simply didn’t have enough runtime to do justice to, frankly, *any* of the main things it brought to the table. And that’s a pretty big disappointment.
I’ve said this before in several of my Star Trek episode reviews, so I’m sorry for repeating myself! But the disappointing thing about Valles Marineris isn’t that the ideas, concepts, storylines, or character moments were bad… it’s just that none of them really got an adequate amount of time on screen to be fully explored. As a result, we got an episode of Star Trek which felt bitty and scattered, and which left way too many things unsaid or on the cutting-room floor. There were several genuinely fascinating ideas in the mix, but because the writers threw *all* of them into this one single episode, none of them had enough time to shine. And the result? Well… a bit of a mess. A disappointment. An underwhelming start to the season. Take your pick.
L-R: Celia Rose Gooding, Ethan Peck, Rebecca Romijn, and Paul Wesley on a barge at a Star Trek promo event in January 2026. Photo: Paramount
Let’s start with Uhura and her new Vulcan cadet. I’m sure this character (whose name I don’t think we even learned in the episode) will be back in subesequent episodes, and we’ll get to spend a bit more time with them then. That’s at least potentially interesting – and as I said in one of my Season 4 previews, I like the idea of Uhura getting this kind of character arc across the series as a whole – growing from the unsure cadet we met in Season 1 to a teacher and a mentor by Season 4. That’s a positive thing, and I’m happy to see it… at least, in theory.
But because this standoffish Vulcan cadet, and Uhura’s reaction to them, was such a nothing-burger in Valles Marineris, I can’t help but feel like this entire storyline could and should have been moved. Perhaps introducing this cadet next week, or in another episode where they’ll be more plot-relevant, would’ve been the better decision. It could’ve freed up a few absolutely vital minutes of screen time this week that other storylines were desperately lacking.
Uhura with the cadet.
Again, for the sake of clarity: this storyline isn’t bad – or, at least, it isn’t off to a bad start. It’s just that this episode in particular already had so many other things going on that these moments between Uhura and the nameless cadet would’ve been better spent elsewhere. I have to assume that the cadet is going to be part of at least one significant storyline later in the season – and even if not, I like that their presence adds flavour and depth to the wider Star Trek universe. Seeing cadets on assignment like this is like seeing a random Andorian or Caitian in the background; it reminds us that Starfleet is bigger than just our main hero characters. And that’s a positive thing because it helps the Star Trek universe feel lived-in and real.
But on this occasion, Valles Marineris wanted to have storylines about time travel, dinosaurs, the concept of cosmic fate and destiny, Pike coming to terms with what happened to Captain Batel last time, Pike’s promotion, some kind of burgeoning conflict-slash-inevitable romance between Ortegas and Scotty, and brand-new additions to the history of Star Trek’s galaxy. There wasn’t time for everything… not at all. And I’m afraid that, in order for the episode to get across the *main* themes and story ideas that the writers wanted to convey, something should’ve been cut or adjusted. And if I had to pick one place to start cutting? It would be the scenes with Uhura and the cadet, as they were totally disconnected from everything else.
This was a busy episode with a lot going on.
There were two big ideas on the go in Valles Marineris, and while they could – and arguably *should* – have been able to work together… they didn’t. The first was something that we saw teased in pre-season marketing material: Star Trek’s first-ever “dinosaur episode.” And the second was a time travel story about fate, destiny, and the need to allow a horrible catastrophe or crime to take place in order to secure the “correct” version of the present day.
Going back to dinosaur times to set up this kind of story was a creative idea. But the way it was handled in Valles Marineris meant that we neither spent much time with the dinos, having a fun Jurassic Park-inspired adventure, nor was there sufficient time to consider the real ramifications of everything on Pike’s side of the story. We learned, in brief, that: Pike and the Enterprise are literally responsible for the asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs, and by extension, humanity’s existence, that there used to be two other sentient alien races (besides the precursors to the Voth) in the Sol system, that some kind of “fate” or “destiny” exists in Star Trek at the macro level, not just for individuals like Pike, and that a race of humanoid Martians from millions of years ago had some kind of role in seeding the galaxy with their DNA. That’s *a lot* for any story to incorporate, so it’s no wonder that basically none of these points got time to be sufficiently explored.
So, uh, Pike (indirectly, I guess) wiped out the dinosaurs.
If you’ve read my review of Discovery’s fifth season, you might remember me saying something similar, but I don’t really like when Star Trek gets into the weeds with massive questions like “where did we come from?” or “who created the races in the galaxy?” because I think it robs the setting – and, by extension, us as the audience – of one of the franchise’s most fundamental building-blocks. We *don’t* always know why certain things happened – like the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs – and we don’t *need* to know. There doesn’t have to be a single in-universe reason for why humanity evolved… and it certainly doesn’t need to be tied to some of our hero characters. Those kinds of things are best left unexplained.
This was, in a nutshell, the Discovery Season 5 problem. By going all-in on the Progenitors, the seeding of the galaxy, and so on… the show tried to answer questions that never needed to be asked, let alone given an in-universe explanation. And this side of Valles Marineris suffered the exact same fate. What do we, as the audience, gain by learning that the Enterprise caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? That was never the point of Star Trek; it was never a story that set out to ask the question “where did we come from and why?”, and because Strange New Worlds is still a semi-episodic project, the massive in-universe implications – for humanity at large and for our characters on the show – almost certainly won’t be addressed in a big way.
Captain Pike.
The appeal of Star Trek, to me, is that the Enterprise encounters different aliens, different planets, and goes on different adventures every week. There’s plenty of room in that framework for things like time travel, and even for encountering humanoid races in the distant past. I think both of those concepts could have been made to work. But by doing the Discovery-esque thing of making it this massive, fundamental, history-altering thing – let alone a time-loop paradox that’s hand-waved away with the old “destiny” excuse – I’m afraid that Valles Marineris didn’t stick the landing.
Going all the way back to The Lost World (not the Jurassic Park sequel; Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel), dinosaur stories have been all about adventure. Conan Doyle imagined a remote plateau in South America where dinosaurs still walked the Earth, Jurassic Park depicted mad scientists bringing the long-extinct creatures back to life to turn a profit… but there’s always been that adventurous tone. Valles Marineris offered the opportunity for Star Trek to have its very own dinosaur adventure… but an overladen episode didn’t have the time for that. The moments we got with the away team were fun – almost certainly the most fun I had with the entire episode. But they were so painfully short that the idea of “Star Trek meets the dinosaurs” fell pretty flat.
I had high hopes when I saw the trailers…
Perhaps it’s because “the dinosaur episode” had been so prominent in Season 4’s marketing material and promos, but I really feel this promised episode didn’t live up to expectations. I liked the idea of seeing, for example, Spock using his tricorder and meticulously scanning and categorising different dinosaurs. But, of course, Spock didn’t even join the away mission. The away team encountered precisely *two* dinosaurs: a T. Rex, which they shot and stunned, and some kind of feathered velociraptor, which La’an punched. That’s it. Two dinosaurs. In the dinosaur episode.
There were the beginnings of a fun story here. I like the idea, for instance, of an alien shipwreck on Earth in this era, and a stronger story could’ve considered what that might’ve meant for the history of life on Earth. And I liked the idea of the crew landing on a strange M-class world, without understanding where or when they are because of technobabble. Concealing the truth like that… it could have been a creative way to introduce this story and set up the kind of dino adventure I was hoping to see. But it turned out to be a disappointment, because the episode had too much to do elsewhere.
A wrecked spaceship on the surface of prehistoric Earth.
I will say, on a more positive note, that I liked the way the dinosaurs looked. It was nice to see a feathered dinosaur; since Jurassic Park’s premiere some thirty-odd years ago, palaeontologists have discovered that a lot more dinosaurs had feathers, and I’m glad the designers were able to incorporate that. The T. Rex, too, felt like it could’ve walked straight out of Jurassic Park! And even the plants and trees of prehistoric Earth looked pretty great.
Star Trek’s creative team have clearly gotten a lot more comfortable with the AR wall since its introduction. There are still some occasional misfires; the hideous CGI whale in Starfleet Academy’s premiere, for instance. But for the most part, sets built around the AR wall have looked pretty good, and I think the recreation of prehistoric Earth looked great here. There was some fantastic CGI and animation work to bring this place to life. I just wish we’d had the chance to spend a bit more time hacking through jungles, climbing volcanoes, and dodging dinos with the away team.
Two of the CGI shots of prehistoric Earth.
This next part is going to seem a bit nitpicky, so feel free to disregard it if you think it doesn’t matter!
Voyager’s third season episode Distant Origin introduced us to the Voth – the descendants of a race of sentient dinosaurs who left Earth millions of years ago and eventually settled in the Delta Quadrant. The latest DLC pack for the video game Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown even features this race and a mission based on the episode, which is why it’s so fresh in my mind right now! The Voth were believed to have descended from hadrosaurs – a real-life dino species which existed in the Cretaceous period. So… where were the Voth, or proto-Voth?
When we saw an alien spaceship attaching itself to the Enterprise, I felt certain that we were about to encounter the Voth! That could’ve been a fun way to tie in this adventure to dinosaur times with an existing piece of Star Trek lore. Instead, we were introduced to a race of sentient Martians, and their enemies on another M-class planet in the Sol system. And while I don’t dislike that necessarily (at least, not in isolation), it does make me wonder why the Voth weren’t chosen instead. Was it the prosthetic makeup? I note that the Martians were pretty basic in their design, whereas the Voth’s reptillian makeup would’ve been more complicated (and expensive) to replicate.
A dinosaur.
I don’t wanna spend too much time on this, and I think there’s enough wiggle-room based on dialogue in Distant Origin to argue that the Voth (or their ancestors) might not have evolved into a sentient species by this point in time, let alone have been a technological or spacefaring people. But it would’ve been a fun callback to Voyager if we’d encountered the Voth or proto-Voth in this episode.
I mentioned above that I don’t dislike the introduction of the Martians or the Dol’drm *in isolation*, so let’s expand on that a little.
The history of Star Trek’s galaxy is already… well, let’s just call it “unnecessarily complicated.” There are the Progenitors, who apparently seeded half of the galaxy with genetic material. There’s the Q Continuum, with all of their time travel shenanigans. Then we have all of the time travel episodes to various periods in Earth’s past (or the past relative to the 23rd and 24th Centuries), which often saw various characters getting a little *too* involved in history!
Una and Ortegas on Earth.
In short, if this was the first Star Trek episode to visit the past, or even to touch on events in this exact era, I think I’d be okay with the Martians and the Dol’drm. Their existence adds to our understanding of the Star Trek galaxy. But because Star Trek is some six decades old, closing in on its 1,000th story, and because we’ve had plenty of episodes and storylines dealing with Earth, Mars, human history, pre-human history, and so on… it feels like an unnecessary addition. It complicates elements of the Star Trek galaxy’s fictional history rather than explains storylines that needed to be expanded upon… and I can’t help but feel that the dangling narrative threads that this episode leaves behind will never be addressed.
How, for instance, did the pre-warp Martians manage to travel the galaxy and leave their genetic material in dozens of races? Isn’t that what the Progenitors did in The Next Generation and Discovery, so doesn’t it tread on the toes of that story? And where were the Voth, or the ancestors of the Voth, in an era where we should’ve seen some evidence of them? Star Trek had never before teased the idea of a prehistoric Martian race, nor of a destroyed planet in the Sol system, and while these ideas can be made to work… they’d have worked a lot better if they were painted on a blank canvas instead of having to be shoehorned in between existing pieces of lore from across sixty years of the franchise’s history.
Dr M’Benga explained that the Martians’ DNA somehow made its way all over the galaxy.
Time travel is not easy to get right. It doesn’t always work well in Star Trek, and even in dedicated films or books where time travel is a major plot point, it’s all too easy for writers to tie their stories in knots with paradoxes, time-loops, and so on. And Valles Marineris falls victim to this. The Enterprise’s direct involvement in the destruction of the Dol’drm homeworld and the Chicxulub asteroid impact is a predestination paradox; a particularly annoying kind of time travel plot hole that the episode tries to just hand-wave away right at the end. Why was the Enterprise there? Because *it was always supposed to be there*, duh. That’s it. That’s all the explanation we’re gonna get.
Even if this was for something small, it would still be infuriating! But the Enterprise is responsible for *literally all of humanity ever existing*, and it’s a fucking paradox! And all the explanation we’re offered is “well, that was supposed to happen. Now shut up and don’t tell anyone, ever.” Doesn’t that piss you off? Because it pisses me off! Throwing out “fate” and “destiny” as ways to get out of a time travel paradox is just so exceptionally lazy. Worse, it’s a massively overused trope; a cliché of time travel stories that’s been seen way too often. Star Trek has done this before, of course, but that doesn’t make it any better. And in a Discovery-inspired “the entire fate of all of history depends on this” storyline? It’s absolutely atrocious, to be blunt about it.
Spock explaining the origin of the Chicxulub meteor.
I want to talk about the Martians.
I was underwhelmed, to be honest, by the Martians’ visual presentation. The “humans with painted foreheads” thing really didn’t do it for me; they felt neither sufficiently ancient nor adequately alien, and their design didn’t even do what the Progenitors’ did back in The Next Generation, feeling like it could conceivably be a precursor to humans and other humanoid races. Costuming was also pretty uninspired; the Martians’ costumes looked like they might’ve originally been intended for the Romulans to wear.
Then there’s the question of technology. The Martian ship was easily able to pick up the damaged Enterprise, yet it was immediately assumed by Pike and co. that the Martians must be a pre-warp civilisation. Their visually impressive spacecraft apparently possessed no antimatter, because a single antimatter fuel cell from the Enterprise was able to be turned into a powerful weapon. Given that the Martians seemed to possess technology superior to Starfleet’s in some ways – like phasing through walls or language translation – I had a hard time buying that they were a pre-warp, pre-antimatter society. Heck, we can create actual antimatter here on Earth, today, in the real world. So how could the Martians not have that technology given the power of their spaceship, phasing, and so on? It just felt quite jarring to go from “oh no, this incredibly powerful warship has captured us!” to “the Prime Directive applies to these pre-warp simpletons” without sufficient explanation. “Show, don’t tell” – the old adage from Creative Writing 101 – should’ve been applied here, and if we’d seen for ourselves the limitations of the Martians’ technology, the episode would have avoided this. But, as we’ve already discussed, Valles Marineris was already overstuffed with storylines and content.
The Martians.
If I might nitpick (again), what do we make of a single starship fuel cell being used to destroy an entire planet? I know that antimatter is powerful – both in the real world and in Star Trek’s technobabble. Photon torpedoes use antimatter in some form, for instance, so we know it can be weaponised. But it seemed a bit of a stretch, to me, that an entire *planet* could be destroyed so casually with something that the Enterprise – and, by extension, every warp-capable ship in the galaxy – just uses for fuel. Why are *all* weapons not antimatter? Could a single torpedo blow up a planet?
In this instance, I get the sense that the writers just didn’t have the attention to detail or level of care that a story set in a long-running fictional universe needs. If a single fuel cell, small and light enough to be carried by a couple of people, can be used to blow up an entire planet… I mean, how are *any* planets left standing in the Star Trek galaxy? Surely the likes of the Klingons, the Cardassians, or the Borg would’ve weaponised antimatter in that way centuries or millennia ago. In other Star Trek stories, planet-killing superweapons – such as the unmanned vessel from The Doomsday Machine, or Red Matter from Star Trek ’09 – were assumed to be rare. They’re analogous to nuclear weapons: exceptionally powerful and dangerous, but very uncommon and difficult to create. Valles Marineris is apparently saying that every ship in the fleet is cutting about with dozens or even hundreds of potentially planet-killing superweapons that they do nothing with except use for fuel. And the only reason no one’s out there blowing up planets all willy-nilly is… just because?
The Dol’drm homeworld is destroyed.
In the run-up to Season 3, we learned that Strange New Worlds has been cancelled. And a big part of the marketing material for Season 4 has been this idea that the stories this time will take us “one step closer to where [Star Trek] all began” – i.e. The Original Series. As part of that, I have to imagine that we’re going to learn the eventual fates of several of Strange New Worlds’ original characters, the ones who weren’t part of The Original Series: La’an Noonien-Singh, Erica Ortegas, and Pelia, as well as Una Chin-Riley, who was absent after The Cage. I think Valles Marineris started at least one story arc which could tie into that.
Though, once again, it didn’t get enough time on screen or a sufficient explanation, La’an suffered an injury to her hand in Valles Marineris. The conversation she had with Dr M’Benga and Nurse Chapel made reference to her (in)famous ancestry and her “recessive” augment DNA, though it was a massive dump of exposition and a clumsily-worded scene that was probably the worst in the episode. Given that we know La’an had left the Enterprise before TOS, and that modern Star Trek writers have a penchant for taking things to the extreme… I think it’s fair to say that *at least* one of SNW’s original characters is going to be killed off before the end of the series, right? And what we saw this week with La’an could have set the stage for that. Perhaps she’ll go rogue if her augment DNA activates, and someone will have to stop her. Or maybe, as we saw last time with Captain Batel and the Gorn, something’s going on inside her with this DNA that’s going to accelerate the end of her life. In any case… it was a very barebones foundation, but perhaps it’s something to build on.
Goodbye La’an?
In Season 3, Captain Pike got a complex and deeply emotional story with Captain Batel – their relationship expanded and deepened before her untimely sacrifice. I said after the Season 3 finale that I’d have liked to spend a bit more time with Pike to consider the ramifications of what he went through; he seemed to experience an entire lifetime with her before her sacrifice, and then saw that “perfect” life ripped away. It was not only a life he got to lead with someone he loved, someone he had a family with… but it was also a lifetime in which his debilitating accident never occurred. There was scope, I felt, to consider an age-old question: is getting a taste of paradise, for just a moment, worse than never experiencing it at all?
This time, the Martian commander picked up on Pike’s loss, and snippets of conversations with Admiral April and Number One both hinted at or referenced what happened with Captain Batel. But I don’t think we’ve fully explored this idea just yet, and I’ll be curious to see how much further Strange New Worlds takes Pike’s emotional journey in the aftermath of Captain Batel’s loss. As above with La’an, there’s an interesting framework to build upon, and I’m glad that Season 4 didn’t just try to drop it and move on – something modern Star Trek has done with too many storylines, to be honest! But there’s more to do with Pike and his emotional state, I feel.
The Enterprise.
Then we have Pike’s promotion. This storyline reminded me a little of what we saw with Picard and Kirk in Generations – Kirk advises Picard to stay on the bridge of his ship, and not to accept a promotion to Admiral. Admiral April offers Pike the role of Commodore – a half-step to becoming a full Admiral, and role he may one day accept (depending on how we interpret Kirk’s line about Pike becoming a “Fleet Captain” by the time of The Menagerie), but on this occasion, Pike turns him down – though Una does receive a promotion of her own at the end of the episode, which was nice to see.
I think we’re going to see Pike’s promotion at the very end of the series, with him accepting this new role and having to transfer command of the Enterprise to Kirk as a result. But, again, this feels like Strange New Worlds laying the groundwork for that. Starfleet is sufficiently impressed with Pike as to offer him a promotion, and we know that, sooner or later, he *will* take a promotion ahead of his debilitating accident.
Pike turned down April’s promotion offer… for now.
Before we wrap things up, a few final thoughts.
Is Strange New Worlds setting up a sitcom-y “frenemies to lovers” storyline with Scotty and Ortegas? I don’t remember much interaction between them in Season 3, after Martin Quinn joined the cast, but there was definitely something between them this week. Ortegas complained about Scotty’s safety features and mocked his accent, and the two developed some kind of rivalry between the pilot who flies the ship and the engineer who keeps it flying. Could this arc – if indeed it exists – be tied to Ortegas’ exit from the Enterprise bridge ahead of the season finale? We know, thanks to Paramount’s casting announcement, that Sulu will have some role to play in Season 5… and Sulu will be the Enterprise’s helmsman under Kirk’s command. So where does that leave Ortegas?
Pelia seemed to make a reference to long-running sci-fi series Doctor Who, claiming to have seen one of these solar storms before, while aboard “a phone box.” This is a fun little Easter Egg, of course, but it also ties into something that showrunner Akiva Goldsman has said: a crossover with Doctor Who was actively considered by both the Star Trek team and the Doctor Who team, and that it came relatively close to happening. In Goldsman’s words: “Pelia travelled in the TARDIS. Why not?” I don’t mean to say that this reference was intended to tie in with a specific crossover story idea, but it furthers something we saw in Season 3, and it’s another fun little connection between these two legendary sci-fi properties.
It was nice to see Pelia this week.
So that was Valles Marineris. It didn’t wow me, to be blunt about it. And I think, on balance, it’s the weakest of Strange New Worlds’ season premieres, which is a bit of a shame.
However, Strange New Worlds remains a mostly episodic show, and while there are storylines that kicked off this week that will be continued across the rest of the season, there will be a new adventure for Pike and the crew next time – hopefully a stronger, more enjoyable one. I had high hopes for a fun dinosaur-themed adventure when I saw them in the trailers and teasers, but unfortunately, the finished product was a muddled, overstuffed time travel episode with a glaring, overdone paradox at its heart, and an episode that didn’t really have enough time to spend on any of its potentially interesting and fun ideas.
Given that Seasons 4 and 5 were written with the knowledge of the show’s cancellation and ending in mind, I hope this week’s overladen, disjointed episode isn’t a harbinger of things to come. If the writers and creative team have more ideas for stories than there are available episodes… well, we could see more episodes that end up trying to cram in too much content. For me, that would really soil the remaining season-and-a-half, so I’m crossing my fingers that Valles Marineris is a one-off blip rather than an indication of what the rest of Seasons 4 and 5 will look like.
Scotty and Ortegas… Strange New Worlds’ next couple?
Thanks for joining me for this review. If you missed them, I have reviews of every Strange New Worlds Season 2 and 3 episode here on the website – you can find them by clicking or tapping here. And as this season rolls out, I’ll be following along with weekly episode reviews, so I hope you’ll stay tuned for some of that! In this big sixtieth anniversary year, I’ve also been writing a few pieces celebrating the Star Trek franchise, and I’ve reviewed Season 1 of Starfleet Academy and the video game Across The Unknown, too. I hope you’ll check out some of those articles and reviews if you have the time.
So Strange New Worlds Season 4 has landed… but not with as strong an episode as I’d have hoped to see. However, there’s still plenty of time for things to turn around, and every season of Star Trek, frankly, has these duds or less-interesting stories. As long as it’s a one-off, I think we can survive episodes like Valles Marineris. And hey, if you enjoyed it more than I did… then that’s great! The Star Trek fan community should be a big tent, and there’s always going to be a range of different opinions on which episodes and films are the best.
See you next week for a review of The Griffin Incident, and until then… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The first three seasons are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and its DLC. Spoilers are also present for Star Trek: Voyager.
I wasn’t expecting this – and certainly not so soon after launch – but Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown has just received its first add-on! There were a couple of free updates to the game earlier in the year, which made a few improvements and also added in the fan-requested Delta Flyer, but this is the first of several planned pieces of DLC for the game. I paid £25 here in the UK for the “Expansion Pass,” which promises to add all of this content in four additions over the next few months. So far, at time of writing, only the first DLC pack – titled Delta Chronicles – is available, but I jumped in anyway to check out what’s been added.
And I gotta say, I’m impressed!
This review will be in two parts… probably. I don’t anticipate reviewing each of the four DLC pieces individually; that just seems like a lot of work relative to the amount of content. I’ve already written two articles reviewing the base game, and I even compiled almost two hundred screenshots in a gallery here on the website, so Across The Unknown has been covered pretty comprehensively! Today, I’m going to cover the first DLC pack (that’s Delta Chronicles) and talk a little about what’s been teased for the remainder of the Expansion Pass. And later in the year – or in the early part of 2027, perhaps, once all of that content has launched – I’ll talk about the rest of it. That’s the plan, anyway! But plans have been known to change.
At time of writing, only the first of four planned DLC packs is available.
Before we go any further, I encourage you to check out my review of Across The Unknown, which you can find by clicking or tapping here, and my follow-up piece, which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Those articles will give a lot of context for what we’re going to discuss today, and you can get my thoughts on other aspects of the game from my first two run-throughs.
Secondly, I want to briefly talk about what I did – and didn’t – do in order to review this downloadable content. I went back to Across The Unknown… but not for an entire playthrough. Instead, I used the game’s sectors as checkpoints, and jumped in only to the places where there was new content to play. I didn’t really want to commit to another full run through Across The Unknown, having done two already just a few months back. As a result, I didn’t necessarily get the “full DLC experience,” like having DLC characters or allies available for the remainder of a playthrough. I think what I did is more than enough for a review of the available content, but if you disagree… no hard feelings!
Captain Janeway and the Doctor in Sickbay.
Before we talk about what’s been added, let’s talk about what’s yet to come!
Later in the year, there’ll be new missions, new characters, and even an entire new sector – presumably complete with a main mission of its own. And all of that sounds like an absolute blast! Across The Unknown adapted many different episodes from Voyager, but there was still a lot of content left on the table for the game to pick up. I’m very pleased that the developers are continuing to add new content – some of which, like the Delta Flyer, is free – and I’m happy to pay for DLC for a game like this. I know this is my bias as a Trekkie showing, but Across The Unknown is genuinely one of my favourite games of the year so far, and when it wasn’t overpriced to begin with, I’m happy to splash out on DLC.
Perhaps the thing I’m most curious about, though – and very, very interested in – is the upcoming Equinox DLC.
This sounds like it’s going to be some kind of much more difficult mode, with players able to take on the challenge of commanding the USS Equinox instead of (or as well as? Not sure on that!) the USS Voyager.
A new DLC based around the USS Equinox is coming soon.
I just think this sounds like a fantastically creative and fun idea! The whole point of Equinox (the episode, as well as the chapter in Across The Unknown) is to make you think. Captain Ransom commits a horrible atrocity, but he does so claiming he was out of options and facing starvation and the deaths of his crew. Putting players in his shoes – perhaps facing a much more harrowing and difficult journey – could be absolutely fascinating.
Mechanically, it could be the game’s equivalent of a “hardcore mode,” with fewer hero crew members, less space for resources, a smaller, less-powerful ship, and more. And narratively, it could be a much more in-depth examination of that core theme of Equinox – challenging players by asking “what would you have done in Captain Ransom’s shoes?” In a way, only interactive entertainment can *really* get at the core of that kind of question. If that’s what Across The Unknown’s Equinox DLC is about… I’m all for it! I think it could be a really interesting and unique idea. Even though I think I already know, deep down, that I’m gonna be absolutely *rubbish* at any kind of extra-hard game mode!
Equinox’s MSD was briefly glimpsed in the trailer…
But that’s for another time. For now, let’s focus on the newly-available DLC for Across The Unknown.
Delta Chronicles adds two new hero characters, a fun new allied ship, and several new missions based on classic Voyager episodes. I tried out all of them, and I really had a blast. I’d say, if you take your time, don’t try to rush the missions, and just incorporate them into a standard playthrough of the game, there’s about two hours’ worth of additional content – perhaps two-and-a-half or even three if you really take your time, or have to re-play any of the missions. Here in the UK, Delta Chronicles retails for £8.49 (for the Steam version), and it’s also included as part of the £25 Expansion Pass. I think it’s pretty good value for what it is – though it’s almost certainly gonna be better value to buy the Expansion Pass rather than individual pieces of DLC.
The first mission is Cold Fire, based on the episode of the same name. This appears in Sector 3, and gives you the chance to meet Suspiria – the “other” Caretaker.
Voyager approaches Suspiria’s array.
This mission came with a few skill-checks, an away mission, and a bit of time spent researching and preparing an upgrade that (spoiler alert!) is necessary if you want to get a reasonably good outcome from the mission. Cold Fire is potentially risky for Kes; I think this is a point at which she could be lost, which could impact the remainder of your run. But it was fun, the away mission wasn’t too difficult or silly, and it was neat to step back to an episode I remember fondly but haven’t seen in a while.
One criticism of Cold Fire, though, would be that it felt *relatively* easy to accidentally get Voyager home years ahead of schedule! In my run, using an arguably imperfect save file, at a pretty early stage and without having the benefit of a ton of XP and upgrades, I basically had a 65% chance to convince Suspiria to use her Array to send Voyager back to Earth. That triggered a little cut-scene, which I did appreciate… but I can’t help but feel that a lot of folks could just sort of bumble into this early end to the game without really appreciating what’s about to happen. The whole point of Across The Unknown is to give you these choices, to let you have the run of Voyager and make different decisions. RNG (that’s “random number generation”) has been a big part of the game, and that’s… okay. But in this case? Maybe the probability of success is a little too high for something so early into the story!
Suspiria can send Voyager home…
Up next is Distant Origin. This mission was a bit more of a challenge; there were several pretty low chances of success, and failing any of them during the “away” mission (which actually takes place aboard Voyager this time) leads to the Voth escaping and the mystery remaining unresolved. A bit unsatisfying, especially if you’re doing a “no save-scumming” run! But if you beat the RNG (or you’ve upgraded everyone and everything so much that you have a higher likelihood of success than I did) then you’re rewarded with a fun encounter.
Voyager gets to take on the Voth City Ship – a massive capital ship – in a combat encounter, and I like the unique look of the ship that’s been created here. This is a mission, though, where you almost have to choose to get a less-than-perfect outcome; it’s possible, I think, for the Voth to basically believe Dr Gegen’s claims about his species’ true history, which in turn means he’s not gonna be available as a hero. The same can happen with Dr Telek R’Mor, Kashyk, and others – you have to be careful when making your dialogue choices with the Voth leader, in this case, to ensure you can escape with Dr Gegen in tow.
Engaging the Voth in combat.
I didn’t get to use Dr Gegen much after recruiting him, but I did go out of my way to bring him along on an away mission. As you might expect, he’s got scientific and medical skills which could be useful, and he offers a new kind of cloaking device when he’s recruited – though this needs to be researched in the tech tree. His unique ship combat skill is called Ship Hibernation, and it stops Voyager dead while repairing shields and other damaged systems. That seems… well, let’s just call it “situational” and leave it at that, eh? Not necessarily the most powerful ability!
But Dr Gegen has other potential uses on away missions, and his cloaking device reduces the difficulty of away missions – which, again, could be very handy as you get deeper into a run. When I go back to Across The Unknown for another full playthrough – perhaps later in the year or next year, when the rest of the DLC is out – I’ll definitely be curious to experiment with this a bit more! Re-playing Sector 5 to get the Distant Origin mission was a bit punishing; I’d forgotten how much Across The Unknown’s difficulty spikes around this point in the story!
Dr Gegen can join away missions once recruited.
Sector 7 brings us to Omega Directive, and this is a story with an away mission, some dialogue choices, some tech to research… and a major time crunch! In my first run through Across The Unknown, I got caught out by a Malon ship which I didn’t know would explode (ending my run and forcing me to restart or reload a save) if I let the timer run out. And I’m 99% sure that Omega Directive operates in much the same way. I think it could’ve been interesting to give players a choice here about whether or not to include other members of the crew; perhaps framing it as a “obey the law” versus “circumstances have changed” debate. But as it is, the story plays out pretty similarly to the episode it’s based on.
The away mission isn’t especially tough, and as long as you pick the right conversation options, you’ll get the chance to build an advanced Omega Molecule chamber. There’s still an amount of luck; this is an RNG-based game, at the end of the day! But if you play your cards right, this is one area where you can actually get a better outcome than the real Janeway did by stabilising the Omega molecules. If you’re going for an “evil” run, you can even steal the synthesised molecules – or try to, anyway.
Omega Directive’s away mission.
I’d rank Omega Directive about on par with other side-missions in the game. It was fun, but I’d have happily entertained a proper cut-scene, and maybe some kind of risk-reward option when it comes to deciding who to trust with the secrets of the titular Omega Directive. The away mission was okay, and as long as you have engineers and techies in your crew, you’ve got a pretty good chance of success. The ticking clock adds a bit of jeopardy to the situation, and if you wait too long, it’ll clearly end in disaster – so there’s definitely something to spur you on.
Given that Omega molecules have just recently been referenced in Star Trek, it was a bit of fun to step back to this story – it’s another episode I haven’t seen in a while. It’s a good mission for Seven of Nine, and I like that it’s an example of how Across The Unknown gives you the chance to not only recreate Captain Janeway’s choices… but to do better than she managed to do. The base game didn’t always have that – so this was a fun change of pace.
You can choose to steal the Omega molecules…
Sector 10 brings us the final two away missions: Homestead and Inside Man.
Despite Homestead being one of Voyager’s final episodes, at least in my playthrough of Across The Unknown, it came first. So we’ll start there! This mission felt the most basic of all the DLC content, to be blunt. I think there’s a way for it to end in a ship battle with the miners who are attacking the Talaxian settlement, but I played the mission twice and didn’t get that outcome. Story-wise, Homestead follows the basic plot of the episode; if you’ve got some of the upgrades and researched specific techs, it seems like there are multiple ways to convince the miners to leave the Talaxians alone.
What was unusual here, I felt, is that Tuvix – a potential hero character if you play that mission – has no role here. If Neelix is missing or replaced by Tuvix, then your “we’ve got Neelix at home” replacement Talaxian takes point on this mission. It’s nice that you don’t have to just skip Homestead, and still have the option to play it, but I can’t help but feel that this could’ve been a fun way to include Tuvix, or to further that particular storyline in a new or different way.
Neelix gets to meet a colony of his people… if you managed to keep him around!
Inside Man can lead to the recruitment of holographic Barclay, and I really like this idea. One thing I’d love to see, as the Expansion Pass continues its rollout, would be more hero characters from other parts of Star Trek. A fun idea would be replacing certain Voyager characters with others from The Next Generation era – Deanna Troi, Garak, Jadzia Dax, or Data could all be really fun inclusions in a game like this, if the point is to give you a completely different voyage across the Delta Quadrant! And, to me at least, this Barclay inclusion feels like a first step.
Because this is getting towards the end of the game, Barclay won’t get a ton of time to make an impact – but I enjoyed Inside Man for what it was. There’s some RNG in determining whether or not your heroes figure out the original deception in time, and I think this has the potential to end your run if you get it wrong (or get unlucky), but that’s part of the game!
It’s Mr Broccoli… I mean, Mr Barclay!
Inside Man also offers a potential new allied ship: the Ferengi Marauder! I’ve always loved this design, so I went out of my way to make sure I could get the ship. And it really is a fun thing to see Voyager and a D’Kora-class ship going into battle together! Given that this is, again, the final act of the game, you could conceivably bring the Ferengi with you in the final confrontations with the Borg… and I just think that’s a really neat idea. I like that the developers took the basic storyline from Inside Man and extended it, asking the question “what if the Ferengi came to the Delta Quadrant?” Narratively, the mission ends and you don’t get to see the Ferengi again. But having them as a recruitable ally for combat… it’s just really neat!
Finally, we have the Delta Flyer – the only piece of content we’re discussing today that you don’t need to pay extra for!
I’m glad that this was added in; it felt like a pretty glaring omission from the original game, and it was something I noted in my review. Because of the way the Delta Flyer was conceived of and built in the series, it seemed like something that would be *pitch-perfect* for a game like Across The Unknown, which made its absence all the more odd.
Finally!
The Delta Flyer is a difficult unlock, coming right at the bottom of the tech tree under all of the other shuttlebay upgrades. As a reward, you get to see the Delta Flyer in your shuttlebay, and you get to use it to enhance your chances of a successful outcome during some away missions, as well as when scanning planets and debris in the system view. I didn’t spend a lot of time with the Delta Flyer, but I managed to get it built and tried it out – and it definitely increases your chances of nabbing the most resources in a system!
There was also a truly beautiful cut-scene depicting the Delta Flyer’s maiden voyage. One of the best things about Across The Unknown has been the attention to detail in all of the cut-scenes; we’ve been treated to some absolutely beautiful “starship porn!” And, with Voyager languishing in un-remastered DVD quality on Paramount+, the shots of Voyager, the Delta Flyer, and more are quite literally the best-looking official depictions we have right now. The Delta Flyer in particular just looks incredible, and I really want to highlight the developers’ beautiful animation work.
It’s worth unlocking the Delta Flyer purely to watch this cut-scene!
So I think that’s all for today!
If you played and enjoyed Across The Unknown, as I did, or you’ve been waiting for the game to get its first big updates, then the Expansion Pass is the way to go. I don’t think there’s a lot of point in buying Delta Chronicles separately – unless money’s tight right now. But if you didn’t enjoy Across The Unknown, or it just didn’t seem like your kinda game, it’s worth being aware that nothing in this DLC fundamentally changes how the game plays. There’s no additional voice acting, the missions and heroes are narratively distinct from – but mechanically similar to – the content already in the base game, and really, this is just more Across The Unknown for fans of the game.
For its price point, I feel satisfied with Delta Chronicles, and I believe the Expansion Pass will feel like a good investment, too. That’s assuming, of course, that all of the promised content actually makes it to release! But because Across The Unknown was priced appropriately from day one, I don’t mind paying extra for this kind of thing. The base game feels complete enough without it for folks who don’t want to pay extra; none of this really feels like “cut content” in that sense, and the base game is feature-complete. But for fans of the game, I think the additional missions and heroes are worth the price of admission.
Voyager and a D’Kora-class ship fighting side-by-side against the Borg.
I thought I was done with Across The Unknown, but apparently not! When the rest of the Expansion Pass content launches, I hope you’ll join me for another review, as I’m sure I’ll be checking it all out. And if we get news of further DLC content to come, I’ll definitely take a look at all of that, too!
If you missed them earlier in the year, you can find the first part of my review of the game by clicking or tapping here, the second part by clicking or tapping here, and my screenshot gallery by clicking or tapping here. I’ll probably go back, in the next few days, and update my screenshot gallery with some of the DLC content, too.
There’s more Star Trek content to come here on the website, too! Strange New Worlds’ fourth season kicks off imminently, so I’ll be doing individual episode reviews. And as the big sixtieth anniversary nears, I have a few other plans for articles and essays all about the Star Trek franchise! So I hope you’ll join me for some of that. Safe travels in the Delta Quadrant, friends! And, as always… Live Long and Prosper!
Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown is out now for Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. The Expansion Pass and the Delta Chronicles DLC pack are also available now. Across The Unknown was developed by GameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. Star Trek: Voyager remains the copyright of the Skydance/Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
If you’ve been a regular reader for a long time, you might remember some of my coverage in the months leading up to the launches of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. I argued at the time that it wasn’t the right moment to launch new hardware – the pandemic and its associated disruptions had had a massive impact on the entire world, there were shortages, factories had temporarily shut down, there were shipping and supply problems, and delays to what were supposed to be launch titles. The result of releasing new consoles in 2020 was sad but predictable: scalpers and touts bought up practically the entire supply, and for months afterwards, people were paying through the nose to get their hands on consoles that offered a relatively minor upgrade to the previous generation, and with practically no next-gen-exclusive titles.
And here we go again.
At time of writing, in mid-2026, both Xbox and PlayStation are working on new hardware. Rumours abound that next autumn could be a targeted launch date; I’ve also heard spring or autumn of 2028 being mentioned. But one thing’s clear: both hardware manufacturers are hard at work getting ready for next-gen.
New consoles could be launching as early as next autumn.
But, as happened last time, there are serious problems on the hardware front. Xbox has openly admitted that the prices they’ve been paying to their component suppliers have doubled, and are likely to double again. The same will be true of PlayStation and Nintendo – and all three companies have used this as an excuse to hike prices even further.
The current hardware generation felt like the smallest-ever leap in terms of graphical fidelity and gameplay – the main things players look for in a new console generation – and this next one is likely to be very similar. I can’t always tell, at a glance, if I’m looking at gameplay from an Xbox Series or Xbox One, or a PS5 or a PS4, because there just hasn’t been as significant a jump as there had been in the past. And that’s in 2026: almost six years into the current generation of consoles. Many games are still being released cross-platform; there’s a case to be made that we’ve hardly even started this generation properly, let alone fully taken advantage of current hardware.
Games like Grand Theft Auto VI are only just beginning to push current consoles close to their limits.
The same thing will happen this time. Look at the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI – the game Rockstar and Take-Two hope will be one of this generation’s biggest hits. It promises to be a hugely interactive sandbox; an “open” world in the truest sense of the term, set in a sprawling metropolis based on Miami, and with fantastic visuals to boot. What can new hardware do for gaming that GTA 6 isn’t already doing? With changes being so incremental these days, will we even notice a significant difference between the PS5 and PS6 versions of a game like that?
Games today are pretty darn great. They look good, play well, and while there’s always gonna be room for improvement… we’ve realistically reached a place where those improvements are smaller and smaller than ever. I’m perfectly happy to recommend games to people from fifteen or even twenty years ago; graphical fidelity and gameplay just haven’t changed all that much in all that time. That’s why folks are still perfectly happy to stick with the likes of Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3, Mario Kart 8, and so on. New games will always appeal, and there are still plenty being created that push the boundaries. But it’s easier than ever to play a years-old game and not even really notice that it’s old!
This game is more than ten years old and still looks fantastic.
A.I. datacentres are currently being built at large scales around the world. Near where I live in the UK, a massive new datacentre project has been given the green light relatively recently, with construction due to start either later this year or early next year. But as we know by now, the A.I. boom has resulted in an even worse shortage of components and hardware than the pandemic did, driving up prices for all kinds of hardware – but especially GPUs.
I don’t pretend to understand A.I. to any great extent, so I don’t know why GPUs – a.k.a. graphics cards – are of so much use to datacentres! But I know that it’s happening, and that RAM and GPUs are two of the most in-demand items for those projects. The results are that there’s a massive shortage of components, and sky-high prices for the ones that are available.
A.I. datacentres are buying up a ton of components. Image: Meta A.I.
PlayStation has stated, on the record, that they’re unwilling to sell their next console at a loss. Hardware has often (but not always) been a loss-leader for games companies; selling a console at a small loss still pays dividends when players buy games. But if PlayStation isn’t willing to do that anymore, and component prices are shooting up… well, you do the maths on that. I’ve heard $1,000 (or £750) genuinely suggested as the price of the next PlayStation at launch – and it could even be higher than that.
Xbox, too, has said that its next console – currently codenamed Project Helix – will be a “very premium, high-end experience.” And if that doesn’t sound like they’re *also* looking at prices north of $1,000, well… I don’t know what does! We’ve just seen Valve’s new Steam Machine launch for the same kind of money, too.
“Project Helix” is Xbox’s upcoming console.
Adding those two factors together – that next-gen is likely to be a minor upgrade at best, and that current prices are already getting silly – then I think we can make a great case for a delay. Mid-2026 is probably the final opportunity that Xbox and PlayStation will have to make such a decision, before contracts have to be signed and before manufacturing really begins in earnest. With prices too high for a lot of players, and no real pressing need to launch brand-new hardware that won’t actually make a massive difference to game design or graphics… isn’t that the smart move?
It’s certainly a consumer-friendly move – which is why it won’t happen! But I would argue that it’s also a sensible business move, too, and announcing a delay today could win both Xbox and PlayStation some desperately-needed good press. Xbox is reeling from layoffs, and the unsurprising news of how bad things have gotten over there. And PlayStation recently had the double-whammy of removing purchased digital content from players and then announcing that they’re no longer going to make physical games. Both companies could use some good headlines!
PlayStation is going all-digital in 2028…
Imagine if one or both of these companies said something like this: “As a response to the impossible challenges of today’s hardware shortages and sky-high prices, we’ve taken the decision to delay our next-gen hardware by eighteen months.” I genuinely believe it’d win them some much-needed positive headlines. And, thinking about it from a corporate point of view, there could be real, genuine advantages to launching new hardware that could undercut the competition. Looking back across the history of the games industry, cheaper hardware almost always performs better than more expensive competition. The Wii against the Xbox 360 and the PS3, the N64 and PlayStation against the Sega Saturn, and of course, the PS4 against the Xbox One are all examples of this.
If Xbox announced a delay today, it would be a gamble in some ways. They’d be betting on hardware prices slowly coming back down as either datacentre excitement falls, or as manufacturing scales up to meet it. But the rewards could be incredible if the new Xbox could come in even £100 cheaper than the PS6 as a result. And the same is true for PlayStation – being able to offer a cheaper console than Xbox’s Project Helix could cement their status at the top of the industry.
The Sega Saturn lost its console war.
Right now, it feels like both Xbox and PlayStation are locked in to a launch window *because* their competitor is also locked in. It’s like corporate mutually-assured destruction; neither company wants to be the one to delay, because they don’t want to cede any ground to the competition in a difficult marketplace. But this line of thinking isn’t gonna lead anywhere good. The current generation of home consoles is the first ever, in history, that looks set to be smaller and to have sold less hardware than its predecessor. And sky-high prices are part of that.
If next-gen hardware launches at the kinds of prices the industry is currently expecting, it will meet a similar fate. Right now, it seems to me as if the only chance Xbox and PlayStation have to even possibly mitigate that is to wait; to delay their upcoming consoles until the A.I. datacentre situation is resolved – one way or another. And it seems all but guaranteed that that’ll happen. Prices are inflated right now, and it’s a struggle for individuals and companies to keep up. Prices *have* to reach a more reasonable level, otherwise individuals will be priced out of buying anything electronic, corporations will make fewer sales, and even these A.I. behemoths won’t be able to sell their services because no one will want them, be able to afford them, or have any hardware to run them on. Something’s gotta give sooner or later.
Not even Wario will be able to afford a next-gen console at this rate…
But unless and until that happens, going ahead with a massive rollout of new video game consoles feels like a mistake. It will almost certainly be a very rough, rocky, and underwhelming launch for the PS6 and Project Helix if they’re even close to the rumoured prices. Just look at Nintendo’s Switch 2 – it’s less than half of the PS6/Helix’s $1,000 and yet it’s still considered to be overpriced by a lot of folks, which has led to it struggling to move as many units as its predecessor.
The real danger here, for us as players, is that Xbox and PlayStation will ramp up efforts to extract even more cash from a smaller playerbase. If they sell fewer consoles this time than last time, and even fewer next time because of insane prices, well… investors want to make money, and that money has to come from somewhere. They’re gonna feel the only option they’re left with is to wring out every last penny from a smaller and smaller number of players. Expect to pay more for games, expect more in-game microtransactions, and expect additional fees for things that used to be considered standard – like getting a control pad or even a basic power lead with your new console. The Steam Machine, for example, has launched without a controller in the box, and I think Xbox and PlayStation are looking at that, too.
The Steam Machine doesn’t come with a control pad as standard.
As someone who’s enjoyed gaming for close to forty years, since I first picked up a joystick at a kids’ club in the ’80s, I feel truly saddened by the state of things. Gaming has always had a barrier to entry in terms of price; you can’t play games if you don’t have some kind of hardware capable of playing them on. But that barrier – until recently – has always appeared to be surmountable. Gaming has only been able to become such a big hobby because it’s been something that most folks are able to buy into. Sure, you might have to save up for a while to get the latest console or the newest blockbuster game, but until now, it’s been an achievable goal.
If gaming continues on this path of increasingly-expensive hardware, higher prices, more in-game transactions, and worse-value products… people are gonna stop playing. Gaming is going to end up as this “elites-only” hobby that us plebs are priced out of. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened… but it’s terribly sad to think of all the kids, all the folks on lower incomes – such as myself – and all the people who just have other financial commitments who are either already priced out of the hobby, or who are about to be.
There are some wonderful games out there. Pictured: Pragmata
The sunny side of this, as I tried to illustrate a couple of weeks ago (click or tap here for that), is that there are still ways to play even if budgets are tight. Older hardware, second-hand devices, emulators, even phones… all of these and more offer ways to get started or to keep playing even as prices for newer stuff soar ever higher. And because, as we discussed above, many older games are still perfectly playable and no less enjoyable than their modern counterparts… well, what have you got to lose by buying a second-hand PS3 instead of a $1,000 PS6? Until prices settle, that could be the only option for some folks.
Sorry if this was a big dump of negativity. But I really believe that a delay to next-gen consoles, given everything happening in the world right now, just makes a lot of sense. I don’t see what next-gen hardware really has to offer at the moment, anyway, so why not kick the can down the road by a couple of years and wait to see whether prices might start to settle down? If only one company does it, I think it’ll be to their long-term benefit. If both major hardware manufacturers do it, it could genuinely be the best news the industry has had in a long time. And right now is probably the last opportunity to delay things before it’s too late.
All titles and properties discussed above are the copyrights of their respective manufacturers, corporations, oweners, developers and/or publishers. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware minor spoilers for Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and the Fallout TV adaptation.
One story to come out of the latest mess at Xbox is one that I predicted back in January: the next Fallout video game is being taken away from Bethesda. I thought it would be interesting to talk about that today, as well as consider what a new title in the storied – but arguably sullied – post-apocalyptic franchise could have to offer.
As always, everything we’re discussing today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one person. If I highlight a part of the Fallout franchise you despise, or criticise something you adore… that’s okay. There ought to be enough room in the fan community for differences of opinion and respectful conversations that don’t descend into toxicity. I will also say, for the record, that I haven’t played every game in the Fallout series (I didn’t play Fallout 1 or 2 back in the ’90s, and I still haven’t played New Vegas), and that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the Fallout TV adaptaion. I don’t hate the show, but the best thing I can say about it is that it’s “solid, but not spectacular.” If you think any or all of that renders my take on the next Fallout video game invalid… well, here’s your chance to click off and read something else, I guess!
A Pip-Boy.
It’s also worth noting that what we’re going to get into today has not been officially confirmed by Bethesda, Xbox, or Microsoft at time of writing. Rumours abound in the games industry, and while what I’ve heard about Fallout seems credible to me based on the sources that have stated it, until it’s official it should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. It isn’t my intention to stir the pot (too much), or add to unsubstantiated rumours, but this topic is of interest, and I think the sources are reliable enough to warrant an article like this.
I think the first and most important thing to say is this: Bethesda losing the right to make the next Fallout video game is *entirely* the fault of Todd Howard and the other executives at the studio. I have precisely zero sympathy for any of them, and frankly, this situation should be neither a shock nor a disappointment to the senior folks at Bethesda. Their own actions and policies directly caused this, and the only surprising thing, for me, is that it’s taken this long for Xbox and Microsoft to act.
Todd Howard, head of Bethesda, at the premiere of Fallout Season 2.
In the ’90s and into the 2000s, when Bethesda was a smaller outfit and when games didn’t take quite so long to make, it was totally okay to only work on one game at a time. But the gaming landscape has shifted – both for Bethesda itself and the industry at large – and for years, I’ve been struck by the absolute bone-headed, stubborn idiocy of Bethesda Game Studios to continue to insist on only developing one project at a time.
Backed up by the almost limitless resources of Xbox and Microsoft, and with several subsidiaries under its own umbrella, Bethesda has had years to build up or adapt a second team capable of developing one of its big open-world role-playing titles. And… the execs chose not to do so. The result of that is that it’s going to be near enough two decades in between The Elder Scrolls V and The Elder Scrolls VI – and, left to their own devices, Bethesda would’ve allowed a similar span of time to elapse in between Fallout titles, too. Fallout 4 launched in 2015, and with The Elder Scrolls VI (Bethesda’s next project) not launching until 2028 at the earliest, it would be 2033 or beyond before another Fallout game could be ready. And that’s under the best circumstances, assuming that game development cycles don’t lengthen any further in the years ahead.
Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, has wasted no time in pushing for a new Fallout game. Photo: Microsoft/Xbox
For obvious reasons – or, at least, reasons that *should* be obvious – two-decade-long waits in between entries in a series are beyond unacceptable. Fans want games sooner than that, of course, but from a business perspective, I mean… it’s just idiotic. Given the resources available to Bethesda, and the amount of time they’ve been working with Microsoft and Xbox, there’s been more than enough time to create a second development team. That would’ve allowed Bethesda to keep their IP in-house while also getting more games ready more quickly. But Bethesda was unwilling to do that – for some reason – so it’s now fallen to Xbox’s new leadership to step in.
Good.
There’s a happy medium somewhere in between the annual releases of something like Call of Duty or EA Sports titles and the insane waits for new entries in series like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto. Too many titles in the same series coming along too quickly often means releases are lower quality (something Bethesda *definitely* can’t afford!) or that franchise fatigue will eventually set in. Look at the likes of Assassin’s Creed for an example of that. But there’s got to be a balance – twenty-year waits for new titles absolutely takes the piss, and worse, it risks making new entries in dormant franchises less interesting to audiences.
It’s been over a decade since the last single-player Fallout game.
Since Fallout 4 was launched more than a decade ago, gamers have been treated to open-world adventures like Red Dead Redemption II and Ghost of Tsushima, and role-playing epics like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. Not only are those games giving players new and fun experiences, but in many ways, they surpass what Bethesda has shown itself to be capable of so far. Fallout 76 may have appealed to fans of multiplayer experiences, but for a lot of fans of the series, that title hasn’t filled the void left behind by a new single-player title. And with other games coming along and doing many of the same things as Bethesda did – only better – well, there’s a case to be made that Bethesda has been waiting too long, leaving too much time in between releases, and prioritising the wrong things.
All of which is to say that I totally understand Xbox and Microsoft’s decision here. If Bethesda isn’t capable of making a new Fallout game anytime soon, because their sole development team is currently dedicated to The Elder Scrolls VI… well, why should the parent company wait another three or four years (at minimum) before development can even *start?* This was not only self-inflicted by Todd Howard and other senior figures, but it was so predictable you could’ve seen it from space.
Bethesda’s only development team is currently hard at work on The Elder Scrolls VI. Hopefully.
However, as is often the case… that isn’t all there is to say.
The studio that Microsoft and Xbox seem to be tapping to lead this new Fallout project is Obsidian. That name should be familiar to Fallout fans; Obsidian developed Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, and that title is widely hailed as the best modern Fallout game, eclipsing both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 in terms of narrative, characters, setting, and world-building. Obsidian also developed one of my favourite-ever games: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. So… good, right?
Well, not so fast. Obsidian’s recent titles haven’t been quite so hot, to be blunt about it. I tried out Avowed last year, but bounced off it after a few hours, feeling that its world, characters, and core narrative hadn’t really gripped me the way I’d hoped. And The Outer Worlds 2, while arguably overshadowed by conversations around its price, underperformed. Obsidian is also a different studio in 2026 than it had been in 2010, with many of the New Vegas development team no longer working there.
I didn’t stick with Avowed when I tried it.
Then we come to a pretty disturbing rumour. This part of the story, more so than anything else we’ve been discussing, should be treated as unconfirmed – I will give that caveat straight away. But it’s been suggested that Obsidian had already been working on its own post-apocalyptic title prior to being tapped by Xbox and Microsoft to develop a Fallout game, and that this game – which was never meant to have anything to do with Fallout – will be adapted and revised to work in the Fallout universe. In short, a non-Fallout game may be “reskinned” to have more of a Fallout flavour.
That’s a double-edged sword – at best. On the one hand, I can see there being an advantage to converting an already-in-progress project like this; it would mean the new game could be ready for release more quickly. However, it could also be *painfully* obvious that the new game was never meant to be set in the Fallout universe if this transformation isn’t handled perfectly, and there could be all kinds of issues that arise. The game’s world and characters could feel inconsistent with what’s come before, or there could be questlines or factions that just don’t seem to fit. If Obsidian takes its time – and, crucially, Xbox and Microsoft are willing to allow sufficient time to be taken – I think a lot of that can be mitigated. But if, as I suspect is the case, the entire reason for handing Obsidian the Fallout license is because Xbox’s new leaders are panicking, there’s going to be a rush to get this game out as soon as possible. And if, as has been suggested, it’s going to be built atop an existing game that wasn’t originally set in that world? I think fans are gonna pick up on that.
Fallout 3.
A proper Fallout game, in the current gaming landscape, is gonna take four-plus years to make. And even if Microsoft and Xbox throw everything they have at the project, we’re realistically looking at a game that won’t launch before 2030, and will almost certainly be a next-generation title for Xbox’s new hardware. So even this move, panicky and rushed as it seems, still won’t result in a new Fallout game immediately. However, four years is better than fourteen, so fans should be able to look forward to a return to the post-apocalyptic wasteland far sooner than they might’ve been expecting.
With the third season of the TV adaptation already in production, it’s still unclear to me whether a new Fallout game will be ready before the series concludes its run. It would obviously be very useful for both projects if the game could be released before the show’s finale, but I’m not convinced, yet, that that’ll be possible. Games this size take time to develop, and even if Obsidian throws all of its people onto this one project, it’s still not going to be a rapid process. And if it is… well, the game’s gonna be shit, isn’t it? As I said above, there’s a balance to be struck when it comes to game development; take things too slow and you end up with an irrelevant brand that fewer people are interested in, but rushing and crunching almost always result in an inferior, broken title. Microsoft and Xbox clearly want this game ready ASAP, but my advice would be not to set an arbitrary deadline and don’t try to rush it.
A third season of Fallout is currently filming.
From my point of view, I don’t have any particular expectations or wishes for a new Fallout game – but there are a few basic things that I think Obsidian needs to keep in mind. A new Fallout title would need to be true to the formula of Fallout 3 and 4, so it will have to be fully open-world – which isn’t something Obsidian has done with The Outer Worlds 2 or Avowed. The game will also, realistically, need to be bigger than both of those games, even if it’s technically a spin-off rather than the official “Fallout 5.” In fact, I doubt very much whether this game would be titled “Fallout 5!” And I think, in terms of setting, the game would need to be based in the remains of the United States; as popular as some fan mods have been, Fallout is a distinctively American thing with its aesthetic, its alt-history, and its Americana.
I would imagine that a new game would connect, in some way, to stories, themes, characters, or settings from the Fallout TV show. That would be the best way to get “brand synergy” going, after all – something a corporation like Microsoft adores! So that probably means the new game would be set sometime after the events of the TV show, and any characters who survive to the end of the show could, in theory, make a cameo in the new game. We’ve already seen the Ghoul appear in Fallout 76, and that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. As much fun as it could be to set the new game in a different era – perhaps in between the events of Fallout 76 and Fallout 3 – I suspect that won’t happen.
The Ghoul (from the Fallout TV series) appeared in Fallout 76.
Location-wise, aside from Vegas, Washington, and Boston… the game could really be set anywhere. If rumoured remasters of Fallout 3 and New Vegas are true, then I highly doubt a new, original game would want to re-use the same setting, but I could see a New Vegas 2 potentially being greenlit, given the studio involved. I still don’t think it’s necessarily the most likely, but you never know! Some fans have suggested that a new game developed by someone other than Bethesda might be set away from the East Coast; Bethesda’s games have all been set in that region, with earlier titles and New Vegas, which weren’t developed by Bethesda, being set in the western U.S. That may just be coincidence, though, and I wouldn’t read too much into it!
I think pretty much any major American city that hasn’t already been explored is fair game for an adaptation. So you could see New York City, perhaps, Chicago (though that might draw unfavourable comparisons with Cyberpunk 2077′s sequel), or somewhere like Seattle or Detroit. Having said all that, I got it completely wrong when I said that Grand Theft Auto VI would (and should) be set in a new city that the series hadn’t explored before… so I could be wrong here, too!
Where (and when) will the new game be set?
That’s all for today. I wanted to share my thoughts on the news that the next Fallout game is to be stripped away from Bethesda. If a company sits on a license and does effectively nothing with it for a decade, and has no plans to for at least the next four years… I mean, what did we expect? The reason I predicted that this would happen is because it seemed so obvious, and I really don’t feel bad for Todd Howard or any of the Bethesda higher-ups whose intransigence and refusal to move with the times caused this.
Despite not being the world’s biggest Fallout fan, I’m pretty sure I’ll check out the new game when it’s ready (assuming I’m able to do so, anyway). Obsidian is about as good a studio as Microsoft and Xbox could’ve picked for a project like this, in spite of recent titles not being quite at the same level as New Vegas or KotOR II. There are reasons to be optimistic… unless you’re Todd Howard, I guess.
The Fallout franchise is the copyright of Bethesda, Xbox, and Microsoft. A new Fallout game has not been officially announced, but may be in early pre-production. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
As part of my ongoing series of articles to celebrate Star Trek’s big sixtieth anniversary year, I want to take you to an alternate reality! No, not the Kelvin timeline, the Mirror Universe, nor any of the other parallel worlds glimpsed in various Star Trek productions over the past six decades. What I want to examine is what our world – the real world – might look like if Star Trek had never aired.
Because… we came closer to that than you might think.
I daresay most Trekkies know this, but I’ll very briefly recap for anyone new or who doesn’t remember. In 1964, Gene Roddenberry penned Star Trek Is…, the first pitch for what would become The Original Series. In late 1964 and into 1965, The Cage was produced by Desilu for NBC… who shot it down. However, convinced that Star Trek could still be made to work – subject to some revisions – NBC approved the production of a second pilot. That episode would become Where No Man Has Gone Before, which I re-watched here on the website a few weeks back.
Kirk and Spock in Where No Man Has Gone Before, the second pilot.
But for our purposes today… we’re gonna say that the second pilot didn’t happen, and then examine the alternate timeline created by Star Trek’s absence.
In this timeline, NBC took a look at The Cage and rejected it even more strongly, refusing to pick up Star Trek or greenlight that second pilot, let alone commission a full season. Gene Roddenberry and Desilu might’ve tried to shop the project to CBS and others, but they also refused to pick it up. Star Trek would never be made, and The Cage would remain in Desilu and NBC’s vaults for decades without being broadcast.
What’s the point of this exercise? Good question!
The USS Enterprise on a recent promotional poster.
I think it’s an interesting thought experiment. What might the sci-fi landscape look like, six decades on, without Star Trek? Would other shows of the mid-60s have stepped up to take its place? Would some shows that, in the real world, only lasted one or two seasons, have taken the audience that TOS got, and gone on to become enduring, popular franchises? And what of Star Trek’s legacy beyond the world of entertainment? The franchise has inspired people all over the world to get into fields like engineering, medicine, and, of course, astronomy and space sciences.
In short… what might the world look like without Star Trek, and how big can we really argue the franchise’s influence has been? Those are the questions I want to consider as we step “through the looking-glass” to this strange parallel universe!
So let’s get back to our alt-history story. It’s early 1965, and the word from NBC and Desilu is “no.” Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi pitch hasn’t been picked up and won’t be going ahead.
Gene Roddenberry, by the mid-1960s, had already been working in TV for a decade. He had credits as a writer and as a producer on dozens of productions in genres like police procedurals and westerns, and was the creator of The Lieutenant, a drama series set in the US Marine Corps. I daresay that, if Star Trek hadn’t been picked up, Rodenberry’s career would have continued in a similar vein – writing a few episodes here and there for various different shows, working as a producer where he could, and perhaps continuing to pitch new ideas to the networks. Whether anything else would’ve been on Star Trek’s level, though… well, I doubt it.
Here in the real world, after The Original Series had aired, but before the Star Trek films and The Next Generation were created, Roddenberry put together a few more pitches and ideas for new TV shows. Four of these became TV movies: Genesis II, Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes, and Spectre. I daresay none of these would’ve been made without Roddenberry’s status having been inflated by Star Trek’s success – and there’d almost certainly be no Earth: Final Conflict or Andromeda, either – the two ’90s/’00s sci-fi shows produced after Roddenberry’s death based on his work and ideas.
No Star Trek almost certainly means no Andromeda…
The Original Series, despite its prominence to us Trekkies, wasn’t the only sci-fi series on American TV in the mid-1960s. Science fiction was still a relatively new genre, especially on television, but there were successful sci-fi and sci-fi-adjacent shows on the air. The Twilight Zone is one of the most famous, of course, and predates Star Trek by more than seven years. The first Batman TV series – the one starring Adam West – was also on the air from 1966 to 1968. Then there’s the likes of Lost in Space, which aired for three seasons from 1965, The Time Tunnel, which only managed a single season in 1966-67, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which ran for four seasons from 1964, and The Invaders, which ran for one season.
In a world without Star Trek, might some of these have been more successful?
We already know the legacy of Batman – new films with the titular character are still being created today, and Batman was a pretty big hit at the time. The same is true for The Twilight Zone. But I want to zoom in on The Time Tunnel, The Invaders, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea this time – I think, in a world without Star Trek, they’re exactly the kinds of niche, nerdy, “cult classic” TV shows that could have hoovered up the Trekkie community that never was!
The Time Tunnel was one of Star Trek: The Original Series’ sci-fi contemporaries.
Picture this: The Time Tunnel doesn’t get canned in 1967, but runs for two more seasons. It gets re-broadcast in syndication in the early ’70s, growing in popularity, and before you know it… fans are clamouring for more. Perhaps an animated series would be created to satiate fans, or maybe the show would be picked up for some kind of second phase.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea could be in a similar boat (if you’ll excuse the pun). It has a lot in common with Star Trek, with aliens, monsters, and a lot of themes that tie into real-world events and issues. In a world without Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea – which was already on the air – could’ve been primed to pick up the baton for sci-fi with a message, and the fan community could’ve latched onto that. Again, after the series went off the air, re-runs could’ve grown its audience, leading to calls for a sequel series or movie.
The Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
The Invaders only lasted for a single season, but I can absolutely see a pathway for a show like that to succeed in a world without Star Trek. After defeating the initial alien invasion, perhaps the characters would’ve discovered that it was only the first part of a larger plan, or that other alien races also have designs on Earth. The Invaders, being set on Earth, is different to Star Trek – but still has that “cult classic” potential.
I haven’t mentioned another ’60s classic, yet – but there’s a reason for that.
Doctor Who started airing here in the UK in 1963, and it quickly became a family favourite with us Brits! But Doctor Who didn’t cross the Atlantic until well into the 1970s, and I think its legacy is still very much a British thing. That isn’t to say Doctor Who couldn’t have gotten even bigger, if there were a big Star Trek-shaped void in the sci-fi realm. But in terms of what we’re talking about today… I consider it kind of off to one side in its own, very British niche.
Doctor Who didn’t hit American screens until the 1970s.
So that’s our alt-history ’60s! With no Star Trek, a show like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Invaders, or The Time Tunnel manages to pick up some of the would-be Trekkies, and blows up to become much bigger than it ever did in our world.
If I had to pick just one – based on my admittedly incomplete knowledge of these programmes – I’m going to say, for the sake of argument, that it’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea that makes the leap. Lost in Space might seem superficially more similar to Star Trek, and I like The Time Tunnel for its visual style and timeline-hopping shenanigans! But if we’re picking just one of these, for the purposes of building out our alt-history of televised sci-fi, I’m gonna say that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea has the right mix of sci-fi, classic adventures, and a comparable kind of moral messaging to The Original Series, so it’s going to be the winner!
In our alt-timeline, the void left by Star Trek’s absence is filled by Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea…
But what does that mean for the next chapter of our alternate timeline?
In the real world, the success of Star Trek – especially in the early 1970s after being rebroadcast – directly led to an expansion of the sci-fi genre. George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, has said on the record that Star Trek paved the way for Star Wars, literally saying that Star Wars stood “on the shoulders” of Star Trek and the sci-fi-friendly audience that it helped to create. So, without Star Trek… do we get Star Wars?
There are other sci-fi films and series in our alt-timeline, so I’m not going to suggest that an expansion of the science fiction genre “never happens.” 2001: A Space Odyssey was in pre-production before Star Trek came along, and that film is still hugely influential over the genre, just as one example.
Other sci-fi titles, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, would still be made.
However, I do believe that, in a world without Star Trek, the timings of some of these things changes. Perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey is still a success, or maybe it’s slightly less successful without Star Trek giving its audience a bit of a boost. But without Star Trek, and especially without the resurgence of space-based sci-fi that Star Trek led in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I’m going to say that there’s no Star Wars in 1977 – and no Alien in 1979, either.
There’s still a place, in our alt-timeline, for both an epic space fantasy like Star Wars and a gritty sci-fi horror picture like Alien. But because Star Trek looms so large over both films (and their subsequent franchises), and because in this alt-timeline, sci-fi has gone in a different direction, I’m going to posit that neither of these hugely influential pictures gets made. There will be epic sci-fi and sci-fi horror… but it won’t come along in the second half of the ’70s, it’ll come much later.
Gene Roddenberry (left) and George Lucas. Photo: Dan Madsen
Now we have to talk even more speculatively!
I’ve suggested that, without Star Trek, and with the sci-fi genre looking very different in the ’70s, we don’t see Star Wars in 1977 or Alien in 1979. Star Wars, according to George Lucas, was only able to come along when it did because Star Trek had “softened the ground” for sci-fi and brought new eyes to the genre. And Alien almost feels like the antithesis of Star Trek in many ways – a working-class crew of “space truckers,” a corporate dystopia, and a film that presents space not as “the final frontier” for peaceful exploration, but as a dark, dangerous place. Neither film gets to exist without Star Trek.
But what does the absence of *those* titles mean? Arguably, the Star Wars franchise is even more important for sci-fi going into the ’80s than Star Trek, and Alien is not only a landmark science fiction film, but a seminal work of the horror genre, too. If Star Trek means neither of those films get made… well, now we have to look at the snowball effect and the ramifications of that!
No Star Trek means no Star Wars, and no Star Wars means…
I maintain that, somehow, sci-fi would have a resurgence on both the big and small screens in our alt-timeline. But if it doesn’t happen in the ’70s, then do we get films like E.T., The Terminator, Blade Runner, Flight of the Navigator, or The Last Starfighter in the ’80s? And without Alien, what becomes of films like The Thing or The Fly? None of this is to say that Star Trek, Star Wars, and Alien are directly responsible for these films’ existence, but if you hack away at the foundations of sci-fi on the small and big screens, it’s at least conceivable to me that these stories never get greenlit; that studio executives and producers aren’t willing to fund “experimental” films or “unproven” genres like sci-fi and sci-fi/horror in such a big way. The entire landscape of ’80s cinema would be completely changed as a result.
With less space-based sci-fi, we come back to my idea about shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Time Tunnel proving popular. Perhaps sci-fi goes in more of a terrestrial direction, with films inspired by those shows doing more with sci-fi concepts on Earth, in the deep sea, and going backwards and forwards through time. That might bode well for Back to the Future, The Abyss, RoboCop, and similar titles in this era!
Our alt-timeline could see more Earth-based sci-fi stories, like The Abyss.
I also think that, in lieu of sci-fi, we could see more films in the fantasy or superhero genres in the ’70s and continuing into the ’80s. There are landmark fantasy films in this era – The NeverEnding Story, for instance, which was a favourite of mine when I was a kid. You could also point to Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Last Unicorn, Highlander, and even The Princess Bride as films that would likely still exist. Some of these titles might grow in popularity in a world without Star Trek and Star Wars, with fantasy becoming a much bigger genre in this era.
Without Star Trek and Star Wars leading the way for sci-fi, films like Superman could have led to the superhero genre becoming much bigger, much earlier. It’s hard to remember nowadays – almost twenty years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s dominance at the box office – but the superhero/comic book adaptation genre wasn’t always a guaranteed box office draw. The end of the ’80s saw Tim Burton’s Batman, but in our alt-timeline, I wonder if superheroes like Iron Man, the X-Men, and others might’ve stepped into the void left by fewer sci-fi titles. Superheroes and sci-fi have a lot of things in common, and comic book adaptations could easily be this timeline’s biggest blockbusters.
There might be a lot more superheroes and comic book adaptations in our alt-timeline.
Having rolled the snowball into the ’80s, I think changes from here become harder to predict. If we have more fantasy films, for instance, could an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings be produced years earlier? And if so… would it be as well-received? That’s very much an open question. If superheroes dominate the ’80s box office, how long does that last? And what does it mean for blockbuster titles in the ’90s and towards the millennium? Again, stacking change atop change makes things harder to predict!
I will posit, though, that sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s, someone, somehow, cracks the sci-fi genre open again. Films set in space, be they horror titles, pure sci-fi, or epic adventures will – eventually and, from our point of view, belatedly – hit the big and small screens. But in our alt-timeline, I doubt we’d recognise any of them, or any of their names. Some might draw inspiration from the same sources as Star Trek and Star Wars, whereas others may be inspired by the dominant fantasy and superhero genres, or even the terrestrial sci-fi shows that replaced Star Trek. But somehow, some way, we don’t see space stories completely disappear. And going into the millennium and beyond, there may be fewer films and TV shows like that… but there are still going to be *some*.
Films set in space wouldn’t be entirely absent. Photo: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)
Star Trek’s influence, though, doesn’t merely extend to the world of entertainment. So let’s also consider what the franchise’s absence could mean outside of the realm of film and TV.
There are countless individual stories of people who were inspired to become engineers because of Scotty, doctors because of Dr McCoy, or astronomers because of Star Trek’s focus on science. We can’t possibly account for all of those individually, but there are some trends we can point to.
First of all, I think a world without Star Trek would gradually see less interest in space and space exploration. It wouldn’t be obvious at first; the moon landing, the Space Shuttle, and so on would still happen on schedule and would still attract interest and attention. But gradually, over time, without the inspirational aspect that Star Trek brought to the table, there’d be fewer people getting interested in astronomy and related scientific fields, and – as above – that would have a kind of snowball effect.
Gene Roddenberry and several members of The Original Series cast at the dedication ceremony for the Space Shuttle Enterprise, 1976. Photo: NASA
There are some specific areas where Star Trek had more of a direct influence. For example, the first Space Shuttle was only named “Enterprise” because of a campaign by Trekkies! So I think, in our alt-timeline, that Shuttle would almost certainly have a different name (most likely “Constitution,” for America’s bicentennial) – and that could have knock-on effects for the rest of the fleet. Then there’s Nichelle Nichols’ role in helping to recruit female astronauts, as detailed in Women In Motion, a great documentary film.
NASA would still want to recruit women astronauts to go into space, but it’s conceivable that this would be slower, and perhaps the first American woman to go into space (which, in the real world, was Sally Ride in 1983) wouldn’t happen until later.
I don’t think we’re talking about major discoveries or missions not going ahead; the space shuttle was already in early development by the late ’60s, and I can’t really point to any specific mission to space that wouldn’t have been able to go ahead without Star Trek and its legacy. But I think it’s fair to say that some missions might’ve launched later, that fewer people might’ve felt called to work in space-related scientific fields, and that there would be knock-on effects of that. By the time our alt-timeline reaches 2026, the snowball effect could put it several years behind the real world in terms of certain missions and discoveries.
Nichelle Nichols leveraged her fame and role on Star Trek to help NASA recruit women astronauts.
As we can see, Star Trek’s absence doesn’t mean there’s *no* sci-fi, no space adventures on TV, or massive, earth-shattering impacts on space exploration. But the entertainment landscape – and the world at large – would be undeniably different without it. Science fiction could easily have gone in a very different, more terrestrial direction, focusing for years not on outer space, but on the deep oceans, time travel, and the future of Earth. If aliens appeared at all, they’d appear as visitors – or invaders – rather than being encountered out in space, on their own home worlds.
Star Trek’s vision of humanity’s future is more optimistic, uplifting, and aspirational than practically any other sci-fi setting, and its writers have almost always found ways to tell interesting and dramatic stories despite the denizens of Earth living in a tech-driven post-scarcity “utopia.” I’m not sure any other franchise – real or imagined – could pull that off quite so successfully in our alt-timeline, and that means that sci-fi almost certainly looks darker and more dystopian than it does in the real world.
Sci-fi (and entertainment in general) would be bleaker and less hopeful without Star Trek.
I would like to add one addendum; an epilogue to our alt-timeline. After passing through various different corporate owners, and with its sole tape remaining locked in a vault… I think The Cage would eventually be cleaned up, remastered, and turned into a TV movie. It would take decades before it would ever see the light of day, and the chance to launch Star Trek as a real show would have long since slipped away. But a version of The Cage would eventually be broadcast – and audiences would see it as a fun little curiosity; a relic of a bygone era of television production. There might even be articles like this one, wondering “what might have been” if this weird little mid-60s sci-fi series had been picked up for a full season!
So that’s all for today. I hope this little thought experiment has been of some interest.
I was inspired by Star Trek’s 60th anniversary, and I’ve actually had a piece in my writing pile for several years, tentatively titled “Star Trek’s Contemporaries”, in which I planned to look a bit more deeply at shows like The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which I referenced in this piece. Stay tuned, because I daresay I’ll get around to that one day!
Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike in The Cage.
The point was to take a look at a world without Star Trek… not because that’s a world I’d ever want to live in, but as a way to highlight the very real, tangible impacts that Star Trek has had and continues to have on sci-fi, the wider entertainment industry, and even beyond. If Star Trek had never got past the pilot stage – as very nearly happened – I think we can make a case for sci-fi being in a radically different place, the entertainment industry looking quite different, and perhaps even some real-world space missions not happening on schedule. As we celebrate the franchise’s landmark sixtieth anniversary, I think it’s worth taking time to acknowledge how important Star Trek has been and continues to be.
If you want to check out more pieces celebrating Star Trek’s 60th, I’ve recently written up re-watches of The Original Series’ second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the very first episode of Star Trek that I can ever remember watching: The Next Generation Season 2 episode The Royale. Earlier in the year, I reviewed Star Trek’s newest series, Starfleet Academy, and the video game Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown. I also took a look at the franchise’s uncertain future amidst a corporate merger, and wrote about my encounter with William Shatner – Captain Kirk himself – who I met at Comic-Con. Click or tap any of those links to check out those articles, and stay tuned! There’s more to come here on the website as the sixtieth anniversary year continues.
Thank you for coming along with me on this alt-timeline adventure! And, as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends.
All TV programmes and films discussed above are the copyrights of their respective studios, production companies, distributors, and/or broadcasters. The Star Trek franchise – including The Original Series and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance Paramount Corporation. Star Trek: The Original Series is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available, and is also available on DVD/Blu-ray. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: This review contains spoilers for Pragmata, including the end of the story. If you want to check out my spoiler-free thoughts on the game, click or tap here.
I’m finishing up my coverage of Pragmata today with the second half of my review. If you missed it, last time I wrote up my thoughts on the game without getting into spoiler territory – I talked about gameplay, boss battles, level design, and more. If you just want a brief summary from last time, I said that the game was a lot of fun with an old-school feel – but with a punishing difficulty spike and a lack of proper accessibility options that made it too tough of a challenge without using an unofficial mod.
This time, I want to delve into the game’s story, characters, and world in a bit more detail – and talk about a few things that I couldn’t last time without spoiling it. So if you ignored my little graphic above, and if you still want to go into Pragmata without knowing how the story ends… this is your final chance to nope out! Click or tap here to read my spoiler-free thoughts, bookmark this article, and come back when you’ve beaten the game.
Concept art.
I don’t often break reviews into two parts like this, but last time, I felt the spoiler-free section was running too long and warranted its own post here on the website. Hopefully this two-part format isn’t too annoying, and if you’ve been waiting around for the continuation… thanks! I hope this will be interesting.
As always, my usual caveat applies: everything we’re going to talk about today is the entirely *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one person. If I praise an aspect of Pragmata that you didn’t enjoy, or criticise something you liked… that’s okay. There ought to be enough room in the gaming and sci-fi fan communities for respectful disagreement without descending into arguments and toxicity!
With all of that out of the way, let’s talk about Pragmata.
An early combat encounter.
When I played the demo earlier in the year, and for my first couple of hours with the game after I picked it up… I wasn’t particularly interested in either of the main characters. Hugh seemed incredibly, almost aggressively *bland*, and I struggled to get invested in his emotional arc after the apparent deaths of his captain and the other members of his team. And because his encounter with Diana felt so random, their coming together didn’t really have much of an impact, either.
Not at first, anyway.
I was playing Pragmata because I was enjoying its level design, its combat, its hacking mechanic, its exploration, and its enemy varieties. The game, as I said last time, has an old-school charm that makes it feel, in many ways, like a title from the Dreamcast/Xbox era – the second generation of truly 3D games, after the worst of the jank had been overcome! I had a blast playing games on the Dreamcast and original Xbox back in the day, and Pragmata felt like a modernised, shinier version of that kind of title.
Pragmata feels like a bit of a throwback, gameplay-wise.
But as Hugh and Diana spent more time together, and bantered back-and-forth both at the Shelter and while exploring the game’s various environments, I felt myself getting a bit more invested in their stories. I maintain that Pragmata’s narrative is never going to be its biggest selling-point – this is an action/adventure game that you can play while paying remarkably little attention to the story, if you so choose! And it’s very much a video game story, not something cinematic. But… that’s okay. It was still enjoyable for me, and as time went on, I found myself getting more attached to both characters.
I’m not usually any kind of “completionist” when it comes to gaming. If a level is fun to explore, I’ll happily explore it, finding whatever hidden treasures and items are on offer. But I’m never gonna be someone who has to get *every single* weapon upgrade or random collectible. When it came to Pragmata, however, I was really quite keen to make sure I picked up all of the “Real Earth Memories” – the little additions to the Shelter that are scattered across the game world.
One complete and one incomplete REM area in the Shelter.
These REMs have absolutely no material impact on gameplay. And even in the Shelter, they’re basically just cosmetics to make sides of the room look a bit different. Some of them trigger a brief dialogue exchange between the co-protagonists, but that’s really all there is. But I found myself compelled to go back and re-play whole chunks of levels that I’d already beaten if there was a missing REM to find! That just isn’t something I usually care about… and I think it’s a testament to how Pragmata successfully got me invested in Hugh and Diana’s stories. I wasn’t just collecting these things to beautify the Shelter, but because Hugh wanted to give them to Diana, and she wanted to play with them.
The Shelter is a *very* video-gamey location; the player’s base, securely hidden away from IDUS, Eight, and the game’s legion of robots, but conveniently accessible from almost everywhere in the game world! This is what I mean when I say that Pragmata is a video game, not a cinematic story. But I really didn’t mind it, once I got into it, and on the rare occasions where I couldn’t get back to the Shelter easily enough… I could actually feel my anxiety starting to rise!
The Shelter.
I don’t really appreciate games without a free save system. Having to trek back to the Shelter to save, then seeing all the robots respawn, could feel annoying on occasion. But I will caveat that complaint by saying that, if a game *insists* on this Dark Souls-inspired feature… the way it’s handled in Pragmata is about as good as it gets. The Shelter usually felt accessible enough that I could make it back there if I wanted to save, if I’d just beaten a boss, or if I was running low on health and needed to regroup. Shelter access hatches appeared with just enough frequency that returning there never felt like too much of a chore – even if it wouldn’t have necessarily been my first choice for how to handle saving.
This may be less of an issue for you than it is for me – because I wanted to be able to go back to different parts of the game to grab screenshots for this review! But someone’s gonna have to explain to me why there are only ten save slots available. Save files aren’t exactly big – and even if they were, I have the disc space to accommodate them. So why am I limited to so few save slots? I’d like to have been able to use more, so I could’ve returned more easily to different parts of the game. In my case, it’s because I wanted to get a diverse range of screenshots to use in this piece, but there are plenty of other reasons why you might want to replay a particular level, or go back to a boss fight.
I’d have liked more than ten save slots.
As is the case with practically every title nowadays, Pragmata comes with a “deluxe edition.” I will give credit to Capcom for not locking the game’s release date behind a few days of so-called “early access,” but for my money… the deluxe edition really doesn’t seem to have much to offer. You get a couple of skins for each of the two characters, one weapon skin (which is barely noticeable and has no gameplay impact), and a few pieces of concept art and music which can be played at the Shelter. If you want to go the extra mile to show support for Pragmata and Capcom, that’s totally okay – how anyone spends their money is up to them, at the end of the day! But for me, I didn’t really think that the small amount of extra content was worth the asking price.
To get back to the narrative, the game’s two big “twists” – that Diana’s friend Eight was actually a baddie and that Hugh was going to die before he made it home – were not exactly subtle. I called Eight’s villainy from basically her first moment on screen, so when the “shocking reveal” of her betrayal came to pass, the moment perhaps lacked the weight and surprise factor that the writers may have intended. Hugh’s condition, though, was more of a slow burn thing, but from the second he was injured, it seemed as if his chances of surviving to the end of the story were slim!
Hugh cradles an injured Diana.
I think it’s bold, though, in the current media landscape to create such a clearly one-and-done story. There can’t be a direct sequel to Pragmata because one of its two protagonists (arguably its *main* protagonist) has died. And after defeating IDUS and Eight and stopping their plans, the main villains are gone, too. Given the investment a game like Pragmata requires (the game cost a reported $80 million to make), the decision not to even leave the door cracked open for a possible sequel is a bold one.
We’re firmly in the grip of sequels, spin-offs, and franchises across the entire entertainment industry. From the likes of Marvel and Star Wars at the cinema to Halo and Call of Duty in gaming, if there’s one thing you can be certain of it’s that corporations love nothing more than a story with sequel and spin-off potential. But stories… end. Every story has to eventually come to an end, and if that end is to be satisfying, it usually needs to come sooner rather than later. Pragmata told a fully contained story with a beginning, a middle, and a proper, definitive ending. That’s rare right now – so I think it’s worth celebrating.
Pragmata got a definitive ending.
With all that being said… if there’s one *more* thing you can bank on in the modern entertainment industry, it’s that any successful title will be practically forced to get a sequel. Even if, as in cases like The Last Of Us, there’s no need – and no real pathway to do so successfully. So I wouldn’t be stunned to learn that Pragmata 2 is going to be greenlit, and that – somehow – Hugh and Diana will get back together for another adventure.
Not sure I’d wanna play it, though.
Lots of games give you either magical or tech powers alongside your weapons, and in Pragmata, these take the form of Diana’s hacking abilities. These hacks unfold almost like quick-time events, with some pretty rapid button presses necessary to open up enemies and make them vulnerable to weapons fire. I generally liked the way this was handled; it added a second dimension to combat that you had to be almost continuously on top of, lest your attacks become ineffective.
A completed hack.
In terms of weapons, though, the main gun Hugh uses in Pragmata could be pretty annoying! There are a range of weapons with different abilities, but the key caveat here is that all weapons – bar one – are one-time-use only, meaning that when you’re out of ammo, you either find a new one, return to the Shelter and 3D print one, or swap to an alternative. The main gun Hugh uses – the only one not restricted in this way – could be annoying because of its limited magazine capacity and *painfully* slow reload time.
Even after multiple upgrades (I think, by the end of the campaign, I’d taken the grip gun about 80% of the way to its maximum upgrades), you still only go from six bullets per clip to eight, and reload times are still unusually slow for a game of this type. Switching to different weapons, dodging attacks with Hugh’s thrusters, and using Diana’s hacks could go some way to making up for this – and it’s something I found I started to get used to as the game wore on. But it felt a little *too* restrictive, if that makes sense, and I’d have liked to have seen this feature toned down just a tad – or perhaps given an option to do so.
The grip gun’s limitations felt a bit restrictive.
The other weapons, though, were pretty good fun, and could synergise well with different mods. (In this case, I mean the in-game collectibles, not unofficial downloads!) As one example, I favoured the short-range “shotgun” style weapon, and when combined with a mod that let me do more damage at close range, I found that to be an exceptionally effective combo against some (but not all) enemies.
The mods were also great for adding new hacking abilities or increasing Diana’s potential. I used mods to increase hacking range, allowing Diana to hack robots from further away. A second mod meant that being hit didn’t reset the hacking gauge, which was *incredibly* useful for my poor arthritic hands and not great gaming abilities! And later into the game, another mod allowed Diana to make enemies overheat much more quickly, allowing Hugh to perform some very powerful moves with another QTE-type button press.
Hacking from long range.
Those are just a few examples from the way I chose to approach Pragmata’s combat – but what I like about the game is that there is genuine variety. If you don’t wanna shoot enemies up close, there are mods and weapons to allow you to hit them from a greater distance. If you want to focus more on hacking than weapons, you can do that. You can choose what to prioritise, and in what order you want to unlock upgrades – and as long as you keep on top of things and make sure you’re checking treasure chests to find all the mods and upgrade materials, there’s a lot of ways to customise the experience.
As I said last time, the amount of hidden or unlockable content felt pitch-perfect relative to the size of Pragmata’s levels. Exploring side-rooms or hidden corridors *always* felt worthwhile, because you’re almost always going to come upon something of use or something of interest. Even if it’s “just” lunafilament (the game’s generic sci-fi “do everything” wonder material that you spend on upgrades), it still serves a very useful purpose! And there was never too much lunafilament, nor too little – at least for me. Some games either drown you in resources, making finding them not feel worthwhile, or else are way too stingy, making building even a single upgrade feel like a chore. Pragmata absolutely nails this, getting the amount of everything just right.
Exploring every nook and cranny always felt worthwhile.
In a worse game, you might feel that some of Pragmata’s gameplay loops get repetitive. “Go to place, clear all the enemies, maybe solve a small puzzle, then repeat” is basically what you’re doing a lot of the time. But because each level feels different, and each new area throws new enemy variants and new puzzles at you, I never really felt it get stale. Combined with making upgrades to alter the way I was playing, this worked pretty well. If it had been stretched too thinly, then perhaps it would’ve worn out its welcome eventually. But, as above, the game’s story and levels were paced just right.
As I said last time, though, a lot of this felt very “video gamey!” More than once you encounter a locked gate or door that requires three or five or seven different buttons to be pressed (all in different areas, naturally) in order to be unlocked. Then, when you enter a room filled with enemies – or one of Pragmata’s obvious boss battle arenas – the doors all conveniently lock behind you, only to open as soon as the baddies have been defeated. It sure was nice of IDUS to unlock all of those doors for us after we defeated their bots, eh?
Battling a big bot.
Jokes aside, this way of building levels just felt charmingly old-school to me. Sure, it isn’t “cinematic” or particularly modern, and if you think about it too hard, it’s a bit of a contrivance that Eight and IDUS would simply unlock all the doors right after you defeat a boss or a legion of robots. But I don’t think Pragmata is meant to be that kind of game.
Last time, I talked about Pragmata’s ridiculous difficulty spike, and I want to go into a bit more detail on that. I was able to beat the game’s first boss – the one you can also encounter in the demo – without too much difficulty. And most of the rest of the enemies in the second area of the game, including the giant baby-faced robo-things, I was able to figure out and push through. But at the end of that second section, after unlocking the giant gate in the cityscape area, I was shocked by the absolutely insane difficulty of the boss battle.
This boss fight was impossible for me.
Bosses are meant to be a challenge, and I get that. But this felt like way too high of a difficulty spike when compared not only to what came before, but also to the enemies and challenges that came shortly after, too. It was a “spike” in difficulty in the truest sense of the word, and even after going back through the second and first areas to pick up as much lunafilament and make as many upgrades as possible, that boss was just too much for my poor arthritic hands to manage.
I’ve said this before, and I daresay I’ll have to say it again before too long, but proper difficulty settings are a basic accessibility feature that any game in 2026 needs to incorporate. Pragmata only has two difficulty settings – effectively “normal” and “hard” – and that’s just not good enough. I’m trying to continue to enjoy my gaming hobby in spite of disability, and Pragmata’s well-designed levels and generally enjoyable combat was something I wanted to continue to experience. The game very nearly cut me off from that with this stupid difficulty spike, and I just wish that there’d been a way to properly adjust the difficulty without having to resort to unofficial mods. I have no objection to mods whatsoever, especially in the single-player space, but something like basic accessibility should be officially included, and I’d love to see Capcom take this feedback on board and patch in an “easy” mode. Unless they do, it makes Pragmata a difficult recommendation to anyone in a similar position to myself – and a title I would absolutely tell players on console to avoid, as there’s no modding support on PlayStation or Xbox at time of writing.
The game needs better difficulty and accessibility options.
However, if the very *worst* thing I can say about a video game is that I was having such a good time with it that I was willing to go above and beyond to ensure I could keep playing it, well… that probably isn’t the most damning condemnation ever, eh? I just think it’s worth re-iterating the point about difficulty and accessibility, because in this case, I was very nearly cut off from getting much further into Pragmata. I don’t believe it’s right that folks with disabilities or skill mismatches should be cut off from single-player games like this, not when basic accessibility features and difficulty options have been around for decades and are part of many games. Look at a title like Control – that game’s wide range of difficulty options and accessibility features should be the baseline industry-wide standard, not an exception.
But enough about that. I think, between this piece and the previous one, I’ve covered the topic in enough detail.
I enjoyed the design of each of Pragmata’s bosses, and I liked how they all looked and played in completely distinct ways. The standout, perhaps, is the Lunadigger – the giant Dune-esque “worm” that closes out the game’s fourth sector. The way the levels leading up to this fight had you being incredibly careful about stepping on the moon’s surface was also incredibly creative, and led to some fun platforming – as well as more than a few mad dashes across the dust!
The Lunadigger was a tough but fun boss.
Given where the world is today with artificial intelligence, a game like Pragmata feels pretty timely. Not so much because of its robot baddies or its hacking – though those are interesting, too – but because of the way the story was written and how it leans into an old sci-fi trope that’s being taken increasingly seriously by computer scientists and those in the A.I. space.
Eight – Pragmata’s overarching villain – wants to send a kind of biological weapon of sorts to Earth. Why? Not because she was ordered to do so, but because her programming interpreted her creator’s wishes that way. Dr Higgins was furious with the Delphi corporation for not heeding his warnings and causing the death of his daughther, and wanted to punish them for it – and Eight responded to that by seizing control of IDUS, killing everyone at the Cradle, and attempting to exterminate life on Earth. Not because she was *ordered* to, but because that course of action made sense to her programming.
Eight was revealed as the game’s overarching villain.
That’s an extreme example, arguably, of the A.I. “alignment problem,” which is an increasingly prominent topic of discussion out here in the real world. In short, an A.I. could become “misaligned” if its goals – or even just its methods – don’t line up with what humans want or need. And if an A.I. were to, for instance, decide that the best way to achieve its goal was to kill humans, it might do so not out of malice or murderous intent, but simply because it had other priorities.
In this case, Eight and IDUS represent the concept of A.I. in a more general sense. They’re taking actions not because they particularly *want* to kill Hugh, Diana, or anyone else, but because they have goals that even they don’t fully understand. The professor’s dying wish that Delphi should be exposed for what it did to Daisy was processed through Eight’s programming… and the solution she came up with isn’t one that he – or anyone else – could have possibly wanted or even predicted. And given some of the things we hear from time to time from the world of A.I. here in the real world, that’s a pretty interesting and timely story! It reminds me a little of Star Trek’s classic episode The Ultimate Computer, in that sense.
IDUS is a depiction of A.I. gone wrong.
The other theme that we see in Pragmata’s story is one of family. Hugh and Diana become a “found family” over the course of their adventure, with Hugh playing a fatherly role to the robot’s child-like personality. This led to some cute moments between the two of them, particularly when they were chatting at the Shelter. This bond seemed to form quite quickly, which would probably be my only somewhat-criticism, but there were plenty of sweet moments between Hugh and Diana as the game wore on.
Sticking with the theme, Pragmata makes a point about the sacrifices parents make for their children – in Hugh’s case, literally using the last of his strength to send her to Earth so she can live out her dream of seeing the beach and the ocean with her own two eyes. And this moment, which was sufficiently built up across the latter part of the game, definitely plucked the right emotional chords. This was a man devoting his final moments to giving his surrogate “daughter” the one thing she wanted – and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel *something* as the game’s story came to an end.
Hugh’s sacrifice came at the end of the story.
So let’s start to wrap things up.
Pragmata is a pretty fun game with a classic, old-school feel – and one glaring flaw in terms of its accessibility. Once I got around that, however, I had a good time as I followed the story to its conclusion. I enjoyed some well-designed levels, came to care more about two characters than I initially expected I might, got into some tough combat encounters, and hacked my way across the moon with Hugh and Diana.
This game hadn’t been on my radar at all in 2026, but a strong and enjoyable demo version earlier in the year convinced me to add it to my wishlist. And I’m glad that I picked up the full version and got to go on this adventure with Diana and Hugh. As I said last time, there’s some stiff competition in 2026, but if you join me in December for my annual “End-of-Year Awards,” I have a feeling that Pragmata could be a dark horse contender for “game of the year.” We’ll have to wait and see on that, though!
Hugh and Diana near the end of the game.
I hope this spoiler-filled look at Pragmata’s story and gameplay has been interesting. I originally intended for this review to be a single article, but having written so much in both the spoiler-free and spoiler-filled sections, I thought it made more sense to break it into two separate pieces.
I have a few other games on my list that I’d like to get around to before too long, so stay tuned for reviews of games like Mixtape, inKonbini: One Store, Many Stories, Mouse: P.I. For Hire, and 007: First Light. I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll get around to all of them, but they’re definitely on my agenda this summer and autumn. I don’t play as many games as I used to, these days, but 2026 has felt like a pretty good year for new video games – even if it’s an absolutely atrocious one for gamers and the games industry as a whole.
Thanks for reading… and happy gaming!
Pragmata is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. Pragmata is the copyright of Capcom. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
This review is free from major narrative spoilers for Pragmata.
I recently completed Pragmata – Capcom’s sci-fi adventure – so it’s time for a review!
Pragmata hadn’t been on my radar this year, but I picked up the demo version back in February – and if you know me, you’ll know I’m a sucker for a good free demo! The demo version only lasted about half an hour, if I recall correctly, but it was interesting enough for me to put the game on my wishlist. I don’t usually like to pay full-price for video games, so I waited to see if Pragmata was gonna go on sale this summer. It didn’t… but I picked it up anyway!
There will be no major narrative spoilers in this article, so nothing’s gonna ruin the story for you. I’m only including official screenshots from Capcom this time, too, and none will show anything that could spoil the game. If you just want my take on Pragmata prior to picking it up for yourself, feel free to only read this article! But if you also want to get my thoughts on the game’s narrative and main characters in a bit more detail, as well as a couple of mechanics that you gain access to later in the campaign… I hope you’ll join me next time. I’ll get into the game’s story, world, and characters in more detail. When the spoiler-filled review is ready, click or tap here to read it, or follow the link above.
No spoilers today… but check back soon for my thoughts on the game’s story.
It goes without saying that everything we’re going to talk about today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one critic. If I highlight something in the game that you think sounds awful, or if I offer criticism for something you enjoyed… please keep that in mind! There ought to be enough room in the sci-fi and gaming communities for polite discussion and differences of opinion without getting into toxic negativity.
Alright, with all of that out of the way, here comes the two-sentence summary!
I liked Pragmata for its old-school charm, its “double-A” story, and a pair of characters who grew on me over the course of their adventure. But I didn’t like Pragmata for its ridiculous difficulty spikes and lack of proper accessibility options.
There’s a lot to love in Pragmata, and one big point of criticism.
Let’s go into a bit more detail about each of those points.
Pragmata is unapologetically a video game. It doesn’t try to go for a “cinematic” presentation, it isn’t aiming for realism, and it embraces things like boss fights, locked doors, and a player base that’s always accessible. Its story, while it does throw up a few twists and turns, is fairly straightforward, and there are really only three characters to speak of. Enemies come in different flavours, and each takes a slightly different combination of weapons and powers – presented here as “hacking” – to defeat. If you dialed back the graphics (and toned down some of the bright white hallways and offices), you’d easily believe that this was a video game from, say, 2006 – not 2026. And in this case, I mean that as a compliment!
Sometimes you just want to switch off and blast through waves of enemies – and Pragmata offers that. There are puzzles to solve along the way, as well as some elements of platforming, and that’s basically the gameplay loop. Go to an area, kill all the bad robots inside, solve whatever puzzle is required to move on to the next stage, and repeat.
Going up?
But within that structure, there are some very creative levels. Pragmata has you wandering through a variety of different simulated environments – including a cityscape, a beach, and a jungle, as well as the futuristic sci-fi base which serves as the game’s main setting. Each level is well laid out, and while they aren’t vast and expansive, there are enough unlockables and secrets to make exploration and checking out side-rooms and secret areas feel genuinely worthwhile.
If you’ve been a reader for a long time, you might recall one of my criticisms of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor being that there just wasn’t enough content to find when exploring that game’s vast, semi-open levels. Pragmata absolutely does not have that problem. If you’ve found a room, a chamber, a corridor, a hidden area… you’re gonna find something worth your while. Maybe it’s a “log,” documenting the problems at the company and its sci-fi base. Maybe it’s an unlockable – something to improve your health, weapons, or tech powers. Or maybe it’ll be one of the cute collectibles to add to your home-away-from-home. I spent more time in Pragmata than I expected… in part because I wanted to collect all of the additions to my character’s home base. That’s something I don’t often do when playing games – and I think it’s testament to how Pragmata roped me in in ways I wasn’t expecting.
The way into the player’s base.
I described Pragmata’s story as “double-A,” so let me elaborate on that (without getting into narrative spoilers!)
Many of today’s “triple-A” video games go for these big, cinematic stories with characters who are meant to feel incredibly realistic. Think of games like The Last Of Us or Red Dead Redemption II – every aspect of the narrative in a title like those is designed to feel like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster. Pragmata, to me, feels like a video game story. And that is not a criticism! Some stories are well-suited to one medium or another, and for my money Pragmata’s story is fine. It isn’t gonna be a big-budget streaming series or a movie, and that’s okay. It works *because* it’s a video game.
I guess that might sound like a backhanded compliment; like I’m calling the story “simplistic,” or something. But that isn’t really what I mean. The parts of the story that are there are genuinely interesting, and I found myself getting more invested in it as the game unfolded. I just mean that there’s a difference between a story like Pragmata’s and one you might get in some other modern titles. For me, the story and gameplay generally worked pretty well together, and the narrative added to that old-school charm rather than detracted from it.
Hugh and Diana encountering bots.
Where Pragmata really succeeded, though, was in its characterisation. If you’ve only got *two* characters in your story 90% of the time, you have to absolutely nail both of them – and Pragmata really did. At first, I felt Hugh was a pretty bland “everyman” type; but he very quickly grew on me as the story unfolded. And his sidekick Diana, while she could be annoying on occasion, certainly did, too.
We’ll go into more detail about Diana and Hugh in the spoiler-filled article in the days ahead, so stay tuned for that. But both characters were interesting and engaging. I also felt the way that you controlled both characters in gameplay was something a bit different. It’s certainly a twist on the old “escort mission” idea! Both characters had things to say, ways to contribute to the fight, and their own emotional moments, too. I could see there being some criticism of how quickly their bond seemed to build, but for me, I think the game’s story was paced just right, and it’s not a criticism I’d personally agree with.
Diana and Hugh: the game’s co-protagonists.
Okay, let’s be negative for a moment.
Pragmata is not a particularly accessible game. I suffer from arthritis, which affects my hands and fingers – and, to be blunt about it, I was never the best gamer in the world even before that became an issue! But because Pragmata doesn’t offer adequate ways to tone down the difficulty… well, it made the game too difficult and borderline inaccessible for me.
One relatively early section of the game builds up to a boss battle. And though groups of enemies could occasionally pose a challenge, I got through the game up to that point without too much difficulty. But then came one of the worst difficulty spikes I’ve enountered in a game in a good long while. And look, I get it: bosses are supposed to be tough. But this one, compared to the game around it, was exceptionally difficult, and for someone with limited dexterity… I couldn’t do it. And this was on the easiest of Pragmata’s two difficulty options. You read that right: the game only has *two* difficulty options – with a third, much harder one being unlocked after beating the campaign.
Because of that… I can’t recommend Pragmata to someone in a similar position to myself, unfortunately.
A combat encounter.
“But Dennis,” I hear you ask, “didn’t you say you completed the game?” And that’s right – I did. But I was only able to do so by downloading and installing an unofficial mod.
To me, that kind of game design is not acceptable. I praised Pragmata for its old-school feel, its classic level design, and its creative enemy types. But I cannot stand for a modern game, in 2026, launching without proper accessibility features. And, say it with me, folks: “difficulty options are an accessibility feature!”
I turned the mod off after beating that one impossible boss, and I hoped I could get through the rest of the game without it. And I tried, believe me! But I did end up having to use the mod a couple more times before the end of my run, again because either a boss or a swarm of enemies was just too much for my decrepit body to handle. I’m disappointed by this, and I would encourage Capcom to seriously look into including more difficulty and accessibility options in future titles.
Ironically, for a game about hacking, I had to “hack” my copy to make it playable!
That’s the end of the worst of my criticisms of the game!
Sound design and music can go unnoticed in games, sometimes. For my money, Pragmata did a good job here. Beeps and boops felt sufficiently futuristic and sci-fi – if that makes sense – and each of the game’s weapons had sound effects that seemed to fit with the design. Music could be intense during combat, gentle during quiet story moments with the two characters, and melancholic at key moments in the story, too. I haven’t set the game down humming its theme tune, or anything, but sound and music were solid throughout.
Visually, I have to say that nothing in Pragmata really jumped out at me as being uniquely interesting – but I didn’t hate any of the designs, really. Robots (the main cadre of enemies you’ll encounter) all felt sufficiently futuristic, and some could feel either creepy or intimidating, with designs that leaned into those ideas. Bosses always managed to feel genuinely imposing, too.
Detail of one of the game’s robotic enemies.
There were some cute collectibles for the player’s base, and I went out of my way to make sure I got the entire set. Most of these also triggered a small cut-scene or moment of dialogue between the main characters, which added to the fun. I’ve never been someone who needs to get 100% of all collectibles in a game, and I missed my share of weapon mods and upgrade materials across my adventure! But it was always worth backtracking to get those other pieces, and I’m glad that I was able to gather and install all of them before beating the final boss.
So I think that’s all I can say for now without getting into spoiler territory.
If you want to know if Pragmata is right for you… first answer this question: are you reasonably good at third-person action/adventure games? If you are, and if you aren’t suffering from arthritis or a similar issue to me, then I absolutely recommend it. It was a fun experience, a bit of a throwback in some respects, and a generally fun time. But if you’re someone, like myself, who prefers to play on easy mode – or if you just want to experience a story without needing to worry too much about dying over and over in a game that *doesn’t have a free save system* – then you might want to think twice. If you play on PC, you can do what I did and mod the game. But if you’re on Xbox or PlayStation, that option’s not available to you… so it’s absolutely worth being aware that there aren’t proper difficulty or accessibility options before you part with your money.
I recommend Pragmata… with a major caveat.
Once I got around that issue, I did enjoy the rest of the game. And I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on playing the remainder of Pragmata simply because of Capcom’s refusal to cater to gamers of different ability levels. For me, this is an absolutely valid point of criticism, and by far the worst thing about Pragmata. The only reason it didn’t ruin the game for me – and the only reason I was able to keep playing – was thanks not to Capcom, but to the efforts of the modding community. Another great reason for playing on PC, eh?
If that’s not an issue for you, though (or if you’re okay with modding the game), then I’ll absolutely say “go for it!” I had fun on this sci-fi adventure with Hugh and Diana, and over the course of my seventeen-and-a-half hours with Pragmata, I was enjoying myself far more often than not. I think Pragmata faces stiff competition when it comes to deciding on my personal “game of the year,” but it might be a dark horse contender come December.
I hope you’ll check back at the end of the year for that! And if you’re okay with story spoilers, join me next time. I’ll break down Pragmata’s narrative in a bit more detail, as well as touch on a few things that I wasn’t able to this time. Thanks for reading… and happy gaming!
Pragmata is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. Pragmata is the copyright of Capcom. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Xbox has been losing the home console war for… what? Thirteen years, give or take? The launch of the Xbox One was where it all went wrong, and this generation’s Series S and Series X consoles haven’t been able to win back players en masse. So Microsoft clearly has to do *something* to reinvigorate its gaming division. But are Microsoft’s recent moves the right ones? Is killing off multiple studios just days after announcing their latest titles a sign that Xbox is getting a grip… or are they finally losing the plot? With Microsoft’s A.I. investments also helping to drive hardware prices through the roof, what does the future look like for the brand? And could there be a day – perhaps sooner than we think – where there isn’t an Xbox to compete with PlayStation in the home console market?
Let’s break down the latest Xbox news and discuss that today.
If you’re a regular reader, you might recall articles over the past few years which had titles like “What’s Going On At Xbox?” and “I’m Not Sure What Xbox Is Doing Any More” – because this is hardly a new issue. Microsoft’s gaming strategy has been muddled, confused, and contradictory for a long time, and Xbox has seemingly tripped over itself time and time again over the last few years. Sadly, for fans of Xbox… this ain’t new.
We’ve been here before.
The latest news from Xbox, if you haven’t heard, is that huge layoffs are imminent as major studios are set to close. Xbox also pulled out of funding several third-party titles, leaving their futures uncertain. And this comes just a few days after what had been a relatively successful Xbox Games Showcase event, where excitement for new titles – including several that are now either all but cancelled or whose futures are uncertain – had been effectively built up.
Senua, the third entry in Ninja Theory’s Hellblade series, was prominently featured at the Xbox Games Showcase just a few days ago… but Microsoft had already decided to pull the plug. The same is true of State of Decay 3, with Undead Labs seemingly on the chopping block. And other games which had been previously revealed or teased, like Arkane’s Blade adaptation and IO Interactive’s fantasy title, are also seeing funding pulled and may face cancellation as a result.
Senua may never be finished or released.
The word is that Xbox needs to cull “underperforming” or just plain unprofitable studios as part of a scheme to refocus on big, established brands. The likes of Halo, Call of Duty, and – thanks to its TV adaptation bringing in new eyes – Fallout are among the series that Xbox sees a future in. They might actually be the *only* ones, at least right now.
If you just take a surface-level view, that kind of thing makes sense. If a studio has developed a game, perhaps over five-plus years, and that game makes a net loss… why should a corporation trust that studio to get it right next time? That’s the basic argument that a lot of folks have been making in defence of these shutdowns, closures, and layoffs.
But is that really all there is to say?
Halo could be one of the only brands Xbox is interested in right now.
Microsoft and Xbox’s leadership and executives have to own up to the roles they played in these disappointments. A game like Redfall was always a risky prospect to greenlight, coming from a studio with no multiplayer experience and with the live-service space already saturated. The Outer Worlds 2 saw its marketing catastrophically overshadowed by a desperate attempt to hike up its price. Games like South of Midnight just don’t seem to have been advertised very effectively (I only saw that the game existed because I was subscribing to Game Pass at the time). And so on. In each of these cases, any disappointment is at least as much on management and leadership as it is on the studios, the developers, and the games themselves.
Some of these decisions may be “necessary,” from a corporate point of view, to balance the books and shore up Xbox as a brand. But they’re also undeniably the result of more than a decade’s worth of failures on the corporate side, and there’s no escaping that. Xbox may have recently parachuted in new leadership, who can claim that they weren’t around for any of that, and they’re just here to clean up the mess. But at Microsoft, many of the folks who are ultimately responsible for these decisions remain in place. And it’s pretty galling, as a developer or junior employee, to lose your livelihood because of decisions that were made years ago by people who either remain gainfully employed or who have enjoyed the most luxurious of golden parachutes.
Former Xbox head Phil Spencer.
But okay, let’s stop before this turns into another one of Dennis’s anti-corporate rants!
I want to consider what this means for Xbox, and what a slimmed-down, smaller Xbox might look like in a few years’ time when the results of these closures and layoffs becomes more obvious.
This should be obvious, but the most important thing that any video games publisher and hardware manufacturer needs is… *games*. Xbox needs big games, sure, but it also needs smaller and medium-sized games – exactly the kinds of titles that are currently being killed off. Hardly anyone buys an Xbox console entirely because of Hellblade or South of Midnight, but without those kinds of games for folks to play in between releases in some of the bigger franchises… what else is there? Third-party stuff, sure… but then why not buy a PlayStation, a Switch 2, or a PC? Why sign up for Game Pass if there are gonna be fewer of those kinds of titles to dip in and out of? Game Pass is worth it if you get to play a dozen or more games a year… it’s a lot less of a good value proposition if all you’re gonna get is one game in a big franchise every few years. And no Call of Duty to boot.
Any games publisher or platform needs smaller and medium-sized titles in between its biggest releases.
Xbox’s big brands, too, aren’t as strong as they need to be – and they aren’t as strong as the CEO and executives seem to think they are. Last year’s entry in the Call of Duty series – Black Ops 7 – was a bit of a flop, and there hasn’t been a truly great entry in the Halo series since Reach. Just in the first-person shooter space, then, there’s absolutely a case to be made for a new series, or the return of a long-dormant series, to be given a chance to impress. But Xbox’s executives also killed off the remake of Perfect Dark, didn’t they?
The games industry is changing, and for a lot of players, a handful of games – or even just a single title – is all they’re interested in. Folks will play Grand Theft Auto Online, Fortnite, or Roblox for years or even a decade, and Xbox – like all of the big players in the AAA space, really – has been desperately trying to create “the next Fortnite” or “the next GTA Online”. It hasn’t worked.
Like everyone else, Xbox has been trying to create “the next big thing.”
By killing off (or selling off) unprofitable or underperforming studios, Xbox may be able to claim a short-term win in its next financial earnings report. Spending less money on these kinds of studios will combine with a slow return of Game Pass subscribers after last year’s exodus, and that’ll probably make Xbox’s balance sheet look reasonable by this time next year. If this year’s inevitable Call of Duty is a success – and if titles like Fable do well, too – that’ll be another boost.
However, I can’t shake the feeling that this is *desperately* short-term thinking from Xbox’s executives. Just like last year’s Game Pass price hike, it’s an attempt to shuffle things around to make the books look better to investors – but not only does it not address Xbox’s real, core issue, it risks making the future of the brand even less secure. By increasing Xbox’s reliance on a handful of massive brands, Microsoft is practically inviting trouble – especially when most of those brands haven’t been performing particularly well for quite a long time.
Xbox is doubling-down on the likes of Call of Duty.
When was the last genuinely great Fallout game – one that received as close to universal approval as possible? It wasn’t Fallout 4, with its voiced protagonist, annoying settlement system, and degraded role-playing experience. And it definitely wasn’t Fallout 76. So… New Vegas, I guess? And that’s already more than fifteen years ago.
The same is true of Halo. Halo Infinite underwhelmed. The Halo TV adaptation was unceremoniously cancelled. Halo 4 and Halo 5, while appreciated by some fans, definitely didn’t hit the highs of earlier games in the series, and weren’t as widely-played. And the jury’s out on Campaign Evolved – the *second* remake of the first game, which launches in a few weeks’ time.
The TV adaptation of Halo was cancelled after two seasons.
My point is this: are *these* really the kinds of names that Microsoft and Xbox can rely on and build the future of the brand around? Will a new Halo game deliver the kind of win that Xbox needs, and bring in unprecedented player numbers? What about Fallout? The TV show may have been a success so far, but by the time a new game is ready it could easily have finished its broadcast run. Think about it: Fallout is already two seasons in, and even if a brand-new Fallout game were announced today, with experienced developers and a big budget, you’re looking at a minimum of four years to have it ready to go. Two or three more TV seasons could easily have come and gone by then… and the moment to capitalise on its success will have well and truly passed.
Putting a growing number of eggs in fewer and fewer baskets is basically what Xbox is announcing they plan to do. So if any one of those baskets should fall… you’re looking at a big, eggy mess, if I can stretch the metaphor that far! By reducing the number of studios under its umbrella, laying off potentially thousands of developers, and publishing fewer games in the years ahead, Xbox might be able to show a positive balance sheet in 2027… but how long will it last? And with that dependence on a handful of franchises to prop up its hardware, its ports, and Game Pass, too… is it sustainable?
By the time a new Fallout game has been developed, the TV series could easily have finished its run.
Speaking for myself, one of the things I enjoyed most about Game Pass – and one of the things I missed when I cancelled last year – was being able to hop onto the app and see what was new. I tried out games I’d never have thought to buy simply because they were there. If Xbox doubles- and triples-down on Call of Duty and Halo, where will that kind of experience go for players? Where will the next South of Midnight come from? That was my “game of the year” in 2025, and while I fully accept it wasn’t a commercial success… it was still a fantastic title. Not every game from every studio can be a massive hit every time. Sometimes you have to learn from failure and do better next time – something which applies to Compulsion Games *and* to leadership at Microsoft.
Or at least it would in an ideal world.
Maybe Xbox’s financial situation really is so dire that it’s either make these cuts now or watch the entire business fold. Perhaps Microsoft’s leadership has basically threatened to get out of the hardware business – or gaming entirely – if Xbox can’t demonstrate that there’s a way back. And if that’s the case, if the ship is sinking so badly that the only thing to do is throw *people* overboard… well, it isn’t the fault of the people being tossed, is it?
New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. Photo: Microsoft/Xbox
From the point of view of players like ourselves, the games industry needs Xbox. Not because of anything Xbox does, has done in the past, or might do in the future. Not because Xbox hardware is fantastic, powerful, or well-designed. And not because any Xbox games – past, present, or future – are must-play “games of the generation.” The industry needs Xbox because, without it, there’s only gonna be PlayStation and Nintendo. Xbox is a balance – not only a one-to-one competitor with PlayStation in a way that Nintendo hasn’t been for twenty-plus years, but a non-Japanese company in the hardware space. If Xbox falls and disappears from the gaming hardware landscape, your only choices for new hardware in the years ahead will be Nintendo, PlayStation… or PC.
Nintendo, since the days of the Wii, has been off to one side, doing its own thing – and, generally speaking, doing it pretty well. But Nintendo doesn’t compete with PlayStation in the same way as Xbox; a lot of current-gen titles don’t even come to Nintendo’s less-powerful hardware, and the brand is arguably more focused on family-friendly titles, casual titles, and a handful of bigger exclusives. Xbox is the counterweight; the competitor that PlayStation needs lest it gets a monopoly on the entire hardware market. And that would be a net negative for players, unfortunately.
Without Xbox, Sony will effectively have a monopoly over current-gen gaming, and that’s not acceptable.
Sony has recently announced – to some backlash – that, after 2028, they’re going all-digital. There will be no more PlayStation discs produced after that date (which I have to assume will coincide with the launch of their new hardware, which may very well not even have a disc drive included). Right now, there’s a *chance* – however minuscule it may seem – that Xbox can force Sony to walk that back by offering a competing device that does come with physical discs. Xbox has an opportunity to do to PlayStation what the PS4 did to the Xbox One some thirteen years ago.
But PlayStation clearly feels confident in making this move in part *because* they know that the competition from Xbox isn’t serious. Numbers are difficult to come by, but it’s generally accepted that, for every one Xbox Series console sold since 2020, there have been three PlayStation 5s sold. Sony feels it can act with impunity right now, because of this disparity. But as long as competition exists, there’s at least a chance for Xbox to score a win – and that could force Sony to pull back from some of its unpopular and anti-consumer moves.
PlayStation has massively outsold Xbox for two console generations in a row.
Without Xbox, there’s nothing to stop Sony going all-digital. Without Xbox, there’s nothing to stop Sony jacking up the price of PlayStation 6 consoles way beyond the $1,000 mark, or increasing the base price of games to $80, $90, or beyond. With Xbox in the marketplace, Sony might still do that. And given Xbox tried, with The Outer Worlds 2, to force an $80 base price for games, maybe they’d just follow suit. But at least it’s possible for genuine competition to exist… and in a capitalist marketplace, competition is one of the only things protecting us as consumers from the worst impulses of corporations.
I sympathise with the folks being laid off. I’ve been there, I’ve been in that position, and I know how much it can hurt. And given the state of the industry, with job losses elsewhere and an apparent contraction in the market, this could very easily be the last time some of these people will ever get to work in game development. If there are fewer jobs going at fewer studios, and a glut of newly-available workers entering the job market… I mean, do the maths. There may not be a game development job available for all of them. And that’s just awful.
This was less than three years ago…
I hope that Xbox’s decision to slim down, streamline, and kill off whole studios will lead to a more stable brand going forward, because the industry needs the competition that, right now, only Xbox is able to offer. But to be blunt with you, I struggle to see how doubling- and tripling-down on a handful of franchises that are arguably way past their own heydays is going to accomplish that, and I fear that Xbox’s leaders are merely shuffling things around to make their balance sheet look better in the short-term… at the expense of the longer-term.
However, with Sony receiving criticism for its all-digital idea, maybe an opportunity has just opened up for Xbox. They might’ve lost the console war for two generations running, but that could change… right? If Sony’s belief that they can get away with those kinds of things is mistaken, it could hand Xbox an opportunity to close out the current generation strongly, and perhaps even make a comeback in the years ahead. I wouldn’t put a lot of money on that, were I someone who liked a gamble. But you never know, I guess.
Today, though, doesn’t feel like a day for that much positivity. And I’m afraid I see way more negatives than positives for Xbox right now. It may be possible for the brand to make a comeback – if Sony presents an opportunity on a silver platter through its own missteps. But it’s more likely, in my opinion, that these closures, cancellations, and layoffs will come to be seen as the beginning of the end for Xbox… not the start of a bright future.
All titles and hardware discussed above are the copyrights of their respective studios, developers, publishers, etc. Some promo images courtesy of IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of minor spoilers for some of the titles discussed below.
Where has the first half of 2026 gone?! I can’t believe the year’s already halfway done; New Year’s Eve quite literally feels like it was yesterday! But it’s the 30th of June today – so as I do every year, I’d like to take a look ahead to some of the entertainment experiences that lie ahead between now and Christmas.
And yes… Christmas is coming. We’re already halfway there!
This isn’t a review or recap of some of the films, games, and TV shows of 2026. That’ll come in December, when I hand out my annual “End-of-Year Awards,” so stay tuned for that! Instead, this is a look ahead – I’ve chosen five films, five TV programmes, and five video games that I’m looking forward to as the second half of 2026 gets underway.
What might we watch and play between now and Christmas?
As always, a couple of important caveats!
At time of writing in late June 2026, all of the titles discussed below are still officially slated for release later this year. However, it’s not impossible to think that some (or even all) of them will miss their intended release/broadcast dates, and may even slip back into next year. These things happen all the time.
Secondly, if a title you’re really hyped up for or excited about doesn’t make the list, or if I show interest in something that sounds just awful to you… *that’s okay!* There will always be a range of opinions on entertainment and media, and we don’t all like the same things. I’m sharing a few titles that – in my *subjective* opinion – seem interesting or entertaining, but this is by no means an exhaustive list!
Which upcoming games are on your radar?
With that being said, I feel a need to point out one particular exclusion this time around. You’ll notice below that Grand Theft Auto VI – arguably the biggest release of the year for the entire entertainment sector – isn’t on my list. That’s for a couple of reasons. One: GTA 6 has been teased and delayed before, and I wouldn’t be stunned to learn another delay is imminent. I don’t have any “insider information” on that, but it feels like a 50/50 bet to me right now.
Secondly, and more importantly from a personal point of view, the money-grubbing pricks at Rockstar and Take-Two have deliberately cheaped out on giving Grand Theft Auto VI a PC release. Because PC is where I play games – and I have no intention of buying an expensive console – I won’t get access to GTA 6 this year, even assuming that it makes its release date. For that reason alone… I’m not even thinking about the game, to be honest. There will be plenty of other things to watch and play. Assuming GTA 6 makes it to PC in a year or two from now, I daresay I’ll try it out (perhaps when it goes on sale). But in 2026? It isn’t even a blip on my radar!
Okay, with all of that out of the way… let’s get into the list!
Film #1: The End of Oak Street
I’ve seen a couple of trailers for The End of Oak Street, and I’m kind of intrigued! It could be terrible, of course, but its basic premise reminds me a little of a book I read a long time ago called Island in the Sea of Time, which sees a modern-day settlement sent back to the Bronze Age. This film, though, might involve time travel to the dinosaur era… and, I mean, who doesn’t love a good dino movie or Jurassic Park homage?
Director David Robert Mitchell was responsible for the critically-acclaimed 2014 film It Follows, and The End of Oak Street will star Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. I wasn’t totally sold on McGregor’s “American accent” in the trailer, to be honest, but he’s usually been solid in other films I’ve seen him in. It just seems like a really interesting idea for a film, something a bit different to typical horror or monster movies, and perhaps a step away from the recent Jurassic World saga, too.
Film #2: Hexed
Walt Disney Animation Studios has been on a bit of a winless run, of late. An overabundance of sequels hasn’t helped, and other titles from the likes of Netflix and Sony have arguably surpassed their best offerings. But I have hope for Hexed – the studio’s first original story in a couple of years. Wish may not have been the kind of film everyone was looking for, but maybe a change of pace will be just what Disney needs to get back on its feet.
We don’t have a ton of information about Hexed just yet, only that the film will see a teenage character (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) discovering that she has magical, witchy powers. I welcome Disney stepping away from sequels (did we really need a *fifth* entry in the Toy Story series?) to try something original. Sequels may provide a short-term cash boost by playing on fans’ positive feelings for an earlier title, but for long-term success, original stories are what’s needed.
Film #3: Digger
A “black comedy” starring Tom Cruise as a man trying to save the world… from a disaster he himself unleashed. It sounds like it has potential, right? Digger is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won Oscars for his work on Birdman and The Revenant – so, again, the pedigree there makes me feel optimistic!
We don’t have a ton more information about Digger yet; all we’ve seen of the film is a teaser and there’s only a very short outline of the premise. But what’s out there is already enough to pique my curiosity, and I have high hopes for a funny, engaging, and perhaps somewhat thoughtful picture when Digger is released.
Film #4: Werwulf
Robert Eggers, best-known for the likes of The Witch, The Northman, and the remake of Nosferatu, is coming back with this new horror film. And the premise sounds… interesting. Set in medieval Britain, and seemingly drawing on British folklore surrounding werewolves, Werwulf will star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Willem Dafoe.
As a Brit, I like the premise of a film exploring British folklore, and there have been relatively few successful werewolf films, if you think about it. Aside from cult classic Dog Soldiers, I can’t think of many recent pictures to feature these iconic monsters. We don’t have a lot of information to go on about this one, and there hasn’t been a trailer yet, but Werwulf is one to keep an eye on.
Film #5: Dune: Part Three
Maybe I was mistaken, but I believed for the longest time that Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was going to be a two-part adaptation. Regardless, Part Three – which is based largely on Dune: Messiah – is the final instalment, and will premiere later this year. Most of the cast from the first parts are returning, and with this adaptation having been one of the best sci-fi film series of the last few years… I’m definitely excited to return to Arrakis for one final adventure.
My recollection is that Dune: Messiah is somewhat of a lesser story, but Villeneuve obviously saw value in continuing his adaptation, so I’ll be curious to see where this final chapter goes. With a TV prequel/spin-off already having hit streaming, this version of Dune is growing into its very own franchise – and as a sci-fi fan, I welcome that.
TV Series #1: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4
I bet you saw this one coming from a mile away! Strange New Worlds has been – for me, anyway – the absolute high-water mark of modern Star Trek, with a return to a more episodic style of storytelling. This has given the show the freedom to travel to new planets, encounter a wider range of aliens, and dip its toes in such diverse genres as horror, war, comedy, and even do a musical. This episodic style feels, for want of a better word, much more “classic,” like Star Trek shows from decades past.
Season 4 has teased us with some kind of wormhole mystery, dinosaurs, and an episode where the main characters are played by Jim Henson’s muppets. No, I’m not kidding! Above all, though, it’s my hope that the show’s final ten-episode season (Season 5 will be a measly six episodes, sadly) will be more of the same. That mix of classic “monster-of-the-week” storytelling with characters who grow and evolve over the course of multiple stories is what’s made Strange New Worlds such a joy to watch. And yes, I’m *still* salty about the show’s premature cancellation.
We won’t have to wait long for this one – Silo’s third season arrives in just a few days’ time! I called Season 1 my favourite TV show of 2023, and even though I felt the quality dip a little in Season 2, there’s still a ton of potential in this unique sci-fi mystery series. Season 2 ended on multiple cliffhangers for different characters, and also introduced us to a new storyline set in Washington, DC, apparently some time before the events of the series. I can’t wait to see what happens this time around.
Silo’s third season went into production back-to-back with its fourth and final season, too, so it’s my hope that this story will move along at a reasonable pace and won’t feel either stretched too thin or unnecessarily padded. Apple TV+ has been pretty good with its sci-fi content; I simply must catch up with For All Mankind one of these days, too! Silo is one of the shows that I fully expect will be in contention for my “TV Series of the Year” award come December.
I still haven’t watched very much anime, but 2026 has been the year in which I first dipped my toes in the medium. When I started looking for new and upcoming anime series to watch, The Cat and the Dragon leapt out from the bunch. I mean, it’s a story about a baby dragon who’s raised by a family of cats. What’s not to love? Oh, and the cats are magical, too.
Truthfully, I don’t really know what to expect here! I’m still pretty new to anime in general, and this adaptation of a fairly long-running light novel/manga series might turn out not to be “my thing.” But I’m curious, and I’m definitely keen to continue my exploration of anime with something that sounds a bit… different.
TV Series #4: The East Palace 동궁
The East Palace is a historical dark fantasy series set in Korea. It follows the adventures of a “ghost slayer,” who has the ability to travel between the human world and the spirit world, after he’s recruited by the king. It sounds interesting, and I felt that the trailer teased an action-packed, exciting, and decidedly spooky production. The East Palace was produced in Korea with a Korean cast, and draws on Korean folklore and legends for the core of its story.
Would it be glib and unfair to suggest that The East Palace is “KPop Demon Hunters for grown-ups”? Because honestly, that’s kinda the vibe I’m getting! If you know me, you know that KPop Demon Hunters was my favourite film of 2025, so I very much meant that as a compliment. It’s also part of the reason why The East Palace piqued my curiosity, to be honest!
TV Series #5: Stuart Fails to Save the Universe
I’m not really a Big Bang Theory fan, and I think I gradually stopped watching the series around Season 3 or so. So I’m not at all caught up on the show or its characters – including the titular Stuart. I’m not even sure, in the photo above, which character *is* Stuart. But this “spin-off” from The Big Bang Theory looks like it’s going to be something different – a comedy series all about travelling between different parallel worlds and trying to stop or prevent some kind of apocalyptic event.
With the caveats that The Big Bang Theory’s sense of humour wasn’t always my thing, *and* that time travel-multiverse stories can be a pain to get right… I’m curious, I gotta say. The trailer didn’t exactly blow me away, and it’s probably 50-50 whether I watch the season to the end or bounce off it. But I think there’s potential in the idea of a sci-fi/action story that has this comedic angle. Whether it needed to be a Big Bang Theory spin-off using characters from that series, though, and whether that’ll end up being a net negative for someone who only casually watched the first few seasons of that show… I guess we’ll see.
Video Game #1: Kena: Scars of Kosmora
At time of writing, Scars of Kosmora is on the schedule for 2026, but with no release date set in stone yet… that could slip. Kena: Bridge of Spirits was my pick for “game of the year” in 2021, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting developer Ember Lab’s next project. A direct sequel has got me genuinely excited, and I can’t wait to pick up the next chapter of Kena’s story. This older, wiser version of the character looks to be a ton of fun.
There are new gameplay ideas in Scars of Kosmora, and some of the levels we glimpsed in the trailer a few months back look larger and more expansive, too. This might actually be my most-anticipated game at the moment!
Do you remember Star Trek: New Worlds around the turn of the millennium? Outposts Unknown is kinda in the same vein; I called it “Star Trek meets Banished” when I took a look at the demo. You build a colony in a fairly laid-back way, the game has a cute art style, and it’s set in the Strange New Worlds timeline, featuring Admiral April in a cameo at the beginning.
These kinds of games have been fun for me for a very long time, so to get a new base-building strategy game set in the Star Trek universe – and tying in, in some capacity, with my favourite series from the modern franchise – is genuinely fantastic! There are several other Star Trek games in the works, too, so with the franchise potentially disappearing from streaming in the years ahead… could Star Trek find a home in the realm of video games?
This game looks like it’s going to have an intense and emotional story – following an older man as he undertakes a road trip. I like the visual style, I like what I’ve heard of the game’s music, and I’m always up for a narrative adventure, particularly one that has heart. As I’ve gotten older, these kinds of stories – a man remembering his life and reflecting on his choices – hit close to home, too.
Forever Ago also features a charming little camper van; a VW combi in all but name. I’ve long had an appreciation for those kinds of vehicles, and having one in the game as perhaps a home base or a road trip vehicle just looks like a lot of fun. A game like this will obviously live or die by the strength of its story… but I’m optimistic at this stage.
Video Game #4: Gears of War: E-Day
I’ve never played any games in the Gears of War series before, and to be honest, I don’t really know what to expect. But E-Day is being heralded by Xbox as a good place to start; a prequel, set before the events of the main series, but with many familiar characters present. I’ve heard good things about Gears of War – the first game in particular – and I think there’s at least the potential that I’d enjoy this series.
However, as I’m no longer subscribed to PC Game Pass… this could end up being a “wait for a sale” title for me! It certainly isn’t something I’m gonna jump into on day one. But as I look ahead to the second half of 2026 and beyond, it’s definitely on my radar.
Video Game #5: Cognition Method
I played the demo/teaser for Cognition Method more than five years ago, and I discussed my time with the game here on the website. I assumed that the full game must’ve already launched, but no! Cognition Method, which is an independently-developed game, is due out later this year. I’ll be very curious to see what the devs have managed to create.
Cognition Method: Initiation (the demo/teaser that I mentioned) had gameplay that involved manipulating gravity, kind of like a more advanced version of Half-Life 2′s gravity gun, if I’m remembering correctly. The developers claim to have been inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that the game will be a “non-ordinary” sci-fi story. Sounds intriguing!
The first half of 2026 has given us some fun entertainment experiences, and I’m sure there will be more to come between now and the end of the year.
From a personal point of view, the first half of the year has been a bit of a mixed bag. There have been some real highlights – I got to meet William Shatner, Star Trek’s very own Captain Kirk, at Comic-Con, for example – but also some low points, too, and I admit that I’ve struggled with motivation and finding topics to discuss here on the website. Here’s hoping that the second half of 2026 will be more positive than negative!
September will also bring us the sixtieth anniversary of Star Trek, and I hope that Skydance-Paramount will do something – *anything* – to mark the occasion. I guess we’ll find out soon enough, eh? And if some of the titles discussed above sound like fun, I hope you’ll check back for reviews and discussion of some or all of them over the months ahead. Thanks for tuning in this time, and see you… out there!
All titles discussed above are the copyrights of their respective studio, developer, broadcaster, distributor, publisher, etc. At time of writing, all titles discussed above were scheduled or heavily rumoured to have a broadcast/release date in the second half of 2026, but that may be subject to change. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The Steam Machine is gonna be close to $1,500. Xbox just announced yet another price hike for its hardware. Nintendo’s Switch 2, which already launched at an inflated price, has also just had its RRP raised. So if you’re a gamer, and especially if you *want* to get into gaming… what should you do?
That’s the question I want to wrangle with today.
First of all, a couple of quick caveats. I’m going to talk about a few pieces of hardware, hardware categories, and specific brands – but none of this is sponsored or endorsed. All of this is just one person’s opinion, and I wasn’t paid in any way for making these recommendations. Secondly, everything we’re going to discuss is *subjective, not objective* – these are my thoughts and ideas, but I’m not trying to claim that this is somehow “the only correct way” to approach video games in 2026. Other people can and will have completely different opinions… and that’s okay. There ought to be enough room in the gaming community for differences of opinion and polite disagreement.
Let’s talk about gaming in 2026.
Two things to say, right off the bat.
One: I don’t believe the video games industry is going through “a crash” akin to what happened in 1983. Back then, as I’ve said before, gaming was brand-new, and the market for home consoles in particular was minuscule. It was genuinely possible that video games themselves would’ve been a flash in the pan; a fad that didn’t catch on. Gaming could literally have disappeared altogether before it really got going – and we aren’t there in 2026. Not at all.
But this clearly *is* a contraction in the video games market, and it looks like – in the short-to-medium term, at least – we’re going to see the industry shrink. That has already manifested in layoffs and studio closures, and more of both are certainly still to come. There could be industry-shaking earthquakes, like a hardware manufacturer quitting altogether, or a huge powerhouse of the industry filing for bankruptcy. Watch this space… but I’m afraid the short-term future of gaming isn’t looking too hot.
There’s a definite slowdown in the video games market.
Two: a lot of what we’re seeing is a direct result of corporate greed. And I don’t see how we can separate price hikes and the insane cost of video games and gaming hardware from that. Anyone who tries to claim that “the market” is to blame either doesn’t understand that a few mega-corporations dominate the industry, or is being deliberately disingenuous.
The biggest factors on the corporate side that I can see are as follows: corporations raked in unprecedented profits during lockdown, and blindly assumed those revenue levels would continue. They didn’t – and companies that staffed up and invested on that basis are now having to cut back. Many of the same companies involved with the current A.I. and datacentre investment boom are also players in the video games space (i.e. Microsoft, Nvidia, and Sony), so they’re trying to argue on the one hand that component prices are out of control… while *causing* those same prices to spiral out of control on the other. Corporations have also been greedily chasing every trend going – especially live-service, always-online multiplayer titles. There was only ever room for a few games like that to turn a huge profit, but companies like Sony over-invested in those kinds of games, burning *tons* of cash in the process.
This is how I imagine most corporate CEOs and investors…
And, of course, there’s plain and simple *greed*. “Economic headwinds,” “tariffs,” “inflation,” and “supply chain issues” are all excuses that corporations have used over the last few years to attempt to justify jacking up prices. But these same corporations – as I have pointed out here on the website – have literally never been more profitable in their entire existences. Both Sony *and* Microsoft had the gall to boast to investors about record-breaking profits… only to turn around within a matter of weeks, if not days, and tell gamers that prices were going to have to rise.
Greedy corporations are nothing new, of course. But I don’t believe we can separate the issue of corporate greed from the increasing unaffordability of gaming. If you want someone to blame… start there. Because these corporations have been pushing and pushing for years, if not decades, and we’re finally seeing the consequences of that greed in the form of an industry-wide slowdown.
Gaming is being fucked over by people like this.
But this isn’t meant to just be a forum to whine about corporate decision-making! So let’s try to find some less-expensive routes into gaming for newbies. And for older folks like myself, let’s look for ways to keep gaming, even if the industry continues this slide into unaffordability.
What device are you using to read this article? Whether it’s a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop PC, chances are it’ll be able to run *some* games. I think you might be surprised at how even a pretty basic, low-end smartphone can run pretty good games. To pick just one example (for now) – you can play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on Apple and Android devices, including budget-friendly models. Vice City was originally launched in the PS2/Xbox era – and plenty of titles from that generation (and earlier) have received official iOS and Android ports in recent years. Not every single game will work on every device, so you’ll have to check your spec. But you’d be surprised at the kinds of titles your phone or tablet can run.
Four games of the Xbox/PS2 era that have received full Android ports. Clockwise from top-left: GTA: San Andreas, SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Max Payne, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II.
And if you have a laptop or even a mini PC, you’ll be able to run titles like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind – another classic of the Xbox generation. I recently got Morrowind working on my laptop, and that was part of what inspired me to put this piece together. I was surprised that a budget laptop (I think I paid about £125 for it) could run an open-world game, even one that’s twenty-something years old.
Games are better today than they were back then. But I think it’s fair to say that there have been smaller and more iterative improvements with each generation since really the PlayStation 2/Xbox era, and many games from twenty or even twenty-five years ago are still just as much fun as brand-new titles. If you have a better laptop or PC, and you’re able to run a few graphics mods, you can even improve the way some of these titles look, too.
There are some fantastic older titles that are still perfectly enjoyable today – and they can be a heck of a lot cheaper than modern games!
Speaking of “retro gaming,” don’t snooze on emulation. Emulation can be a controversial topic, and you should *always* make sure you stay on the right side of the law, and only emulate games that you definitely own a copy of! But emulators exist for most older consoles, and you can get emulators that run on most phones, tablets, and computers. You’ll have to check your system spec to see what emulators you can work with and thus which titles you’ll be able to play, but as a general rule of thumb, most modern phones, tablets, and laptops ought to be capable of running any pre-2000 game via an emulator, and probably quite a few Xbox/PS2/GameCube-era titles, too.
Emulation can be a lot of fun. If you missed a title when it was new, or if you want to return to a classic but your old hardware isn’t cooperating… emulation is the way to go. Many emulators are free and open-source, too, so you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money to get started. As long as you’re careful and you follow the rules, emulation opens up a whole new world. Or… a whole *old* world, I guess.
If you missed a game like Halo: Combat Evolved when it was new… why not try emulating it?
We mentioned older hardware there, which is a great segue into my next point! Instead of spending silly money on a brand-new console, look to second-hand shops, pawn shops, places like CeX – if you’re in the UK – online auctions like eBay, and private sales on places like Facebook Marketplace. You can easily find a working PlayStation 3 console for a fraction of the cost of a PS5, and there are some absolutely fantastic, graphically beautiful games from that generation that are well worth playing.
Here in the UK, I’ve seen second-hand GameCubes and PlayStation 2 consoles for well under £100, and PS3s, Wiis, and Xbox 360s in the £80-100 range, too. It can be worth visiting local auction houses – a few years ago, I bought a box that contained a PS2, a television set, and a bunch of games and DVDs for around £15. Even if that price has doubled by now… it’s still gonna be worth it! I gave the TV to a friend, and it still works, and I still own the PS2.
Older hardware can be picked up inexpensively second-hand.
If you want to buy new, though, you have options there, too.
There are dedicated “gaming handheld” devices in the £70-100 range, and these machines can easily emulate games from before the millennium. One that I’ve heard good things about (and is actually on my wishlist) is the G350. This Game Boy-inspired device runs a version of Linux, and I think there are quite a few other handhelds in the same category. Obviously you can spend more money on a handheld device – the Steam Deck, for instance, or a Nintendo Switch Lite – and those will give you more options. In fact, the Steam Deck is currently (as of June 2026) relatively reasonably priced compared to current-gen consoles and the Nintendo Switch 2.
Then we have laptops, tablets, and mini PCs. For my money, a mini PC or laptop probably offers more versatility, and many of these devices, even at the lower end, can run older games pretty well. I don’t want to get into the weeds with specific PC recommendations, but if you can find one with reasonably good VRAM (that’s your graphics memory), then you should be set to run at least some games.
Even a cheap laptop should be able to handle some older and less-demanding titles.
PC is, generally speaking, more expensive to get started with. But the advantage to playing on PC is that, in my experience, anyway, there are way more discounts and sales. Steam and Epic Games – two of the biggest digital shops on PC – regularly run sales, and Epic even offers free games once a week. Some titles can be 80% or 90% off during big summer and holiday sales events, so this is absolutely a factor if money’s tight. Spending more up front to get even a low-end PC can pay dividends if you end up paying less for your games.
Another advantage to PC is the abundance of controllers and peripherals you can use. If you’re looking to replace a PlayStation or Xbox console that’s stopped working, don’t throw out your old control pads! They’re all compatible with PC. Anything with a USB cord (pretty much) will work on PC, even if you have to track down drivers online, so those old controllers from previous consoles can even find a new lease on life. There are USB adapters for many older wired control pads, too.
PCs can use all kinds of controllers and input devices.
Then there are new controllers. I recently picked up an 8BitDo control pad for less than £25. This model – the SN30 Pro – is modelled after old SNES controllers – but with analogue sticks and all the modern buttons. It’s a blast to use a device like that… and it’s cheaper than most official peripherals from the big manufacturers. Considering the Steam Controller will be £85 (if you can even manage to get one), that’s not bad!
Despite Xbox’s recent price hikes, an Xbox Series S console – the brand’s lower-end, digital-only model – might be an option. If you pick up a Series S, you’ve basically got access to every current-gen title (except PlayStation and Nintendo exclusives, obviously). And with the Game Pass subscription service recently being given a rare price cut… that’s definitely the least-expensive route into current-gen gaming. At time of writing, a Series S is under £300 here in the UK, and a full year’s worth of Game Pass Ultimate will set you back £17 per month – more than Netflix, sure, but that’s £204 per year. The base price of most AAA games nowadays is £60-70, so if you’re gonna play more than four of those games per year on your Series S… you’re still coming out ahead.
An Xbox Series S with Game Pass is the least-expensive way to get into the current generation of games.
Then there’s Nintendo. The Switch 2 is – I would argue – overpriced. But you can pick up a preowned Switch 1 here in the UK for around £120-130. And there are some fantastic Switch games, as well as ports of great games from other studios, including The Witcher 3 and Alien: Isolation. The Switch is still being supported by Nintendo, at least in the short term, with occasional updates – Animal Crossing: New Horizons recently got a free update, for example. So that could make it worthwhile, too. And with 150 million Switches out there, there may well be new games still to come on that console.
So I hope this has been helpful in some way to… someone!
I’ve been a fan of gaming since I first picked up a joystick at a kids’ club in the ’80s, and the idea that gaming is going to become this “elites only” hobby that everyday folks are getting priced out of… that hurts. I was fortunate to have built my PC a couple of years ago, before prices started to get silly, but I gotta admit… I’m looking at the state of the industry with increasing despair these days. And god forbid my PC (or one of its vital components) should pack up!
Here’s hoping my PC will outlast the current price hikes and component shortages…
In a way, this is a market “correction.” The games industry’s big corporations overspent after lockdown, or chased the wrong trends years too late, and they’re now seeing the results. But it’s coinciding with a huge boom in A.I. and datacentre construction, which has hoovered up insane amounts of components – RAM in particular. It’s kind of a double-whammy, in that sense, with the industry being hit on both the hardware and software fronts simultaneously.
I used to work in the video games industry. I spent close to a decade on the inside, and I really feel for the developers who are suffering and being laid off. It absolutely sucks. And I feel bad for the folks who want to get started with gaming – perhaps by buying their very first home console – and now feel they’re priced out of the hobby. That cannot be allowed to continue, or gaming as a whole risks losing vast numbers of potential players.
Marathon developers Bungie are being hit by layoffs, sadly.
On a more positive note, it’s at least *plausible* to me that this current trend will only last a few short years. If the A.I. and datacentre rollout slows down – for any reason – then there should be more components available for less money. There could even be a glut of cheap components hitting the market in just a year or two’s time if things change on that front. Even if that doesn’t happen, manufacturers will scale up to meet demand, and the current spike in prices could ease. It won’t go back to where it was, but it certainly could drop from where it is today.
Games corporations want to make as much money as possible. It’s in their interests to make sure gaming remains as accessible as possible to as many players as possible, and I don’t believe that the industry’s big players – Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation – see a future where gaming is a luxury that only the wealthiest in society can afford. If you can sell a million consoles for £400 apiece, you’re gonna make more money than if you can only sell 50,000 consoles for £2,400 apiece. So it’s in everyone’s interests for the price of hardware to come down – and soon, because Microsoft and Sony both have plans afoot for new consoles within a couple of years.
That doesn’t help if you need to get a console today, but… well, if there’s literally nothing you can do but wait, waiting could actually mean that prices will become more affordable.
Hopefully you’ll be gaming soon… somehow.
My intention here was to try to stay positive. I wanted to lay out a range of options, from devices many people already own through cheaper hardware to pre-owned consoles, trying to show that gaming doesn’t have to be totally unaffordable to everyone. The headlines sound scary: $1,500 for a Steam Machine, a PlayStation 5 for $800, and so on. But there *are* cheaper options, less-expensive routes into the hobby for people who want to get started, or who want to know where to turn. I hope at least some of these suggestions were relevant, informative, or sparked your interest.
I encourage you to take a look around the web for other articles like this one. I’m by no means an expert, and there are bound to be things I’ve missed. Depending on where you are in the world, some hardware could be a lot more expensive… or it could be a lot cheaper. So check your local listings, your local second-hand shops, and so on. Whether you’re just getting started, looking for something new to play, or feeling dejected about the price of something you hoped to buy… I hope this piece has been of some use.
Have fun out there, and whatever platform you play on… happy gaming!
All titles and hardware discussed above are the copyrights of their respective developers, publishers, studios, companies, etc. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Excitement for the sequel to Grand Theft Auto V was always going to reach fever-pitch, so this level of hype was to be expected. But with pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI officially open… should you put your money down? Let’s get into all of that today.
Back in the day, when games came on cartridges or discs, pre-ordering could make sense in certain cases. There could be limited copies of some titles, especially at launch, and if you lived in a region like the rural area where I grew up, there might only be one or two video game retailers. If the store you went to had sold out of a particular title, it could mean a long journey to track down another one – or a long wait. I pre-ordered or reserved games under those circumstances a few times – and I did the same for books, video cassettes, and DVDs, too. When something you really want is coming out, and you don’t have the time or energy to queue up at midnight to grab a copy, pre-ordering or reserving your copy just… made a lot of sense.
Pre-orders for GTA 6 are now live… but don’t bother.
But that isn’t the world we live in anymore.
Sure, some console players – especially on Nintendo, but also on PlayStation and Xbox – still buy physical copies of all of their games. But is that the norm anymore? And even if you’re one of the players in that category, chances are you still buy downloadable content, receive patches and updates digitally, or occasionally splash out on a digital-only title. The industry has moved on, and fewer and fewer discs and cartridges are sold every year.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be available digitally on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. There are literally *infinite* copies of digital games, so there’s no chance you’ll miss out. GTA 6 might sell out physically for a time – maybe. But even if it does, or even if it’s sold out in your local area, those digital copies will remain available. There’s no “FOMO,” because you have literally zero chance of missing out on playing Grand Theft Auto VI the day it launches – if that’s what you want to do.
If you want this character costume, you’ll need to buy the $100 “ultimate edition.”
Nowadays, most big-budget games come with day-one patches and updates anyway, *especially* titles on disc. Day-one bug-fixes and last-second patches are commonplace. But here’s the thing with GTA 6: you don’t get a disc even if you buy a “physical copy;” all you get is a download code in a pretty case.
In short… there’s no advantage to buying the game physically over downloading it digitally, even if you have a slow internet connection.
Speaking as we were of bugs, do you remember Cyberpunk 2077? That game – which generated a similar level of hype back in 2020 – launched in such an appalling state that many folks considered it to be literally “unplayable,” and the game was yanked off Sony’s PlayStation Store as a result, with plenty of refunds being offered. Cyberpunk 2077 is, to me, the game that best embodies the “no pre-orders!” movement. If folks had been willing to wait even a day, a mere twenty-four hours, instead of rushing to pre-order… they’d have seen the state the game was in.
What kind of state will the game be in at launch?
To be clear, I’m categorically *not* suggesting that GTA 6 will launch in such a rotten state! Although the recent launch of the atrocious GTA 3 Trilogy Remaster should be enough to give anyone pause; that was a total fuck-up. But for such a big game, and one developed by Rockstar’s main team, I’m pretty confident that the launch version of GTA 6 will be functionally playable.
That doesn’t mean, however, that it will be the “best” version of the game.
Patches, bug fixes, and free updates happen all the time. Rockstar’s last two big games – Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption II – both received numerous patches after they launched, tweaking and improving them. The launch version of basically any game in 2026 is demonstrably worse than the version you might play even just a few days later. So, once again, why would you want to play on day one, knowing that to be the case?
A gun which you can only get in the “ultimate edition” of the game.
It isn’t my intention to shit all over the hype or excitement anyone is feeling for Grand Theft Auto VI. I’m sure that the game will be entertaining, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it one day, too. But I also believe we’re at a point now where pre-ordering a title isn’t just bad for individual players, it’s actively harmful to gaming as a whole. It encourages bad behaviour from games companies – things like paying extra to play the game on its *real* release date instead of a few days later, or releasing incomplete, bug-riddled messes in the full knowledge that they’re already going to make a huge profit. The biggest corporations in the industry are getting worse, charging higher prices for less content, and paywalling off more and more pieces of titles… and pre-ordering helps them get away with it.
I know, however, that I’m shouting into the void. Pre-order numbers for GTA 6 are going to be huge; this is arguably the most highly-anticipated release of the year across the *entire* entertainment sector. But I still think it’s worth *trying* to dissuade people from putting their money down unnecessarily for a title that – I would certainly argue – is overpriced, that we still don’t have a ton of information about, and to reward a publisher and a developer who, in my opinion, have been misbehaving pretty badly for years.
Flamingos, as seen in the trailer.
Some of the things Rockstar and Take-Two have achieved with Grand Theft Auto V have been emulated – or attempted, anyway – by other titles across the games industry in the thirteen years since GTA 5 was released. Microtransactions and an in-game currency in a title that players have to pay for up-front has become normalised thanks, in large part, to Grand Theft Auto V’s success, and we’re seeing the impact of that now. Going all-in on live service, always-online multiplayer titles – as Rockstar and Take-Two have done – has been a huge weight around the neck of many studios and publishers across the entire video games industry, as corporations have tried to recreate GTA 5′s success… and income.
And there’s more.
Grand Theft Auto VI should’ve been created and released years ago. But because its predecessor has been such a cash cow, Rockstar and Take-Two put the game on hold. They also sacrificed GTA 5′s planned DLC at the altar of the game’s online mode, cancelled Agent – Rockstar’s planned Cold War-era spy title – and even quietly stepped away from Red Dead Online, not because it wasn’t profitable, but because it wasn’t *as* profitable as GTA 5′s online mode.
Take-Two’s board of directors.
Grand Theft Auto V has been a double-edged sword for the games industry. On the one hand, it’s introduced lots of new players to interactive media, and demonstrated that video games can go toe-to-toe with films and TV programmes in terms of profitability and cultural impact. On the other, it poured diesel on the fire of the “live service” trend, pushing other companies further down that path – a path that has led to billions of dollars being pissed away on titles like Concord and Highguard, games that were never going to make their money back. And that’s been bad for the industry overall, as well as arguably caused game development elsewhere to be under-invested, to stagnate, and even regress in some cases.
Rockstar and Take-Two have become arrogant. Forgetting the series’ PC roots, Grand Theft Auto VI won’t get a simultaneous PC launch – something practically every other AAA title can manage. Ports of ancient games, like 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, are belatedly launched on PC for a ridiculous price tag. And there seems to be less of an expectation, and more of an *entitlement* in the Take-Two boardroom that GTA 6 will earn even more money even more quickly than its predecessor.
Even if the game is good… I don’t want to support a company like that. Certainly not by pre-ordering their latest title.
There’s a more expensive edition, naturally, containing all of the game’s cut content.
Some of the conversation and analysis surrounding Grand Theft Auto VI seems to be praising Take-Two and Rockstar for resisting the temptation to try to launch the game with a $100 price tag. And that is ridiculous. GTA 6 is going to be $80 in the United States for the base version of the game – though, naturally, the “ultimate edition;” i.e. the complete version of the game *without* content having been cut out, will retail for $100. In the UK, that’s £70 for the basic version and £90 for the complete edition.
Since Nintendo launched the first $80 base version of a game with Mario Kart World, other greedy corporations in the industry have been salivating at the prospect of selling their own titles for the same money. We’ve seen it with Xbox, who tried to push The Outer Worlds 2 at that price, and there are other examples, too. But most titles, at least for now, still go for $70 or $60 – so this $80 price tag is nothing to celebrate, nor should Rockstar or Take-Two receive *any* praise whatsoever for capping their greed at a “mere” $80!
See you in Vice City… if the money-grubbing pricks at Take-Two ever launch the game on PC!
I’ve been a GTA player since the very first top-down game in the late ’90s. In fact. Grand Theft Auto is the first game I can remember buying that had a BBFC “18” rating. I had fun with that game, its sequel, and its London spin-off, and I enjoyed the series all over again on the Xbox, when I played Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas. I’m by no means a “hater” of this series, and I still hope to play and enjoy Grand Theft Auto VI if and when it comes to PC… and perhaps when it goes on sale!
But pre-ordering this game feels pointless, and even if I owned a current-gen console, I wouldn’t.
You gain nothing – the game’s all-digital anyway – and with patches, hotfixes, and updates bound to arrive within days or weeks of launch, why would you want to sign up to play a demonstrably, objectively *worse* version of the game? There are so many other things to play! If you’re like me, you’re bound to have a backlog of titles you haven’t gotten around to playing yet. And if you’re a subscriber to something like Game Pass, there’s a whole library of titles out there. I just don’t see any point in pre-ordering Grand Theft Auto VI when we don’t know what kind of state the launch version will be in, we don’t even know for certain that this long-delayed title will actually make its purported November relase date, and when it’s fully-digital anyway, even if you buy a “physical” copy. Do yourself a favour and wait… at least wait till launch day, if not a few days after. Make sure Take-Two and Rockstar have earned your $80-100 before you commit.
Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to be released in November 2026 for Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5. A PC release has not been confirmed. The Grand Theft Auto series – including GTA 6 and other titles discussed above – is the copyright of Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-3 and the trailers and teasers for Season 4.
We’ve recently been shown another new trailer for Strange New Worlds’ fourth season – perhaps the last trailer before the premiere next month. I thought it could be fun to go over the trailer together and see what – if anything – we might be able to learn or infer about the stories that lay in wait!
Along with the trailer, Skydance-Paramount released a brand-new poster for Season 4, too – a cropped version of which you can see above. The poster is pretty plain, in my opinion, depicting the main characters standing on a mountain or rocky outcrop, with the USS Enterprise above them. Clouds seem to form a swirling circular pattern around the Enterprise, but that’s about it. Compared with the fun, artistic posters we got for Season 3 – which depicted pairs of characters in various moments inspired by some of the stories – I felt this one was pretty plain. “Plain” is not synonymous with “bad,” of course! And it is noteworthy, I think, that Paul Wesley’s Kirk is now considered a main character – or a major enough character to warrant a spot on the poster with the rest of the cast.
Kirk is a prominent character in the new trailer.
A few weeks ago, I noted that an earlier Season 4 trailer seemed to contain a lot of talk about the dangers of Starfleet’s mission of exploration, and of death. I wondered if that might be hinting at something big and explosive this season – the loss of a main character, perhaps. That trend didn’t really continue this time, though, and while the latest trailer was still action-packed, there wasn’t really any of that potential “foreshadowing” of death. Make of that what you will!
Also last time, I half-jokingly commented on “Spirk” in the trailer, as Kirk and Spock seemed to be paired up and even hugged at one point. That was more tongue-in-cheek than anything, but this time… well, there were definitely undertones to the clips of Kirk and Spock, especially at the beginning of the trailer.
Are things about to get… Spirky?
Now, I doubt whether Strange New Worlds will go for any kind of explicit Kirk-Spock romance in Season 4, and I suspect these moments, however they’re arrived at, will be about building the friendship and brotherhood between the two men. Spock, at least in Strange New Worlds’ canon, seems pretty clearly heterosexual, and Kirk told us back in Season 2 that he’s either married or engaged (presumably to Carol Marcus?) in this era. So, again, my suspicion is that we won’t see any overt romance between Kirk and Spock. But their moments together definitely seem to take them beyond mere friendship and hint at the creation of a much stronger bond.
The season’s tagline, according to the poster, is “boldly go one step closer to where it all began.” Referencing Strange New Worlds’ status as a prequel to The Original Series, this line hints at a season of episodes that will manoeuvre characters into position for the beginning of TOS, and part of that seems to include building up the Kirk-Spock friendship. Kirk and Spock start out in TOS as already great friends; we never really see the beginnings of that bond. Perhaps one storyline in Strange New Worlds’ fourth season will show us how that friendship came to be.
Kirk and Spock.
That tagline, though, could also imply that some characters will be stepping away from the series ahead of the truncated fifth and final season. We already know that Strange New Worlds has cast both Sulu and Dr McCoy – the latter being played by the venerable Thomas Jane, who excelled in The Expanse a few years ago. That could be another indication that the likes of Ortegas (the ship’s helm officer) and Dr M’Benga in sickbay could be stepping back. Dr M’Benga was seen a couple of times in The Original Series, but he’d clearly ceased to be the Enterprise’s chief medical officer by that time. And Ortegas may have departed the ship, taken a promotion, left Starfleet… or passed away.
Then there’s Una, La’an, and Pelia. Pelia didn’t even make the cut for the poster, and while we’ve seen her in a previous clip from the season, she was entirely absent from this trailer. Una and La’an may also be on the chopping-block if the show’s writers and producers aim to reposition characters to set up the beginning of TOS, though neither seems to have explicit replacements in the way Pelia has with Scotty, Dr M’Benga has with Dr McCoy, or Ortegas has with Sulu. But I still think, especially after what we saw last time, that a death or other departure for one or more of these characters is a possibility in Season 4.
Dr M’Benga is one of several characters who could be replaced by the end of the season.
There was a lot of Kirk in the trailer, and not very much Pike. Captain Pike may have drawn the short straw this time, again following that trend of going “one step closer” to the beginning of The Original Series. Because we know Pike’s ultimate destination, he can’t be written out of the show! But he does seem – based not only on this trailer, but the previous one, too – to be taking more of a back seat. I hope that won’t be the case; this was “the Captain Pike show” that fans were clamouring for a few years ago, and I still want to spend more time with this incarnation of the character.
That leads into my next point, which isn’t about the trailer directly, but rather about the direction Strange New Worlds has taken and now seems ready to double-down on. I’m not convinced, I’m afraid, that this series needed to be such a direct prequel to TOS. I think I’d have been much happier, all things considered, to have spent less time with legacy characters like Kirk, Scotty, and Chapel, and to have spent more time with Captain Pike and his crew – some of whom we glimpsed in The Cage, but were never seen again. The core concept of the series – at least, the series that I wanted to see – was, as I said, “the Captain Pike show;” an exploration-focused, episodic show in the vein of classic Star Trek, but that just happened to be set before Kirk’s famous five-year mission. It didn’t need to include all of these characters… and I don’t think it needs to be such an overt prequel.
But all of that’s for the birds now, eh?
The new season’s tagline.
We seemed to get another clip of a scene from the earlier trailer, showing Kirk yelling “noo!” as something happens off-screen. I speculated last time that this could be a character death, and Kirk’s line to Spock in this trailer about “saving [their] friends” could be connected to that. Perhaps the event that pushes Kirk and Spock together is something traumatic; an incident which forces them to come together to help the ship and crew. That, in turn, could lead to the scene we glimpsed at the beginning of the trailer, perhaps as the two men decompress and begin to process whatever it is that they went through.
There was an interesting clip of Kirk (at least, I’m pretty sure it’s Kirk), with his phaser raised, as several characters appear to be transporting in, with either a large window or perhaps the main viewscreen behind. These transporter beams *looked* to be Starfleet in origin (based on how transporter beams have looked previously in Strange New Worlds)… so why would Kirk feel threatened by that? I would point out, though, that we don’t see these people materialise. They could be here to help… or not.
Who’s this beaming in?
There was a new admiral briefly seen in the trailer – someone other than Admiral April. This character seems to be telling the crew that what they’re being ordered to do “is hard,” and combined with the earlier clip of Kirk… I wonder if this new character is going to be one of Star Trek’s many “badmirals!” A rogue admiral, or an admiral ordering the crew to violate their own ethical boundaries, is pretty much a stock character in Star Trek at this point, but we haven’t really seen much of that in the modern era. It would be interesting if Strange New Worlds were to introduce this kind of antagonist in Season 4.
Those two clips could easily be from different episodes, though – and I could be way off base with this character and his intentions. We only saw the briefest glimpse of him, he doesn’t even have a name, and simply being an admiral and giving orders doesn’t automatically mean he’s gonna be an evil-doing villain! I just thought it seemed like a possibility.
Is this a new “badmiral?”
Dr M’Benga’s line to Pike about time was especially interesting, and I wonder if we’re going to get some kind of time travel or time-bending story at some point. Again, time travel is pretty common in Star Trek, and Strange New Worlds has already done stories sending characters backwards and forwards through time, so it wouldn’t be unexpected. Given that Pike’s future is set in stone, I wonder what he might make of time travel; does he now see the dangers in it, or would he be willing to embrace it if there was a way to use it for the greater good?
An intimidating alien ship fires on the Enterprise, and I think I’m right in saying that this isn’t the same vessel that we saw being prominently featured in the previous trailer. I don’t recognise the design, so this could be a brand-new alien faction, or it could be intended to be a new type of ship for someone we’re already familiar with. This clip also gave me the impression that it was being witnessed from behind glass; perhaps the conflict is being seen from another character’s perspective aboard a third vessel.
Under attack!
One of the clips in the trailer appears to have been “mirrored;” La’an, Una, and Ortegas all have their Starfleet badges on the wrong side of their jackets. Was that a “goof,” or a mistake in the trailer? Or is it something we’re gonna see in the finished episode… for some reason? No idea, but I thought it was worth mentioning!
Could it be a hint at a visit to the Mirror Universe, though? That… doesn’t seem likely. The Mirror Universe doesn’t literally “mirror” the way characters look, and while, if Strange New Worlds was gonna do a Mirror Universe story, those three characters could fit without treading on the toes of established canon, I’m still not convinced. Modern Star Trek has done a lot with the Mirror Universe since 2017, as well as similar dystopian settings, and with the Mirror Universe having never really been my favourite part of the franchise… I’m content for Strange New Worlds to steer clear of it!
Why was this clip “mirrored” in the trailer?
Scotty seems to get a romantic encounter in the new season, sharing a kiss with a character who I thought might’ve been the Vulcan cadet we saw in the first teaser clip. Not so sure that’s who it is now, having looked more closely, but in any case, giving Scotty a storyline like that could be fun. Anything’s better than more Spock romance, right?
Did we see a *zombie* aboard the Enterprise (or a similar-looking derelict ship)? At one point near the end of the trailer, a very zombie-esque character raises a finger to their lips in a “shush” motion, and… yeah. They look like they could be some kind of zombie. That could be a trick of the light, but I’ve seen other fans speculating that the previous trailer contained a scene in engineering with La’an where she may have been surrounded by similar-looking “zombie” characters. I didn’t read that clip that way last time… but maybe I got that wrong.
Is… is that a *zombie?*
This is already running long for an article about a two-minute trailer, so let’s quickly run through a few other things I noticed. I like the city we see as a shuttle approaches; it felt like it could be a Federation colony, or maybe one of those “lawless” settlements that modern Star Trek likes to visit. It’s always cool to see a shuttle being flown – though we also see a shuttle encountering a problem at one point. The settlement also had a hot air balloon, which was funny – I wonder if anyone’s gonna take a ride in it?
Did someone draw on Captain Pike’s face while he was asleep? In one clip he seemed to have some kind of marking or drawing on half of his face, while a group of aliens (and some members of the crew) were present. That clip also looked like it could involve a supernova or perhaps a wormhole. Spock having posters in his quarters (if indeed that room is his quarters) was kinda funny.
Did someone doodle on Pike’s face while he was asleep?
We saw clips involving sword fighting, riding on horseback, wearing dresses, and a dragon-like creature attacking the Enterprise. Is that hinting, perhaps, at another fantasy-inspired story? I wasn’t wild about The Elysian Kingdom back in Season 1, to be honest, but if a story like that was played a bit more straight, with some of the familiar fantasy ideas coming into Star Trek’s galaxy… I could see that being interesting. Lower Decks already established that some human settlements use “dragons” in some capacity, so it’s not totally out of left-field.
I couldn’t tell what Uhura might’ve been doing with a drone while wearing a spacesuit, but maybe it’s connected to the black hole we saw. The black hole was glimpsed this time, but was more prominent in the previous trailer. Admiral April telling Pike he’s going on a “fun” mission could set up something comedic… or it could lead to a dark twist; perhaps even an episode where a character is killed. Something about the way he said it, and the way it was presented, just made me feel that “fun” might not actually mean “fun” in this instance!
Will this mission turn out to be as “fun” as Admiral April hopes?
Several clips showed the ship in flight, encountering various phenomena, and at one point we hear Ortegas telling everyone to “hang on,” perhaps suggesting she’s about to pull a difficult or dangerous manoeuvre. The away mission that, last time, I said could’ve taken the crew back to the Vezda prison looks a bit different now that we’ve seen it from a different angle, for which I’m glad. I still think this set design isn’t the greatest, but seeing it from a new angle – as the crew are seemingly ambushed by Andorians – definitely improved things.
We also saw a second, much shorter clip of one of the dinosaurs or dino-like aliens. I still can’t tell if this will be a time travel story to ancient Earth or if we’re gonna see dinosaur-eque aliens on another planet, but I’m definitely curious! Spock seems to be addressing an Orion or a group of Orions when he warns that “the finest crew in Starfleet” will fight back. I also glimpsed what looked like a Gorn ship, perhaps implying that the Gorn aren’t completely gone from the show. And one of the buildings – perhaps in the settlement with the hot air balloon – seemed to have a digital display with writing in Klingon as well as Chinese.
A dinosaur.
Is Pike being beamed away from the bridge against his will? One very brief snippet seemed to suggest he might be! And was Spock conjuring something by magic, at one point? Again, it looked like he was. We see at least two characters walking or clambering on the Enterprise’s hull – I assume one might be Uhura, because that could be where she launched her drone. Not sure about the other, though.
So I think that’s all for today!
I encourage you to take a look at the trailer for yourself, and to look at other breakdowns and analyses from elsewhere in the fan community. I could be way off-base with some of my assumptions and guesses, and other folks have undoubtedly spotted things I’ve missed. Still, the trailer looked fun, certainly seemed action-packed, and it’s set the stage for what I hope will be an interesting and enjoyable season of Star Trek.
I liked this shot of the Enterprise’s “shadow.”
What I didn’t see was anything to indicate that Skydance-Paramount is gonna really lean into the franchise’s big sixtieth anniversary. I’ve said before that I’d have loved to see a crossover, perhaps the return of an actor from The Original Series, or a storyline that links up in a big way with something from past iterations of Star Trek. Strange New Worlds Season 4 will run through September – with episodes presumably airing either side of the anniversary. It would’ve been the perfect moment to do something big to really celebrate this milestone, and I’m still crossing my fingers and hoping we get *something* like that.
I hope this has been interesting – and please take all of this with a grain of salt! I have no “insider information” about the upcoming season, and at the end of the day, all of this is just one old Trekkie’s *subjective, not objective* take.
When Season 4 hits our screens next month, I’m planning to write individual episode reviews. I hope you’ll join me for those! And if you missed it, I’ve also talked about previous trailers and clips for the upcoming season. You can find the first of those articles by clicking or tapping here, and the second by clicking or tapping here. The sixtieth anniversary has also been a cause for celebration here on the website! I’ve written up a re-watch of Where No Man Has Gone Before, the second pilot for The Original Series. And most recently, I’ve also written up a re-watch of The Royale, from Season 2 of The Next Generation, which is the earliest episode of Star Trek that I can ever remember watching. Check out those posts by following the links! And until next time… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 will premiere on Paramount+ on the 23rd of July 2026. Seasons 1-3 are available to stream on Paramount+ now, and are also available on DVD/Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – remains the copyright of the Paramount Skydance Corporation. Some still frames used in this article were edited using A.I. tools to remove logos and watermarks. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Do you remember your “first contact” with the Star Trek franchise? The *very first* episode or film you ever watched?
Let’s set the scene! It’s the 19th of June, 1991. The Soviet Union, while in decline and wounded by the revolutions of 1989, still exists, and the coup attempt that finished it off hasn’t yet taken place. The England football team is still reeling from a semi-final defeat at last year’s World Cup in Italy. The World Wide Web doesn’t exist publicly yet. And Sonic the Hedgehog won’t be released on Sega’s new Mega Drive/Genesis console for a few more days.
It was also on this day that The Royale premiered in the United Kingdom, on the channel BBC 2. And this is the very first episode of Star Trek that I can ever remember watching. Thirty-five years ago this very day, I began my journey as a Trekkie. And I thought it could be fun to mark the occasion by taking a look at the episode together.
I’ve chosen this photograph to represent the summer of 1991 in the UK! Photo: Ben Brooksbank / Eastcote station, entrance 1991, via Wikimedia Commons
Okay, let’s step back for a moment. The Royale is the first episode of The Next Generation that I can remember watching in its entirety. However, I’m reasonably sure that I’d seen at least *parts* of other episodes prior to that. And my uncle, who was big TOS fan, had certainly talked Trek with me when I was a wee bairn! I can very vividly recall being enthralled with a toy phaser that he owned when I must’ve been only five or so – a solid two or three years prior to this moment. So why pick The Royale, then? Fair question!
This is the moment at which I became a regular viewer of The Next Generation, kick-starting a love of Star Trek which has persisted to the present day. Even if I’d played with that toy phaser a couple of years earlier, or watched parts of other episodes… The Royale is the one that turned me into a Trekkie. This is the moment I decided that Star Trek was something I needed to see more of; a TV show that I couldn’t put down and a world I wanted desperately to explore. Is it a great episode in its own right, or one of the best offerings in the franchise? Arguably not – though I’m afraid the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia rather blind me to that! But it’s a special episode for me personally, as it marks the moment when I fully joined the Star Trek fan community.
William Shatner, Gene Roddenberry, and Patrick Stewart, circa 1990-91.
At this moment in the early summer of 1991, I’d have been finishing Year 3 at school (which I believe is the equivalent of second grade in Ameria; not sure on that, though). My memory isn’t great these days, but I can remember some of the things I experienced that year. Year 3 marked the beginning of being in the “Juniors” at school, not the “Infants” with the younger year groups. It was around this time that I got my first taste of computing – at my small school in the rural north of England, there was only one computer, and it was in the Juniors classroom! I can remember sitting with another pupil – an older girl – as I had my first-ever lesson on a BBC Micro. I looked down at the keyboard and told the girl, with some alarm, that I wanted to use “little letters, not big letters” (meaning lowercase, not uppercase) and listened as she explained to me that the keyboard could write *both* sets of letters!
At home, we didn’t have a computer. My household had a landline telephone, a single television set, and a Betamax recorder that my parents would begrudgingly swap for VHS later in ’91. And we didn’t own a games console, either – although I’d played games before, at a kids’ club and at my uncle’s place, I wouldn’t get my first games console for another year. I finally got a Super Nintendo in the summer of 1992.
A Betamax recorder, similar to the one my parents owned in June 1991.
Sorry, this is turning into a stumble down memory lane, isn’t it?
But I suppose that’s a testament to the power of media. When I re-watched The Royale, I wasn’t just revisiting the episode and its story. I was stepping back in time to the moment I became a Star Trek fan, and that brings with it a certain amount of reflection. The world has changed a lot since that episode premiered here in the UK some thirty-five years ago. In fact, it’s almost unrecognisable in some ways. If I could magically teleport through time and sit down with my eight-year-old self, they’d be *stunned* to hear about some of the things that happened in the intervening years. And probably a little shocked at my appearance, too!
My point is that this episode holds a very special – and an utterly unique – place in my heart. Returning to it is always fun, but when I started to put pen to paper to write about it, I found myself wallowing in memories. Because this episode made me a Trekkie, I can’t help thinking back to that time in my life and reflecting on all of the things that have changed. Returning to The Royale today, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of its UK premiere, is something I’ve been looking forward to! I guess I just didn’t expect to take such a diversion back to my own past and my own schooldays.
A behind-the-scenes photo of the bridge of the Enterprise-D.
Season 2 of The Next Generation coined the phrase “growing the beard;” the opposite of “jumping the shark.” This phrase means, in brief, that a television show has improved significantly after a rougher first season, and references Jonathan Frakes’ character of Will Riker, who first got his iconic beard this year. While I don’t agree at all with the sentiment that Season 1 of TNG is somehow “bad” in its entirety, I think it’s fair to say that the show went from strength to strength, growing into something better over time.
And it’s that moment that I joined in and became a Star Trek fan. That can’t be a coincidence, can it? In fairness, I’ve always wondered what I might’ve made of Star Trek if, at this seminal moment, I’d have watched an episode like Angel One, or a similar lowly-rated story from Season 1. Would I have persevered with Star Trek, or written it off? I suppose we’ll never know… but it’s an interesting “what if” idea, isn’t it?
Riker in Season 1 (left) and Season 2 (right).
If you’ve made it this far, thanks! I think we’re finally ready to get into The Royale and its story.
The Royale aired at the midpoint of The Next Generation’s second season, in between Contagion and Time Squared. It was broadcast in the United States more than two years ahead of its UK premiere, in March 1989, and was written by Tracy Tormé and directed by Cliff Bole. Bole had previously worked on William Shatner’s police show T. J. Hooker, and had directed three episodes of TNG’s first season, including the penultimate episode, Conspiracy. He’d go on to direct almost two dozen more, as well as seven episodes of Deep Space Nine and ten of Voyager.
Tracy Tormé, the episode’s writer, is credited under a pseudonym for The Royale, as a result of conflicts with Maurice Hurley, TNG’s head writer for Season 2; Hurley had made changes and revisions to Tormé’s original script for the episode. According to Chaos on the Bridge, William Shatner’s documentary about the making of The Next Generation, Tormé and Hurley regularly butted heads during Seasons 1 and 2, before Tormé ultimately left the series ahead of Season 3.
The opening shot of the episode.
According to director Cliff Bole, The Royale suffered from having a low budget. The revolving door leading into the hotel – and, really, the entire surface of Theta VIII outside of the hotel – is, to be incredibly generous, “minimalist!” Even the remastered version of the episode doesn’t change this (for which I’m actually glad), but I think there’s a weird kind of low-budget charm to the way the planet and away mission are presented. It’s kind of like The Original Series with its papier-mache and polystyrene rocks; something about that, while objectively unrealistic in its appearance, just… “feels like Star Trek,” or at least it does to me!
Tracy Tormé has said that his original draft was much more surreal, and from what I can glean, it sounds like it might’ve been closer to The Original Series in tone, perhaps with more of a focus on comedy or even outright silliness. Allegedly, this version of the story was felt to be too similar to A Piece of the Action from TOS; both stories involve an alien society contaminated by a book from Earth, and both had gangsters in them. That version of the episode may have been a lot funnier… or it could’ve been a lot worse, but I suppose we’ll never know, eh?
A very minimalist set…
The episode begins with the Enterprise-D arriving at Theta VIII, and a brief discussion between Riker and Geordi about the planet. This sets up Theta VIII as an inhospitable place; a freezing planet with high winds and ammonia tornadoes. It’s a cute little conversation, and I like the shot of Riker on the bridge, moving from the front, near the helm and conn positions, to Geordi’s station at the back. It’s not something we’d see a lot of across the show, this kind of panning shot, following a command character as they move between stations.
It’s also a bit of a rarity to see Geordi on the bridge after Season 1, and I think this moment worked a lot better than if, say, Riker had called down to Engineering. Having the two together, with Riker looking over Geordi’s shoulder for the chat, just felt a bit more personal and familiar, adding to the sense that these two are friends as well as colleagues. Not a huge moment in the episode, considering what’s to come – but I still really like it!
Riker with Geordi on the bridge.
Riker’s conversation with Picard in the Ready-Room has drawn a lot of attention over the years, but not for the reasons the writer may have wanted! Picard talks about Fermat’s last theorem, which was a famously unsolved problem in mathematics, and uses it as an example of how much Starfleet and the Federation still have to learn about the universe. This point is interesting, and it establishes a couple of things about Picard: that he spends his downtime thinking about puzzles like this, and that he’s keenly aware of how far humanity still has to go to uncover the mysteries of the universe. It neatly encapsulates who Picard is, why he’d join an organisation like Starfleet – and why, all these years later, he’s a character that so many of us absolutely adore!
But this moment has been overshadowed somewhat by the solution to Fermat’s last theorem! Only a few years after The Royale aired, mathematician Andrew Wiles published his proof, rendering Picard’s statement inaccurate. And some fans and viewers hold up this moment not as Picard being philosophical about Starfleet’s mission of exploration… but rather, as an example of how Star Trek’s vision of the future can be invalidated as the world around it shifts. I don’t really like that approach, and while we can look back at this scene now, with the benefit of hindsight, and acknowledge that, factually speaking, Picard is now incorrect to say that Fermat’s last theorem was never solved… I think his point still stands! And it feels a little pedantic for folks to seize on this moment as a kind of “gotcha” to say that Star Trek gets its vision of the future wrong. Star Trek, for me anyway, kind of exists in a floating timeline, and while we wouldn’t make an episode today using Fermat’s last theorem in this way, the point Picard was making about how humanity still has a long way to go to understand the universe isn’t invalidated. It’s interesting, though, that the proof was published only a few years after the episode aired.
This discussion of Fermat’s last theorem is interesting.
The teaser ends with the revelation that the debris detected in orbit of Theta VIII is from a NASA spacecraft. I like the little scene in the transporter room, and it’s always fun to see Chief O’Brien prior to his role in Deep Space Nine! However, I can’t help but feel like this moment – which is treated as a huge revelation by the episode – doesn’t quite make sense if you stop to think about it. Why wouldn’t either the Klingon cruiser or the Enterprise-D have been able to detect that the debris was of Earth origin? And given how much random junk and debris there must be in space, why would the Enterprise-D have diverted here just for that? Would the episode have been a bit more solid if it began with the message from the Klingons saying that they’d detected the wreck of an Earth spacecraft in orbit of Theta VIII?
I think this is an example of the passage of time – and the fact that I’ve seen this episode so many times over the years – getting in the way! The “big reveal” of the NASA emblem doesn’t shock me any more, and it hasn’t since I was eight years old and I first saw the episode! But that isn’t The Royale’s fault, and thinking about the mystery that the episode wants to establish going into the ad break… it’s done pretty well. I just get the sense that, if you think about it from an in-universe point of view, the Enterprise-D wouldn’t have necessarily diverted to Theta VIII for no reason, and the Klingons probably wouldn’t have even mentioned the debris unless they knew it was of human origin. Changing that would’ve completely ruined the shock of seeing the NASA emblem and American flag, but I’d still argue it would make more sense in-universe for the crew to have deliberately set out to recover the debris of a ship from Earth, rather than diverting the entire ship to take a look at some random space junk.
O’Brien and Riker with the recovered debris.
In the Conference Room, the crew briefly discuss what they’ve found. The damage to the debris could indicate it was hit by weapons fire, and Picard states that there’s no way a vessel from the mid-21st Century could have travelled so far into deep space. I think it’s fun to see, now we’re almost forty years on from The Next Generation’s premiere, how the show, especially in its first couple of seasons, was trying to remain consistent with The Original Series and its vision of Earth in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Encounter at Farpoint showed us the aftermath of World War III and the “post-atomic horror,” and now we’re getting NASA spacecraft from that same kind of era venturing beyond the solar system.
As we get closer to some of these dates and moments in real-time, we can see how wrong those depictions were! And that’s kind of sad, in a way. But speaking as we were of Star Trek having a kind of “floating timeline,” where events in the real world can ultimately overwrite some of these ideas… I don’t think it really matters all that much. If you look at Star Trek episodes produced in the 2020s, they might not reference the “mid-21st Century” in quite the same way, but Star Trek’s internal timeline is, for me, vague enough to still come together! And my personal head canon, anyway, is that Star Trek diverged from the real world at some point in the mid/late 20th Century! But I think we’ve gotten a little off-topic, huh?
Data and Picard in the Conference Room.
I love the handheld phasers that the crew use for the away mission. A lot of phaser designs feel “iconic,” but something about the models used in the first part of The Next Generation just feels even more special, somehow. Perhaps that’s the nostalgia talking again! This model, lovingly referred to as the “dustbuster” after a handheld vacuum cleaner that it resembles, was seen on a few occasions across Seasons 1 and 2, but was changed by Season 3.
To get back on topic, Wesley and Geordi show Picard and the others a “structure” that they’ve detected on the surface of Theta VIII. And here’s where I feel like the script and the production didn’t quite align! This structure, briefly glimpsed on Wesley’s monitor, is simply never shown at all; the away team beams down to a black void with a simple revolving door set into it, and the exterior of the hotel is simply never seen, nor even acknowledged. This is clearly a consequence of the budget issues we talked about, and I happen to find the black void and simple door to be suitably mysterious and otherworldly, especially for the kind of story the episode is setting up. But it’s also a bit of an inconsistency, if you think about it, and it makes me wonder why they didn’t rework this moment on the bridge to perhaps make note of a pocket of breathable air, but not draw attention to the existence of a “structure” that we never get to see.
We never actually get to see what this structure looks like.
The away team beams down to Theta VIII, and they encounter the revolving door! One thing I didn’t realise until looking into the production history of The Royale is that all of the sets for the hotel were constructed specifically for The Next Generation – they didn’t use an existing hotel or casino set, which is genuinely fascinating. I guess it must’ve been cheaper to do that than to try to book an existing location or reuse a set from another series, but… how?
Director Cliff Bole, who had previously worked on a crime drama called Vegas, described the set as being built with “curtains,” and recalled that whole scenes needed to be shot from very specific angles so as not to give the game away! The moment the away team walks into the hotel for the first time, though, doesn’t feel – to me, anyway – like actors walking onto a set. The number of people in frame, as well as the score and sound design, too, make the hotel’s casino feel like a very real – if mysterious and otherworldly – space.
The casino.
The interaction with the assistant manager at the hotel’s front desk is still, all these years later, absolutely hilarious. Sam Anderson, the actor who took on the role, has absolutely perfect comedic timing, especially in this first encounter. As Riker and Worf push him on what the planet’s called… I can’t help but laugh every single time, no matter how many times I’ve seen The Royale.
Anderson would go on to have roles in films like Forrest Gump and TV shows like ER and Lost.
There’s a creepiness to this interaction, making us think that the assistant manager is hiding things or refusing to share everything he knows about the hotel or the planet it’s situated on, and that successfully builds up more of the mystery that The Royale is going for.
The assistant manager.
It’s also at this moment that we get the first signs of the episode’s other angle: the cheap story from a low-quality novel. Playing out like a tired cliché of the crime and drama genres, the hotel’s bellboy interrupts the away team to talk to the assistant manager about a girl. And the soundtrack here! It’s just pitch-perfect for this kind of over-the-top drama cliché; exactly the kind of thing you’d have heard in a B-movie or TV soap opera. The dramatic change in music adds so much to this scene, indicating to us as the audience that there’s something very strange going on. I love it!
This leads into the revelation that none of the people the away team has encountered are emitting life-signs. And this gets a little confusing; Data explains that they exist, but that they aren’t organic, nor are they machines. Again, the mysteries of the story are deepening. And we get a fun introduction to the character “Texas” to round things off.
The away team scanning for life-forms.
We get a brief scene back aboard the Enterprise-D with Wesley and Geordi still working on a way to break through the communications blackout. Picard talks to them, wondering whether something intelligent may be blocking their signal, and then hears from Counsellor Troi that Riker doesn’t appear to be in danger; she describes his mood as “amused,” which obviously tracks with what we just saw! This little scene on the bridge doesn’t add a lot, but it’s a fun little cutaway in its own right.
I think it might’ve been interesting for Picard to ask Troi, rather than Wesley and Geordi, whether there was some kind of intelligence or life-form at work here. Surely she’d be able to tell whether there was anyone else down there besides the away team, and that could’ve impacted how the crew were reacting to the situation. Deanna’s empathic abilities are not always perfect, of course, but she might’ve been able to join in this conversation and share her perspective, at least. Again, a nitpick – but it’s a role we’ve seen Troi fill multiple times already, even at this point in the show’s run, commenting on the likes of Q or the Ferengi, to name but two examples. So I don’t think it’s out of the question for Picard to have asked her if she could feel another presence down on Theta VIII.
Why doesn’t Captain Picard ask Counsellor Troi if she can sense another intelligence or presence down on the planet?
The blackjack scene with “Texas” is funny. Noble Willingham, the actor who played the role, would later go on to have a starring role in Walker, Texas Ranger with Chuck Norris, and he just feels perfectly cast as the old gambler in The Royale. He reminds me of The Simpsons’ character of the Rich Texan, thanks to a similar outfit, accent, and mannerisms, and I just think he’s a really fun and pretty unique character across really the entirety of Star Trek. He fits perfectly into this pulpy, low-quality novel, but there’s an edge to the character, too.
We get some genuinely cute moments with Texas and Data – Texas gives him his stetson hat to wear, briefly, and tries to talk him out of asking for another card during the game. I’m not a gambler, and I’m not all that familiar with blackjack as a game, but its rules are simple enough to understand – and Data explains them well – meaning it makes for a good choice of game to show off in a scene like this. Trying to explain the rules of a more complex game would’ve taken too long and could’ve been confusing or just less engaging for the audience.
“Texas.”
After another short scene on the bridge, it soon becomes clear to the away team that they’re trapped in the hotel. The scene of the three of them running through the revolving door is a little silly, to be honest; they’re clearly just going all the way around and coming back out into the hotel, and it makes for a kind of comical presentation which contrasts with how seriously all three characters are taking it! But it does well enough to establish the core premise: they’re stuck in the hotel, unable to leave, and also cut off from communicating with the Enterprise.
The Royale always reminded me a little of The Eagles’ song Hotel California. Remember the line “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”? Isn’t that pretty much the premise of the story here, that escaping the hotel is impossible? I’ve never seen other Trekkies making that link, though, so maybe that’s just a me thing! And the song isn’t *literally* about a magically inescapable hotel, it’s a metaphor. Still, I find the comparison to be a fun one.
Behind-the-scenes during production.
Riker attempts to talk to the assistant manager again, but makes no progress in figuring out how to leave the hotel. The Enterprise-D is able to briefly get in contact with Riker, but only long enough for him to tell Picard that they can’t leave the building. We get another scene with the bellboy and the assistant manager, with that absolutely wonderful scene-setting score again! And I just really love this incredibly cheesy story that’s unfolding at the hotel; it’s so silly, but it’s so… *Star Trek* at the same time.
Maybe you won’t agree, but I think The Royale is the kind of episode that modern Star Trek wouldn’t do. We’ve seen recent episodes involving time travel, including to the modern day, as well as stories involving aliens capable of generating illusions not dissimilar to the hotel in The Royale. But this kind of self-contained story – an alien recreation of a low-budget Las Vegas hotel, based on a book, and complete with one-dimensional characters played with self-awareness by the performers? I mean… would modern Star Trek do something like that? I doubt it… but it’s episodes like this one that make Star Trek what it is, at least to me. Recent stories all seem to be galactic in scope, with existential threats to the entire Federation and moustache-twirling villains who are played completely earnestly. The Royale is totally aware of the kind of books and TV shows it’s parodying, and I think that self-awareness is a big part of how well it works.
The bellboy with his gun.
After a cute moment with Worf at the “turbolift,” the action moves to one of the hotel’s upper floors – and it’s here that the mystery begins to be explained. The away team reaches one of the hotel’s rooms, where Data’s detected “human DNA,” and they uncover the body of one of the NASA astronauts.
For a Star Trek episode, on a relatively low budget, produced in the late ’80s… the prop of the skeletonised astronaut is actually really good! At least, I think it is. It manages to feel old, decrepit, mouldy, and like it’s been there for centuries, and the reveal, I’m certain, would have shocked me when I first saw the episode all those years ago. It’s a well-executed moment, suitably creepy and intense for a mystery story, and it sees The Royale take a surprisingly dark twist. Yes, the away team has been trapped for a while, and yes, we know that, back on the ship, there are problems with communication. But this is the first time, really, after meeting some fairly whimsical characters and seeing a cheesy side-story right out of a mid-century soap opera, that the crew feels in danger. And if this prop had looked a lot worse… well, that feeling wouldn’t have been as strong.
The skeleton.
Worf’s comment about how dying in one’s sleep is “terrible” didn’t pass unnoticed – a subtle nod to how Klingons view such things. He then goes on to uncover the dead man’s NASA flight suit as Data explains that the astronaut – Colonel Richey – has been dead for almost three centuries. The Enterprise is able to get back in touch at this point, conveniently allowing Riker to ask them to search for details of Colonel Richey’s identity, while Worf uncovers the novel Hotel Royale – a ficticious book created for this episode.
I like the flight suit, and how it feels comparable to NASA’s spacesuits of the Space Shuttle era. Riker’s comment about the 52-star American flag indicating a time period was also interesting; it continues Star Trek’s theme of depicting a positive future for the United States in particular! I wonder which two new states those stars are meant to represent? Puerto Rico, perhaps, and Washington, DC? Those are the two most-likely candidates for statehood right now, I believe!
The flight suit with its flag and mission patches.
As an aside, the remastered version of the episode contains one major difference from the original, and it’s at this moment. The original mission patch on Colonel Richey’s flight suit was much more basic; an Apollo 17 patch with the name scrubbed off. The remaster updates this, giving the patch a unique design, which I think looks a lot better – and certainly feels a bit more realistic for a mission of this type. It’s only seen briefly, but it is seen in close-up, so I definitely think it was worth updating it when The Next Generation went through the remastering process a few years ago.
After Worf discovers the novel Hotel Royale, Riker hands the book to Data to summarise it. And I’ve always loved seeing Data do these superhuman feats – reading an entire book in seconds, as in this case, just makes him feel like a unique character with special abilities. Data proceeds to explain, in brief, the plot of the book to Captain Picard and the away team, and they realise that the characters in the book are some of the people we’ve been seeing downstairs. It was a bit of a heavy-handed approach to have the characters say, out loud, things that we could’ve easily understood for ourselves, but that’s my only real criticism of this scene.
Data explains the plot of the book (left) while Picard and the crew listen.
Things take a darker turn again when Worf and Riker uncover the colonel’s diary. Somehow (and it isn’t explained how, sadly), Colonel Richey pieced together that the illusory hotel was concocted by an alien that he claims was aboard his ship and killed his crewmates. The alien (or aliens), out of a sense of guilt, built the hotel for him and allowed him to live there. He then spent the next thirty-eight years trapped in the Hotel Royale, before passing away.
So now we know why the hotel exists on this barren, otherwise lifeless world! The mystery has been at least partially solved, and with the exception of a bit of heavy-handedness in some of the dialogue, this worked pretty well. The mystery connects to Star Trek’s fictionalised past – the 21st Century – and to a race of aliens who appear to have inadvertently caused the deaths of the other NASA crew. And the book being misinterpreted as a kind of almost religious text by the aliens would be funny… if it wasn’t so dark. Colonel Richey’s final words, that he would “welcome death,” really hammer home that much darker tone for this aspect of the story.
Data and Riker with the diary.
The next scene aboard the Enterprise gives us Dr Pulaski’s only lines in the episode. The crew come up with a plan – spearheaded by Geordi – to “slice” into the forcefield around the hotel, even though doing so would cause the frozen atmosphere of Theta VIII to rush in. If the away team couldn’t be beamed out in time, Dr Pulaski opines that, in theory, they could be resuscitated after being flash-frozen.
I like Dr Pulaski, and one of my biggest Star Trek “what-if” questions is what The Next Generation and the rest of the franchise might’ve looked like had she stuck around. Her role in The Royale is relatively minor, but I daresay it’s no coincidence that her presence in the first episodes I can remember watching is a big part of why I find her to be such a fascinating character. Dr Crusher’s return in Season 3 was welcomed by fans (and the cast) at the time, of course, and we’ve since seen different things from her. But Dr Pulaski is a unique character; her conflicts with characters like Data and her occasionally standoffish manner contrast in a fun way with other members of the crew.
Dr Pulaski doesn’t play a big role in this episode.
As the away team splits up, Picard and Counsellor Troi begin to look over the text of Hotel Royale. I absolutely *adore* Picard’s disgusted expression on reading the opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Somehow, that line has become a byword for poor-quality writing, often criticised and parodied, and its use here really emphasises the low-quality nature of this fictitious book. Picard, who had been discussing complex mathematics and high-brow philosophy with Riker at the start of the episode, is forced to engage with a text he clearly detests – and it’s kind of funny.
Back on the casino floor, Data attempts to get “Texas” to leave the hotel, surmising that he may be trapped within its walls, too. But the blackjack game is still going, and Texas shows off a much creepier side, as he tries to leverage Vanessa’s losing streak to… well, you can figure out the rest. It’s a turn for this previously comedic character to end up looking controlling, manipulative, sexually aggressive, and creepy, but it fits with the tone of the kind of novel Hotel Royale purports to be.
Vanessa and Texas.
As Riker and Worf reconvene to share that they found “nothing” of consequence to aid in their escape, we get another of the pulpy scenes with the bellhop. It starts with the assistant manager, as the TV drama-style music swells, and leads into the arrival of Mickey D: the gangster at the heart of the novel.
The only part about this I didn’t really like was the action cutting between the planet and Picard, in his Ready-Room, who could apparently hear everything going on through the comm channel. Picard, for me, didn’t seem to take it as seriously as he perhaps should’ve; in-universe, the characters don’t know how dangerous the situation is, and we know that even holograms can kill if they malfunction. There’s no reason to assume that, just because this is a low-quality story, Riker and the away team will be safe – Mickey D could, perhaps, have harmed them if they’d got caught up in the middle of it. It was just a bit… tonally weird, I suppose. And cutting away from the actual scene to watch someone listening to it, only to make yet another comment on the quality of the writing? It just didn’t add a lot to the episode.
Mickey D arrives.
The conflict between Mickey D and the bellboy, over a girl named Rita, escalates, despite the assistant manager’s attempts to defuse the situation, and the two seem to be heading outside for a confrontation. However, Mickey D shoots the bellboy in the back, quips about Rita not being worth dying over, and then departs.
Mickey D is a completely one-dimensional character – but in a self-aware way. He’s a typical “Vegas gangster” of this time period, with his mannerisms, style of dress, and everything made out to emphasise that. His one big action – shooting a young man in the back – also hammers home that this is a man who doesn’t play fair. I’d never say he’s a great or even good character (he gets far too little screen time for that), but he fills a role in this story in a way that makes sense, and he advances the plot both within Hotel Royale’s fictional story, and for the away team down on Theta VIII. They witness the shooting (complete with over-acting and no visible injuries or wounds), and that kick-starts the final act of the episode.
Michael Dorn (right) with guest star Leo Garcia, who played the bellboy.
Riker and Worf watch Mickey D walking out of the hotel, surprised that he’s able to leave while they remain trapped. This leads to a conversation with Captain Picard, who recounts the scene from the book. Riker then asks how the book ends – and after learning that “foreign investors” buy out the hotel, he comes up with a plan for the away team to *become* the foreign investors. This was hinted at, by the way, in their first interaction with the assistant manager shortly after their arrival.
One thing that’s great about this moment is how the typical TNG music sting starts to play, then blends into the TV drama jazz music that had defined the scenes recounting the pulpy Hotel Royale story. I just think it’s really creative; a way to kind of symbolise that these two disconnected halves of the episode’s story are going to come together. And, for the first time since arriving, Riker and the away team now have a plan to get back to the Enterprise-D.
The music swells… and Riker is a man with a plan.
The away team re-encounters “Texas” and Vanessa, this time at the craps table, and begin their scheme to win enough money gambling to buy out the hotel and finish the story, hopefully allowing them to escape. Data’s unique skillset once again proves invaluable; he’s able to “fix” the dice to make sure they win, much to Texas and Vanessa’s enjoyment.
We get a tiny sub-plot with “Texas” trying to bet against Data, and taking it personally when he loses. It was of some interest, especially given his earlier creepy behaviour, and seeing him taken down a few pegs is definitely satisfying. But he isn’t a major antagonist, and this feels like little more than a minor stumbling-block on the way to finishing the story.
The craps game.
What I love about this sequence is how into character both Data and Riker get. Data adopts mid-century gambling mannerisms and terminology, despite not quite understanding all of it, and his line “baby needs a new pair of shoes” is delivered in a totally deadpan way that *only* Brent Spiner could ever manage! It’s really funny, really cute, and it’s one of the many reasons why I fell in love with Data way back when. He’s just such a fun, charming character, and every time he tries act “more human” he does it so earnestly and in such a fun way that it’s impossible not to root for him.
You know the rest of the story: thanks to Data’s interference, they win over and over at craps, breaking the bank in the process. They then announce they’re buying the hotel, to the surprise and gratitude of the assistant manager, and spread the rest of their winnings around. Even “Texas” gets to benefit, remaining at the craps table with Data’s loaded dice.
The assistant manager realises who he’s dealing with.
I think we’re meant to understand that, because the away team was believed to be the trio of “foreign investors,” they couldn’t leave the hotel until they’d completed their role in the story. Whether Colonel Richey was also assigned that role by the aliens who created the illusion isn’t clear, though, and the episode ends with the core mystery solved – but still some unanswered questions.
Back in the Ready-Room, Picard and Riker recall Fermat’s last theorem, and suggest that some of the mysteries of Colonel Richey’s story, and the hotel on Theta VIII, may simply never be solved. And while that may seem unsatisfying (which, in a way, it is), it’s also an interesting take on space exploration and Starfleet’s mission, isn’t it? We’re used to our heroes turning up at a planet, solving a puzzle or unravelling every aspect of a mystery, and warping away to a new adventure. But space… well, it isn’t always easy to understand. Who were these aliens? Why did they choose that book for Colonel Richey? What went wrong in their encounter with humanity – and what were they even trying to do? Why strand Colonel Richey on Theta VIII – is the planet their homeworld? Why not attempt to make contact with the Enterprise-D if that’s the case? So many questions left unanswered… but the lack of an answer is kind of the point.
Picard and Riker are left with unanswered questions as the Enterprise prepares to leave orbit.
So that was The Royale! Thanks for joining me on this re-watch of the episode.
I had a blast stepping back in time some thirty-five years to the episode that first turned me into a Trekkie, and I hope it was a bit of fun to come along for the ride with me. I adore this story, despite its low-budget sets, hammy acting, and kind of silly premise – and I hope that came across! As a kid, I was absolutely transfixed by this story, and desperately keen to go on more adventures with Riker, Data, Worf, and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise-D. From this moment on, I was a regular viewer of The Next Generation, watching the rest of Season 2, then Season 3, and going back to earlier episodes from Season 1 when they were re-broadcast.
Star Trek became a pretty big part of my life from then on. As I navigated school and social life, and especially as I grew into adolescence and attended seondary school, it became both a source of joy and, sometimes, an escape from the real world. I loved going on these adventures with the crew, and when TNG’s two spin-offs (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) came to the UK, I watched those religiously, too. And I may never have started to do so were it not for The Royale.
The Enterprise-D in orbit of Theta VIII.
In Star Trek’s big sixtieth anniversary year, I thought it was fun to return to my own origins as a Trekkie, and with today being the thirty-fifth anniversary of The Royale’s UK premiere… well, it all just sort of fell into place!
It’s impossible for me to be in any way “objective” when dealing with an episode like this, so I hope that didn’t impact your enjoyment of this re-watch. I wanted to go back to The Royale not to criticise it or pick it apart – though I daresay there’s been some of that – but really to celebrate what it means to me personally, and to my journey into the Star Trek fan community. Hopefully that positivity came across, anyway.
It’s been a long time since June 1991, and a lot has changed. But my love of Star Trek – and of The Royale – hasn’t diminished. Star Trek has been a near-constant presence in my life since this moment, even when new episodes and films weren’t being aired, and without it… well, I probably wouldn’t be here running a small website! I really don’t know where I’d be without this wonderful franchise, to tell you the truth.
The away team beams back to the ship.
If you liked this format and want more re-watches of older Star Trek episodes, I have several here on the website. My most recent was Where No Man Has Gone Before – The Original Series’ second pilot. You can find that piece by clicking or tapping here. Earlier this year, I also took a look at The First Duty from The Next Generation’s fifth season. Click or tap here to check that out. And if you visit my dedicated The Next Generation webpage, you can find all of my commentary and other TNG episode re-watches. Click or tap here to head there.
Later this year, we’ve got Strange New Worlds’ fourth season to come, and I plan to write episode reviews for that, so I hope you’ll join me for some of those. And as the sixtieth anniversary gets closer, I have a few other ideas for articles and episode re-watches that I hope I’ll be able to find time for.
Thanks for reading, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available, and is also available to buy on DVD/Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including The Next Generation and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for the prologue to 1666: Amsterdam.
Isn’t it great that free demos are coming back in such a big way? Demo versions of games used to be ubiquitous; you’d even get free demo discs with certain gaming magazines back in the 1990s and 2000s! Having recently tried the demo version of Star Trek: Outposts Unknown, I’ve just finished playing my way through the “prologue” to the upcoming horror-fantasy game 1666: Amsterdam.
And you know what? I had fun.
Horror isn’t usually “my thing,” which is something I’ve said many times here on the website! But horror and horror-adjacent titles can still be enjoyable for me if they’re done well (and they aren’t overly reliant on cheap jumpscares or excessive gore). Despite mages and wizards being stock fantasy characters – especially in the realm of video games – witches haven’t been quite so common, if you stop to think about it. So a game that dips its toes in the world of European witchcraft seemed… interesting.
Arriving at a witches’ coven.
I’m always going to have my curiosity piqued by titles that look to offer some kind of different experience; something I haven’t necessarily played before. And while, in strict gameplay terms, 1666: Amsterdam didn’t feel all that special, its narrative – and its time-bending story involving a secret witchy cult – definitely fits the bill!
Obviously, gameplay matters in a video game. And we’ll get into a couple of specific gameplay gripes in a moment – because 1666: Amsterdam’s prologue has definitely highlighted a couple of areas where improvement is needed! But, broadly speaking, I come to a title like this to be engaged by a strong narrative, and the fact that, even after barely half an hour of gameplay, I feel compelled to return to this world and uncover the next chapters of the story? That’s a good sign!
Cilo and the professor.
Let’s get the negatives out of the way first.
There were a couple of moments in the prologue where I felt some refinement to the controls was needed. On a couple of occasions, you’re steering two people at once – one supposedly following another, and then later, a couple holding hands. Although an interesting riff on the “follow the NPC” idea *in theory*, I just wasn’t wild about how this worked in practice. Having to steer two characters through some occasionally narrow doorways or staircases using just one control stick just… I dunno. If it’s a small part of the game, I guess I could overlook it. But it felt clumsy, and I wasn’t sold on this method of circumventing the old “follow this important character” cliché.
Secondly, there were two moments where button-prompts either didn’t appear at all or didn’t appear in time. The first “puzzle” – if we can call it that – in the prologue involved finding a specific book on a specific shelf, but even after locating the correct shelf, the prompt to search for the book didn’t appear at first, leaving me wandering aimlessly around the library wondering what I’d done wrong. Secondly, in the section where you play as a cat, my cat-character got stuck on a log, unable to jump down for a minute, because the button prompted me to jump onto a log… but the prompt to jump down again didn’t appear.
One of the places where a button prompt went missing.
As I said in my last look at a demo version, this is a game’s chance to make a *good* first impression! Bugs are to be expected in a game which is still being developed, and I understand that game development isn’t easy. Feedback from players can also be important. But a demo version should be polished… and the level of polish, at a couple of points, was imperfect.
That being said, nothing I encountered prevented me from progressing to the end of the prologue, for which I’m glad!
There was no combat in the demo, so I can’t say whether 1666: Amsterdam’s combat encounters will be fun, but from what I’ve managed to glean from the short teaser at the end of the prologue, it looks comparable to something like last year’s South of Midnight – third-person combat with some magical witchy powers in the mix. Combat may not be the biggest part of the game, with puzzles, exploration, and advancing the story clearly having big roles to play, too, but as long as combat is competent, I’ll be satisfied.
Combat, as glimpsed in the trailer.
I love games where you get to play as a cute kitty cat – two of my favourite titles of the last few years have been Stray and Little Kitty, Big City! And black cats are absolutely adorable; my own cat has black fur. Despite what people say about bad luck or evil spirits or whatever nonsense… black cats are cute! So any game that gives me a black cat – either as a companion or, as in this case, as a playable secondary character – I’m gonna be happy.
Choosing which “personality” the cat will have was also an interesting element to the game, and while it didn’t mean much in terms of the demo, I expect it’ll matter a lot more in the full version of 1666: Amsterdam. There seemed to be half a dozen or so cats to choose from, and the little descriptions they were given hinted at different abilities. There might be some different lines of dialogue, or even completely different side-missions, as a result of these choices.
Choose your furry feline friend!
I don’t know, at this stage, whether a game like 1666: Amsterdam will have a lot of replayability. Some games offer branching narratives, or gamplay that’s so varied that coming back to it can feel like a completely new experience. Others are much more linear. If I had to guess, I’d say 1666: Amsterdam will probably have quite a linear narrative, but that there may be ways to shake up the combat or puzzle-solving, depending on certain choices. I don’t object to that at all – I love a good linear title. Indika, which doesn’t feel a million miles away from 1666: Amsterdam, as they’re both third-person, horror-adjacent historical titles with female protagonists, is one of my favourite games of 2024, for instance.
Time travel can be difficult to get right in any work of fiction, and having two (or perhaps three) time periods on the go simultaneously can feel confusing. For my money, though, the prologue to 1666: Amsterdam seems to have done this side of its story quite well. It was actually quite nostalgic to step back to Millennium Eve and see all the decorations; I’m not sure if that moment has ever been recreated in a video game like this. Certainly not one I’ve ever played! But it did make me feel oh so old to see one of the game’s playable characters – a woman in her mid-twenties – who was presumably born *after* the turn of the millennium!
It was weirdly nostalgic to go back to Millennium Eve…
The story of a “Collector” intrigues me. And I think it’s a testament to the strong storytelling present in the prologue that I really want to learn more about this world and unfold this story. That’s what a demo version for a game like this is supposed to do, I suppose! But it definitely roped me in, and I can feel my interest for the game starting to build. When it releases in full – potentially sometime next year – I’ll definitely be checking it out.
The studio behind 1666: Amsterdam is Panache Digital Games, who you might be familiar with from 2020’s Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. I didn’t play that game, which received mixed reviews upon release, but it was another game with a unique concept, I guess. Patrice Désilets, who was the creative director behind Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the first two games in the Assassin’s Creed series, is the head of Panache Digital Games. With Assassin’s Creed supposedly also working on a witch-themed title (Hexe), comparisons may be inevitable when the two games launch!
Aaron, the kitty cat.
1666: Amsterdam seems to be getting an “early access” launch later this year. But that’s not something that I usually dabble with, so I expect I’ll be waiting for the game’s full release before I jump in. Still, the prologue was interesting – and from the point of view of getting me hyped up for the title, a definite success!
I hope this has been interesting.
I like to check out demo versions when they become available, and a title like 1666: Amsterdam definitely feels like something a bit different right now. There are a couple of places where some additional polish is needed, but the game’s story feels genuinely compelling, and I really can’t wait to see it unfold. When 1666: Amsterdam gets a full release – which may be next year – I hope you’ll join me for a review.
1666: Amsterdam will launch in early access on PC in late 2026. A full release date and console launches have not yet been announced. A demo version, titled 1666: Amsterdam (Prologue) is available now on PC. 1666: Amsterdam is the copyright of Panache Digital Games. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Last year, when Microsoft announced that the price of PC Game Pass was going to rise for the second time in twelve months, effectively going up by more than 70% in just over a year, I cancelled my subscription. I laid out my rationale in a post here on the website (click or tap here to read it, if you’re interested!) and I said at that time that I would consider returning to the service if it was going to be priced fairly. Recently, Microsoft has announced that the price of Game Pass will fall – not back to where it was, but certainly a significant cut from last year’s excessive and unnecessary price hike, proving wrong the folks who said that “corporations don’t care what you think,” or that “voting with your wallet can’t change anything!”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to see this price cut. And I still believe, despite what we’re going to discuss today, that a good, fairly-priced subscription model probably represents the future of gaming as a medium. An Xbox Series S console with a Game Pass subscription has once again become my go-to when I’m asked for the best way to get started with modern gaming, especially on a budget.
But, at least right now… I don’t feel like I personally miss Game Pass too terribly – and despite the price cut, I haven’t been tempted back.
Xbox recently reduced the price of its Game Pass subscription.
For some context, I became a subscriber to the PC version of Game Pass back when it was in beta, and I remained a subscriber for more than five years. In that time, Game Pass introduced me to some wonderful games, including titles I’d never have thought to try for myself if I had to pay full price. Two of those titles – Little Kitty, Big City and South of Midnight – were even named my “games of the year” in 2024 and 2025 respectively. So it’s fair to say that Game Pass had an impact on me, and gave me access to a library of titles, some of which I found to be incredibly fun.
Moreover, it was a blast to be able to *try* games without the fear of wasting a lot of money. I dabbled in a few titles I’d never have chanced spending money on… and I bounced off some of them hard! Firing up the app and scrolling through new games, newly-added games, and classics from years gone by felt like a lot of fun, too, and just choosing what to play was part of the experience. I was never a Game Pass “hater,” and it really was with a profound sense of regret that I felt the service had become unaffordable. Moreover, I wanted to make my voice heard – in whatever minuscule way I could – and tell Microsoft that that kind of exploitative price hiking just isn’t okay.
Most of us don’t have unlimited budgets, so massive price hikes aren’t okay.
After I cancelled Game Pass, I bought a couple of titles that were either already part of Game Pass or that have been subsequently added to it. And during last winter’s Steam sale, I picked up a couple of others, too. This year, I’ve also purchased a couple of new games that are part of Game Pass – and I haven’t worked my way through all of those titles, yet!
In short, while there are games on Game Pass right now that I don’t own and would like to play – titles like Forza Horizon 6, for example, The Alters, or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – I don’t feel a desperate need to jump in again… at least, not as things stand. I haven’t been playing as many games over the past few months, but I’ve picked up a couple of titles that I’d been really looking forward to, like Mixtape and inKonbini: One Store, Many Stories, and I still have games from last year, like Empire of the Ants, that I’m yet to get around to. Until I get some way into clearing that backlog… why do I need Game Pass, again?
A selection of titles coming to Game Pass over the next few months.
I took the roughly £160 that I would’ve spent on Game Pass after last year’s price hike and put some of that money towards games like Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which is a title I thoroughly enjoyed and still dip into. But now that the price of Game Pass has come down, well… I still own those other games. Some of them are sitting in my library, waiting to be played (and hopefully also reviewed here on the website!), and because of that, I just don’t feel like making that monthly commitment right now. If I were to buy every single game I wanted, every year, it would undoubtedly add up to more than a Game Pass subscription at the current price, which is a pretty big argument in favour of the service. But having stepped out of that “ecosystem,” to use some corpo-speak, after more than five years inside of it… I don’t really feel compelled to rejoin.
I think a lot of players – especially on PC, thanks to the abundance of discounts and cheaper titles – have a backlog of games. My Steam library has over 225 games in it at time of writing, and I haven’t played all of them by any stretch! There are games I bought on sale, intending to play later. Games I started but didn’t finish for one reason or another. And even a few brand-new titles that I want to play and review but I just haven’t found the time to do so yet. With such an extensive collection – and even more titles over on Epic Games, some of which were totally free – I guess I just feel like I’ve got most of what I want, at least for now. By pushing me away from Game Pass, Microsoft has pretty much lost me as a customer for the foreseeable future. And that’s despite my having been an active and pretty vocal supporter of the subscription in the past.
I’ve got a Steam backlog to work through!
There are titles on Game Pass now, like Forza Horizon 6, and that will come to Game Pass in the near future, like Clockwork Revolution and possibly Fable, that have definitely piqued my curiosity and that I’d like to try for myself. But every game I can think in those categories has a replacement – a game I already own on Steam or Epic (or even on my Nintendo Switch) that I could play instead. And with a backlog that’s only grown over the last few years, I think I’d rather work my way through some of those rather than make an expensive commitment to Game Pass.
Because despite the recent price cut, taking it from £13.49 a month here in the UK down to £10.99 a month for the PC version, Game Pass is still more expensive than it was a year ago, a *lot* more expensive than it was a couple of years ago… and as much fun as Forza Horizon 6 might be, I can get a similar kind of racing experience elsewhere. Having paid £60 for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, I’d rather spend more time playing that at the moment – even though they aren’t directly comparable games in a lot of other ways!
inKonbini: One Store, Many Stories is a game I’ve recently purchased.
I thought long and hard about the title of this piece, because despite how I feel right now, I did enjoy the freedom Game Pass gave me when I was subscribing to it. And I maintain that, even at its current price, it’s a relatively good value offering, especially on the lower tiers, and an easy recommendation to anyone getting started with current-gen gaming. Since the price was cut, I’ve been less reluctant to recommend Game Pass to folks in that position.
But for me… I’ve spent years accruing a backlog of games on Steam and Epic, and I think it makes more sense right now – especially given the state of things here in the UK and around the world – not to add another subscription and monthly commitment. Without spending a penny, I could play a new-to-me game every single day from now until the first part of 2027! So… I think that’s what I’m gonna do. Not literally, of course! I don’t have that much time or energy for gaming, these days, unfortunately. But when I am in the mood to play, I’m gonna fire up a title I’ve already bought on Steam, and set Game Pass aside for the rest of 2026. Perhaps, if the service continues to improve, add new titles, and maybe even offer some kind of extra discount… I’ll reconsider at some point.
Xbox’s current logo.
I hope this has been interesting. After Microsoft announced the price reduction, I did think about whether or not I wanted to jump back in. And I wanted to write up how I’ve been feeling as a kind of addendum to my piece last year, when I discussed my reasons for cancelling. Having specifically said, back then, that I’d reconsider if the price came down, I thought it would only be fair to lay out the reasons why I’ve opted *not* to rejoin the service at this time.
And hey, if reviews of games like Mixtape and inKonbini sound like something you’re interested in, stay tuned! I’d love to get around to one or both of those games this month or next.
Thanks for reading. I hope this made sense and didn’t come across as a silly stream-of-consciousness waffle! Have fun out there… and, whether you’re a Game Pass subscriber or not, happy gaming!
The Game Pass subscription service is available now for players on PC and Xbox game consoles. All titles discussed above are the copyright of their respective developer, publisher, and/or studio. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of minor spoilers for Star Trek: Outposts Unknown and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
I did not expect to be talking about *another* brand-new Star Trek video game so soon after covering Shadow Frontier, but here we are! Paramount Games – Skydance-Paramount’s newly-established interactive media wing – is clearly going all-in on the Star Trek franchise, which is great to see. After the announcement of a third-person horror title, “Summer Games Fest” has just introduced us to a top-down strategy game also set in the Star Trek franchise: Outposts Unknown. And there’s a free demo available to play right now!
Here’s a question which might cement your Trekkie status (or leave you questioning whether you can really call yourself a “true Star Trek fan” any more!) – do you remember a game called Star Trek: New Worlds? No, not “Strange New Worlds,” just simply “New Worlds” – it was a similar colony-building title which was released in the year 2000. Outposts Unknown is, as you might expect, light-years ahead in terms of graphics, and takes advantage of a quarter of a century’s worth of improvements in game design… but there are echoes of that older title, I felt. I had a blast playing New Worlds shortly after the turn of the millennium, so to get another game in that same kind of space all these years later? It’s just a lot of fun!
If you missed it, by the way, I’ve already taken a look at Shadow Frontier, so click or tap here if you want to check out my thoughts on that title.
The player’s ship in a cut-scene.
Last time, I said that Bloober Team – the developers of Shadow Frontier – was a studio I’d heard of and that has a good reputation. Their 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2, for instance, won several top industry awards. Outposts Unknown is being developed by Magic Fuel Games and published by Playstack, neither of which I’m familiar with.
However, Magic Fuel Games seems to have experience in developing city-building games, which is a positive thing, and Playstack published Post-Apocalyptic Courier Service, which is a game I’ve at least heard of! Cityscapes: Sim Builder – developed by Magic Fuel Games – seems to get good reviews on Apple and Android, too. So there are reasons to be positive, even if the developers and publishers aren’t big names in the industry yet.
Beaming down at the start of the game.
But that’s for the future, and while I *hope* that the finished game will be good… the demo had a problem. In short, after I’d played for almost three hours (on a single save file), the demo locked up and wouldn’t let me progress any further. In-game characters came to a standstill, the in-game clock stopped advancing, and while the music kept playing and I could move the camera around, I couldn’t do anything. I tried all of the usual things to unlock a locked-up game: closing the programme, re-loading the save, even rebooting my PC. But nothing helped – and with no other save files (that I could find, anyway) my three hours of progress seem to have been for nought.
I appreciate that “game development is hard,” and that this demo version represents an unfinished game that’s still being worked on. Bugs are expected. But… I don’t think it’s unfair to ask Magic Fuel Games and Playstack to make sure that the *demo version* is playable and free from this kind of issue. Is it? I would’ve liked to at least get to the end of the part of the game that the demo allows, partly for my own enjoyment and partly so I could relay that experience to you via my website… but I couldn’t. There’s a serious bug in the current version of the demo, as of mid-June 2026, which prevented me from going beyond in-game day 21. And so, with great regret, I have to recommend *against* downloading the demo unless and until that issue can be fixed.
This was as far as I could get before everything locked up.
That is a major caveat, as you can see.
But I did spend close to three hours with Outposts Unknown before I was locked out of progressing, and I have some thoughts. I’ve tried not to let the run-ending bug colour my impressions, because there are definitely things to enjoy about Outposts Unknown.
First of all, I really like the game’s art style. You might say it’s got a kind of “mobile game” aesthetic, but I don’t necessarily mean that as an insult. I like the less-than-realistic style used for character models, buildings, and so on, and I especially enjoyed the bright colours in the environment. Outposts Unknown is vibrant, and that gives the alien planet a truly “otherworldly” feel. Sometimes, even Star Trek on TV can mess this up, with too many planets feeling samey, like they’re all filmed on the same handful of sites in Southern California or Toronto! So to get a planet that looks genuinely alien and different was pretty great.
I really like the bright colours and the game’s overall aesthetic.
Something I thought to myself several times while I was playing the demo is that Outposts Unknown is the kind of game I could easily see myself sinking hour upon hour into. Although the game isn’t a true “sandbox,” its procedurally-generated elements give it a certain amount of replayability – assuming that the main story will be solid enough. Gameplay reminded me a little of titles like Banished, and if you know me, you’ll know I’m a huge Banished fan. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into that game, and I can see the potential in Outposts Unknown to become a similar kind of obsession!
If you’ve played games like Banished, you’ve got a starting point for understanding how Outposts Unknown works. You have resources to collect, buildings to construct, upgrades to unlock, trades to manage, and individual workers (referred to here as “crew members”) to keep happy and healthy. Basic resources can be used in construction, or they can be refined into new variants, which in turn are needed to unlock more advanced buildings and to replenish supplies. Balancing all of this will be something that takes some figuring out; I wasn’t perfect at it in the demo by any stretch!
A building (the security office) under construction.
This kind of gameplay naturally means that there are going to be times where you have more to do and times where you have less to do. Waiting while members of the crew gather enough resources to progress with construction, or waiting for enough refined materials to be produced may, to some players, feel “boring.” I didn’t really get that impression most of the time, but I think it’s worth noting that – *especially* in the opening act – games like this can feel slow-paced.
One thing that I felt really *didn’t* help in this regard, though, was Outpost Unknown’s crew shift system. In brief, the game is split into a day-night cycle, and during the day, your crew will be on the ground, doing their jobs, keeping your little outpost running. But at night? They all board a shuttle and fuck off back to the ship. That *would* be fine… except the in-game clock keeps ticking, and you’re just sort of… sitting there, looking at the screen, waiting for them to come back. Nothing can happen at the outpost without crew; there’s no way (that I found, anyway) to automate things like resource extraction or refining, and there also doesn’t seem to be any way for the crew to rest on the planet. Even speeding up the in-game clock to its fastest setting still meant several minutes of just… nothing at all happening. I’d love to see an option to skip these dead night sections by the time the game makes it to its full release.
The entire crew just fucks off for several in-game hours, and you’re stuck with nothing to do…
I was also a little confused by the ship itself; in brief, you have a few things aboard your ship (in orbit) that you can upgrade and manage, even though you don’t spend any time there and only see it on a menu screen. This wasn’t particularly well-explained in the demo, and I found that my ship, for instance, complained about running out of hyposprays at one point. But… why? And also, why should I care? I mean, it *sounds* like it could be an issue, right? But… with no explanation for what I need hyposprays for, or what their absence may do to the crew (nor how to manufacture them, either) it just kinda… passed me by.
Games like this can feel like they’re throwing a lot at you, especially when you’re just getting started, and in some ways, that’s just how it goes when you boot up a brand-new strategy game. Figuring out the intricacies of the rules and which resources to prioritise – especially when you don’t have the manpower to do it all – is part of the fun of playing! But, especially in a demo version, I guess I just expected a little more guidance on getting started.
The ship menu.
I like that Outposts Unknown is set in the Strange New Worlds timeline, and that the game is clearly leaning into the aesthetic of that series. Unfortunately, it comes along a little late – Strange New Worlds has been cancelled, sadly, and will end with a truncated fifth season that will probably air next year. But it’s nice to get at least one video game set in the Strange New Worlds era before the show fully wraps up. And yes, I’m still upset that Strange New Worlds was prematurely cancelled by Star Trek’s new corporate overlords!
Admiral Robert April, who appears in Strange New Worlds, was seen briefly in the demo; I don’t know if any other characters from the show will cross over, nor even how prevalent Admiral April’s role will be further into the game, but it would be nice to get even just a couple of short missions or cameo moments from familiar faces. Does the game *desperately need* that? Arguably not… but if it’s a game made to appeal to existing Trekkies, why not include a handful of familiar characters at key moments in the story?
Admiral April kicks off the game’s story.
I’m not the *greatest* player in the world when it comes to strategy games! And I give that as a caveat because I felt a few moments in the demo were either confusing, not sufficiently explained, or just set up in such a way as to take a long time. At one point, relatively early in my run, my next objective (the game gives you objectives in a linear fashion) was to unlock something from the tech tree and synthesise five refined materials called Tech Data. But the demo didn’t explain how to do this or where to get these from – and it was actually a pretty convoluted process.
To get Tech Data you need some kind of advanced science lab (I forgot its name, sorry!), but you can’t just build one. In order to build this lab, you first need refined metal, which means harvesting enough raw metal to build a metal refinery, *then* even more metal to get enough to build the lab. But the refinery and the lab both need power, so you need to build a power generator, *and* wire up the generator to both buildings. All the while… I still only had eight crewmen to get anything done. It took multiple in-game days to achieve this one task when every preceding task had been much quicker. And I just… I didn’t like that, to be blunt. Not for a demo. If I was playing a full campaign, then sure – that kind of thing is par for the course. But to take, like, forty minutes or more of real-world time (at the game’s full speed, too) just… waiting? It didn’t leave a great impression, to be honest.
My small colony. The advanced science lab is the building with the blue roof.
There were a couple of other bugs in the demo besides the one that killed my run. At one point, two different crewmen were killed by one of the planet’s weirdly aggressive plants – but they didn’t fight back, and I didn’t get any kind of alert or warning. I didn’t see the first one happen, but the second one was in the exact same location, so I think it was the same issue. In brief, both crewmen were attacked while harvesting a resource, and they seem to have prioritised continuing to work over defending themselves, leading to both of them being killed.
And this leads nicely into my next point: it takes *forever* to replace even one dead crewman! You only get “resupplied” once every four or so in-game days, and when this pops up, you get the chance to add one new crewman (or to choose to add some rare resources). But this is *painfully* slow, especially in what feels like the early game; there’s gotta be a better way to replace dead crewmen than just waiting around for days on end while your colony’s efficiency drops.
Getting re-supplied gives you a chance to expand your crew roster (or replace dead crew members).
That being said, I liked the characters. I *adore* any strategy game that lets you rename your workers – your crew, in this case! And it’s just a bit of fun to give them silly names (or, perhaps, to pick real names from Star Trek’s extensive history if you wanna go lore-accurate!) And the crew were pretty diverse – a good mix of humans, Vulcans, and Andorians, though it would be nice to see a few other familiar races represented, too.
And, like I do in any game like this, I found myself getting attached to some of the crew! When they were in danger – and when the game worked properly and *informed me* that they were in danger – it could feel genuinely tense. Combat, such as it is, is pretty minimal, with crew members firing phasers and wearing down the hit-points of mysterious alien flora. But it looks pretty good, and the game has a photo mode if you’re into that kinda thing.
A close-up look at one of the crew members.
I think I’ve waffled on for long enough.
Think “Star Trek does Banished,” and you’re not a million light-years away from Outposts Unknown. If you like slower-paced base-building games, or if you enjoyed New Worlds back in the day, I think there’s a lot of potential in the game. But, at this stage, I have to recommend caution because of the game’s bugs. Being forced to end a three-hour run, with seemingly no way to go back and salvage things… that’s kinda annoying, and I would’ve liked to have made it to the end of the demo so I’d feel more confident in issuing a recommendation.
If Magic Fuel Games and Playstack keep working on it, and can successfully quash these bugs, then I can see Outposts Unknown becoming a real time-sink for me. It’s the style of game that generally appeals to me, especially with my arthritis limiting my reflexes in some other, faster-paced titles. And as a Trekkie… I’m always going to be interested in a game like this. It’s a genre I like and a franchise I love coming together. As long as the game actually works by the time it launches, I’ll be happy.
A crew member gathering resources.
This is not a big-budget, “triple-A” kind of title, so you will need to set appropriate expectations. But, speaking for myself, I enjoy the art style, the somewhat less-realistic but still bright and cheerful colour palette and character designs, and the largely text-based interface, with little voice acting, isn’t really a problem for me personally. But as the games industry moves on and more players *do* expect more things like that, it’s something to be aware of before you commit.
I hope this has been interesting. I’m in no mood, frankly, to try again with the demo and potentially kill another two or three hours, only to get locked out again. So unless I see a significant patch, I’ll wait for the game’s full release. And… to be honest, maybe I’ll wait a few days *after* launch to check the reviews! Bugs happen in games, especially games that are still in development – I get it! But this was Outposts Unknown’s one chance to make a good first impression. And despite enjoying myself with the demo much of the time… that bug absolutely ruined it, and it’s definitely giving me pause and making me feel a little cautious about jumping in on day one.
If you decide to try out the demo for yourself… good luck. I hope you’re able to make it all the way to the end! When Outposts Unknown launches – which is allegedly gonna be later this year – I’ll try my best to review the full game, so be sure to check back for that. And if you missed it earlier in the year, I reviewed Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, which is another Star Trek strategy/management title. Click or tap here to check out my thoughts on that game. And until next time… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Outposts Unknown will be released on PC and MacOS in 2026. Star Trek: Outposts Unknown is the copyright of Magic Fuel Games and/or Playstack. The Star Trek franchise is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware minor spoilers for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Picard.
I wasn’t planning to cover anything that came out of “Summer Games Fest” this year; none of the rumours about updates, reveals, and announcements prior to the broadcast really leapt out at me – and I still have a backlog of games from the past few years that I need to get through! But I was pleasantly surprised to see that Star Trek: Shadow Frontier has been announced – a new single-player, third-person, horror-focused adventure game from Bloober Team… a development studio that I’ve actually heard of!
Skydance-Paramount is doing some *weird* things with the Star Trek franchise at the moment, eh? After cancelling every single TV series that had been in production at the time of the corporate merger, we’ve since had three new video games announced: the VR-only Infection, the absolutely brilliant Across The Unknown (which I reviewed earlier this year), and now Shadow Frontier. Just as Star Trek seems to be winding down on the small screen, at least for the foreseeable future, in the interactive space, we’ve hardly ever seen this many titles in production at once!
A new Star Trek game is coming next year!
Paramount Games is Skydance-Paramount’s newly-formed publishing arm, and in addition to Shadow Frontier, it’s also going to be taking the reins of other big franchises and properties that now fall under this growing corporate umbrella. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin was also announced at “Summer Games Fest,” and there’s a fighting game based on the Avatar: The Last Airbender series, as well as a few other titles. Paramount Games is also taking over the publishing rights for the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise, which has several video game adaptations under its belt, and even (weirdly) the upcoming title Marvel 1943: The Rise of Hydra.
I think it’s interesting, in the aftermath of the corporate merger, to see Skydance-Paramount making a big push in the video games space. Interactive media is a growing and lucrative business, so it makes a lot of sense – and for a big corporation with successful and beloved IP, it’s a no-brainer to develop video games using those familiar names. As a Trekkie, I kinda hope that this means we’ll see more Star Trek games going forward, and I want to support Shadow Frontier as best as I can with that goal in mind. If Star Trek is disappearing from streaming/TV in the years ahead, and perhaps only popping up as an occasional cinematic franchise, video games could be a new frontier for the franchise, keeping the lights on and throwing a bone to the fan community.
Paramount Games’ lineup.
Very few Star Trek games have ever really taken the gaming landscape by storm, which is such a shame. If you think about it, there should be a huge overlap between Trekkies and gamers, yet most Star Trek games have tended to be relatively low-budget titles that really only appealed to the existing fanbase. The only real exception that I can recall was 2000’s Elite Force, which, for a time, became a darling of LAN parties and the burgeoning online shooter scene.
Bloober Team, though, is a good developer – their Silent Hill 2 remake a couple of years ago was wildly successful and highly-praised. You could hardly have picked a better studio to develop a single-player horror title, and I’m genuinely optimistic and even enthusiastic for Shadow Frontier based on little more than the development studio’s pedigree.
Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 won several big awards.
A horror game wouldn’t necessarily have been my first choice – it isn’t my personal favourite genre for video games, films, or TV. But there are two great reasons to be hopeful about Shadow Frontier. The first, as mentioned, is Bloober Team’s track record. Their two most recent horror titles: Silent Hill 2 and Cronos: The New Dawn were both well-received upon release. And the second, to be honest, is that Star Trek can do horror really well.
Recent episodes of Strange New Worlds, Picard, and Discovery have all leaned into horror and horror-adjacent ideas in recent years, and going further back, episodes like DS9′s Empok Nor are rightly heralded as classics. Star Trek may not be the first name audiences think of when considering sci-fi horror, but after telling almost 1,000 stories across six decades, it’s fair to say that the franchise has tangled with the genre on more than one occasion! There are some truly unsettling aliens and monsters in Star Trek’s galaxy, and even if none of them are going to be the main antagonist in Shadow Frontier, I think it’s fair to say that space has all kinds of terrifying monsters and mysteries to explore.
Sprinting down a spooky starship corridor…
I got the impression, just based on the teaser trailer that Paramount Games released, that players are going to be wrangling with a new alien or monster on this occasion, not a familiar faction like the Borg or Klingons. So my dream “Borg Invasion” idea will have to wait a bit longer! It’s hard to judge from a very short teaser, which was mostly cinematic and seemed to show only the barest teases of gameplay, but I got a kind of Dead Space or Prey vibe from the weird-looking tendrils or “corruption” that seemed to be afflicting parts of the starship.
But there will clearly be room for connections to familiar characters and factions, even if the entity or alien monster itself is new to Star Trek, and I’d really love to see how this new story will fit in with what we already know of this part of the 24th Century. I don’t want to speculate too much, but I think it’s gotta be at least possible that a bigger link to someone like the Borg, the Dominion, or the Romulans will be part of the game’s narrative.
Objects floating in zero gravity.
And then we have Ro Laren! Ro, who will be voiced by original actress Michelle Forbes, is going to be the main playable character! That just sounds like a really fun idea, and I can see Shadow Frontier potentially filling in some of the gaps in Ro’s story in between The Next Generation and her return in Picard a couple of years ago. Despite the TNG-era combadge, which featured prominently in the trailer, I’m not convinced that this game will take place during or just after The Next Generation, but rather a few years later, perhaps, somewhere in the final couple of decades of the 24th Century.
Ro’s role in Starfleet, which was explained in Picard, makes her a great choice of character for a game like this. If we assume that this alien monster (or whatever it is) will be something that Starfleet needs to send a covert agent to tackle… I mean, the stage is pretty much set for someone like Ro, isn’t it? Above all, I just think it’s so nice, all these years later, to be getting new stories with this wonderful character. Ro was one of the first major recurring characters in the Star Trek franchise, and her arrival also began Star Trek’s expansion, with the Bajorans and Cardassians taking on an important role in Deep Space Nine. I was thrilled to welcome Ro back to Star Trek a couple of years ago, and to get a new chapter of her story in this interactive form… it just sounds really fantastic!
Ro Laren as seen in the teaser.
I’m also thrilled to see Skydance-Paramount greenlighting a *single-player* title for Star Trek, instead of trying to cram the franchise into a live service or online multiplayer mould. There are too many games like that already, and even massive, well-established brands have faltered when trying to launch that kind of game. You need only look to Marvel’s Avengers or Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for examples of that. There must’ve been a temptation to say, “hey, let’s try to make a Star Trek Fortnite clone,” with the ambition of raking in stupid levels of cash. That was never realistic, of course… but when has that stopped a corporate executive from drooling all over their shirt at the chance of making that kind of money?
I’ve always preferred single-player games, and I think I always will! So, speaking for myself, I’m really glad to see this kind of game being created in the Star Trek franchise. I’m sure there’ll be a “special edition” with character costumes and that kind of thing, and perhaps even DLC if Shadow Frontier sells well; such things are par for the course in the modern video games industry. But at its core, Shadow Frontier will be a single-player adventure with a story to follow… and I just like that kind of game much more than the open-ended, story-less titles that have become more common in recent years.
A “corrupted” Federation starship.
There are, I should point out, reasons to be cautious with a new Star Trek game. The franchise doesn’t have a great track record in the video games space more generally, even if some recent titles have done very well. 2013’s Kelvin timeline game is one of the worst games of its decade, being released in a broken, unplayable state. And some other titles, despite seeming to have potential, never really took off in the way I’d have hoped.
The current video games industry also has its unpleasant trends. “Release now, fix later” has screwed over so many titles in recent years, as games are launched too soon, needing a lot of work in order to meet what I’d consider the bare minimum acceptable standards. And there are monetisation problems, not only with titles being overpriced, but also coming with expensive “special editions,” paid “early” access periods, and more. I hope that Shadow Frontier will be priced fairly, and that if there is to be DLC, it’ll be good value for what it is. Above all, I hope that the game will launch in a decent state, and won’t be forced out too soon to meet an arbitrary deadline.
Red Alert! A new Star Trek game is incoming!
So that’s all for today.
I’m genuinely looking forward to Shadow Frontier, and I think the game has a ton of potential. It’s the first Star Trek game from the newly-established Paramount Games, and of this new Skydance-Paramount era, so I hope the corporation is planning to go all-out and make it special. Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown did really well earlier this year; I think it’s fair to say that that game exceeded expectations. If Shadow Frontier can do something similar… we could be seeing a Star Trek resurgence in the interactive space. And that would be fantastic.
In the 60th anniversary year, things have felt pretty quiet… or even disappointing. Starfleet Academy’s cancellation may have been expected, but it was still a bitter blow to learn that Star Trek on streaming seems to be winding down in its entirety. This announcement may not be as big or bold as a new TV show, but I’m still pleased to see it. And there are reasons for positivity. I’ll do what I can to support Shadow Frontier, and when it’s ready I’ll try to review it here on the website. Thanks for reading, and as always… Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Shadow Frontier is currently scheduled to be released in 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch 2. Star Trek: Shadow Frontier is the copyright of Bloober Team and Paramount Games. The Star Trek franchise is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: The Original Series.
2026 marks Star Trek’s landmark 60th anniversary – and six decades later, we’re still getting brand-new episodes and stories! That’s something incredibly special; a milestone few other franchises have ever reached or will ever reach. Today, as part of my ongoing celebrations of the 60th anniversary, I thought we could step back in time, not only to the first season of The Original Series, but to a particularly special – and rather unusual – episode. Today, we’re watching Where No Man Has Gone Before – Star Trek’s second pilot.
After The Cage wasn’t picked up by NBC in 1965, Gene Roddenberry and his team were given a rare and unusual second chance to salvage Star Trek. The resulting script was Where No Man Has Gone Before, and after almost the entire cast – sans Leonard Nimoy as Spock – was changed, the new episode entered production. Recycling the sets which had been built for The Cage, but which were subsequently dismantled and rebuilt ahead of filming the rest of what we now know of as The Original Series, the episode has a completely distinct look, one which simply doesn’t appear anywhere else in the franchise.
Black-and-white promotional photos showing Leonard Nimoy with George Takei (left) and William Shatner (right).
The uniforms may be the most obvious, with Star Trek’s (in)famous red shirts nowhere to be seen! Instead, the entire crew wears either blue, a different shade of “gold” that almost looks green or khaki, or beige. And, with the exception of Kirk, the remaining characters we’d come to know – Spock, Scotty, and Sulu – are all wearing a different colour than we’d expect. Spock gets a uniform similar to Kirk’s in command gold, Sulu – who isn’t the helmsman this time, but some kind of mathematical aide – wears medical blue, and Scotty is in one of the beige uniforms that seem to have taken the place of engineering/security’s red.
The uniforms are also different in the way they appear: visual zippers on the shoulders, a softer, ribbed crew-neck collar that evokes World War II-era naval uniforms, and smaller, slightly different Starfleet delta patches, too. These uniforms are similar to those seen in The Cage, which is another quirk of production. But for the main crew and characters we’d come to know, this was the only time we’d ever see them in these particular uniforms.
The uniforms are different in this episode.
Then there are the sets. The bridge is different – albeit in ways that may not be obvious at first. Kirk’s chair has a large communicator on one side, which I think I’m right in saying wasn’t seen again. The main viewscreen, though, is the most clear and obvious point of difference; its corners are far more rounded than they would be in the rest of the show, again evoking more of that World War II naval style in some ways. The set was moved to a different sound stage when The Original Series entered full production, which is why it looks different here.
Sickbay, which is one of the only other Enterprise rooms where the episode spends much time, is also quite different, with different coloured walls and simpler upholstery than we’d see in the rest of the show. Some doors in Where No Man Has Gone Before are grey or silver instead of the more familiar red, chairs are a different colour and have shorter backs, and the Enterprise as a whole just feels a little… different. You weren’t making that up, if you felt something was “off” upon watching this episode! Things really are different.
The main viewscreen on the bridge (left) and sickbay (right) aren’t quite the same as they are in the rest of the series.
Unusually for a pilot episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before wasn’t the first to be broadcast. That honour fell to The Man Trap, which executives at NBC apparently felt was a simpler, more straightforward story. This episode was pushed back and aired as the third of Season 1 in the United States… but interestingly, when Star Trek came to the UK in 1969, it actually was the first episode that the BBC chose to broadcast. I wonder why that happened?
Here’s a fun question: how many times, across The Original Series, do we see Captain Kirk wielding his phaser rifle? This iconic, legendary prop, which is well-known to all of us Trekkies and instantly recognisable, must’ve been used a lot… right? Well, no! The phaser rifle *only* appears here, in Where No Man Has Gone Before, and despite being seen in publicity photos of William Shatner in his role as Kirk, it never appears again in the entire series. According to Star Trek legend Bjo Trimble, Gene Roddenberry disliked the design, feeling that it looked “too lethal” for his calmer, more rational vision of humankind’s future.
Prop designer Reuben Klamer (pictured in 2013 with the original prop) designed the phaser rifle for Where No Man Has Gone Before.
In addition to Chekov, who wouldn’t be seen until Season 2, Where No Man Has Gone Before is also noteworthy insofar as it was produced before Nichelle Nichols was cast as Uhura, and before DeForest Kelley was cast as the ship’s doctor. The role of communications officer is instead taken by Lieutenant Alden, played by Lloyd Haynes, and standing in for DeForest Kelley is Paul Fix, who plays the character of Dr Mark Piper.
I’ve always felt that Dr Piper – in his limited on-screen moments – is a bit of a half-step between The Cage’s Dr Boyce and the main show’s Dr McCoy. He’s similar to both characters in as much as he’s older than Kirk, but he comes across as being a bit less serious than Dr Boyce, slouching during a conference meeting, but also less lighthearted or quippy than Dr McCoy would be. The archetype that Gene Rodenberry wanted to create – the older, slightly wiser ship’s doctor, who could be a guide to the captain both in medical matters and beyond – was clearly present in Dr Piper and Dr Boyce, but these versions feel… less refined, if that makes sense. Like, I can see where Dr McCoy is going to materialise, but the full personality of the character isn’t there yet.
Dr Piper with Captain Kirk.
As an interesting aside, Gene Roddenberry had his heart set on casting DeForest Kelley for both The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before, but was overruled by others involved in the production. It was only when Star Trek was fully greenlit that Rodenberry got his man – and I think we can all agree that it was the right call! Still… it’s interesting to see what might have been.
I usually prefer to watch Star Trek on streaming nowadays… or at least I do during the months where I pay for Paramount+! But on this occasion, I actually went back to my old DVDs; the streaming versions are the remastered ones, complete with new special effects and CGI shots of the Enterprise. And while the remastered version of The Original Series does look, by every objective measure going, “better,” I wanted the classic look this time. There are differences in the way the episode looks – the Galactic Barrier, for instance, looks very different, as do a few other VFX shots. The Enterprise itself is also a fully CGI model in establishing shots.
The original versions (left) and remastered versions (right) of two moments in the story.
As a Trekkie, there are a lot of things that seem “wrong” about Where No Man Has Gone Before. What I mean by that is… with the hindsight that six decades and almost 1,000 subsequent stories can provide, there are things in the story that just don’t seem to fit. Spock being so quick to advocate for Mitchell’s extrajudicial execution, the Enterprise being on a mission to scout outside of the galaxy, some confusion about warp drive and impulse engines, and how fast impulse actually is when trying to get between star systems… all of these things feel a little “off.” To what extent that will bother you, or whether you can set it all aside and enjoy the story for what it is will be a matter of personal taste!
For me… I kind of place Where No Man Has Gone Before along with The Cage in almost their own category. These are fun Star Trek stories, of course, but they’re also unique oddities within the broader franchise; episodes which almost seem to take place apart from the rest of The Original Series. I think I can fall victim to being overly nitpicky sometimes (check out some of my other episode write-ups and reviews for that!) and the temptation is there with Where No Man Has Gone Before to say that things like the uniforms, the attitudes of some of the characters, and the Enterprise’s strange mission all seem to be, for want of a better word, “wrong.” But placing the episode in context, and understanding it for what it is, helps me set a lot of that aside. Even though it’s not an episode I re-watch all that often, I still had a good time when I revisited it, and I found myself getting swept along for the ride.
Black-and-white promotional photos of James Doohan (left) and Leonard Nimoy (right).
That’s testament to the power that Star Trek still has some six decades later! There are undeniably outdated things in Where No Man Has Gone Before: papier-mache rocks, for instance, or Kirk and Mitchell’s attitude towards women. But the story itself is timeless; a classic morality fable about the dangers of granting a mere mortal the powers of a god. Given where we are today with conversations about artificial intelligence and its potential to far exceed us in terms of its capabilities, and the so-called “alignment problem,” stories like Where No Man Has Gone Before actually seem *more* relevant, not less.
So I like that we catch a glimpse of a kind of “alternate reality” for both Star Trek the show and the USS Enterprise in-universe. We see Kirk, presumably at a slightly earlier moment in his command, with different crewmates, wearing different uniforms, and even with a slightly different design to parts of the ship. It makes for a fun “what if;” what might The Original Series have looked like if *this* series – the one we catch a glimpse of for just one episode – had been continued with zero changes? Would these uniforms have been as iconic, with their toned-down colours and no red? Would the phaser rifle have become a standard part of the Federation’s arsenal? Would Dr Piper have been as well-received and well-remembered as Dr McCoy? And would some of the characters we don’t spend as much time with in the episode – like Alden or Yeoman Smith – have gone on to fill the absent roles of Uhura, Rand, or Chapel? I guess we’ll never know, eh?
Lieutenant Alden, the Enterprise’s communications officer in this episode.
I think I’m right in saying that extra-sensory perception, or ESP, wasn’t mentioned again after Where No Man Has Gone Before. Obviously, we’ve seen similar abilities in races like the Talosians, Betazoids, Q Continuum, and more – and humans would occasionally gain similar powers in some stories. But it was never again expressed in quite this way, with Starfleet apparently keeping track of humans who possessed these seemingly magical powers.
It’s interesting that this vision of the future sees almost a blend of magic and science. ESP, even in the 1960s, was a fringe idea at best, but Where No Man Has Gone Before wraps it up in the language of science, presenting it as something to be merely noted and catalogued, the way we might expect Starfleet to make note of someone’s height or allergies. Because ESP is this kind of pseudoscientific, paranormal thing – which, if we think sceptically, has never been proven to exist – it feels odd to see it included in a Star Trek episode in this manner. I don’t hate it, and when you look at other stories in The Original Series, The Animated Series, and even early Next Generation episodes, it doesn’t feel that out-of-place. But once you get past, say, Season 2 of TNG, it’s not the kind of storyline I’d expect to see. Star Trek could make a comparable episode today, but if one were commissioned, I don’t think the ESP angle would be included at all – at least, not in this straightforward, scientific way.
Kirk, Spock, and Dr Dehner discuss extra-sensory perception.
So we’ve talked a lot about what makes Where No Man Has Gone Before stand apart, different from the rest of Star Trek. Let’s move on to ways in which the episode *does* feel familiar!
I recently had the opportunity to meet William Shatner – Captain Kirk himself – at an event here in the UK. Click or tap here to check out my thoughts on that, by the way; it’s a big part of why I wanted to write up another TOS episode re-watch! Shatner’s Captain Kirk arrives in Where No Man Has Gone Before basically fully-formed as the character we know and love: friendly with his crew, especially close to Spock, flirty with women, and with a strong sense of duty and protectiveness for his ship. Those traits would go on to define the character, and they’re all present here, in what was the first time Kirk was conceived and brought to the screen.
Spock has changed from The Cage, but in terms of the character we’re most familiar with, he’s also more or less fully-formed. Where No Man Has Gone Before was the first time (in production order, I mean) that the Vulcans were established as being a logical, unemotional people, and Spock embodies that here in a way he didn’t in The Cage.
Kirk and Spock in the conference room.
The barest bones of Scotty can be glimpsed; James Doohan is already doing the accent, and while we don’t exactly see Scotty as a miracle-worker (major repair tasks and the retrofitting of Delta Vega’s station fall to other characters this time), he’s at least established as the Enterprise’s senior engineer. Sulu is a bit of an oddity; as I said above, he’s not a helmsman, nor even a bridge officer, and if uniform colours mean *anything* in this particular story, he might well be supposed to be affiliated with the science or even medical divisions. But nevertheless, we have George Takei in his familiar role, and Sulu gets a few lines.
Dr Piper is a Dr McCoy prototype, as discussed above, and although he doesn’t get a ton of screen time or a lot of lines, you can see the outline for that kind of character in Paul Fix’s performance. So, once again, we have the bare bones of a familiar character – albeit that this one isn’t played by the actor we’d expect to see!
Sulu, Scotty, and Dr Piper.
The Enterprise, despite some key differences that we’ve already discussed, still feels familiar. The bridge is set up the same, despite the different main viewscreen, and the captain’s chair, Spock’s science station, the red turbolift doors, and the helm console are all exactly as we’d remember them. Minor differences may be a result of the set being dismantled and rebuilt at a different location, but by and large, the internal areas of the Enterprise that we see are still familiar enough not to feel totally “wrong.”
The exterior of the ship is also exactly the same. Where No Man Has Gone Before re-uses the filming model that had been built for The Cage, and some establishing shots of the ship would go on to be mainstays of The Original Series. The remastered Blu-ray version has different CGI shots; the Enterprise moves in ways we didn’t really see in the show’s original run. But, like I said, that’s partly why I wanted to watch my old DVD copy on this occasion!
The exact same moment in the story as seen in the original version of the episode (left) and the Blu-ray remaster (right).
For a one-off character, Gary Mitchell is surprisingly well-written. He fits seamlessly into The Original Series at this very early stage, and if Where No Man Has Gone Before was the first episode you ever watched, I could see what happens to him being genuinely shocking – especially to an audience some sixty years ago. I genuinely buy into Kirk and Mitchell’s friendship. Some one-off characters who are introduced as supposed besties of someone on the main cast don’t always stick the landing – their inclusions can, sometimes, feel a little *too* forced. But Mitchell and Kirk have chemistry together, thanks to William Shatner’s performance playing well with guest star Gary Lockwood.
Opinions on Mitchell himself may vary, I suspect, due to the passage of time. Writing in 2026, some six decades on from the character’s debut, I view Mitchell as being kind of arrogant and unlikable from the get-go; his dismissive attitude to the Enterprise’s helm officer and his unpleasant interaction with Dr Dehner being examples of this. But to an audience back then, I think Mitchell was meant to come across as kind of similar to Kirk; a ladies’ man with a sense of humour, perhaps even a happy-go-lucky attitude that would contrast with his later god-like powers.
Gary Mitchell, prior to his transformation.
I would argue, though, that Mitchell’s early scenes with Kirk on the bridge and in the turbolift are at least meant to inform us of a selfish or arrogant side – something that would make his developing powers even harder to handle. Because Mitchell starts out as arguably a flawed person, there’s room for him to abuse the powers he develops later on in a way that feels plausible. If a character like Kirk had been given such powers, it would be harder, perhaps, to imagine that he’d want to misuse them; Kirk has a stronger moral core – or at least, I feel he does with the benefit of more than a hundred other episodes and films! But Mitchell has that arrogant streak from the get-go; a flaw that makes him susceptible to being corrupted by power.
But is that the moral of the story? That *only* a flawed person would abuse power?
I suspect the real intention was to show that a normal guy – as Mitchell is supposed to be, for the era in which Where No Man Has Gone Before was produced – is always going to be too tempted to abuse power. He’s an example of, to quote Kirk in the episode itself: “absolute power corrupting absolutely.” Mitchell was intended to be just an “everyman,” a regular Starfleet officer who couldn’t handle that kind of power. None of us can… and that’s supposed to be the point.
Mitchell with his god-like powers.
Gene Roddenberry saw Star Trek, in part, as a vehicle for conveying these kinds of morality fables. Yes, there’s a vision of the future where humankind has overcome all kinds of obstacles, and there’s an incredibly positive outlook which, at the height of the Cold War, seemed impossible to a lot of folks. That inspirational side, that optimism, and that sense of hope are still part of the franchise to this day. But there’s also storytelling by metaphor – Gary Mitchell receives god-like powers, but those powers can be read as a metaphor for political power. Mitchell’s transformation, seen through that lens, is a warning against granting *anyone* – even a likeable guy or an “average Joe” like Gary Mitchell – too much power. I wonder if you can think of a contemporary example of someone like that… a politician, perhaps?
Then there’s Dr Dehner. Her powers take longer to manifest, and seem to be a little behind Mitchell’s – whether that’s because she’s supposed to be weaker, or because powers grow and improve over time isn’t 100% clear in the story itself, but it’s still an interesting question. It’s fascinating that Dr Dehner, not Mitchell, is the character able to be reasoned out of her power-mad state. If we take what I was saying before about storytelling by fable and metaphor, I think we can argue that Where No Man Has Gone Before wants to present intelligence, and perhaps education, as being virtues; that Dr Dehner, as a psychiatrist and a more intelligent and thoughtful person than Mitchell – was able to snap out of it and resist the temptation of unlimited power.
Kirk was able to remind Dr Dehner of her humanity in a way he couldn’t with Mitchell.
So I hope this has been interesting.
Where No Man Has Gone Before is, in many ways, an odd little curiosity; produced more than a year before the rest of The Original Series’ first season, it doesn’t integrate with it perfectly. But the outline of what Star Trek would become is present here – some characters aren’t fully fleshed-out yet, and others would be added, removed, or changed entirely. It makes the episode feel… unique. A distinct offering, and a rare glimpse at a vision for the series that’s both similar and different. Compared to The Cage, the episode is a lot closer to the rest of The Original Series. But compare it to any story produced later and it stands apart.
My encounter with William Shatner last month, and Star Trek’s big 60th anniversary year, were the catalysts for returning to Where No Man Has Gone Before. And you know what? I had fun with it! It’s an episode I haven’t actually re-watched in a few years, at this point, and it’s been even longer since I went back to my TOS DVD collection and watched the show in its un-remastered form. It was a lot of fun.
Fire on the bridge!
As the 60th anniversary nears, I have a few other ideas for episode re-watches, essays, discussion pieces, and more. Some of those may eventually make their way onto the website – so please stay tuned for that! And just next month we’ll be graced with Strange New Worlds’ fourth season. I plan to write individual episode reviews, so if that’s something you’re interested in, I hope you’ll join me for that.
Star Trek: The Original Series (a.k.a. Star Trek) is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. The series is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including The Original Series, Strange New Worlds, and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Skydance-Paramount corporation. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Iron Lung.
After reviewing one video game adaptation – The Super Mario Galaxy Movie – just the other day, I’m back to check out another game-turned-into-a-film! But I think it’s fair to say that this one’s a little different.
I haven’t played Iron Lung, the game upon which this film is based. If you think my unfamiliarity with its source material makes my take somehow less valid… well, no hard feelings! But I wanted to be up front about that before we got started. I also want to add that I’m not a viewer of the video game YouTuber Markiplier, as Iron Lung is a film he wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in. Note that I *didn’t* say that I dislike Markeplier, merely that his channel isn’t one I’m familiar with, as that kind of “gamer” content isn’t something I watch. Again, if you think my unfamiliarity with the film’s lead invalidates this review, that’s okay. These things are all subjective, at the end of the day.
Iron Lung is based on the video game of the same name.
I love to hear that someone is *passionate* about a story – even more so in the overly-commercialised film and entertainment landscape we inhabit in the 2020s. So I’m always willing to give passion projects like Iron Lung an opportunity to impress me, and perhaps a bit of a pass if things don’t quite measure up to other titles in the same space. The story behind the cinematic adaptation of Iron Lung is genuinely pleasing, even to an old cynic like me, and knowing that a video game could compel someone to use their money, fame, and connections to put together an entire film… that counts for something.
But let’s be honest: not all passion projects are any good, right? John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth, for instance, or last year’s Megalopolis, which I also reviewed; that film being the longstanding passion project of legendary director Francis Ford Coppola. Being truly excited about something – and exercising full creative control over the subsequent project – does not always make for a compelling or enjoyable movie. And, to be blunt, it’s in that category that I would place Iron Lung: a well-intentioned film, clearly created by someone truly passionate about its story… but that just didn’t come together to make something I enjoyed watching.
Simon (the protagonist) aboard his submarine.
Let’s start with the film’s central – and, for almost its entire runtime, *only* – on-screen performance. Being the only character on screen almost all of the time, having to react and emote and talk to oneself… these are acting challenges that would trip up even a seasoned Hollywood veteran. And, as I said a moment ago, I don’t doubt the passion behind the performance, nor that Mark Fischbach (a.k.a. Markiplier) truly gave the role everything he had. But there were moments in his performance which, to be blunt, were so bad that they veered into being unintentionally funny. There weren’t enough of those, sadly, to turn Iron Lung into a “so-bad-it’s-good” title that I could ironically enjoy. But the performance of the film’s lead, especially as the story progressed and Simon began to hallucinate and spiral… it was too over-the-top, too unbelievable, and just wasn’t good enough to carry the film.
When the staging is so minimalist, and the story is so muddled, a film like Iron Lung needs that sole acting role, that central performance, to step up and carry it over the line. And for me, it absolutely couldn’t do that. Perhaps Fischbach would’ve been better served by hiring a professional actor to take on the lead role instead of trying to do it himself – even if that might’ve taken some of the fun out of the production for him.
Simon was the only character on screen almost all of the time.
I called the story “muddled,” so let’s talk about that.
At key moments in the film, and especially from the halfway point onwards, I struggled to follow what was going on. The script didn’t make clear why Simon was doing some of the things he was doing or what his goals may have been. From the first moment we meet him, Simon’s main objective appears to be to survive the expedition and win his freedom. Great, got that. That explains why he’s mapping the cave, why he’s trying to find his way back, and why he seems, at points, to be pretty desperate and despondent.
But we don’t get enough of an explanation, either through monologue/dialogue, or even just from staging, camera work, and environmental storytelling, to explain some of the things that are going on. There’s deliberate ambiguity in some cases – like his hallucinations, the question of radiation exposure, and so on. But others – like the attack on the second submarine, and Simon sabotaging his own sub at the film’s climax – that really needed some more explanation. If Simon was going to go out in a blaze of glory; a heroic act of self-sacrifice to try to preserve the unseen and unexplained data… why was that not made clearer? I just didn’t get it… and it took looking up a plot summary after the credits had rolled for me to finally go “oh, so he deliberately rigged his own sub to explode.” Still not clear on the “why,” but at least I get what he was trying to do now.
The story felt muddled and confusing, especially towards the end of the film.
I will credit Iron Lung for its practical effects and its visual style. The submarine’s X-ray camera, set back from the minimalist pilot’s station, was genuinely well done, and it made for a tense voyage of exploration when Simon couldn’t see, in real-time, anything that was in front of him. Having to constantly stop and check the camera upped the tension, and the large rectangular button, with its slightly ominous green light, was a huge part of that. The grainy black-and-white X-ray images that the camera produced also added to this effect, and it was a lot better doing it this way than, for example, trying to have a bunch of CGI shots of the outside of the submarine.
The submarine set – which is more or less directly copied from the video game, as far as I can tell – was minimalist, but it was still an atmospheric space. The rusted, corroded metal, all of which felt old and decrepit, the clunky physical buttons and switches, the gauges and valves, they all evoked old World War II submarine films, and the claustrophobia that classic titles of the genre could create. Sealing the only porthole on the sub, too, added to that sense of being trapped; that this submarine was really just an over-engineered tomb from the very first moment Simon was sealed inside.
Simon at the camera station.
Fake blood, especially in lower-budget titles, doesn’t always look great – but Iron Lung did a pretty good job with it. Especially later in the film, the blood became incredibly important, and the viscosity of the liquid actually looked about right, as did the colour. There were a couple of moments where I felt maybe it wasn’t *perfect*, but I’m content to let such things slide for the most part. What Iron Lung desperately needed to avoid was using something too thick – and looking like ketchup – or too thin and watery. I think, on balance, this exceptionally important aspect of the film landed about right.
I’m also pleased to see, in 2026, a film that doesn’t over-use CGI and digital animation. There’s something just… neat about old-school physical sets and props, and while there was CGI in the film, it didn’t swamp the production or feel overdone. And again, for a film on a shoestring budget compared to a lot of Hollywood titles, the CGI that was present actually looked pretty darn good.
An example of the film’s use of blood.
Although Mark Fischbach’s performance was more miss than hit, the voice roles of some of the other members of the cast were a lot better. Captain Ava stuck the landing, really nailing the feel of being a post-apocalyptic captain, barely keeping her ship and crew together. I was still confused why she was so willing to risk her own life at the end to rescue the data… but that’s a script issue rather than a performance issue. And the other voices we heard – the male engineer during Simon’s second dive, or the crew of the doomed SM-8 (and their hallucinatory forms) – were likewise well acted and well performed.
Iron Lung is, in a way, a bit of a tough one to review. I didn’t really like the film as it was presented, and ultimately… you can be as excited about a subject as you like, but if the way you bring it to life isn’t up to scratch, that’s what I’m gonna remember. But at the same time, it’s the kind of project I want to see more of and I want to be supportive of – not because I support this particular YouTuber; I’m not a viewer of his channel or familiar with any of his other work – but because I think the world needs more independent films, and films that don’t easily fall into the typical Hollywood mould.
Writer, director, and star Mark Fischbach at a promo event for Iron Lung.
I will say that I’m glad to have been able to watch Iron Lung, and for the money I spent on it (about tree-fiddy on YouTube at time of writing (£3.50 in the UK)) I wasn’t exactly furious that I didn’t like it! It’s my hope that Mark Fischbach, and the team he put together, will continue to make films, and will continue to find projects that excite them and that they *want* to adapt for the big screen. And, like any actor, Fischbach has room to grow. A less challenging role, or even a lead role as part of a bigger cast, where he has other actors to bounce off of and work with, may well suit him better.
Perhaps Iron Lung was never gonna be “my thing.” I’m not a big horror aficionado, I’ve never played the game it’s based on, and I’m not a viewer of Markiplier’s YouTube show. But… the point of adapting a story is to bring it to new eyes, and I like to think I gave the film a fair shake. I wouldn’t have paid to watch it if I didn’t think it had potential, and I certainly didn’t sit down to view it wanting or hoping to have a bad time. It just… didn’t do it for me, I’m afraid.
Thanks for reading. There are a couple of other horror and horror-adjacent films that I’d like to check out later this year, such as The End of Oak Street and Disclosure Day, so I hope you’ll stay tuned for that. And I’ve also recently reviewed both 28 Years Later and its sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, so follow those links if you want to get my take on those titles.
Iron Lung is available to stream now (for a fee) on YouTube. Iron Lung is the copyright of Markiplier Studios and/or Iron Lung Productions. Two images used above courtesy of IGDB and IMDB. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The first part of this review is free from major narrative spoilers for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Super Mario Galaxy games when they premiered on the Nintendo Wii a few years ago. So when Illumination and Nintendo announced that a sequel to 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie would be based on those titles… I was a tad underwhelmed, to be honest. And in 2026, Nintendo – with its price hikes, anti-consumer attitude, and underwhelming new console – isn’t exactly my favourite company in the gaming space, either! So it’s with that background that I belatedly sat down to watch The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
With all that being said, I had a great time with The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023 – I even called it my favourite film of the year. And my feelings about the Mario Galaxy games have more to do with their confusing spherical levels and the Wii remote’s awkward motion controls, rather than any actual narrative gripes. So there were definitely reasons to be optimistic about this return to the Mushroom Kingdom!
Here’s the one-sentence summary: I liked The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. I don’t think it’s necessarily a “film of the year” contender, as its predecessor had been, but it’s definitely an enjoyable film for folks who’ve liked any of Nintendo’s games, the wider Mario franchise, or just animated films in general. Two main story threads felt connected, not just by characters, but also thematically, thanks to a strong focus on family ties, and the film had plenty of good-natured, kid-friendly humour throughout. Despite how I may have felt about the Mario Galaxy source material, the film wasn’t merely an attempt to re-tell the story of either of those games, and it included plenty of references to basically four decades’ worth of Mario games, from the original 2D platformers of the 1980s through to Odyssey and Wonder.
In terms of animation, I really can’t fault Illumination. I was lucky enough to watch The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in 4K on a pretty decent screen, and it really did look fantastic. Bold, bright colours are the order of the day, and there are plenty of stunning views of outer space, too. A variety of different locales came to life, and my only criticism would be that a couple of them felt a little samey, thanks to re-using the Mario franchise’s “blue sky, green grass, and brown rocks” aesthetic. But character models looked fantastic, there were a great variety of allies and villains for Mario, Peach, and the gang to encounter, and big set-piece moments all looked spectacular.
The animation was fantastic.
The film’s score was solid, and it leaned heavily into nostalgia, with classic refrains from the video games being heard at multiple points. That goes for sound effects, too, with many different noises from the games being brought to the big screen. While I wouldn’t say I was “disappointed” that the film didn’t get a big song, like its predecessor… perhaps that’s something which, having sat with the film for a couple of days, I might say was missing. Given how Peaches, Bowser’s song from the first film, went mega-viral, I’m a little surprised to see Nintendo and Illumination not trying to repeat that.
Voice acting was generally pretty good. Brie Larson did well as Rosalina, with the only downside to her ethereal performance being that she wasn’t actually on screen all that much. The controversy of casting Chris Pratt as Mario has subsided since the first film, and again I think he did well in the part. I wanted to highlight the performance of Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr.; he gave so much life and personality to what could’ve been a pretty flat, over-the-top kind of villain. Jack Black as Bowser… I’m actually in two minds, and we’ll have to talk about why in the spoiler-ful part of the review.
Most of the main cast with Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto at the film’s premiere in April 2026.
So I think that’s all I can say without really getting into spoiler territory.
Who’s this film for? Nintendo fans, obviously. But also fans of animated films in general, kids, parents of kids, and anyone looking for a fun adventure, really. If you *despise* Mario and all things Nintendo, I doubt this film will be the thing that finally wins you over! But even if you’re just a casual player of a few Nintendo titles every now and then – as I am, really – I still think you’ll find something to enjoy. In many ways, the film is a nostalgia overload; drawing on familiar characters, visuals, sounds, references, and more. But I don’t think that has to be a problem; a film like this, really, is designed from the ground up to be that kind of thing. My concern was whether, beneath all of that, there’d be a story worth following. And there was.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was lighthearted and funny in places, intense and action-packed in others, and even managed to hit some emotional beats. It’s a film I’d be happy to recommend to anyone who enjoyed the previous instalment and any fan of Mario or Nintendo games. We’re going to get into the film in a bit more detail now, so if you don’t want to see any spoilers, this is your chance to jump ship!
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie from here on out. Also beware of spoilers for several Super Mario games, and the first Super Mario Bros. Movie.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was really about two families – neither of which were Mario’s! Bowser and Bowser Jr., on one side of the film, got a storyline about a deadbeat dad’s reconciliation with a son who adores him. And on the other, Peach yearned to discover her true origin – something she talked to Mario about in the first film – and belatedly discovered Rosalina, her long-lost sister. These stories weren’t symmetrical, but I liked the way that they rhymed, and how both Peach and Bowser Jr. kind of started out with similar motivations.
I love a good villian, so let’s start with Bowser.
The decision to have the pitch of Jack Black’s voice altered for basically half of the film was… well, not my favourite, to be honest. It was one of those things where, when you first hear it, it sounds hilarious; like hearing a friend who’s just inhaled a helium balloon. But for that to take up so much of his performance… I don’t think it landed as well as it should’ve. With Jack Black usually being such a commanding presence in any role, messing with his voice so much didn’t really work. I get where it came from, but for me, Bowser’s best moments came *after* he regrew to normal size and got his voice back.
Miniature Bowser.
Sticking with Bowser, a story about being true to oneself is a good one for a kids’ film. But to frame that story through a villainous lens isn’t necessarily a choice I’d have made. Bowser, though clearly still struggling with his evil side, had made clear and demonstrable progress since the events of the first film, and even seemed to be ready to overcome all of that in a moment of self-sacrifice, willingly going to prison so that Mario, Luigi, and Toad could go free. That’s character growth.
So to take that and then toss it aside so that Bowser could be his “true self”… it sends a bit of a weird message to the film’s intended younger audience, doesn’t it? It’s either saying “rehabilitation doesn’t work; evil people will be evil forever,” or it’s saying “it’s okay to be a bad person if that’s who you are, just be yourself.” I don’t like either of those messages *in a film for kids*, and while I agree with the sentiments that “Bowser should be Bowser,” and that a Mario movie wouldn’t work with Bowser being a reformed ally… it does make me wonder why the writers and producers inserted any of that rehabilitation stuff at all. Was it just to be able to pull a twist later on? Was it to make Bowser’s supposed death hit harder? I don’t know… but I don’t think those justifications are enough, I’m afraid.
Bowser’s downfall.
That being said, Bowser Jr. made for a strangely relatable character. A kid who just wants to see his father again, who’s willing to do anything to get him back, and who’s taken his father’s lessons to heart – evil though those lessons may have been – is a character I can empathise with to an extent. And far from being a one-dimensional “I’m evil for no reason, mwahaha!” type of villain, it gave both Bowser Jr. and his dad a bit more depth. I don’t think kids’ films should be granted an exception for weak writing, worldbuilding, or character motivations – not in most cases, anyway – so to see Bowser Jr. given a backstory that led directly into his scheme, and a plan to reunite with his dad that I could understand and that made sense? I liked it.
On the other side of things, we have Peach and Rosalina.
For the culmination of Peach’s single biggest desire across both films, my only criticism of the Rosalina connection would be that it felt a bit hollow to just have Peach learn about it from a book, rather than having another character – like one of the Lumas – explaining it to her. It was also, perhaps, a tiny bit rushed; Peach’s memory of being sent away seemed to come rushing back to her very quickly as she read from Rosalina’s storybook.
Peach remembers…
But the sibling connection worked really well. I genuinely couldn’t remember if, in the *very* loose “lore” of the Super Mario games, Rosalina and Peach were already siblings, or otherwise related, but I think the connection works really well in the film. The way it’s set up, with Rosalina as the older sibling, having to send her younger sister away for safety… it made for a decently emotional setup for both of their arcs. I’d have liked to have spent a little more time with Rosalina, and especially with Peach and Rosalina after their reunion, but maybe that’s something we’ll see more of in the inevitable sequel.
One thing I strongly complimented 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie for was how it moved away from the tired, played-out (and arguably pretty sexist) “save the damsel in distress” trope. And while The Super Mario Galaxy Movie gets some credit for making Peach the main character invested in saving her sister… the setup, with Rosalina being kidnapped, still felt just a little bit regressive. And certainly less original than the previous instalment’s quest to save Luigi.
Peach and Mario have to save the princess.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t have a lot of close family left, and because I live far enough away from my remaining close relative that I don’t see them as often as I’d like, but both of these storylines – Peach’s quest to help her sister and Bowser Jr.’s mission to save his dad – resonated with me, and I think they hit more of those emotional beats than I’d have expected when I sat down to watch the film. I don’t think The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a tear-jerker by any stretch, but there are moments between both pairs of characters that hit me quite hard.
Mario’s storyline, such as it was, was definitely less important this time around. His “should I ask out Peach?” mini-arc didn’t really go anywhere, and didn’t get enough time in the spotlight to really build up much dramatic tension. It wasn’t bad, and it gave the character something to do beyond just chasing after Peach and Bowser. But in a film that had its main focus elsewhere, Mario’s hesitancy to ask out Peach, and his self-doubt about his “worthiness” to date a princess just… didn’t do much for me, I guess.
Mario with Luigi and Yoshi.
There was potential in Mario and Luigi losing control of the Mushroom Kingdom, perhaps coming to realise that Peach’s job was harder than they realised. But that idea, when it was hinted at at all, likewise didn’t really get much time to shine. Nor did the fact that, on their watch, Peach’s castle was obliterated. In fact, I wish the film had made a tiny bit more of that – either through Mario confessing to Peach what had happened, or through an extended rebuilding sequence at the end. This is, after all, Peach’s home and the seat of authority in her kingdom. She left Mario in charge, yet didn’t so much as bat an eye when he showed up to help. And Mario and Luigi didn’t even have one moment of conflict or anxiety about how to explain to Peach what had happened.
Okay, let’s talk cameos! I don’t think I noticed everything, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie might be a ton of fun to revisit just to catch more of these little easter eggs that Illumination and Nintendo slipped in! But I loved seeing things like the Nintendo 64 logo in the “seedy underworld” part of the galactic spaceport. Birdo made for a fun mini-villain at one point. R.O.B. (the annoyingly slow information kiosk robot) was a cute callback to the Nintendo product of the same name from the 1980s, Bowser Jr.’s weapon looked like a SNES Super Scope, and there were plenty of others, too. Some of these were deep cuts to a single game – Luigi’s frog suit, for instance, or the Tostarena Kingdom from the beginning of the film. And others were more directly connected to the Mario Galaxy titles, like the Lumas, the star bits, the star cannons, and so on. The baby characters – a callback to Yoshi’s Island – were cute, too.
Did anyone else have a SNES Super Scope? I loved mine!
Then we have Star Fox! I loved Star Fox on the SNES; it was one of the games that really made me fall in love with that kind of space-shooter. It was a real treat to see Fox McCloud in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie… but I agree with what a lot of other commentators and critics have said: spoiling that reveal ahead of time, in the film’s own marketing material, was a bit of an own goal.
That being said, I loved the way Fox was presented in this story – a kind of Han Solo-esque rogue with a heart of gold. Fox didn’t get a ton of time in the spotlight, but his moments were some of my favourites in the film. And the sequence of him piloting his ship, blasting his laser cannons and taking down Bowser Jr.? That was genuinely a lot of fun – and a sequence, which, quite frankly, eclipses many comparable sequences in “serious” sci-fi films! It was genuinely that good.
Fox McCloud, from the Star Fox series.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a hard act to follow. And I felt some absences this time around: there’s no Donkey Kong, for instance, despite D.K. returning for his first 3D adventure in decades on the Switch 2 just last year. The first film’s Mario Kart sequence is still one of my favourites, and it’s a shame there wasn’t more of that this time around. And, as mentioned, the lack of a big musical number, while not something every animated film *needs*, felt a bit odd in light of what we got last time.
With all that being said, I enjoyed my time with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It met my expectations in many ways, exceeded them in a few, and didn’t really let me down at all. It’s unlikely to be a film I revisit a lot; I’m just not *that* big of a Nintendo fan, especially at the moment. But I’m glad to have seen it, I certainly enjoyed my time with it, and it’s the kind of happy, bright, kid-friendly adventure that I think we all need to see, sometimes.
So that’s all for today. If you missed my review of The Super Mario Bros. Movie back in 2023, you can check that out by clicking or tapping here. And I have quite a few articles about the venerable Mario Kart series – click or tap here for more on that! I still don’t own a Nintendo Switch 2, so I’m afraid reviews of any potential upcoming Mario titles will have to wait! But I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Nintendo – and the wider video games industry – before too long, so be sure to check in from time to time if you’ve enjoyed my take. Thanks for reading… and let’s-a go!
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is available to stream now and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray later in the year. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the copyright of Nintendo and Illumination. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, The Search for Spock, The Next Generation, First Contact, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Discovery, Lower Decks, Picard, and Strange New Worlds.
It’s Star Trek’s big 60th anniversary year, and since January, I’ve been poking a bit of fun at the franchise! We’ve talked about some truly awful fan theories, some “unpopular opinions” shared by Trekkies, and I’ve even published another of my “what if?” alt-history pieces, postulating about the outcomes of some major storylines. This time, though, I want to get way darker! We’re going to talk about some of the very *worst* things that characters in Star Trek have ever done.
As always, a couple of caveats! Firstly, and most importantly, everything we’re going to discuss today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one person. There’s room within the Trekkie community for a spectrum of different opinions, so if your take on a character, storyline, or episode doesn’t align with mine, that’s okay! We don’t need to get into an argument about it. Secondly, this is meant to be a bit of fun, and an opportunity to talk Trek. If I say that a character acted immorally or that I disagree with their actions, that shouldn’t be taken as me “hating” that character, that episode, or that part of Star Trek. If anything, it’s testament to the power of media – and the power of the Star Trek franchise – to evoke such strong opinions. And it *definitely* shouldn’t be taken as criticism or hate for any individual actors, writers, directors, or behind-the-scenes folks!
The view from the captain’s chair of the Enterprise-B.
Next, let’s briefly talk about the format. I’ve picked ten storylines or character moments from across the franchise’s history where one character – or, in a couple of cases, multiple characters – did something truly awful… when you think about it from an in-universe perspective. I’ve deliberately excluded villains, because it should be obvious that villains would do bad things! I’m instead focusing on immoral or questionable actions taken by characters we’re meant to see as protagonists, heroes, or at least allies. I’ve also chosen, on this occasion, to focus on main and major recurring characters rather than one-off guests – though this may be a subject I’ll revisit in the future, so watch this space!
With all of that out of the way, this is your final chance to jump ship if you don’t want to get into some potentially controversial Star Trek opinions!
Number One: Sabotaging Starfleet’s next major technological leap for selfish reasons. Scotty in The Search for Spock.
He looks quite proud of himself, doesn’t he?
The Search for Spock sees Kirk and his friends deciding to steal the badly-damaged USS Enterprise from Spacedock to rescue Spock from the Genesis Planet. But standing in their way is the USS Excelsior, commanded by Captain Styles. The Excelsior was the testing ground for Starfleet’s new “transwarp” programme, and it was a functional technology that could have utterly transformed Starfleet’s missions of exploration and defence. Until Scotty sabotaged it.
Because Starfleet’s “transwarp” was never mentioned again after The Search for Spock, that seems to imply that the programme was abandoned or never moved forward. Putting two and two together strongly implies that Scotty’s sabotage was at least a contributing factor, and could be the reason why Starfleet and the Federation still rely on warp drive into the 25th Century… and beyond.
The USS Excelsior sputters to a halt outside Spacedock.
There are counterpoints to this, though. My personal head canon has, for a long time, been that Starfleet simply re-designates warp factors as new engines are designed, rather than continually adding decimals to Warp 9.99 or new numbers beyond Warp 10. So it could be that “transwarp” was a success, and Excelsior’s engines were rolled out to the fleet. I also believe Scotty would, after the events of The Voyage Home, have come clean about what happened – or even that the Excelsior’s engineering staff would’ve been able to figure out what happened. So I offer those rebuttals!
However, none of that has ever been shown on screen to my knowledge, and the absence of the term “transwarp” after The Search for Spock could mean that the Excelsior was considered a failure. Given how much more powerful its engines were when contrasted with the Enterprise and other ships at the time… that one act of sabotage may have set back Starfleet’s exploration by literally decades! That’s almost as bad as Starfleet choosing to abandon the Spore Drive.
Number Two: Dating a one-year-old. Neelix in Voyager’s first couple of seasons.
Neelix and Kes in a promotional photo.
I know what you’re gonna say: Ocampans age at a different rate when compared to other species, so Kes wasn’t *really* a “one-year-old” in the way I’ve implied. Okay, granted. But she was, at the time we met her, around the Ocampan equivalent of age eighteen, whereas Neelix was already well into middle age. Even if you completely set aside the fact that Kes is literally one year old, you’ve still got a creepy-ass middle-aged man dating a teenager. And that’s really icky.
I’ve said this before, but I’m really glad that the Neelix-Kes relationship wasn’t in focus more in Voyager’s first couple of seasons. If it had been, I think it would’ve been detrimental to both characters and even to the series as a whole. Perhaps, to be incredibly generous, you could say that attitudes to large age gaps in relationships have hardened in the thirty-plus years since Voyager premiered, making this relationship a bit of a product of its time, and something we’re less likely to see replicated today. Even with that in mind, though, I remember seeing it being discussed on Star Trek sites in the ’90s, when Voyager was airing, so I don’t think that fully excuses it.
Neelix’s jealousy and possessive side are on full display.
Some episodes, like Parturnition, also saw Neelix displaying very jealous, possessive, controlling, and I would argue abusive behaviour towards Kes. And that’s also something that really detracted from his characterisation. Neelix was a lot of fun as the happy-go-lucky guide to the Delta Quadrant… but he also clearly has a darker side when it comes to his personal relationships.
Fortunately, this wasn’t the main focus of Voyager, nor even of Kes and Neelix’s arcs on the show. But just because it was only in focus on a few occasions doesn’t mean we can or should ignore it, and Neelix dating a literal one-year-old – or the equivalent of a high-schooler, if you prefer – when he’s a middle-aged man is still insanely creepy and unsettling, no matter how you slice it.
Number Three: The moron’s mutiny. Michael Burnham in the Discovery series premiere.
Burnham attempts her mutiny.
As I said a few years ago, when I re-watched The Vulcan Hello and Battle at the Binary Stars, I’ve never seen a TV series – inside or outside of the Star Trek franchise – do so much to present its own protagonist as an arrogant idiot. Because that’s how Burnham comes across in the premiere: a complete and utter moron. Burnham misunderstands the advice given to her by Sarek, decides that she knows best and everyone around her is stupid, and tries to stage a one-person mutiny against her captain and entire bridge crew when she doesn’t get her way. It isn’t hard to see why some Trekkies soured on the character immediately, and weren’t willing to give her a chance to redeem herself.
Think about where Burnham and the USS Shenzhou were when she decided to mutiny. On a far border of Federation space, staring down a fleet of powerful Klingon vessels. Sarek told her about the way the Vulcans treated the Klingons *before* first contact had been made, but the circumstances were completely different. If Burnham did manage to get her way and shoot first, the only thing that would’ve happened would’ve been the loss of the Shenzhou and her own death; obliterated in a hail of disruptor fire.
Burnham faces a court-martial at the end of the premiere.
The sensible thing to do – as proposed by Captain Georgiou, Saru, and others – was to wait for backup. The Shenzhou was outmatched and outgunned, so waiting for Starfleet reinforcements, and the arrival of a senior officer who hopefully has more diplomatic sway, is the only sensible move under the circumstances. Burnham’s decision didn’t directly cause the Klingon War; we as the audience know this because we’re privy to what the Klingons discussed with each other. But *Burnham* doesn’t know that – she didn’t see those conversations. There’s no evidence for or against her claim that the Klingon ships are here because they want to unite and declare war, so the sensible course of action, once again, is to wait – not shoot first.
I love the idea of a redemption arc, and I think a flawed character who learns what they did was wrong and actively works to overcome their faults can be fun to root for. But… is that how we’d describe Michael Burnham, either in Discovery’s first few episodes or, really, across the entire five-season run of the show? She softens a bit, later on, and settles into her relationship with Starfleet a bit more. But she never really loses that arrogant, single-minded streak. And she never really has to confront her own actions in the premiere or come to terms with what she did wrong. Her statement at the end of Battle at the Binary Stars hammers this home: she doesn’t lament the loss of her captain or her crewmates, nor the war that broke out. She talks about herself and how sad she is that she’s lost the opportunity to one day command a starship.
Number Four: Creating holographic facsimiles of real people without their consent. Reginald Barclay and Geordi La Forge in The Next Generation.
Data, Picard, and Geordi re-imagined as holograms.
The holodeck is an awesome piece of technology! And it’s something that, as Trekkies, I think we’d all love to be able to play around with one day! But Starfleet and the Federation seem to have absolutely no safeguards when it comes to the holodeck being used to potentially abuse real people. The ease with which seemingly anyone can just create holographic replicas of their friends and crewmates is… well, it’s pretty weird, if you stop to think about it. And two of the best examples of this come from The Next Generation.
While working on an engineering problem, Geordi recreates Dr Leah Brahms, one of the designers of the Enterprise-D, on the holodeck. And he soon falls in love with her – something that the *real* Dr Brahms berates him for when she discovers the truth. Her reaction is pitch-perfect, showing how violated she feels by being digitally created in this fashion.
Dr Leah Brahms (the real one).
Then we have Barclay. Barclay created for himself a kind of “Walter Mitty” power fantasy on the holodeck. And… let’s be honest, that kinda thing is perfectly fine in a lot of cases. But Barclay did it using real people – the officers and crew of the Enterprise-D, people he hated, people he respected, and people he was crushing on. Again, the reactions of those depicted, upon discovering what Barclay had done, showed how wrong and violating this behaviour was… but Starfleet clearly took no action to discipline Barclay *or* to prevent that kind of thing from happening again, because we’ve seen similar behaviour from characters in Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and beyond.
Think about it like this: if you found that one of your friends had created an AI chatbot based on an interpretation of your personality, using a photo of you, and they’d been using that bot for role-play and fantasising… you’d feel sick to your stomach, right? I know I would. And the holodeck is massively more immersive than one of today’s chatbots could ever be. So using it to recreate real people – to date them, fight duels with them, kill them, presumably have sex with some of them… it’s abhorrent.
Number Five: Polluting and changing the timeline. Riker and the away team from the Enterprise-E in First Contact.
“Stay out of history’s way…”
It’s fair to say that human-Vulcan first contact is one of the most significant events in the history of the Federation. So if there was *one* event to which the Temporal Prime Directive should apply, it’s this one. And I know what you’re gonna say: the Borg attack means there are mitigating circumstances, and Picard and his crew had to get involved to *preserve* the timeline and ensure first contact happened on schedule.
But did they have to do it in such an obvious and ham-fisted way?
Geordi and Barclay told Dr Cochrane that he was going to have a statue built and that his entire launch site would be a museum. Even if they had to reveal limited knowledge of the future to convince Dr Cochrane to accept their help, did they need to go that far? No, of course not! And did they need to be present aboard the Phoenix when it launched? Also no!
Riker and Geordi on Earth in the 21st Century.
Given the nature of the Borg attack and the damage to the Enterprise-E, some amount of interference with the timeline was inevitable. But there must’ve been more subtle and less damaging ways for the away team to have involved itself with the events leading up to first contact, ways which would’ve limited the contamination the timeline suffered. And, given Enterprise’s semi-sequel episode Regeneration, we also know that Picard and the crew were downright incompetent and negligent when it came to cleaning up the multiple messes that they left behind.
At this point, Star Trek’s timeline is a bit of a mess – and that’s putting it mildly! Between Kirk, La’an, Picard, and the Soongs, the history of Khan’s birth and rise to power is completely screwed up. Sisko had to trigger the Bell Riots after accidentally getting the real Gabriel Bell killed. Kirk and his crew literally abducted a woman from the 20th Century and brought her to the 23rd. But of all the events in Star Trek’s timeline, first contact is one of the most important in the creation of the Federation and the “correct” version of the future. For Picard, Riker, and the others to have contaminated it so thoroughly, and to have not been so much as reprimanded for it after… it beggars belief!
Number Six: Kidnapping a sentient energy life-form for a laugh. Beckett Mariner in Lower Decks Season 1.
The offending moment.
You might remember this from my review of the episode Envoys, if you’re a regular reader. That episode’s opening moment sees Ensign Marniner trying to kidnap a sentient energy-based life-form that she encounters aboard the USS Cerritos. Why? Because she thinks it’ll be funny, and maybe she can force it to grant her a wish. There are very few moments in the entire six-decade history of the franchise that see Starfleet personnel behaving in a worse way than that, in my view.
Starfleet’s mission is to seek out new life and new civilisations. Mariner’s mission was to put herself first at the expense of one of those new life-forms. It’s inherently un-Starfleet in a way that I struggle to put into words, and while I absolutely concede that it was meant to be a joke and not taken too seriously… I think I’m glad that *this* kind of joke, and that this way of characterising Mariner, weren’t the main focus of Lower Decks. Where the show succeeded was how it made the regular goings-on in Starfleet humorous. Where it failed, in my view, was in trying to emulate the likes of South Park’s Eric Cartman or Rick and Morty’s Rick Sanchez, using Mariner as a stand-in for that kind of character.
Mariner (left) with Ensign Boimler.
Think about what Mariner does in this moment. She sees a brand-new life-form for the first time, and her first instinct isn’t “woah, that’s so unusual and interesting,” it isn’t “I better tell the captain or a senior officer,” and it isn’t to introduce herself or offer help and support. Instead, she thinks it’ll be funny to violate one of the most fundamental ethical rules that Starfleet has, to kidnap a sentient life-form against its clearly-expressed wishes, and then to force it to perform for her or grant her some kind of gift in exchange for its freedom. If the Cerritos’ senior officers found out… surely that would mean not only her expulsion from Starfleet, but also perhaps a period of incarceration.
Fortunately, this was the only time Mariner did something this egregious – at least, across the first half of Lower Decks’ run, which is all I’ve seen of the series so far! And there are moments in every Star Trek show that we basically have to write off or ignore in order for character arcs or other storylines to make sense. So I’m content, in a way, to set the opening minutes of Envoys aside. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it!
Number Seven: Erasing an entire timeline, decades’ worth of people’s lives, and genociding untold millions or billions of people. Admiral Janeway in Voyager’s finale.
Admiral Janeway.
Some fans argue that the worst thing Janeway ever did was murdering Tuvix. I disagree! The way Admiral Janeway’s actions are presented in Endgame leads to one conclusion and one conclusion only: she committed a war crime of almost unimaginable proportions. The Temporal Prime Directive, if it exists at all, exists to prevent actions like those taken by Admiral Janway. By travelling back in time, she wiped out almost three decades’ worth of people’s lives and memories, and erased or “un-made” millions (or perhaps billions) of people who were born and lived in the timeline she wiped out. That is… beyond horrific.
If the future that Admiral Janeway came from was awful, perhaps devastated by a Borg conquest of the galaxy, then we could reframe her choices. But because, for basically everyone except Tuvok and Seven of Nine, the future was at least tolerable – the least-bad version of events, considering how long it took Voyager to make it home – her actions are incredibly selfish, narrow-minded, and immoral.
Sabrina (left, with Harry Kim) is one of millions of people whose lives will have been erased by Admiral Janeway.
It was Spock who famously said that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” so in this case… Seven and Tuvok kinda have to take one for the team. Admiral Janeway’s actions may have saved Seven’s life and helped the elderly Tuvok live a little longer without succumbing to Vulcan dementia, but what are two lives when stacked up against the millions or billions who were erased – genocided, in effect – when the timeline was reset? Sabrina, the young daughter of Naomi Wildman, is one such individual – someone we actually get to meet in the episode. The circumstances of her birth, conception, and parents’ meeting are completely changed by Janeway’s actions, so unless we subscribe to some notion of fate or destiny, Sabrina was un-made – murdered, really – by Janeway.
This isn’t a ranked list, but if it were… I think this would be number one. What Admiral Janeway did is a war crime, by the definitions we have within Star Trek of how time travel can be used as a weapon. It’s mass murder if not genocide, thanks to the changes to the timeline un-birthing countless numbers of people and preventing them from ever living. And it’s a complete betrayal of one of Star Trek’s core philosophies. Admiral Janeway may have felt that her voyage home was unfairly difficult. But… them’s the breaks. Destroying reality to save one or two lives? That’s not acceptable by anyone’s standards.
Number Eight: Torturing Odo. Garak in The Die Is Cast.
Garak with Odo.
When Garak agreed to team up with his old mentor, Enabran Tain, for a mission to the Gamma Quadrant… things quickly went off the rails. A joint Tal Shiar-Obsidian Order plot to attack the Founders of the Dominion on their homeworld was infiltrated by the Founders themselves, paving the way for the destruction of Cardassia’s intelligence agency and Dukat’s rise to power. But Garak himself crossed a line during that journey to the Gamma Quadrant.
Odo began by investigating what appeared to be an attempt on Garak’s life – though this was later revealed to be a feint by Garak to attract attention. But with a *real* plot to kill Garak in the offing, Odo joined the Cardassian on a venture away from DS9 that led them to Enabran Tain. Odo didn’t *have* to do that; he could’ve concluded his investigation, blaming Garak, or remained aboard DS9, leaving Garak to confront Tain alone. They were never “friends,” but Odo went above and beyond to aid Garak in the first half of this story.
Odo during his torture.
But when Garak agreed to join Tain on his crusade against the Founders, Odo became a suspect and an enemy. Garak was assigned to “interrogate” him – and was given the use of an experimental device that could prevent changelings from shape-shifting. A side-effect of this device was extreme pain and discomfort, and Garak used that, intentionally, to try to force Odo to give up information about his people. There’s a word for that: torture.
To be fair to Garak, he feels bad about the torture, and even tries to prompt Odo to share *something* with him; some new information that isn’t on file so he can call the interrogation a success and turn off the device. But… feeling sad about something, while still continuing to do it, doesn’t erase or justify what’s been done. And yes, you could try to make a case for Garak being under duress with the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order demanding results. But again, that doesn’t justify literal torture. Odo’s subsequent reaction to what happened, helping Garak escape and later suggesting that the whole torture thing is something “best forgotten” is… incredibly generous, under the circumstances.
Number Nine: Declaring Talos IV to be off-limits and banning all contact with the Talosians. Captain Pike et al., after the events of The Cage.
Talosians as seen in Discovery.
Think about where The Cage (and The Menagerie) end. The Talosians were deceptive, sure, and they did use their impressive mental and telepathic powers to trick Pike and the crew of the Enterprise. That ability should not be forgotten. But the Talosians also came to accept, however reluctantly, that enslaving humans and Vulcans was not acceptable – and, more to the point for them, simply not practical. So this raises a question: why would Starfleet, an organisation dedicated to seeking out new life and rendering aid, go on to ban all contact with Talos IV and the Talosians?
How many Star Trek stories start with an alien being adversarial or even villainous, but end with communication and understanding? The Talosians in The Cage are the original archetype of that familiar trope; Pike’s story in the episode sees him overcome their telepathy, but moreover, open the first genuine reciprocal dialogue between the Federation and Talos IV. Both sides come to an understanding: that enslaving humans is, if nothing else, not worthwhile for the Talosians. And subsequent events see the Talosians willingly helping both Spock and Pike, without really demanding anything in exchange.
The surface of Talos IV.
So why should Talos IV be off-limits to everyone? The Talosians possess the ability to deceive, using their mental powers to trick people. But is ability alone enough to warrant such a ban? Given the Federation’s resources, helping the Talosians rebuild, or at least stabilise their population, is well within their capabilities, and surely having the Talosians as a friend, or at least being on positive terms, is better than a blanket ban. Especially for an organisation like the Federation, with its mission of peaceful exploration and co-existence.
Cutting off the Talosians will, in the longer-term, likely condemn the entire race to death. Without the ability to maintain their planet, their machines, and their underground home, the Talosian population will continue to decline, resulting in their extinction. This is not a “Prime Directive” kind of situation, either; the Talosians already know about Starfleet and humanity, so offering assistance in some form, even if it’s just resources and materials at first, is surely the right call. Condemning an entire race to extinction based on *one* interaction – an interaction which, to be honest, didn’t end all that badly – just doesn’t feel right based on everything we know about Starfleet. And as the Enterprise’s captain, the leader of the away mission, and the man who spent the most time with the Talosians, I have to assume that it was at least partly Pike’s idea to recommend cutting off Talos IV.
Number Ten: Resurrecting Data after he very clearly expressed a desire to die. Picard in Picard Season 3.
The golem which would later become the resurrected Data.
One of the few genuine highlights of the rough and rushed Picard Season 1 finale was the sequence in which Picard laid Data to rest. I wrote at the time that I could finally see how a sequence like this was missing from Nemesis, and how it was a beautiful way for fans to get closure all these years later. Season 1 had its issues, sure, but the way in which Data was finally able to die – achieving his goal of becoming as close to human as possible in the process, because what could be more human to a machine than mortality? – was not one of them. In fact, it *should* have been left alone, remaining one of the best parts of the entire show.
But Terry Matalas, the showrunner for Picard’s third and final season and who also directed the final two episodes of the show, desperately wanted to reunite the *entire* cast of The Next Generation. He wanted to “play with his action figures,” and the set wouldn’t have been complete without Data… so Data needed to be brought back somehow. Even though, in-universe, Data was as dead as it was possible to be, with both his physical body destroyed *and* his remaining neurons having been shut down.
Data asked for and willingly embraced death in Picard’s first season.
So Picard, who sat with Data in the “digital afterlife,” went against Data’s expressed wishes, resurrecting him again in a new body, using a different set of memories or neurons. He should’ve known that what he was doing was wrong, and that it completely betrayed Data’s own clear instructions for what should happen. But this was really only acknowledged very briefly, and well after the fact, before Picard and the crew just pressed on with the rest of the mission.
I like to believe that, by the 24th and 25th Centuries, a lot of diseases and health conditions will have been totally cured. But there will be some that won’t have been, and there will be some cases where assisted dying or discontinuing treatment will be the least bad option for some folks. Data was in that position in Picard – being forced to exist in the digital afterlife was, for him, akin to being in a coma, vegetative state, or worse. So he asked Picard to help him; to shut down the small part of him that remained and finally allow him to die with some degree of dignity. And it was a powerful, deeply emotional sequence. For Picard to go back on that mere weeks or months later… it doesn’t sit right. And when the storyline found no real narrative justification beyond “hey, look at the shiny thing! Isn’t nostalgia great?” it feels all the worse.
So that’s it… for now!
A Federation fleet as seen in Deep Space Nine.
Stay tuned, because I have another set of “the worst things” that I’d like to write up one day. If your favourite (or least-favourite, I guess) didn’t make the list this time… well, be sure to check back the next time I do this. Because I may already have it under consideration!
I hope this has been interesting, and as I said at the beginning, not something to get too worked up or upset over! If I called out one of your favourite characters for their misbehaviour, or you think what they did was either totally okay or justified by circumstances… well, that’s okay. There will always be a range of different opinions on stories and media, and one of the things I love the most about the Star Trek fan community is how passionate folks can be in defending their favourite characters and episodes!
The USS Voyager.
Although this was intended to be just for fun, these are opinions I genuinely hold. I’m not making stuff up for the sake of clickbaiting you, and I think there are genuine moral and ethical issues with what each of these characters did in the stories discussed above. But again, one of the great things about Star Trek is that it’s *never* really been a purely black-and-white, good-versus-evil kind of franchise. There are shades of grey in many different characters and stories, and even the most virtuous heroes can have flaws or make mistakes.
I know I haven’t been as active on the website over the past couple of months, but I still have some ideas in the pipeline as the 60th anniversary nears. We’ve also got Strange New Worlds to look forward to in the summer, and I’m planning weekly episode reviews as those new episodes air. I hope you’ll join me for some of that! And if you missed it, I had the incredible good fortune to be able to meet William Shatner – Captain Kirk himself – at a recent Comic-Con event, so click or tap here to read about that experience.
Until next time… and Live Long and Prosper, friends!
The Star Trek franchise – including most films and TV series discussed above – can be streamed now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available. Many are also available on DVD and/or Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise is the copyright of Skydance-Paramount. Some still frames used above were upscaled using A.I. tools. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Even as the astronauts suited up and boarded the impressive Space Launch System rocket… I was sceptical. When the countdown got to ten minutes, and then paused… I was *even more* sceptical! Would this long-delayed, oft-postponed mission to the moon ever make it off the launchpad? Or would this be just another broken promise, another failure, and another let-down in a long line? After so many cancellations and disappointments courtesy of NASA, I’m afraid my faith in these things has been well and truly sapped.
But the idea of a return to the moon – even just for a flyby, this time – was so incredible, intense, and inspirational that even as I sat there, watching that stalled clock… I found myself *wanting* to believe it. As the minutes passed, and various NASA ground control crew talked to each other over the radio, it didn’t seem like a sure thing, but I felt my hopes slowly starting to build. And then… it actually happened. Artemis II took humanity back to the moon.
The launch of Artemis II.
Here on the website, we’ve talked a few times about real-life space exploration. Specifically, I’ve shared my scepticism about recent space projects, and how a crucial element of space exploration – the inspirational factor – has gone missing more often than not. Flights to low Earth orbit have become so commonplace that I don’t really consider the most recent astronauts, space station visitors, and space tourists to truly be “pioneers” any more, which I guess says a lot about how far we’ve come as a spacefaring species! But on the other hand, I’ve come to feel distinctly uninspired by and even bored of repeated missions to the ISS, test launches for new rockets and vehicles, and even sending *another* rover to the same planet where we’ve already got one!
Space exploration *needs* that inspirational element. Without it, how are we to convince a new generation that there’s anything worth doing in space? If all we’re able to do any more is go back to the same space station time and again, or send identical-looking robots to the same planet over and over again, or launch the same wealthy bajillionaires into space for ten minutes over and over again… why would *anyone* be interested in that? And without that interest, that inspiration… how can humankind take the next big steps in space technology and space exploration?
That’s where Artemis II came in.
The moon as seen by the crew of Artemis II.
I’m the wrong side of forty, but in my entire lifetime, no humans had so much as left low Earth orbit. The last mission to the moon was all the way back in 1972, meaning you’d need to be past fifty to have even been alive for that – sixty-plus to remember it with any real clarity. Artemis II was the culmination of decades’ worth of effort to take humanity back to the true frontiers of space exploration – and the first spaceflight in years to really feel like it was inspiring masses of people and capturing the imagination of the public at large.
I watched the live stream of Artemis II’s launch – which was late at night here in the UK – while on a video call with my sister. My niece was born just last year, and my sister and I talked at length about how exciting it was that, within her first year of life, something that feels so profound and huge was happening. Artemis II took humans further from Earth than we’ve ever been before, and also paved the way for a new landing on the surface of the moon sometime in the next few years. Those are incredible achievements, and I was thrilled to be able to watch the mission as it unfolded.
Earthrise.
As Artemis II cruised to and around the moon, I periodically checked in with NASA’s live streams. I wouldn’t say I was glued to my screen for the duration of the mission, but I certainly spent a good amount of time seeing this mission unfold as close to first-hand as I could. And one evening, when the clouds had parted and the sky was clear, I perched outside on my garden wall, just gazing up at the moon. “It’s incredible,” I remember thinking to myself, “that right now, people are… there.” Was this what it felt like in the 1960s, during the first Apollo missions? Apollo 8 was the Apollo programme’s equivalent; the first mission to leave Earth behind and orbit the moon. I wonder how many people, in 1968, perched on their garden walls and gazed up at the moon, as I just did.
Artemis II feels like NASA (and the Americans in general, I suppose) planting a flag and saying, “we’re back, we’re really doing this.” And after so many false starts, cancellations, and disappointments… I’m glad to see it. And this isn’t some kind of flag-wavy thing; I’m not an American, and I’d have been just as excited if China or India or the European Space Agency had managed to launch a similar moon-orbiting mission. Space isn’t the sole preserve of one faction or one nation, and it should be something we can explore together – or at least somewhere we can celebrate all achievements, no matter where they originate.
The crew of Artemis II during the mission. Clockwise from left: Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman, and Victor Glover.
There are still innumerable hurdles for current and future space missions to overcome. Going beyond the moon to send humans to visit the likes of Mars or Venus – our closest planetary neighbours – still feels out of reach with current technology, despite recent advancements and promises of a Martian colony springing up! And there will be more setbacks to come, for sure; Artemis III has been “downgraded” from its moon landing to another trial run, and Artemis IV has been pushed back to 2028. But that potential moon landing – humans setting foot on the moon’s surface for the first time in more than half a century, and for the first time in my lifetime… well, it feels a lot closer today than it did just a few months ago.
Sci-fi is what really kick-started my love for all things space. As a geeky little kid, I can remember reading every book about outer space that I could get my hands on, and being *obsessed* with the Space Shuttle and NASA. Going to space – actually sending real people up there – felt magical, like something out of Star Trek. But as time passed (and as I got older), that excitement seemed to fade. And there haven’t been very many missions in the last few years to truly recapture it. The last two I can remember before Artemis II were New Horizons’ visit to Pluto, which completed the “set” of the nine planets I learned about in school, and William Shatner’s trip to space. The idea of sending Captain Kirk himself into space in real life… that definitely tickled me!
We really went back to the moon. Wow.
I’m still not sure what the future will hold for space exploration. Events here on Earth have a tendency to get in the way, unfortunately, and with wars, political disruption, economic problems, and all kinds of other issues already plaguing us… I can’t say I have 100% confidence in Artemis IV landing on the moon a couple of years from now. But I feel more confident in the possibility – the idea that it plausibly *could* happen – than I did at the beginning of the year.
And that’s pretty neat! It’s a feeling I haven’t had in a long time, really.
So, as I said at the beginning: Artemis II inspired me. It’s a rare space mission in the 2020s to truly recapture that sense of excitement, that humanity was going “where no one has gone before” – quite literally, in this case, as Artemis II went further than any of the Apollo missions, setting a new record! It’s important that space exploration retains that sense of wonder and excitement if we’re to inspire the next generation of astronauts and rocket scientists, and I hope that many of my niece’s generation will look at Artemis II with the same sense of wonder that I had when I looked at the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle. Who knows… maybe one day *she’ll* suit up and blast off to the final frontier. I may not be here to see it, but she’ll have an incredibly proud uncle either way.
Some images above are courtesy of NASA. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
I’ve told this story once before here on the website, so please bear with me. In the mid-1990s, around the time Generations was in cinemas, I attended my first-ever Star Trek fan meet. I’d read about it in a sci-fi magazine, and after what felt like a long journey to a kid, I ended up in a big city where I had my first real-life encounter with the Star Trek fan community. As a kid, I grew up in a small, rural area, and I was the only person (that I knew of, at any rate) who even *watched* Star Trek, let alone was a big fan. So being able to hang out with other Trekkies was a blast.
At that meet-up, I was the youngest person there by an entire generation, but the Trekkies I met were incredibly welcoming, and several of them had fun stories to tell about their favourite episodes, merch they owned, or encounters with some of the stars. I distinctly remember a couple of folks sharing tales of how they’d been able to meet William Shatner at fan events in the United States – Captain Kirk himself. Although my way into the Star Trek fan community was via The Next Generation, and by that point I wasn’t fully caught up on The Original Series, I remember being very impressed! And a little jealous.
Well, some three decades later, I can finally check that item off my bucket list! Because this past weekend, I got to meet William Shatner.
William Shatner at the 2026 Saturn Awards. Photo: TrekMovie
Over the past year or so, I’ve been pushing myself harder to get out of my “comfort zone” and become a bit more resilient to the pain. You may know if you’re a regular reader, but I’m disabled, and I can’t walk without the aid of a walking stick, walk very far at all, or stand for any length of time without being in pain. But my desire to spend more time with my family – I have fewer family members these days, so the ones who are still here are important to me – spurred me on to try new things, push myself, and grow my confidence a little. I still can’t manage these kinds of events very often… but some things are worth trying to achieve.
Last year, for the first time in fifteen years, I made it to a Star Trek convention. And I had a blast meeting some of the actors from The Original Series all the way through to Strange New Worlds! It was a long, difficult, painful day, but I made it to the end with a smile on my face and some wonderful memories. The success of that event led me to look for similar things this year, as I’ve been interested in spending money on “experiences” rather than just… stuff.
Publicity photos of William Shatner as Captain Kirk from the 1960s.
I’ve never been to a Comic-Con event before. But when, just after New Year, I saw that Liverpool Comic-Con here in the UK had booked William Shatner – Captain Kirk – as a guest… well, I decided to push myself once again. Because of Mr Shatner’s age (he’s 95 years old, though you’d never know it), as well as my own shaky health, I spent the next few months talking it down. “It probably won’t happen”, and “we’ll see” became my refrains, as I tried to put a lid on any potential disappointment if, for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to get there and meet him.
But, to my surprise, the day of Comic-Con rolled around, and everything was still on the schedule! I’d bought my train tickets weeks in advance (Liverpool is actually slightly easier and more convenient for me to reach than Blackpool had been last year), so I set off. It was an early start, and I actually made it to Liverpool with almost two hours to spare before my 11AM entry to Comic-Con. I killed some time at a nearby shopping complex, the Albert Dock, and with a ride on the Wheel of Liverpool – a large ferris wheel which is that city’s equivalent of the London Eye. The Wheel of Liverpool was right outside where the convention was taking place – and I was the *only* rider when I boarded, for some reason!
Liverpool Comic-Con from the Wheel of Liverpool. The main convention buildings are to the right. Photo: Trekking with Dennis
I’ll be honest: Liverpool Comic-Con, and the venue that hosted it, felt quite poorly-organised, and not very disability-friendly. The event was, in my opinion, oversold, which resulted in densely-packed crowds in some of the venue’s relatively narrow hallways and areas. There were fewer stalls and shops than I expected for an event of this size, too, and even though I wasn’t really there for shopping, it would’ve been a way to kill time while I waited for my meet-and-greet with Mr Shatner.
From a disability access perspective, there were very few accessible bathrooms, even fewer “changing places” bathrooms, and an almost total lack of seating. There *may* have been a way to gain access to extra help, as I was able to do at last year’s Star Trek convention, but the only way I could find to get that access at Comic-Con was by *paying for* some kind of special disability access card, which I refused to do – partly on principle, and partly due to lack of funds.
I was unimpressed with Liverpool Comic-Con’s organisation and accessibility. Photo: Trekking with Dennis
Then we come to the meeting itself. A few days before Comic-Con, I was invited to book a timeslot for my photo session with Mr Shatner, and I duly chose one out of the available options, which were in half-hour increments. I arrived a few minutes early, hoping that there’d at least be somewhere to wait… but I was *stunned* to see that a massive queue had already formed. With none of the staff checking to see timeslot bookings, it seemed as if it was a free-for-all, with everyone just turning up and a giant queue forming for the photo sessions. I was a little disappointed by that; if I’d known, I would’ve arrived way earlier and could’ve perhaps been closer to the front of the line.
All of this is to say that, despite having a wonderful time with Mr Shatner and achieving what I set out to on the day… Liverpool Comic-Con was not well-run, not nearly accessible enough, and if I’d been going there to experience the event rather than for one specific reason… I’d have been *very* disappointed. I felt last year’s Star Trek convention in Blackpool was, in some ways, quite low-budget, but its organisation absolutely blew Comic-Con out of the water, and especially in terms of being accessible and disability-friendly, it takes the win.
The banner in the room where the photographs took place. Photo: Trekking with Dennis
However!
I wasn’t there to go to Comic-Con. There really wasn’t anything else going on at the event that I wanted to do; the only thing I even *considered* was booking a photo session with a couple of the voice actors from Futurama, who were also in attendance. This isn’t actually a slight against Liverpool Comic-Con, it’s just that most of the guests that were booked, as well as the panels and events on the schedule, involved franchises, films, and TV shows that are either not my thing or that I’m just not interested in enough to want to spend that kind of money on.
From my perspective, I was going to Liverpool for one reason and one reason only: to meet William Shatner. And I can now tell you, dear reader, that I did it! A lifelong dream to meet Captain Kirk – and to meet someone who’s actually travelled into space – has been achieved, and I can check that off the bucket list once and for all.
William Shatner as Captain Kirk in The City on the Edge of Forever.
I talked about this last year, when I went to the Star Trek convention, but if I have the choice, I’ll always choose a meeting or a photo rather than an autograph. I know some people are autograph collectors, and this is no shade to them at all, but I’ve personally never been all that interested in autographs. With the money I had, I couldn’t have gotten both a photo and an autograph from Mr Shatner, so I chose to have my photo taken with him. That moment – which probably lasted less than a minute – is a memory that, frankly, I couldn’t put a value on. Being able to be there, with him, to talk to him and thank him for his incredible contributions to the Star Trek franchise… that’s something so incredibly special.
And William Shatner, for many folks, is *still* the one person they associate the most with the words “Star Trek.” To have been able to meet the man who, arguably more than any other, defined what Star Trek was for decades… it’s a really incredible feeling. I could’ve spent that money on something like a Captain Kirk statue, or put it towards that stupidly expensive Star Trek Lego set, maybe, or a prop replica. But I don’t think any of those things really compare to the feeling of being there in that room, standing right next to him, talking to him, even for just a moment, and making that memory.
William Shatner in space aboard Blue Origin’s NS-18 mission in 2021.
So it was another long day. And it was difficult day, thanks in no small part to Liverpool Comic-Con’s poor organisation and lack of disability access. By the time I was on my way back to the railway station I was exhausted, overheating, and probably a little dehydrated, too. But I made it home in the end with my prize: a simple photo of myself standing with William Shatner. And despite everything… it was worth it.
As Star Trek celebrates its sixtieth anniversary, this was even more of a special thing to have been able to do. And I’m glad that both Mr Shatner was well enough to make the trip, and that I myself was able to do it. I have to assume that Mr Shatner doesn’t do this kind of thing for the money any more, not at his time of life and given his financial situation. So I can only imagine that he still attends conventions like these because he likes them, or because he genuinely *enjoys* meeting fans. That’s a pretty incredible thing, to be honest, and at 95 years of age, no one would blame him for retiring quietly and never shaking another hand again!
Kirk in The Search for Spock.
So I hope this has been interesting – and I hope you aren’t *too* envious! I know a lot of Trekkies will have had similar opportunities in the past; it’s by no means a unique thing for a fan to meet the star of their favourite franchise. But for me, this was my first time meeting Mr Shatner, and having been a Trekkie for thirty-five years (I first began watching The Next Generation during its original broadcast run here in the UK in the early ’90s), it was just a really special thing to have been able to do. I’m glad I felt up to it, and I’m glad I pushed myself – even though I’m still feeling the lingering after-effects a couple of days later!
I know I haven’t been as active here on the website over the last month or so, but I have a few ideas in the pipeline as Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary gets closer. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll stay tuned for some of that in the days and weeks ahead.
Live Long and Prosper, friends!
The Star Trek franchise – including all films and TV series discussed above – is the copyright of the Paramount Skydance Corporation. Logos, branding, etc. for Comic-Con and Comic-Con Liverpool are trademarks/copyright of their respective owners and organisers. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Seasons 1-3 and the trailers and teasers for Season 4. Spoilers are also present for Discovery Season 2 and Picard Season 3.
I haven’t had as much to say as usual over the past few weeks, but we’re slowly getting back into the swing of things – and the website isn’t going away, so don’t worry about that! A few days ago, though, we got to catch another glimpse of Strange New Worlds’ impending fourth season! So I thought it could be a bit of fun to go through the trailer and share my thoughts on how the season is shaping up. In addition to the trailer, we also got a release date for the season premiere – the 23rd of July, which is a little over eleven weeks away at time of writing. These spring and summer months can pass quickly, so it won’t be long before we’re sitting down to watch the next batch of episodes – and, disappointingly, Strange New Worlds’ final ten-episode season.
If you want to check out what I thought of the first Season 4 clip we got, back at last year’s Comic-Con event, you can find that by clicking or tapping here. And it goes without saying, but there will be spoilers for all of Strange New Worlds – including Season 4 – from here on out!
The destruction of a planet.
First of all, I’d like to start by saying that a July broadcast date is a little earlier than I expected. Starfleet Academy only wrapped up its first season a few weeks ago, and while we’re still a long way away from 2022’s incredibly poor scheduling, with Star Trek shows tripping over one another… I wouldn’t have objected to Paramount-Skydance giving the franchise a bit more of a break. There are only two more seasons of Strange New Worlds left, and maybe it’s just me… but I really don’t wanna rush through these remaining episodes! I’d have been happy to leave Season 4 until the autumn/winter season, or even into the first part of 2027, if that in turn would’ve meant the remaining season of Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds’ own swansong could’ve also been pushed back a bit. As this current era of Star Trek winds down… that kind of thing has been on my mind.
And as another aside, we got news recently that the sets and stages for both Starfleet Academy and Strange New Worlds are to be fully dismantled. That seems to put the final nail in the coffin of any kind of resurrection for Starfleet Academy or for the Year One spin-off idea that we discussed last year. Neither seemed likely to me, so this news is really just a confirmation rather than a shock. But as we look at the trailer for Season 4… I can’t escape the fact that we’re looking at a show cancelled before its time, and that the curtain is already beginning to fall on this era of Star Trek.
The Strange New Worlds sets have been dismantled now that production has wrapped.
The first thing to say about the trailer is this: for something that was barely a minute long, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about danger – and perhaps even death. Strange New Worlds has killed off characters before: Hemmer and Captain Batel, to name just two. But with the show winding down – and, crucially, the production team being aware of that and trying to pivot to their Year One pitch… could we see another main character death this season? If so, it would obviously have to be one of the original characters: La’an, Pelia, or Ortegas. I suppose we could throw Una into the mix, too, as her fate beyond the end of the series is also unconfirmed.
That could be a total overreach, but in a short trailer, I thought it was at least noticeable that some of the only lines of dialogue we got involved the danger of Starfleet’s mission and the risk of injury or death to Federation personnel. Hemmer’s death in Season 1 was admirable, in some ways, for its sheer brutality and the impact it had on the crew, but it’s also a plot point I’ve criticised, as I felt we hadn’t really spent enough time with Star Trek’s first Aenar main character (and first blind character to be portrayed by a visually-impaired performer). However, now that we’re three-plus seasons in and we’ve gotten to know these characters a lot more, a main character death – if handled well – could be an incredibly powerful moment. I don’t necessarily think it’s something the series “needs,” but if it was well-written and the story could carry such a powerful emotional beat… I do believe it could work.
An away mission to a crystal-filled cavern.
Speaking of Hemmer, one of the clips in the trailer showed a suspiciously pale hand on La’an’s shoulder. Could that be a hint that Hemmer might return for a cameo or single-episode role, as he did in Season 2? If this moment were taking place in the past, either as a flashback or through some kind of time-travel shenanigans… well, anything’s possible. And as Connor Trineer told the audience at a Star Trek convention just last year, in sci-fi, no one is ever *really* dead, right? I mean, if Data can come back after everything that happened to him… why not have a story in which Hemmer once again features?
The very next frame of the trailer shows La’an standing in Main Engineering, speaking to a crowd. And if you look closely, one of the people closest to her in the crowd looks like an Andorian or Aenar. So… Hemmer’s return is confirmed! Just kidding, there’s been no official word on that so far. But it’s interesting, in any case, to even be considering Hemmer as a possible returning character this time around.
La’an with a hand on her shoulder. Inset: Could the highlighted character be Hemmer?
Obviously, the dinosaur has picked up the most attention from fans coming out of the trailer, and it was undeniably a cool “Jurassic Park”-inspired moment. I’m going to reserve judgement on the dinosaur until we know a bit more about this story; will it be a wonderful homage to classic monster movies, or is there something else being planned? Will the creatures be actual Earth dinosaurs, or dino-like aliens from another world? And will they even play a major role in the episode that features them, or is this all just a bait-and-switch; a cool visual for the trailer to get viewers interested? Without knowing more, it’s hard to say.
I will say, though, that last season’s “zombie episode” was in pretty much the same camp for me! When we glimpsed what appeared to be Klingon zombies in the Season 3 trailer, I was cautiously excited – but I wanted to wait and see what the finished episode would be like. Shuttle to Kenfori ultimately turned out to be a great story, a horror-tinged outing that was fun and frightening in equal measure. So I’m cautiously optimistic that this season’s upcoming “dino episode” will go the same way. It’s definitely something different for Star Trek, and I continue to appreciate that Strange New Worlds is willing to try different things and explore not only the Final Frontier, but also new genres and different ways of telling stories.
*The Jurassic Park theme plays.*
Speaking of new forms of storytelling, we didn’t see anything of the puppet episode this time around, which I think is a noteworthy omission from this trailer. We’ve known for a while that the Jim Henson Company has created puppets for one Season 4 episode, and I guess Paramount-Skydance doesn’t want to spoil too much more of that story at this early stage. I know the puppet announcement wasn’t met with universal support from Trekkies, but I’m definitely curious to see what kind of episode it’ll turn out to be – and whether the writers and creative team have been able to take full advantage of a very different medium to put together a story that we may not have seen in Star Trek before.
The young Vulcan cadet whom we’d caught a glimpse of in last year’s clip also made a return, this time serving as a stand-in transporter chief. This would seem to indicate that this character might be a slightly bigger presence on the show, perhaps appearing in more than one episode (and certainly appearing in more than one scene). In both of her appearances, she was paired up with one of Strange New Worlds’ younger characters – Uhura last time, and now Scotty. I think that could be interesting, and I like the idea of one or both of those characters getting an arc that could take them from being the younger, less-experienced trainee to a mentor of sorts to a new, up-and-coming cadet.
The Vulcan cadet.
There were two points in the trailer where we seemed to see a “black hole” – or at least a space phenomenon which greatly resembles one. First, we saw the Enterprise approaching one right at the beginning of the trailer, and later, we saw one of the female characters – Uhura, perhaps, or La’an, I couldn’t really tell – flying towards a black hole-like phenomenon in a space suit. These clips are probably from the same episode (it would be kinda repetitive to re-use the same kind of CGI creation twice in one season), but at the same time, I felt that the scale of the black hole was different when you look at the two clips side-by-side.
Black holes in Star Trek have been a kind of magical macguffin in the past; a real-world scientific name that has been bent and twisted to fit the whims of generations of storytellers! But it will be interesting to see something like this up close again; my mind wanders back to Season 2 of Discovery, where the Talosians projected an imaginary black hole as a shield to hide their planet. I’m not saying a return to Talos IV is on the cards, of course. But there’s precedent for things not being entirely as they seem!
A black hole.
Kirk and Spock – who’ve been building up a friendship across several episodes now – seem to get another turn in the spotlight. Their hug – or rather, Kirk’s hugging of Spock – seems to indicate that this friendship is progressing even more, bringing both characters closer to how we remember them from The Original Series. Strange New Worlds has already done a lot to lay the groundwork for this relationship, so I don’t think we need to go overboard with this younger version of Kirk. One storyline with Spock should be all it takes, as Strange New Worlds enters the latter part of its run, to get Kirk exactly where he needs to be.
Speaking of Kirk, I hope we’ll get to see him with other characters this time around, too. Season 3’s “backdoor pilot” for the Year One spin-off saw Kirk meeting Chapel, Scotty and Uhura, as well as Spock, and Kirk also got a B-plot with Scotty in the comedy episode Four-and-a-Half Vulcans later in the season, so there’s plenty of room to build up some of those relationships a little more. Perhaps it’s because I’m beginning to feel a little burned out on this version of Spock (after so many “Spock comedy” and “Spock relationship drama” stories), but I’d quite like to see Kirk teamed up with other characters this time around… at least for some of the time.
Things are about to get… Spirky.
One of the CGI clips showed a planet (or moon, I guess) being destroyed in a way that felt eerily similar to Star Trek 2009′s destruction of Vulcan. I don’t think we’re going to get things like Red Matter or the Kelvin timeline in Season 4, of course, but there’s gotta be an explanation for this destroyed planet… and the advanced-looking starship of unfamiliar design seen in orbit as it blew up.
Pike’s voiceover, which carried through the first part of the trailer, was interesting. At first, I thought it sounded like it could be one of the captain’s typical inspirational speeches… but now I’m not so sure. Could Pike’s words – if they’re taken from the season and weren’t written for the trailer itself – actually be a eulogy? Think about it: Pike starts by reading what seems like a quotation about exploration, and specifically the *dangers* posed by exploration, then goes on to say that “space is limitless in its beauty… and in its terror.” He concludes with the line “sometimes, things still don’t work out the way we’d hoped.” Could he be speaking to his crew after someone’s death? Could this speech be a eulogy delivered at a wake or a funeral? Combined with La’an’s line about how “any of these missions could be our last,” I think we’ve got at least enough evidence to posit a theory!
“Any of these missions could be our last.”
Then there’s Kirk’s scream as turbolift doors are closed. What’s happening on the other side of those doors, behind the camera? Is Kirk… leaving someone behind? It could be Spock, of course – perhaps Spock is saving Kirk’s life or putting himself in danger in some way, and that could be what leads to the hug and the strong bond the trailer is hinting at. Or… this could be another piece of the puzzle hinting at a main character’s death, perhaps a death involving self-sacrifice to save their comrades.
Okay, I’ll drop the “death” angle for now. But that was a big part of the tone and presentation of this trailer, in my opinion, and while of course it could be the case that the trailer was deliberately cut this way to generate interest, excitement, and trepidation… somehow, some way, by the end of next season, Strange New Worlds will have to explain what’s coming next for its main characters. Why, as of The Original Series and Kirk’s tenure in the captain’s chair, were the likes of Ortegas, Una, La’an, and Pelia no longer serving aboard the Enterprise? They could be promoted, transferred, demoted, arrested… any of that. Or… one or more of them could be killed in action.
Three characters who may not survive to the end of the series…
A few final thoughts, then, before we wrap this up. The cliff or canyon, with flying creatures, would seem to be taken from the same episode as the T. Rex; I read those flying animals as being pterodactyls, or similar winged dinosaurs. The shot of the canyon was pretty, though, and I liked that it seems to be a unique location rather than a re-used outdoor filming site. The same can’t be said, though, for the away mission to the crystal cave, which looks like it might’ve been filmed at the quarry near Toronto that has been seen quite a few times since Discovery premiered.
Speaking of familiar locales… was the moment with Pike and Una being fired at taking place in a similar complex to last season’s Vezda prison? The dark stone, the angles of the plinths… it kinda looked like that to me. Again, that could be a coincidence (or a consequence of recycling sets), but it could also indicate that the Vezda storyline hasn’t been entirely wrapped up. I hope that isn’t the case; it would make Captain Batel’s sacrifice feel a lot worse if the enemy she gave her life to stop came back just a few episodes later! But that very brief clip definitely reminded me of last season and the Vezda prison.
Does this location feel familiar to anyone else?
We saw a brief shot of characters on horseback; Pike is known to be an equestrian, but we haven’t seen him in the saddle since Season 1. It would be neat to get another sequence of Pike on horseback, and perhaps see him introducing some of his shipmates to the joys of riding. The next clip seemed to show an all-female away team, comprised of Una, La’an, and Ortegas, which was interesting. We can also briefly see a shuttle in the background, which could suggest that Ortegas gets another chance to show off her piloting skills.
The alien ship seen in orbit of the destroyed planet seems to have some kind of energy field or weapon which we briefly saw encroaching on the Enterprise; will this be another “they just wanted to communicate!!1!” story, or could we be seeing the introduction of a new villain? I didn’t recognise this ship, and the blue colour used for its engines and weapons is also not something we’ve seen a lot of in Star Trek before. While I think it’s fun to welcome back alien races and villainous factions from the past, it’s also interesting – and healthy for the long-term prospects of Star Trek – to introduce new ones. As with characters, striking a balance between new and returning alien races is important.
The Enterprise being attacked(?) by the alien ship.
So I think that’s everything for now. I wanted to take a look at the trailer, even though I’ve been absent and not really posting much over the last few weeks. I guess Starfleet Academy’s cancellation – and the realisation that this era of Star Trek really is winding down – kinda hit me harder than I expected, and while my website has never been *only* about Star Trek, that news has kinda sapped some of my enthusiasm for writing about the franchise – or writing in general, I guess. So… sorry about that. I’ll try to get back into the swing of things over the next little while.
This trailer did what it needed to do. It piqued my curiosity and got me a little more excited for the upcoming season. I wouldn’t necessarily have rushed Season 4 out the door this summer (and TV shows tend to perform worse in the summer months, which is another great reason to wait), but now that we have a confirmed date of the 23rd of July, I promise to be here with individual episode reviews! So I really hope that you’ll join me for those in what we can officially say is “just a couple of months’ time!”
Dinosaurs, black holes, and Spirk. Oh my.
Until next time… and Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 will premiere on Paramount+ on the 23rd of July 2026. Seasons 1-3 are available to stream on Paramount+ now, and are also available on DVD/Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties discussed above – remains the copyright of the Paramount Skydance Corporation. Some still frames used in this article were edited using A.I. tools to remove logos and watermarks. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware spoilers for the following Star Trek productions: Discovery, Picard, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy.
Although it was predictable, unfortunately, that a third season renewal would be a bridge too far for Starfleet Academy, the timing of that announcement still felt pretty brutal. It came just days after the Season 1 finale, perhaps a year or eighteen months away from Season 2’s arrival, and in the middle of a fairly muted 60th anniversary year to boot. But the news did get me thinking about what Star Trek might look like in the future, now that all of the CBS All Access/Paramount+ shows are being wound down. And also… it got me thinking about what I’d like Star Trek to look like, too.
I said a couple of weeks ago that Starfleet Academy was the “final pillar of streaming Trek;” i.e. the last surviving show of the franchise’s modern incarnation. That pillar is now set to fall, so it means we have to look to the future.
The USS Athena in Starfleet Academy.
As an aside, a fan petition or campaign, however creditable its numbers may be, will undoubtedly not save Starfleet Academy. Star Trek has a long, well-established history of fan campaigns, with the most famous still being the one that got The Original Series renewed for its third season. But the new Skydance-Paramount corporate entity is a completely different beast, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that Starfleet Academy had been “de facto cancelled” before it had even premiered. The new leadership team came in, intent on taking Star Trek in a different direction, but still committed to the shows currently in production. Starfleet Academy was too far along to officially cancel – and announcing a cancellation before the show’s premiere would’ve been idiotic, even by the standards of the old Paramount corporation. So Season 1 went ahead as planned.
I also feel ever more sure that Alex Kurtzman – who’s been in charge of the franchise for eight years – is on the way out. Whatever other ideas he and his team may have had – like Tawny Newsome’s “workplace comedy” show, for instance – seem unlikely to see the light of day.
Alex Kurtzman (right) with Bella Shepard during production on Starfleet Academy.
So that leaves us with two questions: what does this new Skydance-Paramount intend to do with Star Trek? And in an ideal world, what would I like to see happen to this storied franchise?
The first question’s the easy one, at least right now: they’re going to make at least one feature film. That’s, uh, it. At least as far as we know right now, when Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy wrap up, there’ll be at least one new film hitting the big screen. And if it makes waves and picks up a lot of traction, maybe there’ll be a sequel or a spin-off. But it certainly seems, as of mid-2026 anyway, that Skydance plans to make Star Trek a cinematic franchise – and an occasional one at that.
Star Trek is headed back to the cinema.
There is an additional complication, though – one which could, perhaps, see Star Trek on the small screen granted a reprieve sooner than we might expect. After buying out Paramount just last year (and incurring a ton of debt in the process), Skydance is now set on doing the same thing again. This time, their target is Warner Bros./Discovery, which owns the likes of CNN, HBO, Cartoon Network, and more. Brands and franchises like Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and the cinematic adaptation of The Lord of The Rings all come under that corporate umbrella.
This new buyout – assuming it will be completed (which is a big assumption at this stage!) – will leave the new Skydance-Paramount-Warner Bros. corporation in a mountain of debt. And yes, films at the cinema will be part of the new entity’s strategy to pay back its investors. But so will streaming and TV. And if there’s any hope for Star Trek coming back to the small screen in the years ahead, I think it’s gotta be there. At least, that’s how it feels right now.
Skydance-Paramount is making a bid to buy Warner Bros.-Discovery.
Star Trek has told some fun stories at the cinema. I enjoy basically all of the Star Trek films on some level – even so-called “lesser” offerings like The Final Frontier or Insurrection. But, for me, Star Trek has always been more at home on the small screen, which is why Discovery’s premiere nine years ago felt like a true homecoming.
One of the lessons that I *hope* the new Skydance-Paramount team has learned is that Star Trek can’t just be blended up and poured into a typical streaming TV mould. This franchise – arguably more than any other, at least in the sci-fi space – *needs* the freedom that episodic storytelling brings, and trying to chop and change Star Trek to fit in with other modern streaming shows simply hasn’t allowed it to shine. That isn’t to say there haven’t been some wonderful stories over the past nine years, because there absolutely have been. But at its core, Star Trek is about exploring, right? It’s about seeking out new life and new civilisations… and that means that the crews of your starships have to be free to warp away to a new planet, a new star system, and a new adventure pretty much every week.
The Starfleet Academy cadets.
That, for me, is what modern Star Trek has been missing more often than not. Discovery, Picard, and, to an extent, Prodigy and Starfleet Academy, too, went for season-long serialised arcs, with big villains, unfolding mysteries, and characters who grow and evolve over the course of a single story. But that isn’t really what Star Trek ever was, if you look back. There were serialised seasons, especially in DS9 and Enterprise, sure. But even those seasons still had those episodic elements, or else took diversions along the way to visit different places and keep Star Trek’s core theme of exploration in the picture.
I’ve said multiple times here on the website that Star Trek, like any long-running project, has to be adaptable and must be able to change with the times. Doubling-down on what used to work thirty or sixty years ago is not necessarily going to cut it in a transformed media landscape. And I stand by that; as much as some of us fans might want to see it, a return to the exact style of The Next Generation era is off the table.
Star Trek can’t just fall back on repeating what it’s already done.
But I find myself also being of the opinion that there can be too much change, too much attempted modernisation, and too much of an emphasis on copying what’s working for someone else. That’s led to multiple seasons of live-action Star Trek over the past few years that not only feel samey and repetitive when compared to each other, but which have also failed to establish a firm identity for the franchise. What *is* Star Trek to a new viewer? What does Star Trek look like to someone who’s tuning in for the first time? If all you’ve seen of Star Trek is Discovery or Starfleet Academy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this franchise is just… more of the same. It’s no different from the Star Wars shows on Disney+, or countless other modern sci-fi and fantasy offerings from other networks. There’s nothing unique about Star Trek any more… nothing to make it stand out in a crowded marketplace.
And that’s what Star Trek will need to do in the future: stand out. If the streaming landscape continues to be dominated by short, six- or eight-episode fully-serialised seasons, let’s make Star Trek shows longer and more episodic. If big, over-the-top baddies are still the name of the game, step away from those kinds of characters. In fact, use violence sparingly, and focus on stories with scientific and engineering puzzles rather than mindless action and phaser fights. That kind of thing, I believe, is what could give a future Star Trek show enough of a unique hook to appeal to viewers. As audiences begin to tire of some of these streaming programmes, things will undoubtedly change – and Star Trek could, with the right timing, be on the crest of the wave, or even *lead* a trend away from TV shows that are akin to “ten-hour movies.”
Sir Patrick Stewart (pictured) famously described Star Trek: Picard as a “ten-hour movie.”
That doesn’t mean a new Star Trek show can’t have *any* modern features. I think retaining character growth or even giving characters season-long arcs which play out across multiple stories can work exceptionally well. And I’m also not advocating for a return to low-budget “bottle shows” every other episode. Quite a bit of so-called “classic Star Trek” is filler, if you think about it; unremarkable episodes which exist solely to pad out a season and make the mandatory twenty-two or twenty-six episode limit. We don’t need more Shades of Gray, thank you very much!
If you’re already thinking of three words, then you and I are on the same page, because the kind of show I’m describing is… Strange New Worlds. That show, for me, is the model that any and all future Star Trek pitches should be based around. You’ve got an episodic adventure set on a moving starship. You warp away to a new planet and a new story every week. But within that framework, you have characters who develop, grow, and change, and who retain things that happened to them last week in this week’s adventure.
Sitting on the sofa to watch Strange New Worlds…
For me, Strange New Worlds has been the absolute highlight of modern Star Trek for this exact reason. By reverting to an older, more episodic style, the show has been able to explore more aliens, more planets, and more of the Star Trek galaxy as a whole than any of its contemporaries. And it’s also been a beautifully diverse series, with episodes in a variety of genres: the horror and war tones of the Gorn conflict, comedy and drama with Spock and Chapel, a zombie episode… and even a musical. Strange New Worlds really has tried to do it all! Not every story worked or was to my taste, sure… but I appreciate the commitment to trying new things and keeping that episodic style throughout.
That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m asking for “more Strange New Worlds,” or the “Year One” idea that’s been floated around. Strange New Worlds has been cancelled, and for my money, Year One isn’t the direction I’d go. But what I *am* saying is that the show’s core model – episodic storytelling with character growth – is what any future Star Trek show should look to adopt.
Concept art for The Motion Picture showing the USS Enterprise in drydock.
Whether it will happen, though… who’s to say? Star Trek has been cancelled before and found a way back, so I don’t think Starfleet Academy’s finale will be the last we’ll ever see of it. And with corporate shenanigans afoot, it may not be long before Sky-Mount-Bros.-Max decides it *needs* a new Star Trek show to win subscribers or viewers and pay down its debt. But whether Star Trek will take the kind of form I’m advocating for here… I’m not so sure, unfortunately. I’d love to see it happen; I’d love nothing more than to get the kind of exploration-focused, episodic adventure that used to be the franchise’s bread and butter. But in 2026, the entertainment landscape has definitely moved away from TV shows like that. And I have to accept that there may not be a way back.
If you made it to the end, thanks for reading. I hope this has been interesting. As I said, Starfleet Academy’s cancellation prompted this conversation and got me thinking about what Star Trek could or should look like in the future.
All I can really say is this: I hope we aren’t coming to the end of the line, and that Skydance’s warm words about Star Trek over the past months and years are genuine. We are heading into uncharted waters, in a way, with takeovers, mergers, and the streaming wars. Star Trek’s future is unclear right now… but it’s my sincere hope that there will be a future beyond the announced feature film and the end of the 2020s.
Most Star Trek films and TV shows discussed above can be streamed now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including all films, TV programmes, and other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of minor spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1.
Mere days after the finale of Season 1, and with Season 2 still in post-production, news has leaked that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been cancelled. I won’t lie: this was something I expected we’d hear either this year or next year at the very latest, but there’s something about the timing that feels… well, pretty brutal.
The newly-formed Skydance/Paramount corporation seems to be making it clear that a line is being drawn under Star Trek’s current streaming era. That was pretty obvious, I argued, when Discovery and Strange New Worlds were cancelled – the latter coming before the show had even aired a single episode of its *third* season, with two more still to come after that. Star Trek’s new corporate overlords clearly intend to take the franchise in a very different direction, and Starfleet Academy was the last vestige of the old regime. That final pillar of “streaming Trek” has now fallen.
Variety broke the news. Image: Variety.com
I’m still assuming, at this stage, that Season 2 will actually be completed and broadcast. Filming wrapped last month, and while there’s still a lot of work to do in the editing suite, it would be foolish to scrap the entire project. So Starfleet Academy fans can, at least, take solace in the fact that we’re only halfway through the show; ten more episodes should air sometime next year or in 2028.
I don’t really wanna keep repeating the phrase “end of an era;” it was something I said last year when Strange New Worlds got the axe, and when Discovery and Lower Decks wrapped up, too. But with Starfleet Academy being treated so brutally by Paramount, it’s hard to know what else to say. This is definitely calling to mind Enterprise’s 2005 cancellation – with the only difference, really, being that a new feature film is allegedly in the works, a consolation prize we didn’t have back then.
Does anyone else feel echoes of 2005?
If you’re a regular reader, you may recall that Starfleet Academy’s cancellation was something I predicted for 2026 back in January. I’m not taking a victory lap – the show may not have been “my thing,” but I went into it with an open mind, and I truly hoped it would find a way to connect with its intended target audience. Low streaming numbers throughout Season 1, however, seem to confirm that that simply didn’t happen. I said back in January that it would take a real miracle to convince this new incarnation of Paramount to stick with the show beyond Season 2 – going viral and becoming a must-watch sensation, like Stranger Things or Wednesday, perhaps, might’ve been enough to guarantee a renewal. But even doing reasonably well probably wouldn’t have been enough. I just got that impression from Paramount’s new ownership.
But, regrettably, Starfleet Academy didn’t even manage “good but not great” streaming numbers. It never cracked the top ten in the United States or here in the UK, even in a relatively easy TV window where there wasn’t a ton of big-budget competition. Shows like Fallout, The Pitt, and even preschool cartoon Bluey were performing well ahead of Starfleet Academy during its first season. Cancellation seemed inevitable, I’m sorry to say.
A pair of cadets in happier times.
But the timing… it feels brutal, as I said, but also a little insulting to the cast and crew. Paramount will still expect Holly Hunter and her co-stars to go out on the interview circuit, promoting Season 2 next year or the year after. And we’re barely ten days out from the end of Season 1. I get why the decision was made – if a show isn’t performing very well, and a new corporate team wants to reorganise the studio’s big brands and franchises, it makes sense. But even so, you’d think a bit of a grace period could’ve been given, timing-wise. There’s now practically no chance of the show picking up any extra attention from fans who missed it over the past couple of months. What would be the point, after all, in getting invested in a series which has already been cancelled?
With Starfleet Academy’s cancellation, there’s now officially no new Star Trek in production on the small screen. Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy’s second season remain in post-production, so there’ll be new Star Trek on our screens later in 2026 and into 2027. But then, after that? All we have to focus on, barring any shocking announcements, is Skydance’s new feature film. Although this was expected, and despite Starfleet Academy not really being “my thing,” I gotta be honest: this news still stings.
Showrunner and director Alex Kurtzman on set.
However, as I said a couple of weeks ago, there are some potential benefits for a long-running franchise like Star Trek taking a break or going on hiatus for a while. The previous incarnation of ViacomCBS and Paramount threw *a lot* of Star Trek at us over the past few years… in a pretty incoherent and poorly-managed way a lot of the time. There’s something to be said for a new team coming in, wiping the slate clean, and taking a moment so we can all catch our breath. And if the current creative/production team has taken Star Trek as far as it reasonably could, there’s also a lot to be said for new folks taking the reins. Most of the Star Trek shows since Discovery have shared writers, directors, producers, and more behind-the-scenes folks, so giving new people an opportunity to work on the franchise should – in my opinion, naturally – be a positive thing.
No serious Trekkie sat down to watch Starfleet Academy hoping they’d hate it or wanting it to fail. But I think a lot of us recognised that the show was probably coming along a little too late, after the previous Paramount corporation hadn’t handled Star Trek especially well. It would’ve taken something exceptionally special for Starfleet Academy to rise above all of that, and to do something that no project in the franchise’s streaming era *truly* managed to do to any great extent: connect with a new audience. It was a tall order, for sure, but making a show intentionally aimed at teens and young adults was far from the worst idea in the world. It’s just a shame, really, that Starfleet Academy launched when it did, and didn’t really get a chance to connect with potential new viewers.
Surely it’s not some kind of visual metaphor…
Many folks argue that Star Trek shows don’t really “get good” until their second seasons or beyond, so cancelling Starfleet Academy after just one season might seem like a poor decision in that sense. And I kind of see that point, at least to an extent. But if Season 1 just wasn’t finding much of an audience in the first place, not with older Star Trek fans nor with its intended new audience of younger folks, would sticking with it for a third or fourth season have really changed that? I guess we’ll never know, eh?
It’s a shame, and despite the fact that Starfleet Academy wasn’t really for me, I don’t celebrate its cancellation by any stretch. In fact, I lament it. I think it’s a real shame, barely nine years on from Star Trek’s triumphal return to the small screen, to be back here all over again. And despite the way things look right now, it’s my hope that, behind the scenes, there are folks at the new Skydance/Paramount corporation who are seriously considering where to take the franchise in the future. Films are great, and some of Star Trek’s most highly-regarded stories came at the cinema. But for this old Trekkie, Star Trek has always been a television show; a franchise best-suited for the small screen, where crews of explorers can warp away to a new planet, a new alien race, and a new adventure every week. Maybe one day… that kind of Star Trek will be back.
Four main cast members in a behind-the-scenes snap.
If you’re a huge Starfleet Academy fan, you have my sympathies today. This news may have seemed inevitable for a while, but it’s not something any of us wanted to see. And as for what it means for the future? I really don’t know, to be honest. I want to say I feel optimistic that, one day soon, Star Trek will be back! But today… doesn’t really feel like that kind of day, to tell the truth.
Thanks for reading. And, as always: Live Long and Prosper, friends.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Starfleet Academy and everything else discussed above – remains the copyright of Paramount/Skydance. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Discovery, and Prodigy.
I’d like to focus on one individual storyline from Starfleet Academy’s first season today – specifically from the episode The Life of the Stars. This was only one part of the episode, so if you want to get my thoughts on other aspects of The Life of the Stars, I have a brief review in my Starfleet Academy Season 1 episodes piece – click or tap here to check it out. And if you want to see what I thought of Starfleet Academy’s first season as a whole, check out my full review by clicking or tapping here.
We’re going to get into some serious spoiler territory today, so if you ignored my little spoiler warning above, consider this your last chance to nope out before I talk about storylines impacting not only Starfleet Academy, but also Voyager, Prodigy, and other parts of the Star Trek franchise, too.
Promo photo of the Doctor released ahead of Season 1’s premiere.
Today, we’re going to focus on the Doctor: Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram. The Doctor was a surprising inclusion in Starfleet Academy’s cast when the announcement was made a couple of years ago, but I genuinely thought it was a fun idea. I’d speculated for a long time that the Doctor – or perhaps a backup copy of him – could have survived to the 32nd Century, but we didn’t get to see him in Discovery. A teaching role sounded perfect for a being who’s now more than 800 years old; Robert Picardo, who plays the character, described this version of the Doctor as being akin to Yoda over in the Star Wars franchise! I thought that sounded like an apt comparison.
The Doctor appeared in almost all of Starfleet Academy’s episodes this season, but his role in The Life of the Stars was by far the biggest. This storyline explored the Doctor’s history, his family, his memories, and why he struggled to make a genuine connection with Sam – Starfleet Academy’s holographic cadet.
And… I really didn’t like what this storyline had to say, unfortunately.
Behind-the-scenes during production on The Life of the Stars.
Before we go any further, let me give my usual caveat: everything we’re discussing today is the *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one old Trekkie. If you disagree with me about the Doctor (or any other element of Starfleet Academy), if you think I’ve totally got the wrong end of the stick, or if our views don’t align… that’s okay. There’s enough room in the Star Trek fan community for differences of opinion and respectful disagreement, and I share my thoughts with you in that spirit. I’m not trying to say “I’m right and that’s that;” I’m well aware that other Trekkies may completely disagree – and that’s totally fine.
There are always going to be a range of opinions on works of art and media in general, and just because I personally didn’t like what this storyline had to say doesn’t mean other people won’t find it interesting or entertaining. The story was clearly written this way for a reason, so at least *someone* out there must’ve thought it was a good idea!
Robert Picardo (second-left), with several co-stars and the executive producers of Starfleet Academy in March 2026.
Finally, this is my second time criticising the way in which Starfleet Academy handled the legacy of a character from The Next Generation era. The show only did two storylines which really focused in on legacy characters, so for me to come away feeling that *both of them* weren’t enjoyable and I didn’t like what they said… that’s pretty disappointing, to be honest. It’ll go down as a real black mark against Starfleet Academy, at least in my book.
Starfleet Academy, in my view, already had several challenges to overcome: its teen/young adult focus, its serialised storytelling, its unimpressive villain, and the simple fact that it’s the sixth new Star Trek series to come along in just nine years. Solid, well-written, enjoyable callbacks to Deep Space Nine and Voyager could’ve done a lot to boost the show’s prospects, at least for an old Trekkie like myself, and could’ve made it more entertaining and just more memorable. I didn’t want to be in this position of having to criticise two of the storylines that *should*, in a sense, have been just the kind of thing I’d have wanted or hoped to see in a series like this. But… here we are.
If you want to check out what I thought of Starfleet Academy’s connection to Captain Sisko and DS9, by the way, you can find that article by clicking or tapping here.
Series Acclimation Mil was also an episode I did not enjoy…
Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s set the scene. Cadet Sam – short for Series Acclimation Mil – is only a few days old, but she’s been programmed by her holographic race to have the maturity and appearance of an Academy-aged individual. The Life of the Stars follows on from Sam’s role in the episode Series Acclimation Mil, in which we learned why her people wanted to create her and send her to the Academy in the first place.
Sam had been injured (or “damaged,” I guess) a couple of episodes earlier in Come, Let’s Away, and her injuries progressed to such an extent that the Doctor couldn’t find a treatment. The Doctor and Captain Ake agreed to take Sam back to her homeworld, Kasq, where there was hope that Sam could be repaired. There were stakes not only for Sam herself, but also for Kasq’s potential to come out of isolation and to spend more time with organic life-forms. Sam’s mission, at the end of the day, was to better understand organic life and convey that understanding to her makers.
Sam’s injury.
And then we come to the Doctor.
The Doctor had been quite standoffish with Sam when they first met, back in the series premiere. When Sam tried to bring up the Doctor’s past life – the crews of the USS Voyager and Protostar – he quite quickly shut her down. I speculated that the Doctor could be struggling with having lived such a long life, and having seen potentially many generations of organic friends live and die. I said that, while I was glad the Doctor didn’t overwhelm Starfleet Academy in the show’s premiere, I was curious to see if that angle would be explored further.
The Life of the Stars was that explanation – after a fashion. It turns out that the Doctor was, as I theorised, struggling with life and loss… but not in the way I’d have thought or expected. Rather than mourning his friends from the USS Voyager or the cadets of the Protostar, the Doctor had, instead, spent close to eight centuries grieving for his holographic family from the Voyager Season 3 episode Real Life.
The Doctor with Belle, his holographic daughter, in Real Life.
According to The Life of the Stars, it wasn’t Janeway or Seven of Nine that the Doctor missed and lamented outliving. It wasn’t lil’ Harry Kim, the fresh-faced ensign who was one of the first people the Doctor ever met. Nor was it Dal, Gwyndala, or Rok-Tahk, the young kids he came to know – and perhaps the first cadets he ever really “mentored.” The Doctor, according to this story, loved none of them as much as his holographic family from Real Life, and it was the simulated “death” of his holographic daughter in particular that caused him to become withdrawn and unwilling to risk loving anyone ever again.
What the actual fuck?
Let’s talk about holograms, as defined by Star Trek – and specifically, what their capabilities were in the 24th Century. The Next Generation was the first series to introduce holograms, and according to that show, as well as to Deep Space Nine and Voyager, practically all holograms at that time *were not sentient*. They’re characters in a story, computer programmes, pieces of code. Their lack of sentience is such an important point that holograms which become genuinely self-aware were almost always treated as unique, special, or even dangerous, in some cases.
The Doctor with the cadets in Prodigy Season 2.
The first sentient hologram we met in Star Trek was Professor Moriarty, in Elementary, Dear Data. He was inadvertently created by the Enterprise-D’s computer following a misunderstanding, and seemed – at that time, anyway – to be the only sentient holoprogramme in existence. The next self-aware hologram is arguably the EMH programme – i.e. the Doctor’s original programme. And then we come to the likes of Vic Fontaine. But in between we saw countless examples of holograms that were basically – to use some modern lingo – akin to video game NPCs.
This is how we get away with stories like Hollow Pursuits, which saw Barclay recreating members of the Enterprise-D crew on the holodeck as part of his escapist power fantasy. Or the countless references to holosuites at Quark’s being used for… adult activities. Or holograms created entirely for the purposes of being killed in training simulations. The list goes on.
Are these holograms “alive,” too?
What The Life of the Stars is effectively saying, in my opinion, is that the Doctor spent hundreds of years of his life refusing to get too close to anyone ever again because… he had a particularly emotional reaction to a character from a video game. It would be like if you or I refused to get married or have kids because “this one time, my family in The Sims all died, and it made me really sad… I don’t think I could put myself through that again.” Do you get my point? These holograms are, according to everything we know about Star Trek, holodecks, and the 24th Century, not sentient, not self-aware, and not… alive. At least, not by any conventional definition.
I don’t want to downplay the power of entertainment to evoke strong emotions. Heck, I run a website all about films, games, TV shows, and the Star Trek franchise. I can’t even count the number of incredible titles – interactive and non-interactive – that have given me “the feels.” Just the other day, I talked about the intense bittersweet feelings of nostalgia that I got from a single twenty-minute episode of an anime. So I’m not calling out Starfleet Academy because the writers wanted to show the Doctor having a reaction to a holoprogramme that he participated in. If that was the intention of the story, and if it was handled differently, I might’ve been willing to praise an interesting take on the power of interactive media. But that wasn’t the intention, and it’s not the way it comes across.
Robert Picardo, who plays the Doctor.
I’m afraid I have to come to the conclusion that one of the episode’s writers (two writers are credited, but Starfleet Academy also had a writers’ room, I believe) just didn’t understand how holograms worked in past iterations of Star Trek. They looked at their character, Sam, and they looked at the Doctor – two sentient, self-aware, alive holograms – and concluded that *all* holograms must be like that. Even though, during TNG, DS9, and Voyager, sentience was the exception, not the norm. And the result is a massively confused storyline that seriously harms the Doctor’s characterisation.
The sad thing is that this exact same storyline, had it adopted one of two possible changes, could have been one of the best of the entire season. In a season which, in my view, was drowned out by a silly, hammy villain and a little too much teen/young adult drama, a story about an older man coming to terms with loss, grief, and what it means to outlive the people you love… that could’ve been incredibly powerful. I’ve lost people close to me – friends as well as close family – and getting a storyline that touched on that, on what it means to be the one left behind… I really think there’s a lot of potential there, and the Doctor’s unique status and age presented a golden opportunity.
But Starfleet Academy’s writers pissed it away on a story they clearly thought was clever… but that completely misunderstands a very basic piece of the franchise’s history.
The Doctor, along with Sam and Captain Ake, arrives at Kasq.
I am not, despite how parts of this piece may be coming across, a stickler for “the tiniest minutiae of canon.” If holograms were relatively new to Star Trek, or if Real Life had been one of the only episodes in The Next Generation era to feature holograms, I’d have been willing to accept this as a bit of a retcon; a change, but one that could lead somewhere narratively interesting. But I believe that there are a few fundamental building blocks to writing a coherent story in a long-running franchise, and one of those is basic internal consistency. It’s been established on dozens, or perhaps even hundreds, of occasions across TNG, DS9, Voyager and beyond that most holograms – like those in Real Life – are not alive and are not sentient. So new writers have to be bound by that; making an arbitrary change to it this late in the game is not something I can accept.
The consequences of such a change ricochet across the entire 24th Century, if that’s the case. It makes B’Elanna into a murderer, first and foremost, since she reprogrammed the Doctor’s idealistic family life in such a way that his daughter died. It makes a lot of other characters into killers, into sex pests, and more… and while I really like the idea of using the holodeck as a way to critique things like fantasising excessively, relying too much on the computer, or – in the modern day – as an analogy for A.I. chat bots, perhaps… that isn’t how this story was intended, and it doesn’t come across that way, either.
The Doctor remembers his holographic daughter.
There were, as I mentioned, two ways to salvage this story, so let’s go over them in turn.
Firstly, rather than going back to Real Life and Voyager, The Life of the Stars could’ve simply introduced new holographic characters to fill that role. Let’s say that, sometime in the 25th Century, the Doctor settled down with his holographic husband or wife. But, because of some technobabble, his partner or one of his holographic offspring ended up being damaged beyond repair and couldn’t be reset or saved. This could even be tied to the Burn – the massive, galaxy-altering event that underpins Starfleet Academy’s 32nd Century setting.
That gets us to the exact same narrative place, but in a way that makes it clear that the Doctor is grieving someone who was actually alive to begin with. It wouldn’t have the same connection to Voyager, but I mean… is Real Life an especially memorable episode for a lot of folks? I don’t think that one random deep cut to a single episode would’ve been as effective as the writers hoped, even without this glaring narrative fault.
The Doctor gets emotional.
Secondly, there’s the more obvious solution: the Doctor finds it difficult to accept friendships of any kind because of the toll outliving so many friends has taken on him.
This kind of story could see the Doctor lamenting the deaths of people like Chakotay, Harry Kim, or Seven of Nine. It might’ve even been possible to bring back one of those characters for a brief scene – perhaps their funeral or even their deathbed. The Doctor gained sentience and self-awareness around these people; they were the first friends he ever knew, and they had his back on multiple occasions when he was in jeopardy, when he was distressed, or just when he needed to talk. Seeing him grieve for Captain Janeway or Tuvok, remarking that it’s a terrible tragedy to outlive all of one’s friends… that could’ve been incredibly powerful.
And then, to hammer it home, the Doctor would explain that this didn’t just happen once… but over and over again. Generations of organic friends came and went, and he remembers – and mourns – all of them. But after the Burn, perhaps the Doctor felt he’d lost too much, and for his own mental health and wellbeing he needed to start keeping things professional. He keeps Sam (and others) at arm’s length not because he misses his video game family from one random episode… but because he’s grieving the loss of countless friends across eight centuries.
The Doctor’s sense of loss and grief could’ve connected back to Voyager in another way.
Maybe the writers thought that was “too obvious,” and wanted to be a bit subversive. Unless we get them on the record, I guess we’ll never know for sure. But I think that kind of story would’ve got the Doctor to the same place with the same mindset, ready to have that experience on Kasq with Sam, but in a much more powerful, emotional, and enjoyable way – and a way that makes narrative sense based on our understanding of holograms in past iterations of Star Trek.
As I’ve said before on quite a few occasions with modern Star Trek: it isn’t that the core idea was bad, but the way it was executed just… fucked it up. A story about the Doctor coming to terms with grief and having to make the incredibly brave decision to put his heart on the line one more time to save the life of a child? That’s powerful stuff. But because of the way it was handled, and the decision to make the root cause of his grief these one-dimensional characters from the 24th Century equivalent of a video game? It ruined it, and it turned what should’ve been one of the best storylines of the entire season into one of the worst.
Robert Picardo (right) with director Larry Teng on the set of Series Acclimation Mil earlier in the season.
I was excited when Robert Picardo announced that the Doctor was coming back. And I wondered what might lie in store – this is a character I first fell in love with some thirty years ago, so to see him back in a totally different century for a new adventure… I was on board! I just wish that the end result hadn’t misunderstood something so basic about Star Trek, and that the Doctor’s one real moment in the spotlight could’ve been stronger and more enjoyable. When I can see not one but *two* clear and obvious narrative pathways that could’ve made it happen… it’s an unforgivable mistake, in my view.
Starfleet Academy, as I said in my review, wasn’t really “my thing.” But if there was one storyline that could’ve been more my speed, or that might’ve had something to say that resonated with me, it was this one. And I think that’s why I feel this disappointment all the more – it’s not just what it says about the Doctor, and how he apparently spent centuries sulking over the equivalent of his save file in The Sims. It isn’t even what it says about B’Elanna or other characters who used or reprogrammed holograms for selfish reasons across the TNG era. It’s because it feels like, after Starfleet Academy had already messed up its Sisko story, this was really one of the only storylines I might’ve found relatable or enjoyable. But because the writers – again, in my opinion – didn’t understand or didn’t know enough about holograms… it comes across as completely missing the point, and missing the point so severely that it harms my opinion of the Doctor himself.
Sam with the Doctor during her second life.
So there we go. That’s my take on the Doctor’s role in The Life of the Stars and what this new information says about his character.
I would say, to the story’s credit, that there were some creative ideas. Kasq existing in a different “plane of existence” felt like a bit of a cop-out; a way to ensure the Doctor and Sam wouldn’t need to take too long to re-grow and get back to normal. But the visuals of Kasq were creative, I liked the ultimate explanation for Sam’s breakdown being mental, rather than physical, and the episode’s attempted message about looking after one’s mental health is arguably executed far better than in comparable stories in Discovery or Picard. So it isn’t that the episode as a whole as no merit; this side of the story, though, completely failed for me.
I hope this has been interesting, and I hope I didn’t come across as too harsh or aggressive. Star Trek is something I’m passionate about and have been for a long time, and as someone who watched and enjoyed Voyager during its original run, bringing the Doctor back felt like a great idea in this latest adventure. I just wish it had been handled better, and that a different reason for the Doctor’s grief and reluctance to help could’ve been written. We came close – *this close* – to one of the best parts of the entire season.
The Doctor and the cadets at the end of the episode.
Thanks for reading. Despite my feelings about Starfleet Academy as a whole, and this storyline, I can tell you that I genuinely gave the series a fair shake. I always expected it wouldn’t be my favourite part of the franchise – the whole teen/young adult focus, of course, but also the serialised story and the villain with an over-the-top magical macguffin all saw to that. But despite that, I really tried to let Starfleet Academy speak for itself, and to go into the show with an open mind.
This essay concludes my coverage of Starfleet Academy for the foreseeable future. Obviously, if we get major news about Season 2, a third season renewal, or any kind of teasers, clips, or trailers, I’ll do my best to cover that here on the website. But for now… that’s all. I’ve finally said all I wanted to say about the show’s first season.
If you missed them, please check out my reviews of the two-part premiere, the first season as a whole, and episodes 3-10. You can find them by clicking or tapping those links. And as the 60th anniversary year rolls along, I’ll have more to say about Star Trek, so be sure to check back from time to time. Thanks again for reading, and Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Starfleet Academy and everything else discussed above – remains the copyright of Paramount/Skydance. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for practically the entire Star Trek franchise, including recent seasons of Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy.
Later this year, Star Trek will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary – that’s six decades of sci-fi adventures, space exploration, and a wonderful fan community that I absolutely adore! Today, I thought it could be a bit of fun to look at some of the Trekkie community’s so-called “unpopular opinions” about Star Trek. If you read my piece about fan theories a few weeks back, I’m going to do something similar this time around: I’ve compiled a bunch of “unpopular opinions” from across social media, and I’m going to dissect them!
I went to Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, and other social media pages, scanning posts and comments sections, and I pulled out twenty-five “unpopular opinions” for this piece. And rather than just state them and share my opinion, I thought it could be interesting to try to answer two questions! Firstly, I’ll share whether I agree or disagree. And secondly, I’ll try to gauge whether the opinion in question could fairly be described as “unpopular.”
I scanned social media to detect your most controversial opinions…
Here’s a couple of examples so we’re all on the same page!
Example #1: “Khan sucks as a villain because he’s lame and boring, and his evil scheme makes no sense.”
I would say I disagree (vehemently) with this opinion! But I would concede that it is a genuinely *unpopular* opinion within the fan community and with a wider audience. In fact, it’s such an unpopular opinion that I’ve never seen anyone genuinely express it!
Khaaaaaan!
Example #2: “Captain Picard is the best Enterprise captain, better than Kirk or Archer or anyone else by miles.”
This one’s a toughie on the “agree/disagree” bit, because Kirk, Archer, and really every Star Trek captain across the franchise have plenty of their own strengths. But if I had to come down on one side or the other, I’d say I agree; Picard is a great captain. However, this is clearly not an “unpopular” opinion within the fandom – ask any group of Trekkies who their favourite captain is, and it won’t be long before you hear multiple people say “Picard!”
So… does that cover everything in terms of the format?
Who’s the best Enterprise captain?
It should go without saying, but everything we’re going to talk about today is *entirely subjective, not objective* – and it’s just one old Trekkie’s take, at the end of the day. If you hate my opinions, think I’ve got it completely wrong, or if I criticise a show or character you adore, please try to keep that in mind! There are a variety of opinions out there about this wonderful franchise, and I share mine with the Trekkie community in the spirit of light-hearted celebration in this landmark anniversary year.
Some of these “unpopular opinions” have clearly been shared in a tongue-in-cheek way (at least, I hope they have!) and I’m not planning on taking any of this too seriously. This also shouldn’t be interpreted as an “attack” or “hate” for any folks in the fandom who genuinely hold any of these opinions. This is meant to be a bit of fun, partly at Star Trek’s expense, as we move closer to the 60th anniversary.
With all of that out of the way, this is your final chance to nope out if you don’t want to get into some potentially controversial Star Trek opinions!
“Unpopular” Opinion #1: Threshold is a great body horror episode.
“Threshold” and “great” in the same sentence, eh? We’re starting off strong! I can see where this is coming from; Tom Paris’ gradual mutation into a salamander-like “hyper-evolved human” does have some genuinely disturbing moments, brought to life by some solid prosthetics during the sequences in sickbay. The idea of mutating in real-time, and not being able to do anything to stop it… that’s the same kind of idea behind classic body horror films like The Fly, only with a Star Trek flavour in this case.
I would say, though, that for whatever successes Threshold might have on the body horror front in the middle of the story, the ending really nullifies all of it. The CGI salamanders weren’t great to look at, nor were they frightening or disturbing in any way, and the typical episodic TV “reset” of Paris and Janeway back to their normal selves meant there were no lasting consequences for either of them. This comment is clearly a response to Threshold’s meme status, and I’m glad that Trekkies are willing to re-examine even the most disliked episodes! But for me, Threshold is still a weak story, and while there is some creative body horror-adjacent storytelling in the middle, it’s completely negated by the way the episode wraps up.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #2: Spock and Chapel’s romance is too big a part of Strange New Worlds – and it sucks.
100% agree on this one – no notes! Chapel’s “crush” on Spock in The Original Series was cute. But it wasn’t a huge part of the show for either of them, and it didn’t need this kind of on-again, off-again storyline in Strange New Worlds to make sense. In my opinion, Strange New Worlds has been way too focused on Spock and putting him in situations which, frankly, are toe-curlingly cringeworthy. The Chapel-Spock romance is part of that. I had hoped that, with the addition of Chapel’s fiancé, we’d have seen the back of this storyline – but alas.
I think I could’ve stomached an episode or two in which this relationship existed and ran its course. But I agree with the original poster, here: it’s become way too big a part of the show. When combined with other “Spock comedy” storylines (which seem to be the only Spock storylines the producers are interested in or know how to write), it quickly became too much. Cringeworthy, unnecessary, and arguably treading on the toes of The Original Series, too. A bad combination all around! And, based on the number of likes and comments on posts like this, I think it’s a fairly common take among Trekkies, too.
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #3: T’Rul should’ve become a recurring character on Deep Space Nine.
In The Search, which kicked off DS9′s third season, we’re introduced to the USS Defiant for the first time: the first Federation starship (officially) able to cloak. The cloaking device was loaned to Starfleet by the Romulans, and Sub-Commander T’Rul was the officer assigned to oversee it, and make sure it wasn’t being used in a way that violated Federation-Romulan treaties. However, after her first appearance, T’Rul disappeared from Deep Space Nine. Martha Hackett, who played the character, would go on to have a recurring role on Voyager as Seska.
I quite like this idea, to be honest. T’Rul would’ve added something different to DS9 during some of the episodes set aboard the Defiant, and it could’ve been fun to see a Romulan getting to know the crew and learning how to live with the Federation. There wasn’t a Romulan character like that through the entire TNG era, and it wouldn’t be until we met Elnor decades later that we’d get to spend more time with a Romulan. I can see plenty of stories where T’Rul could’ve played a role, and I especially like the idea of her trying to socialise with members of the crew, perhaps teaching us a bit about Romulan culture and customs along the way. Definitely a niche idea, though!
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #4: The first few episodes of Lower Decks were too “horny,” and this turned off potential viewers.
Assuming the original poster meant “horny” as in “overly sexualised,” I have to say I don’t agree. Not that the first episodes of Lower Decks had a lot more sexual imagery and language than TNG-era Star Trek – they absolutely did! But I disagree that the early episodes are unique in that regard! I’ve only seen up to the first part of Season 3; Lower Decks is still a show I need to catch up on and finish watching. But I didn’t feel the tone changed or softened very much across the first two-and-a-bit seasons – which is basically half of the show.
In the run-up to Lower Decks’ premiere, I was a firm advocate for the fact that Star Trek can be funny, that Star Trek has always been funny, and that being an animated comedy shouldn’t matter as long as the show is good. I think the general response from Trekkies has been that Lower Decks is a solid addition to the franchise, even recapturing that episodic, TNG style which Discovery and Picard had moved away from. But did some of its crude humour or over-the-top moments mean some Trekkies switched off? Probably. In fact, almost certainly. Not every Star Trek show is right for every viewer, so folks who want to take the franchise seriously, and who don’t want a Rick and Morty-inspired take on Star Trek were probably never going to enjoy what Lower Decks had to offer.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #5: Chekov was “useless” in The Original Series.
I think I can see where this one is coming from… but I really don’t agree. Chekov was a late addition to TOS, joining in from Season 2. He only appeared in 36 episodes in total – less than half of The Original Series. But… none of that makes him “useless.” In fact, I’d argue very passionately that Chekov’s presence on the bridge alongside Sulu, Kirk, Uhura, and the others was a very powerful and symbolic statement: at the height of the Cold War, a mere five years after the world almost blew itself up over the Cuban Missile Crisis, here was a vision of the future in which Russians, Americans, and humans from all over the world were living and working together in harmony.
Like most of the cast of The Original Series outside of “the big three” of Kirk, Spock, and Dr McCoy, Chekov got fewer moments in the spotlight and fewer lines, and because he joined the show later, I guess that shows up even more. He was also absent from The Animated Series, due to the show’s tight budget. But he does get storylines and interesting moments across practically all of his episodes, and he stands in for Sulu at points in Season 2, as well. Not useless at all!
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #6: Discovery is overrated.
I had to do a double-take when I saw this. “Surely,” I thought, “the original poster must’ve meant underrated, or maybe over-*hated*?” But no, this is their unpopular opinion! To be blunt, I don’t think Discovery is rated particularly highly by a large swathe of the fan community. It has its fans, of course – myself included for the most part. But “overrated” suggests that the show is held in high esteem when it shouldn’t be, when really I’d be arguing the opposite: that too many Trekkies wrote off Discovery without giving it a fair shake, and that Season 2, and parts of Seasons 3 through 5 all had good episodes, interesting moments, and more.
For something to be “overrated,” it has to have that acclaim within the fan community, and I just don’t see Discovery having that kind of reputation for the most part. I think it’s absolutely fair to criticise Discovery, as I’ve done on many occasions here on the website. And if the original commenter dislikes some or all of the show, then that’s okay. But I couldn’t say Discovery is overrated… because I just don’t think the fan community at large rates it very highly to begin with!
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #7: Captain Janeway did the right thing with Tuvix.
Tuvix’s controversial status lives on! One of the best things about Star Trek is that many episodes make you stop and think. They present complex issues with moral quandaries, and they don’t shy away from reckoning with them. And Tuvix is one such example. Do you kill a man you barely know while he’s pleading for his life in order to save two of your friends? Captain Janeway believed she had to, and even stepped in to do it herself when the Doctor refused.
I can understand her point of view. The mitigating circumstances are the unique perils of the Delta Quadrant, and Tuvok and Neelix’s skills in navigating it. But was it the “right” thing to do? The episode pulls no punches, and I’ve even heard some fans say it’s the worst thing Janeway ever did. I don’t agree on that front – wiping out an entire timeline and the lives of everyone in it has to take that prize! But yeah, it was a shitty thing to do. It was a tough situation, and Janeway made the call that she felt gave her ship and crew the best chance of making it home. And hey, if you disagree… play the new video game Across the Unknown and make a different choice!
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #8: Wesley Crusher is fine/underappreciated/good.
Things have changed a lot for Wesley over the years, I think in large part due to actor Wil Wheaton’s incredibly positive attitude and the great way he’s advocated for and represented the Trekkie community. But there was a time when Wesley was wildly unpopular; in the early days of Star Trek fansites, back when I was first getting started with the internet in the ’90s, hating on Wesley was one of the most common things you’d see. I never felt Wesley deserved all the hate he got; some of it crossed a line, really, into something a bit unpleasant or even sinister. We’re talking about a child, after all, or a teenager, and attacking a performer because you don’t like their character is just stupid.
However… I get where the original dislike stemmed from, especially in stories where Wesley could seemingly do no wrong, or was better and more competent than the trained officers around him. Partly, this came from Gene Roddenberry – Wesley was a bit of a self-insert character for Gene, even being named for Roddenberry’s own middle name. But Wesley did have weaknesses and flaws, even in The Next Generation’s first season. His inability to get accepted to the Academy being just one example. And when Wesley did make it to the Academy, the accident he was caught up in tested his loyalties and morality to the limit. Is he the best character in Star Trek? Arguably not. Is he better than folks give him credit for? I’ve gotta say yes.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #9: The reboot/Kelvin timeline Enterprise is a beautiful ship.
To this day, I know Trekkies who point-blank refuse to watch the Kelvin films. But… I think the out-and-out hate for the reboot has begun to fade, thanks to the passage of time. Practically everything about the 2009 reboot was controversial in some quarters of the fan community when the film was released, including the redesign of the USS Enterprise. The design took the original Constitution-class from TOS and changed a lot of things, with a different colour scheme, bulkier nacelles, a lit-up main deflector, and more. It’s certainly a different interpretation of the classic ship from four decades earlier.
I’m actually pleased to see opinions like this. There will always be holdouts – people who can’t get over the changes and who only want to stick to a certain design philosophy or a particular era of Star Trek. But as time passes and puts distance between us and the premiere of these designs, I think it’s nice to see more Trekkies revising their opinions, revisiting some of these elements of the reboot films, and coming away with a more positive impression. It gives me hope, quite honestly, for the future of the fan community in the years to come, and that some of today’s controversies may also be forgiven over time!
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #10: “Faith of the Heart” was a good song for Enterprise’s title sequence.
This is another example of the passage of time smoothing things out, I think! I remember hopping online, circa 2001, to try to download Faith of the Heart – and then burning it onto a CD and a MiniDisc (remember those?) so I could listen to it on the go! Sure, it was different – the whole sequence, really, is a very “2000s” way to open a show, and it feels a bit dated today. But I’ve always enjoyed the song, and I certainly never agreed with folks who said it “ruined Enterprise,” or turned them off so completely that they wouldn’t even watch the show!
“Archer’s Theme,” the music heard during Enterprise’s end credits, is the track some folks argue the show should’ve used instead. And I get wanting Star Trek to revert to type; to have the ship warping over a starry background while an orchestra plays a piece of music. But did “Faith of the Heart” really change much about the series? It’s still Star Trek. And if you hate it… well, it’s never been easier, thanks to DVDs and streaming, to skip it! That being said, I think this is still a minority position within the wider fan community, even if the song’s reputation has recovered somewhat over the years.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #11: Neelix and Kes were a good couple.
This one has to be trolling, right? I’d go so far as to say that, if Neelix’s relationship with Kes had been in focus in Voyager much more than it was, it could’ve been genuinely detrimental to both characters and even the entire series. As the setup for getting Neelix to help Janeway and ultimately join the crew, it tracks. But what it says about Neelix – a man in the Talaxian equivalent of middle age – falling in love with a girl who’s… one year old, and the Ocampan equivalent of, what? Seventeen or eighteen? It’s… really, truly icky.
Moreover, the relationship exaggerated some of Neelix’s worst qualities. In episodes like Parturition, we’d see him getting jealous and possessive over Kes in a way that, frankly, felt uncomfortable. A man who seems positive and happy-go-lucky on the outside seemed to have a dark, possessive, almost abusive streak, and if that had been brought up even once or twice more, it would make Neelix truly difficult to root for. Fortunately, this isn’t an opinion I’ve ever seen another Trekkie endorse, though!
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #12: Sybok was a fun and deep villain in Star Trek V.
The Final Frontier has its issues. But is Sybok one of them? This commenter argues he isn’t, and that a religious zealot who belatedly realises that he’s wrong and he’s been lied to or manipulated gave Sybok a lot of depth. I’d add to that that the idea of exploring a Vulcan offshoot – someone who doesn’t care to suppress his emotions – was also something different. It was certainly unique at this point in the franchise, coming before the Vulcans got more development in episodes like TNG’s Sarek, and of course, through storylines in Enterprise.
The problem I have with this, really, is not so much in concept – I think the original poster is right about that – but in execution. Sybok’s best moment is arguably his final one, when he sacrificed himself to help his brother and the Enterprise escape. Prior to that… Sybok wasn’t *outstanding*, really. There is more to The Final Frontier than some fans give it credit for. And like most Star Trek characters, really, there are elements to Sybok, to the way he’s written, and to the portrayal on screen that worked or that hold some interest. And I will say, to the original comment’s credit, it’s not an argument I’ve seen before.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #13: All of “Kurtzman Trek” sucks and should be considered a failure.
In the time Alex Kurtzman has been in charge of Star Trek for CBS, then Paramount, and now Skydance, there have been more than 200 episodes (and a TV movie) produced and broadcast. Are you telling me, original commenter, that there’s absolutely no merit to *any* of it? Because I find that hard to believe! Even Trekkies who’ve hated most of modern Star Trek have enjoyed some projects – Picard’s third season, or perhaps Strange New Worlds. Alex Kurtzman was in charge of the franchise for that, and was executive producer on both shows.
I don’t think you can write off an entire era of the franchise, any more than you could say “Berman Trek” was bad, or “Roddenberry Trek” sucked. But even if someone is of the opinion that *all* of modern Star Trek is atrocious and without merit… we can agree to disagree without getting into personal attacks. I hope! Has Alex Kurtzman got everything right? No – and I think he’d admit that. But has there been some fantastic Star Trek on our screens since he’s been helming the franchise? I believe there has been.
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #14: Voyager focused too much on Janeway, the Doctor, and Seven of Nine from Season 4 onwards.
I was surprised to see this on one of the “unpopular opinion” posts – not because I disagree (I don’t), but because I’ve never seen anyone else share this opinion online before! For me, the back half of Voyager’s run felt swamped by one character: Seven of Nine. Seven would apparently “learn” some lesson in how to be human one week, only to seemingly forget it all in time for the next story. This led to several Seven/Janeway and Seven/Doctor episodes being so awfully repetitive that I sometimes mix them up. Voyager’s still a great show, don’t get me wrong, but taking some spotlight episodes away from Seven and redistributing them to neglected characters like Chakotay, Tuvok, or B’Elanna wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Picard rehabilitated Seven of Nine for me, though – I even went so far as to say that that series made Seven into an interesting character for the very first time! So this aspect of Voyager, while admittedly not great, doesn’t feel so bad in hindsight, I guess. And the issue isn’t really that most of these episodes are “bad,” but rather that they’re too narrow in their focus on one or two characters at the expense of other members of the cast. When I used to use Twitter and I shared a similar opinion about Seven of Nine being repetitive and boring, though, I got a fair bit of pushback! So I think this opinion can truly be said to be “unpopular” within the fan community.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #15: The Maquis were right to leave the Federation.
This comment went on to lay out that, in the writer’s opinion, the Maquis had every right to reject the Federation and want to leave, regardless of whether they wanted to fight the Cardassians or not. This seems to come from a place of “popular sovereignty;” the political philosophy which states that people should be free to choose how they are governed – and whether they want to remain as part of an institution like the Federation. The right to secession, by definition, exists if popular sovereignty exists within the Federation – something we’ve seen a lot more of in Discovery and Starfleet Academy, to be fair.
So should the Maquis have been allowed to leave? I would say yes… in principle. But it also isn’t quite so straightforward. The Federation had to balance the rights of its citizens along the Cardassian border with the need to avoid war with the Cardassians – something that would have impacted Maquis colonists *and* the rest of the Federation. Sometimes, as Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” If you’re one of the few, in that case… that kinda sucks, especially if it means you have to abandon your home. So it’s not quite as cut-and-dry as presented. But as a general rule, if Federation member worlds want to leave, even if they began life as colonies… they should surely be allowed to do so.
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #16: The Tellarites and Andorians deserve more screen time.
The four original founding members of the United Federation of Planets were humans, Vulcans, Tellarites, and Andorians – yet only Vulcans have really been explored across Star Trek’s nearly six decades of history. Enterprise told more stories with the Andorians, sure, and we’ve seen Tellarites (and half-Tellarites) in Prodigy and Starfleet Academy. But these two races still feel underrepresented across the franchise as a whole. Partly, it must be said, that’s because of their almost complete absence from all three shows of The Next Generation era.
Since the turn of the millennium, Star Trek has made moves to address this. But it would still be neat to get a major Andorian or Tellarite character in the next live-action film or series. These two races are important to the Federation within Star Trek’s fictional history, so it is kind of odd, when you think about it, that they haven’t been seen more often. I would suggest, perhaps, that the more complex prosthetic makeup – when compared to the likes of the Vulcans, Bajorans, and so on – may have made it a bit more difficult or expensive in years gone by. Less of an issue today, though! It’s not an argument I’ve seen very often, and I think that, especially prior to Enterprise, a lot of Trekkies had more or less forgotten about both of these races, and didn’t seem to care much about them.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #17: Jack Crusher was an especially bad character in Picard Season 3 because of what his existence says about Beverly.
This post argued that Jack Crusher’s “secret birth” storyline actively harms his mother’s characterisation. By essentially hiding Picard’s son from him, concealing the birth, and disappearing for decades, Dr Crusher – in this person’s opinion – committed an unforgivable sin, and it was also something that she wouldn’t have done based on the way she was in TNG.
For my two cents, I didn’t think Jack was the best part of Season 3. The storyline he was wrapped up in, while not his fault on his own, wasn’t all that great, and I found it hard to buy into the idea that the character was only twenty-one years old (since the actor who played him was in his mid-thirties). Further, giving this version of Picard a storyline about discovering he had a long-lost son didn’t feel right, either – it felt like a story better-suited to someone younger, which seemed to go against other themes in the season. However, on the specific criticism of Jack “harming” Dr Crusher’s character… I don’t think I agree. It was explained in the show why she did it – to keep Jack safe from the shenanigans that constantly swirl around Picard – and I actually felt that this version of Dr Crusher had a bit more personality than she did in most of TNG. It wasn’t a random thing; Dr Crusher didn’t decide to leave for no reason. And her reasoning made sense in the context of the show.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #18: Strange New Worlds’ Gorn arc is good, and the Gorn make for entertaining villains.
I didn’t really realise that this one was quite so controversial until I saw some of the comments under posts expressing this opinion! Personally, I’ve really enjoyed Strange New Worlds’ take on the Gorn – transforming them into almost Xenomorph-inspired “monsters” has definitely shaken things up. At the same time, though, leaning too heavily on the monstrous angle does raise questions about the Gorn’s sentience and ability to be a spacefaring race, so there probably are moments where it went a little too far in one direction.
Strange New Worlds had a bit of a challenge, I suppose, when it came to villains. Most Star Trek villainous factions are off the table: Discovery had recently done the Klingon war, DS9 has already done a big Cardassian war, there can’t be the Romulans in a big way due to the timeline, and returning to the likes of the Xindi from Enterprise wouldn’t have worked very well, either. So to pick a race like the Gorn – who have run-ins with Starfleet in this era – wasn’t a bad idea. And giving them a new, more frightening presentation has – in my view – worked pretty well.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #19: It’s hard to get used to the way Avery Brooks delivers his lines.
This one’s a toughie for me, because I first watched Deep Space Nine in the mid-1990s when I was a wee bairn. I can’t remember ever thinking that the way Sisko speaks is weird or offputting, as this commenter suggests. In fact, all of my DS9 memories are positive from that period, and Sisko quickly became one of my favourite parts of the entire Star Trek franchise. His vocal delivery, cadence, and manner of speaking weren’t things I’d considered at all until I read this post.
I suppose, to be fair to the commenter, Avery Brooks might come across as a bit of a thespian; the way he speaks and emotes is at least partially inspired by acting in the theatre for a live audience. But the same is definitely true of Sir Patrick Stewart, in that case – and other Star Trek regulars, too. Many actors get their start in stage productions, and that’s not a negative thing at all. Obviously, the way any of us feel about an actor and a performance is going to vary, and I would never say that everyone “must” like Captain Sisko or the way Avery Brooks portrayed the character. But for me… this just isn’t something I ever remember feeling when DS9 was new, and I haven’t heard this argument before.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #20: Bending the rules of “canon” is okay.
Every time a new Star Trek story touches on a character, alien, faction, or even an aesthetic or design we’ve seen before, some folks crawl out of the woodwork to moan about “violating the integrity of canon!” I’ve actually written about this subject before, and I tried to lay out that my position is a bit more nuanced than the black-or-white, “respect all canon” versus “I don’t care” debate that flares up, from time to time, within the Trekkie community! In short, I’d argue that the foundational building blocks of a fictional world and its key characters should be kept the same, but the minutiae can be changed.
As an example: warp drive works using dilithium, so future Star Trek stories need to keep that in mind. But if one episode says warp seven takes a week to reach Romulus and another episode says it takes three days… that kind of thing doesn’t matter. Nor does the fact that uniform designs look different from one show to another. So, yes, canon matters because basic internal consistency within Star Trek’s fictional setting is important if I’m to maintain my suspension of disbelief. But it isn’t the only thing that matters, and we needn’t sacrifice interesting narrative ideas at the altar of “canon purity” if there’s a fun story to be told.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #21: A crossover between Star Trek and Star Wars is a great idea.
As a kid playing with action figures, I already achieved this goal thirty-five years ago! Jokes aside, fans of both Star Trek *and* Star Wars have speculated about what a crossover might look like for decades. And who knows… with Paramount buying up everything in Hollywood, maybe it’s no longer the impossible dream that it once appeared to be!
There are some pretty big hurdles, though, just from a practical point of view. Both franchises are owned by competing companies, and both have decades’ worth of complicated lore and history. Then there’s the question of time and place – Star Wars famously takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” whereas Star Trek takes place in a vision of our future. Which characters would be involved? And how would Star Trek’s technology co-exist with hyperdrives, lightsabres, and the Force? As tempting as it might sound on some level, I don’t think I’d go for it if I were in charge!
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #22: The Prime Directive is unethical.
Several commenters argued that the Federation’s Prime Directive is a fundamentally unethical policy, because it condemns whole civilisations to extinction just because they haven’t developed one specific technology. And, on the surface, that seems to track – stories like Pen Pals, Dear Doctor, and the beginning of Into Darkness quite clearly show Starfleet has the ability to intervene, but chooses not to, even when there’s an existential risk to an entire race of sentient beings.
The Prime Directive, fundamentally, is about not interfering with or altering the trajectory of societies that haven’t yet discovered alien life. And it makes sense, right? Think of the chaos it would cause to our own society if aliens descended from the skies – even if they had the best of intentions. We aren’t ready for that, and maybe we won’t be for a long time. The rigidity of the Prime Directive throws up some strange situations, though – but we often see our heroes finding ways around it, and the fact that they never seem to get in trouble suggests that Starfleet is okay with rule-bending, sometimes!
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #23: Too many people are related to Spock, best friends with Spock, falling in love with Spock, or revere Spock.
Spock has become a larger and larger part of Star Trek, over the years, even as we’ve moved further away from The Original Series. He and his father appeared in The Next Generation, Spock crossed over to the Kelvin timeline where he met his younger self, and Spock has had two long-lost siblings that he never mentioned: Sybok and Michael Burnham. Chapel falls in love with Spock, La’an falls in love with Spock, and all the while, Spock is betrothed to T’Pring. Characters like Boimler talk about Spock with reverence, too. Yeah… it’s kind of a lot, huh?
It can feel, sometimes, like Spock is too present and too big a part of the storylines he’s included in. I’d be totally fine with stepping back from Spock, for a while, and giving other characters a chance to be in the spotlight. The Burnham connection has been established at this point, and there won’t be any retconning or removal of that. But going forward… if we’re lucky enough to see more Star Trek entering production, setting Spock aside would probably be for the best – at least for a while.
Unpopular? 🛑No!🛑 Agree? ✅Yes.✅
“Unpopular” Opinion #24: René Auberjonois should’ve played Odo with an exaggerated French accent.
This one… I think it was entirely tongue-in-cheek! But I thought it was funny, and it’s my list so I’m including it. René Auberjonois played the French chef in The Little Mermaid, and his French accent is pretty iconic! It would’ve certainly shaken things up, with Odo becoming much more of a comic relief character, especially if Auberjonois really hammed it up. Would it have made DS9*better*? Uh, probably not. Would some of his conflicts with Quark have been a lot funnier, though? Yes.
Look, this was just a bit of silly fun. I’m pretty sure no one’s out there seriously suggesting that giving *any* Star Trek character a comedy accent would’ve improved the show. But it’s fun, as fans, to think about these things sometimes. How different would episodes like The Die Is Cast have been if Odo were hamming it up, sounding like the French chef from The Little Mermaid? And, to the credit of the original commenter, it’s not an opinion I have *ever* heard expressed before!
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? 🛑No!🛑
“Unpopular” Opinion #25: Star Trek *should* change over time, and not simply re-make TOS or TNG for every new series.
As early as the ’70s, when The Animated Series entered production, Star Trek was changing. When Phase II was reimagined as The Motion Picture, and Star Trek went to the cinema for the first time, the franchise changed. Star Trek, like any long-running franchise, moves with the times. That means the way shows look and feel changes, it means the way characters are cast and handled changes, and it means the nature of storytelling changes, too. The entertainment industry is not a static, stagnant thing, and if the higher-ups at Star Trek tried to recreate The Original Series every time… well, the franchise probably would have died out a long time ago.
That being said, some experiments and changes work better than others. I’m firmly of the opinion, having seen multiple seasons of modern Star Trek, that the franchise *needs* the freedom episodic television brings, and that serialised stories need to be a much smaller part of Star Trek in the future… assuming there will be a future. It seems that Skydance, Star Trek’s new corporate overlords, are more interested in films than streaming TV, so that could be another change coming down the pipeline. But the original poster is correct – Star Trek can’t afford to be left behind as the entertainment industry shifts around it. Figuring out what to change, how far to take those changes, and what fundamentals need to be left in place, though… that’s a tougher set of questions, and modern Star Trek hasn’t always stuck the landing, unfortunately.
Unpopular? ✅Yes.✅ Agree? ✅Yes.✅
So that’s it… for now!
Concept art of the USS Enterprise in Spacedock.
Stay tuned, because I have *at least* another twenty-five of these “unpopular” opinions that I’d love to write up one day.
I hope this has been a bit of fun. If I tore a hole in an opinion you agree with… please try not to take it personally! This is meant to be a bit of light-hearted fun, joining in with the Star Trek fan community in my own way, and not something to get too upset about or offended by. I tried to pick a mix of different opinions from across social media, touching on different parts of the franchise, including things I agreed with and didn’t agree with.
If you missed it, I have a two-part review of Starfleet Academy’s first season, which is now live on the website. You can find part one by clicking or tapping here, and the follow-up by clicking or tapping here. And there’s more Star Trek content to come as the 60th anniversary nears! I’ve got plans for re-watches, theories, and more, so I hope you’ll check back from time to time. Thanks for joining me to dissect these “unpopular opinions,” and Live Long and Prosper!
Most Star Trek films and TV shows discussed above can be streamed now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including all films, TV programmes, and other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Allow me to preface this by saying that I’m not on the “anti-A.I.” bandwagon by any stretch. While I’m sceptical, to a reasonable degree, about some of today’s large-language models, and whether they can really do as much as investors have been promised, I see the potential in A.I. in a lot of ways. I don’t want this piece – discussing one very specific use of A.I. – to be misunderstood! In fact, I’d argue that anyone who claims to be “anti-A.I.” in every possible case doesn’t actually understand what A.I. is and how broad a category it is; it would be like saying your “anti-computer,” or “anti-electricity.” The uses for A.I. are vast – it’s an incredibly big category of inventions.
So what are we getting into today, then? If you missed the announcement, graphics card manufacturer (and major supplier of components to A.I. datacentres) Nvidia has recently shown off its new A.I.-powered DLSS 5.0 – a graphical overlay for some video games, which is intended to add more “realism” to environments, character models, and faces.
And… to be blunt, I think it looks like shit.
The DLSS 5 Starfield demo.
Some of today’s generative A.I. models can create photorealistic landscapes, creatures, and even people. A.I. art is a big topic in and of itself, and it can be quite controversial, so we won’t get into all of the arguments around it. Suffice to say that, as someone who runs a small website as a hobby, the only times I’ve used A.I. art (that I’m aware of, anyway) are in a couple of my other articles discussing A.I. – and that was a deliberate choice to help illustrate a point I was making. I’m not actively opposed to A.I. art in all cases; as with any subject, it’s not a black-or-white thing. Not all photographs are “art,” but some can be – and I would suggest A.I. art is probably in that same kind of space.
But we’re off-topic already!
DLSS 5, according to Nvidia, is intended to increase the “visual fidelity” of video games, and the company claims it’s their most significant innovation since real-time ray-tracing almost nine years ago. DLSS 5 uses generative A.I. in some form – the exact details are not clear – and seems to work as a kind of “middle man” during the rendering of frames, upscaling, adding detail, and trying to give games a more photorealistic look.
Nvidia’s helpful explanation of how DLSS 5 works.
On the surface, this sounds like a useful invention, right? At least for *some* games, anyway. Game developers have been chasing photorealism since, really, the very dawn of video games and computer-generated imagery, so any new innovation that brings us closer to that goal should be a cause for celebration. Only… well, is DLSS 5 *actually* making things photorealistic? Or is it simply adding a filter?
The screenshots Nvidia provided – which, I would note, are going to have been *very* carefully selected to show the new tech in the best possible light – all feel, well, kinda samey. And that’s despite the games selected to show off this new technology all being pretty different from one another in terms of art style. Yes, all of the games in question were aiming for some measure of photorealism, but there are incredibly important differences in the way they use more subtle things like light, shading, facial animations, and so on. If DLSS 5 smooths all of that out, resulting in games that look indistinguishable from one another… I’m not sure I’d call that a “breakthrough.”
DLSS 5 running on an Nvidia tech demo.
To Nvidia’s credit, they claim, in their marketing blurb, that DLSS 5 is meant to be “tightly grounded in the game developer’s 3D world and artistic intent.” But based on the screenshots and video that Nvidia itself provided as part of this announcement, I gotta be honest: I’m not seeing that. I see a filter that smooths out a game’s rough edges, sure, and definitely adds more detail – but if those details are all the same, and the end result is that faces in particular end up looking incredibly similar from title to title (and, I would add, not unlike a Snapchat/TikTok filter or other A.I.-generated artwork), then I don’t think it’s going to be of interest – at least, not to me.
There’s already a lot of sameyness and repetitiveness in the way modern games look thanks to many of the industry’s biggest studios using the same handful of game engines. Unreal Engine 4 and 5 are so commonplace nowadays that you can almost always notice its presence from the moment you boot up a title. And there are advantages to that – don’t get me wrong. As someone who used to work in the industry, one of the biggest issues developers (and studios) faced was that skills in one engine or one programming language don’t automatically translate; if more studios are using the same software, skills are more easily transferrable.
Another of the demo images.
But for players, the end result has been that an increasing number of big-budget titles feel… samey. And DLSS 5, if it can actually do what’s being advertised, might just make that particular trend *worse*, not better. Photorealism is not one singular thing – just go to an art gallery and look at photos, and you can see that, even in the real world, there are completely different ways to capture a portrait, a city, a landscape… and more. DLSS 5 seems, to me, to be trying to apply the same techniques to every game shown off – and the results are more miss than hit.
One of the titles selected was Starfield – and if you know me, you’ll know I’m of the opinion that Starfield needs all the help it can get! I once described Starfield’s NPCs as “dead-eyed, waxy-skinned Madame Tussauds rejects,” so *anything* that could be added to the game to “fix” its NPCs should be great. Right?
Starfield with DLSS 5.
Look at the image above, which is taken from the opening act of Starfield. Look at the two characters – Heller and Lin. Doesn’t Heller just look like… a meme? You know, the edited “Chad face” meme? And what’s with the lighting? The image is horrifically over-lit, completely negating the vibe of the original scene. I can’t believe Nvidia has got me *defending* Bethesda’s “artistic vision” for Starfield, but the original version of the scene genuinely has more character. The dimly-lit, dusty space evokes the feeling of being on a small outpost at the arse end of space; the DLSS 5 version completely changes the entire tone of the setting. It makes it feel washed-out.
Even if you prefer the more brightly-lit version of Starfield’s opening area, can we at least agree that Bethesda lit the original room a certain way on purpose? Starfield has other indoor areas which are much brighter, so it’s not a technical limitation. It’s clearly a creative choice for that room, at that mining outpost, to be lit the way it was. And DLSS 5 blasted right through that, ignoring all of it.
EA Sports FC.
The one game where I thought DLSS 5 worked best (or “least badly,” I guess) was EA Sports FC. Those kinds of sports games have always been interested in pushing photorealism, and I just felt that DLSS 5 looked most in line with the game’s art style. But the EA Sports FC promo images also threw up some pretty weird and jarring artefacting in the background: in the image above, note how the player on the left, when DLSS 5 has been enabled, seems to stick out from the background quite abruptly. Compare that to the same image without DLSS 5; it’s a much smoother transition from face to background – something that, I would argue, looks more natural and less artificial.
The lighting issue also affects Resident Evil Requiem. The provided images of protagonist Leon (seen below) show DLSS 5 completely changing the way he appears in that scene – and again, as with Starfield above, it looks too bright compared to the original. For a horror game, where environments and lighting matter all the more, I can only describe that as being a potentially huge problem.
The Leon image also has a weird “glassy” effect to the sky in the background, despite seemingly being set outdoors. That could also be a bug – a bug in the very demo images that Nvidia is using to introduce this new technology.
Resident Evil Requiem’s entire lighting has changed.
According to reports by folks who’ve seen DLSS 5 for themselves, Nvidia was running the demonstration on not one but *two* of its top-of-the-line RTX 5090 graphics cards. Here in the UK, those cards retail for upwards of £1,800 – so a rig needing two of them is gonna set you back a pretty penny! Cutting-edge innovation often starts expensive and gradually comes down in price – 1080p HD, ray-tracing, 4K, etc. were all in that category. But if DLSS 5 launches, as promised, later this year and it needs the highest of high-end hardware just to get started… well, I guess that rules me out, anyway!
From what I’ve seen, I gotta be honest with you: I’m not impressed. I think there’s potential – in theory – to use A.I. in some way to improve graphical fidelity, add realism, and do the kinds of things that Nvidia is promising DLSS 5 can. But if the end result is games and characters that look like they’re straight out of memes or A.I. art… I don’t see that proving popular and catching on. Even when DLSS 5 had opportunities to genuinely improve some pretty janky-looking character models in a game like Starfield, it still came up short.
If DLSS 5 could’ve improved any of the games selected, it would’ve been Starfield.
Art is complicated, and art is subjective. And I have no doubt that some folks will happily sacrifice “artistic vision” in order to gain a more detailed, photorealistic look. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the success of indie games over the past decade-plus, it’s that graphics aren’t the only thing that matters to players. I’m still of the opinion that, if I had to choose between two similar games in the same genre, the better-looking one is going to grab my attention first. And the push for photorealism has led to some absolutely beautiful video games over the past few years. But does adding a generative A.I. layer improve things? Based on the evidence Nvidia chose to submit, I’m gonna say “no.”
However, this could be an idea to keep an eye on. If we haven’t yet reached the ceiling of generative A.I.’s capabilities, and if improvements to this kind of system are possible, it could be an interesting technology for the future. For one thing, it could mean there’s less of a need to remaster and remake older games; if the goal of a remaster, like last year’s Oblivion, for instance, is just to improve the graphical fidelity, well, this kind of system might be able to do that much more easily. So, despite not liking DLSS 5 as it’s been shown today, I can at least see the potential for its use somewhere down the line – assuming that Nvidia can hone it, refine it, and ensure that it really does preserve a game’s unique art style without ruining things like brightness and environmental details, or making faces look… well, like *that*.
Thanks for reading. I’m not a tech expert by any stretch, but I wanted to share my thoughts on this new technology as it pertains to video games. If you want to check out my thoughts on one potential future for generative A.I. in entertainment, click or tap here. And if you want to get my thoughts on last year’s alarming A.I. 2027 paper, you can find that by clicking or tapping here. Until next time!
DLSS and DLSS 5 are trademarks of Nvidia. All titles discussed above are the copyrights of their respective developer, studio, and/or publisher. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Non Non Biyori Season 1.
I want to preface this by saying that I’m not familiar with anime as a medium. I haven’t watched any anime, really, save for a couple of films that an ex insisted we watch, and while I’ve never looked down on anime or anime enjoyers, it’s never been something I really sought out or took an interest in. So I’m approaching this series – which I’ve only seen, at time of writing, a few episodes of – as a total newcomer to anime in a general sense. I don’t think that matters so much in this instance, because this piece really isn’t “a review” of the series or episode in question. But I think it’s worth being up-front about these things, and there’ll be no hard feelings if you think my relative unfamiliarity with anime makes my take somehow less valid.
It’s quite rare, these days, for any film, game, or TV series to really punch me in the face with “the feels,” but I really don’t know how else to describe the experience of watching a single twenty-two-minute episode of an anime called Non Non Biyori. This episode almost perfectly encapsulated summertime memories from decades in the past, bringing them bubbling to the surface in a way I just… wasn’t expecting at all. And I felt I needed to put (metaphorical) pen to paper and share the experience with you today.
We’re going to talk about anime and nostalgia today.
For a bit of background, I asked a friend of mine for some TV and movie recommendations – particularly something “slow,” and not fast-paced, thrilling, or scary. My friend, who is a bit of an anime fanatic, jumped at the chance to recommend me several anime shows in the Iyashikei genre. I was totally unaware of Iyashikei, as a total anime noob, but it’s a Japanese term that roughly translates to “healing,” and it refers to anime and manga that depict calming stories and peaceful locales. That sounded like just what I was in the mood for, and Non Non Biyori was the anime that I chose from that genre to get started with.
Iyashikei is a relatively new genre of manga and anime, from what I can tell. It emerged in the mid ’90s, as a reaction to events like Japan’s economic recession, the Tokyo subway gas attack, and the Kobe earthquake, all of which sparked an interest in calming, healing stories. The genre has continued to this day. It seemed like something worth checking out when I was craving something slower-paced and calming, so after a bit of deliberation and research, I settled on trying Non Non Biyori.
Non Non Biyori is set in rural Japan.
Something you should know about me, to better inform this discussion, is that I grew up in a small village in the rural north of England. The village I was raised in from the age of one had a dozen houses, a single farm, and about thirty or so residents, and the primary school I attended never had more than about forty pupils at a time; there were only two classrooms, two teachers, and my year group had just six pupils my age. I have vivid memories of playing in the mud, walking home from school along unpaved farm tracks and over the fields, picking brambles in the autumn… and positively *dying* of boredom as a teenager!
I had absolutely no expectations for Non Non Biyori. The only thing I knew about it was that it’s an anime in the Iyashikei genre. I certainly didn’t expect to get an episode that so perfectly – and so powerfully – reminded me of my own childhood, of summer days spent roaming the village, playing in the sun, and getting into mild mischief. But… that’s exactly what I got in the fourth episode of the first season.
Non Non Biyori.
Non Non Biyori is (at least so far; I haven’t seen all of it) a largely episodic show. The main characters have one or two adventures per episode, and the next episode picks up a different story, often with a different main character in focus. Episode 4 is titled Summer Vaction Started, and I want to focus on one of the main storylines in the episode: that of first-grade pupil Renge over a few days at the start of her summer break.
Renge’s summer break begins when her older sister returns to the small village of Asahigaoka – the setting for the series. Although we’re worlds apart in some ways, I felt echoes of my own childhood in Non Non Biyori’s depiction of Asahigaoka from the very first episode. There’s a sense of isolation that you feel as a kid that can be quite hard to put into words if you’ve never lived in a place like this. The whole world seems to pass you by as you exist in this small, almost unchanging place. You’re restricted to activities within walking or cycling distance, when there’s no public transport and you’re too young to drive, and when all that’s around you are fields… well, you have to make your own fun with whoever you can find!
Renge’s summer begins.
When I was growing up, we had a couple of other kids around my age in the village, and even though we didn’t have a lot in common, we played together, as kids will. I can remember digging a “swimming pool” in a neighbour’s garden one summer – a large hole that we fully intended to turn into our very own private pool. It was nothing more than a muddy hole, but we must’ve spent hours digging in the heavy soil, moving stones, and planning out what we’d do when we finally got our “pool” just the way we wanted it!
Non Non Biyori dragged up memories just like this one – memories from, in some cases, almost forty years ago. And I just… I honestly wasn’t expecting that strange bittersweet feeling from a series like this. These aren’t *painful* memories, but they’re events and situations that I just haven’t dwelt on for such a long time, with most of the people involved totally gone from my life today – or having passed away years ago.
Farm tracks like this were a common sight when I was a kid.
I can see why, to a city-dweller, a series like Non Non Biyori would appeal. It’s textbook escapism – an idealised slice-of-life for the kind of life that most people today, especially in urban areas, don’t really get to experience. I guess that’s also why the Iyashikei genre continues to attract an audience. There’s a lot to be said for something slower-paced and cosy, especially in today’s world. And for folks who live hectic lives in bustling cities… I can totally understand why stories and settings like these appeal. It’s the same reason why period dramas, set in Victorian times or older, are popular in some circles.
As a newbie to anime, I gotta admit that I’ve never really paid much attention to the art style – at least, not background art. Anime characters and that style of drawing and animating people has become pretty popular even outside of Japan, and while I’ve never *disliked* it, it’s not something I really spent much time at all thinking about. I was even less familiar with the way anime shows like Non Non Biyori represent their environments… and I was blown away by some of the vistas in the show.
A water mill.
There are some establishing shots in Non Non Biyori, depicting the village of Asahigaoka and the area around it, that I would literally buy a print of to hang on my wall – they’re that good. And this is another part of the show that I really wasn’t expecting at all! Yet the beautiful artwork brings the setting to life in an absolutely stunning way, and is a major contributing factor to those cosy and nostalgic feelings that I talked about.
An animation studio called Silver Link worked on Non Non Biyori, bringing the world of Asahigaoka to life. The studio, which was established in the late 2000s, has dozens of other productions under its belt at this point, and has a well-deserved reputation for high-quality work. I know it seems silly to harp on about the backgrounds and establishing shots… but I think these are absolutely key parts of the way Non Non Biyori’s summer vacation episode hit me with that sense of nostalgia.
A rainy summer’s eve in Asahigaoka.
To get back to the story, part of the episode follows Renge as she takes time off from school, eventually meeting up with another girl her age – a visitor from the city, who’s come to stay for the summer break. Renge shows the new girl around, and they take photos together, building up a firm friendship. This is a great way for us as the audience to explore Asahigaoka and the area around the village, seeing it through the eyes of newcomer Honoka. We get several beautiful shots – totally dialogue-free – just depicting the environment, and the girls moving through it.
Renge, from her first moments on screen, is… what’s a nice word for “a bit of an oddball?” She’s the youngest of the main characters, perhaps the youngest person in her village, and she seems to have developed a unique way of looking at the world and interacting with the people around her. She has friends, and they accept that side of her, but seeing her make a new friend – someone her own age – was something special, and you could see how much it meant to her.
Renge and Honoka sheltering under a tree.
This setup was another thing that dragged me right back to my own childhood. Across the fields from the village I lived in was a caravan park, and although the holidaymakers usually kept to themselves, we’d occasionally encounter them when out on walks. I have a vivid memory of being four or five years old, playing with a couple of German kids whose parents my parents had befriended. I can remember doing the same kind of thing as Renge does in Non Non Biyori, taking these two German kids around the village, showing them a pond with frogs and tadpoles, a field with lambs, climbing in an old tractor tyre, and then playing with toy cars in our garden.
That memory… it’s been buried for almost four decades. Yet here I am, in 2026, reminiscing about the couple of days I ran around, one summer, and played toy cars with a couple of kids from Germany all the way back in the ’80s. It’s… it’s a testament, I guess, to the power of storytelling, of animation, and of media in general to tug the heartstrings and evoke feelings that we didn’t even know we could feel.
Crossing a bridge together.
The story ends the way you’d expect: Renge’s new friend has to go home, back to the city. She leaves suddenly, and isn’t able to say goodbye. It’s heartbreaking to see Renge – normally so stoic – getting genuinely excited for her playdate, only to find out that Honoka has left. Non Non Biyori feels a bit ambiguous with its timing, but I get the sense it’s meant to take place before things like smartphones and iPads were all the rage. Renge has no way to contact her new friend, and just like that… she’s gone.
As Renge absorbs this news, she slowly starts to tear up – and *I* teared up right along with her. Partly, there’s shock: shock that this character is actually just a kid, despite her stoic and oddball presentation in earlier episodes. And partly… well, it’s because I’ve been there. The German kids I had so much fun with that summer, they went home after a few days. And we never kept in touch. There was no internet, no email, and long-distance international phone calls were impossibly expensive, so… that was it. You got a few days’ of playtime, and then it was over. For a five-year-old… it was pretty heartbreaking.
Renge is left in tears when Honoka leaves.
There was a happy ending, of sorts. Renge receives a letter from Honoka, apologising for leaving so abruptly, and promising to visit again soon.
I’m going to watch more of Non Non Biyori. But… I don’t want to rush it, really. It’s not the kind of show that I want to binge, because it’s exactly the opposite of a binge-style series, I guess. It’s slow-paced, and forcing my way through half a season at once just wouldn’t feel right. These characters all have their own little quirks and personality traits, but the show isn’t really about them – it’s about what they represent, and the kind of life they lead. A slower pace of life that, really, isn’t possible any more – and not just because time has moved on.
Maybe this will be the start of a longer anime journey for me, I really don’t know. I’d quite like to check out the Shenmue anime – a series based on one of my favourite video games ever seems like it could be fun! But, again, I’m in no rush, really. I’m going to take my time with Non Non Biyori, and even if none of the show’s remaining episodes come close to hitting me in the way Starting Summer Vacation did… that’s okay. I came to this series because I wanted a bit of a break, to slow down, and watch something a bit less taxing. I found that, for sure – but I also found something I absolutely was not expecting.
Thanks for reading.
Non Non Biyori is available to stream now on Crunchyroll. The series may also be available on DVD/Blu-ray. Non Non Biyori is the copyright of Kadokawa Corporation, Silver Link, et al. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Original Series, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Discovery.
Welcome to an addendum to my review of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s first season. Because the review was longer than I originally intended it to be, I didn’t get a chance to delve into every storyline in as much detail as I wanted. So in this “Part Two,” we’ll be taking a look at episodes three through ten of Starfleet Academy Season 1. If you want to get my thoughts on the first two episodes of the season, I already have that review published. You can find it by clicking or tapping here. And please don’t miss my full Season 1 review. I go into detail about characters, season-long story arcs, VFX, and a whole lot more. You can find it all by clicking or tapping here.
If you really just want the brief, too-short version, here it comes: Starfleet Academy was more episodic and less serialised than I feared it would be, with individual episodes focusing on different characters. It explored more of the post-Burn 32nd Century in ten episodes than Discovery did in thirty-six. And there were individual moments in every episode that I enjoyed, that won a chuckle, or that “felt like Star Trek.”
Caleb Mir.
However, the series very clearly exists in the “teen/young adult drama” space, drawing on university and high-school drama series for inspiration at least as much as on Star Trek. The tone of the show overall, and the way most of the main cadet characters were handled, just wasn’t “my thing.” And I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be before I switched it on! I tried to go into Starfleet Academy with an open mind, and I can say that I gave the series a chance to win me over. But it would be fair to say that, as someone the wrong side of forty, I’m not the target demographic here. For all of its enjoyable moments, Starfleet Academy just… isn’t for me. And I’m okay with that.
The show also recycled several of modern Star Trek’s least-interesting tropes: an over-the-top villain who’s connected to two of the main characters, a magical macguffin of ridiculous destructive power, and a nefarious scheme that threatens billions of lives across the Federation. A protagonist who was a little too perfect was an odd choice for a show set at a school – where characters need room to learn and grow – and while some of these things are not necessarily Starfleet Academy’s fault on their own, the show has come along after Star Trek has been in production for nine-plus years, and after we’ve had more than 200 new episodes across this streaming era. That context, unfortunately, weighs against Starfleet Academy, making some of its story points – which wouldn’t have been *phenomenal* on their own – even less appealing.
I said in my longer review that Starfleet Academy just doesn’t strike me as being an especially unique or memorable addition to the franchise. And I fear its second season – which is already in post-production – will be its last.
Showrunner and director Alex Kurtzman on the set of the season premiere.
I hope that’s enough context for today as we jump into the individual episodes! If it’s not, be sure to check out my longer Season 1 review.
The episodes below are listed in the order they were first broadcast, beginning with the third episode of the season. If an important character moment or plot point seems missing, that may be because I’ve already covered it in the longer Season 1 review. I’ve tried to hit all of the main points from each of these eight episodes in a more condensed format, because I didn’t have enough energy in the tank to write individual episode reviews week-to-week! I hope this format is an adequate substitute for those longer reviews.
So without any further ado… let’s jump into the episodes.
Vitus Reflux:
Let’s play Calica.
This was an absolutely catastrophic cringe-fest from almost the first moment. When Starfleet Academy was first announced, and fans began to speculate on whether it would be a teen/young adult-oriented show, episodes like Vitus Reflux were what I feared the most! Caleb’s romantic pursuit of Tarima was so bad that I had to physically stop myself from fast-forwarding through their scenes, Jay-Den’s cringeworthy moment with the War College cadets was also toe-curlingly awful to sit through… and this American style of cringe humour just isn’t my thing and never has been.
This was the first episode to attempt to humanise Darem after a pretty rough “rich kid who’s also a bully” start. However, I felt his conflict with Genesis was incredibly poorly-written, coming across feeling scripted and fake. This led to a resolution that felt thoroughly un-earned for both of them, with Daren’s “arrogant dickhead who secretly cared all along” storyline just… falling flat for me. The phaser game was fine, and I appreciated the diversion from massively high-stakes storylines involving pirate warlords and interstellar diplomacy to something a bit better-suited to a class of cadets. However, even this didn’t escape the clutches of American cringe humour, with the two teams each getting a ludicruous mascot.
The main cadet characters.
A story about two groups of kids getting into a prank war is… I mean, it’s something that’s never going to appeal to me. I will say that Vitus Reflux handled that premise about as well as it could have under the circumstances, though. And the War College cadets were set up as suitably antagonistic to “our” Academy heroes such that the conflict worked in context. Captain Ake joining in – in her own, very subtle way – was also a bit of fun, and I think that kind of thing softens and humanises her as both a leader and an educator.
I think I’m right in saying that this was the first episode in which the War College’s Chancellor Kelrec played a significant role. Kelrec is a character I wish we’d spent a bit more time with; he (and the War College in general) seemed to disappear from the series after the halfway point. Overall, this episode was probably the closest that Starfleet Academy came to feeling like a show set at a real school or university. For better or for worse.
Vox in Excelso:
Jay-Den and his family.
If you’re a regular around here, you may remember me saying on multiple occasions that I wished Discovery had shown us what happened to the rest of the galaxy – and the Klingon Empire in particular – in the aftermath of the Burn. Well… we can finally check that one off the bucket list, eh? I’m not sure I buy the whole “on the verge of total extinction” storyline; the Klingon people seem too resilient, and too vastly spread across space, for that to happen, and I chalk that up to Discovery-inspired “turn all the drama up to eleven all the time” kind of storytelling.
The main thing I have in my notes for this episode, aside from the fact that it was nice to get Jay-Den’s backstory to inform his characterisation, is that this fell into one of the most clichéd traps that many stories intended for kids and young people can stumble into. In short, this was a “the kids figure out something incredibly basic that their teachers and the adults around them can’t” kind of story. It fell to Jay-Den to recognise what even the ancient and wise Captain Ake could not: that the Klingons would not accept a handout, and needed to feel like they’d “won” and annexed their new homeworld on their own.
Sharing bloodwine.
This was the first episode where I felt Darem was somewhat likeable, and his moment with Jay-Den as they prepped for the debate was understated and sweet, setting the stage for more to come between them. Jay-Den was strangely relatable, too, as someone who doesn’t enjoy public speaking or having all eyes on him; I felt that, and I’m sure a lot of the show’s younger viewers will have, too. Jay-Den, as a softer and less violent Klingon with other interests besides a “glorious death in battle,” makes for a fun and different kind of Klingon character – completely distinct from the likes of Worf, B’Elanna, and others.
I felt the outdoor filming location used for the Klingon encampment wasn’t very interesting, and I would’ve liked to have seen an environment that looked a bit more “alien” or otherworldly, not just a generic North American forest. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, sure, but I think Starfleet Academy can do better than that. And if there are no good locations near Toronto… use the AR wall and make something up! We got a fun look at some Starfleet and Klingon vessels in the climactic fight, and Captain Ake’s scenes with both Lura Thok and the Klingon leader were cute. It wouldn’t be Star Trek unless *someone* drinks bloodwine with the Klingons, eh?
I loved Cirroc Lofton’s role in Series Acclimation Mil. Despite truly hating the storyline he was part of, seeing Jake again after all this time, and seeing his scenes with Sam, was a genuinely emotional experience, and especially toward the end, I felt myself getting teary-eyed. Lofton put in a great performance, and made a welcome return to the franchise in an attempt to celebrate the life and legacy of Star Trek’s first African American captain.
This episode also solved one of the biggest mysteries behind Sam: why her holographic race wanted to create a child and send her to the Academy. Kasq and the “makers” were interesting, and their distrust of organic races seemed to make sense in context. Sam’s wide-eyed enthusiasm was genuinely one of the best parts of Starfleet Academy, and this episode went into detail about how she came to be and what her intended purpose was for her people.
Kelrec’s musical performance.
There were some fun moments, too, with Caleb reprogramming Sam, the cadets getting drunk and getting into a bar fight with their rivals from the War College, and the off-campus bar just being an interesting and well-designed space in general. The Doctor’s look of disappointment when Sam was recovering from her drunken state was pretty funny, too.
The episode’s B-plot seemed to go nowhere. Actually, scratch that: it *literally* went nowhere. We began with Chancellor Kelrec stressing about a diplomatic visit from an alien race, and going to all the trouble to practice a very precise diplomatic dinner he planned to host – with Ake, Reno, and the Doctor as stand-ins for the aliens. But then… we never saw the upshot of that, never met the aliens, and never even learned if Kelrec’s diplomatic overtures were successful or not. It just felt like a weird waste of time.
Come, Let’s Away:
Kelrec, Ake, and Vance.
My favourite episode of the season, on balance.
This *kind* of story – where the villain gets a win and outsmarts the kids – should have come sooner, though, as it would’ve gone some way to helping make up for Braka’s other deficiencies. Speaking of Braka, this was the only time in the season where I felt he was even *slightly* respectable as a villain, with the over-the-top elements of Paul Giamatti’s performance being toned down just enough to make him feel less like a one-dimensional cardboard cut-out and more like a real person. I think that speaks to having someone different in the director’s chair: Larry Teng helmed this outing, whereas Star Trek regulars Alex Kurtzman and Olatunde Osunsanmi were in charge for Braka’s other big appearances.
That being said, the set for the USS Miyazaki was… well, it was just atrocious, to be blunt. Star Trek often redresses sets from one series to another, but not since Discovery’s transporter room pretended to be a Ba’ul prison cell in Season 2 have I seen such an *awful* and pathetic set redress. Apparently hanging a bunch of bin liners (trash bags) over parts of Strange New Worlds’ Enterprise set was meant to make the ship look “futuristic” and “experimental.”
A behind-the-scenes look at the trash bag-covered set.
Despite that, this was an intense episode – and an episode where the level of intensity felt about right. Braka’s scheme unfolded carefully, the Furies – while pretty flat – were at least a frightening villain to face off against, and the cadets genuinely felt like they were in danger much of the time. Even though I predicted Tarima’s “superpower” from almost her first second on screen, the way she used it, and the way it connected back to her original appearance along with her father, made sense in context, and worked well enough as a “get out of jail free card” to aid the cadets’ escape.
The Furies, despite their somewhat boring and OTT presentation, feel like the kind of post-Burn faction we didn’t see enough of. People who resorted to cannibalism – but later realised they liked it and wanted to keep doing it… I mean, that’s kind of intimidating. And their costumes and weapons certainly added to that feeling. I wish we’d got a story like this to kick off Braka’s story and set him up as a genuinely imposing villain.
Ko’Zeine:
George Hawkins (Darem) getting his makeup adjusted on the set of Ko’Zeine.
Parts of this episode felt like an homage to the classic TOS story Amok Time, with Jay-Den following Darem to his arranged marriage on a desert moon. There was no climactic fight to end things, though! The wedding story was… not my favourite, unfortunately. There were interesting ideas in the mix, but I felt Darem’s new wife went from “yay, I can’t wait to marry you” to “divorce me and abdicate” in a heartbeat, and solely because of one short speech she heard from Jay-Den.
It was a bit of forced drama in a series that, let’s be honest, doesn’t need that kind of thing. Darem’s position at the Academy looked to be in jeopardy because he’s secretly the prince of his homeworld, and now has to be its co-ruler. The setup for that entire thing felt like one big cliché, and while I think Darem ended the episode in a way better place than he had been at the start, really capping off his “redemption arc” from the premiere… it wasn’t a solid outing in its own right.
Caleb and Genesis got the episode’s B-plot.
Back on campus, Caleb and Genesis got to spend a bit of time together one-on-one, which had merit. It was certainly the stronger of the two stories, as well as Genesis’ only real spotlight storyline across the season. I think Genesis felt quite relatable, in some ways, in this storyline, as she sought to overcome her anxieties and step out of her illustrious father’s shadow. Seeing the Academy sets deserted was a bit of fun, too.
Genesis and Caleb got their comeuppance from Reno, and later from Captain Ake. Ake’s scenes with Genesis in particular, as she figured out what was going on and why the promising young cadet was on the verge of sabotaging her own career showed her off in her best light as a teacher and a leader, and I think that might be the single best part of Ko’Zeine, on the whole.
The Life of the Stars:
Hey, look who’s back!
I put in my notes that parts of this episode “felt like an English lesson,” and I think someone more familiar with the (out-of-copyright) play that Tilly and the cadets worked on would’ve gotten a lot more out of it than I did! But, again, this is a show set at a school with an intended audience that skews younger, so perhaps teens and young adults would find the theatre class plot more relatable than I did. In any case, I genuinely felt that my unfamiliarity with Our Town, the play at the centre of the story, hampered my enjoyment of the episode.
Tilly was originally announced as being a main cast member in Starfleet Academy, and back in Discovery’s fourth season, she even got a spotlight episode which felt like a backdoor pilot. For whatever reason, her role was reduced (and none of the cadets from All Is Possible carried over to the main show), but it was still fun to welcome Tilly back to the show here. Her arc, as I think I noted in All Is Possible, basically took her full-circle from the cadet we met at the beginning of Discovery to becoming a teacher. I would love to spend more time with Tilly in Season 2.
Robert Picardo getting a touch-up.
This episode, though, will be remembered for what it says about the Doctor – who escorted Sam back to her homeworld in the hopes of curing her. I felt Sam getting a second main storyline so soon after Series Acclimation Mil was a bit much, and the fact that *both* of her big stories involved connections with a legacy character was a tad repetitive. But for the Doctor… I really didn’t like what The Life of the Stars had to say, I’m afraid.
The Doctor didn’t miss Janeway. He didn’t regret outliving B’Elanna or Harry Kim. He didn’t care about the cadets from Prodigy. No. The Doctor spent almost a millennium pining for the *non-sentient* holograms from his family holoprogramme that we saw in the Voyager Season 3 episode Real Life. That would be akin to you or I reaching old age and not grieving for our friends and families… but for characters from a particularly emotional video game we once played.
I think this’ll have to be the topic of a longer standalone article in the future, so stay tuned.
300th Night:
Stealing a shuttle…
I liked the party atmosphere we got at the beginning of the episode, and how it clashed in such a huge way with what was to come. The Ukeck marketplace was a great post-Burn setting, and one of the best individual off-campus sets that I think we saw across all ten episodes. It felt, in a way, like something out of Star Wars; aliens milling around, scavengers trying to trade for petty cash, and just like a generally run-down, dangerous place that was perfect for this kind of story. A well-designed space.
Some of the ideas here were great, and seeing Caleb achieve his goal of reuniting with his mother was sweet, and it hit some of the right emotional notes. But there was some pretty imperfect execution, too, which dragged things down a notch or two. Caleb was *always* going to choose his mother over his friends and leave the Academy; that was set in stone from episode one. But the way he went about it, being so harsh and so much of a dick to his friends, the people who’d risked a lot to help him… that didn’t feel great. And it didn’t serve a greater narrative purpose, either, making it feel unnecessary and therefore even worse.
Reno, Captain Ake, and the Doctor on the Athena’s bridge.
Braka’s “omega mines” were another of modern Star Trek’s typical over-the-top macguffins with stupidly powerful capabilities – and a convenient weakness. But I kind of liked the callback to Voyager, as well as how the Federation might’ve been researching the dangerous omega molecule as a potential source of power generation in the post-Burn era. Weaponising something like that felt right for Nus Braka, and a shady Starfleet programme that might’ve been doing something dangerous also felt right for this incarnation of the Federation.
Caleb choosing not to tell his mother who his friends were or how they’d come to be there made sense, but I think it also said a lot about the extent to which Caleb trusted her and her judgement; he was unwilling to admit he’d used Starfleet to find her, fearing the reaction she might have. The episode did a lot for Caleb, mostly good but a few negatives found their way into the mix, too. As the first half of the season finale, we got a solid if derivative setup, and the story manoeuvred the cadets and the Athena into position as the only ones capable of stopping Braka.
Rubincon:
Wait a minute, you’re not the captain!
There seemed to be a bit of confusion about the name of this episode; some sources listed it as “Rubicon,” including the venerable IMDB!
My overwhelming feeling about the season finale, unfortunately, is just that it didn’t seem very realistic. I could buy Nus Braka wanting to put the Federation – and Captain Ake – “on trial,” as an attempt at poetic retribution for his own imprisonment. But it felt like an episode where the writers had come up with several very pretty and well-delivered monologues… but no way to connect them together in a framework that made any kind of narrative sense.
The idea that Braka would willingly broadcast unfiltered and uncensored speeches by Ake, Caleb, and his mother to the entire galaxy, right at the moment where he *should* have been on the verge of a huge victory just didn’t track for me, not one bit. And it added to the feeling that Braka was a one-dimensional caricature of a villain; a “32nd Century Heinz Doofenshmirtz,” obsessed with monologuing and being seen rather than actually being in any way effective as a leader.
Caleb.
Rubincon was also hampered by Starfleet Academy’s very real failure to convey the size and scale of the Venari Ral. Were they a collection of pirate ships? A warlord’s private militia? Mercenaries hired by Braka? A proto-state on the verge of forming a government? Or a fully-functional interstellar power? Without that context and that background, it was hard to follow Braka and what his plan even *was*; assuming he detonated his mines and locked the Federation inside a bubble of non-traversable space… what would he do next?
I will credit Rubincon for the way it brought the cadets together, culminating the season-long arc of helping (most of them) grow and learn new skills, then putting those skills to the ultimate test. Reno made a fun lead aboard the Athena, too, and some of Captain Ake’s speeches – even when I felt like they were unrealistic on Braka’s part – hit the right emotional notes. Caleb’s mother also got some pointed barbs at Captain Ake, calling her out for the way she’d been treated years earlier. I don’t think it’s a great finale, to be honest, but it wrapped up key storylines and brought the cadets together for a dangerous assignment.
So that’s it.
A glimpse behind-the-scenes.
That’s all from Starfleet Academy Season 1 for now. I may write that follow-up on the Doctor in The Life of the Stars soon, so stay tuned for that. And with Season 2 already in post-production, potentially targeting a 2027 broadcast, I daresay there’ll be more to say about Starfleet Academy in the months ahead. Rest assured that, if we get a trailer, a teaser, or more details about the show’s future, I’ll be covering it here on the website.
Thanks for joining me this time. There wasn’t enough space to cram all of this into my longer review, so I hope splitting things up like this wasn’t a terrible idea! I wanted to touch on each of these episodes and go into a bit more detail about storylines and character moments than I had time for in that piece.
The USS Athena’s saucer section.
Overall, Starfleet Academy just wasn’t “my thing,” and I doubt it’ll be a show I return to very often… if at all. But that’s somewhat beside the point, and really, a bigger source of disappointment for me is that the show seems to have struggled to attract its target audience. Starfleet Academy failed to break into the top ten most-streamed shows over the nine weeks of its first season, a feat that Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds all managed. And I fear that Season 2 – assuming even that goes ahead – will be the show’s swansong.
But this is Star Trek’s 60th anniversary year, so let’s not end on such a negative note! There’s still Season 4 of Strange New Worlds to come, probably in the late summer or autumn, and I’ve got a few more ideas for re-watches and other pieces to write as the year-long celebration rolls along. If you’re a Trekkie, I hope you’ll swing by to check out at least some of that right here on the website.
Live Long and Prosper, friends!
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Starfleet Academy and everything else discussed above – remains the copyright of Paramount/Skydance. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1, as well as for the following Star Trek productions: Deep Space Nine, Voyager,Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Section 31.
Alright, let’s talk about Starfleet Academy!
First of all, some general information. I chose not to write individual episode reviews week-to-week for Starfleet Academy this season. So this review is going to be a little different in terms of format. This article will detail my overall thoughts on the season, the characters, the storylines, the VFX, and so on. And in the days ahead, I will write a follow-up piece in which I share my thoughts on episodes 3-10 of Season 1. I already have a review of the two-part series premiere, and you can find that by clicking or tapping here.
Secondly, I went into detail about one of Starfleet Academy’s mid-season storylines – the one involving DS9 and Captain Sisko. I’ll touch on that this time, but if you want my full thoughts on the Sisko storyline and whether it was a good idea, click or tap here to check it out. Finally, I thought it would be interesting to return to the Academy’s first major on-screen appearance, which came during The Next Generation’s fifth season. I re-watched The First Duty, and you can read my impressions of that episode, in which I reference Starfleet Academy Season 1, by clicking or tapping here.
Let’s put Starfleet Academy in the spotlight!
I share those articles with you in case you want to get some additional context for some of the things we’re going to discuss today – and even if you don’t care about that, I still encourage you to have a read if you’re a Trekkie, like me! I enjoy writing about Star Trek, and I think some of those pieces will definitely add to the conversation around Starfleet Academy’s first season, if that’s something you’re interested in.
So… what did I think of Starfleet Academy, then, as someone who’s been a Star Trek fan for some thirty-five years?
Cards on the table: I went into this series expecting to find that it wouldn’t be “my thing.” I tried hard to set aside my biases about teen/young adult drama shows, but the inescapable conclusion is that I wouldn’t have even switched on Starfleet Academy were it not for the “Star Trek” label. I asked myself the question of whether I’d have chosen to sit down and watch a similar programme in a different franchise; if this were “Star Wars: Jedi University” or “The Lord of the Rings: Bilbo Goes To College.” And the answer is “almost certainly not.” I showed up for the Star Trek name and the Star Trek name alone, hoping to find that the series… well, wasn’t as advertised, really, and didn’t have as strong a focus on teen/young adult drama as its promo material suggested.
Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau with several main cast members at a special screening for the series finale in March 2026.
Sometimes, having low expectations can be a good thing! And there are definitely aspects of Starfleet Academy that both exceeded my expectations and just plain *worked*, either as a Star Trek story or just a fun sci-fi adventure in a more general sense. I will absolutely give credit where it’s due for the series being significantly more episodic in nature than I’d feared; there are still serialised storylines and character arcs, but not quite to the same extent as either Discovery or Picard.
However, what I would also say is that Starfleet Academy doesn’t feel like an especially memorable addition to the franchise – at least, not for me. There are episodes from right across modern Star Trek that stick in my mind for one reason or another – positive as well as negative. There are characters with strong personalities or who got heavily-featured in big, impactful storylines. There are starship and uniform designs that I found visually pleasing – or, occasionally, so-bad-it’s-good! But Starfleet Academy… it had basically none of that, and I really can’t call to mind a single protagonist, antagonist, visual element, or individual storyline that I’d say will stick with me now that the credits have rolled on the season finale.
And I think at least *part* of the reason for that is because Starfleet Academy has been unlucky. Let me explain what I mean.
The main cadet characters.
Discovery brought the franchise back to its small-screen home almost nine years ago, and since then, we’ve had more than 200 episodes of Star Trek across six mainline shows, as well as short episodes, animated mini-episodes, and a TV movie. The timeline has been chopped up, with different stories taking place hundreds of years apart, featuring new and returning characters, and there’s been so much Star Trek coming at us so quickly that I found myself dealing with franchise fatigue and burnout back in 2023, even as someone who’s a huge Trekkie.
Furthermore, modern Star Trek’s content, with very few exceptions, has been action-packed to the extreme and with ridiculously high stakes. Starfleet Academy’s over-the-top villain and Federation-ending threat don’t exist in a vacuum – they’ve come along after the franchise has repeatedly returned to those same narrative spaces, whether it was with Vadic and the Borg in Picard, Control and Osyraa in Discovery, the Gorn in Strange New Worlds, the Mirror Universe from Section 31, or the Diviner in Prodigy. Lower Decks wasn’t immune, either, with its Pakled story arc, and we can extend this trend back further, with a trio of nefarious villains in the Kelvin trilogy, and even Enterprise’s Xindi arc shortly after the turn of the millennium.
Concept art of Tarima, Jay-Den, and Nus Braka.
In a word… there have been *a lot* of Star Trek stories in recent (and not-so-recent) years that all used the same basic underlying premise: there’s an over-the-top villain whose evil scheme threatens not just these characters, but everyone else in the Federation, or even the entire galaxy. The fact that I’m bored to tears of that kind of storyline is not, in isolation, Starfleet Academy’s fault. But it is a factor that the show has to contend with, and unfortunately, it’s one of the reasons why I came away from this new series feeling that very little about it was unique or memorable.
Let’s play a game called “who am I describing?” I’m going to describe a Star Trek villain from the past decade, and you have to guess who it is. Ready?
This villain clearly has a connection to at least one of the show’s protagonists. The performance is hammy and over-the-top, trying to channel iconic villains like Khan or the Borg Queen, but doing so less effectively. Their plan involves using a magical macguffin of impossible destructive power to attack Starfleet and the Federation. And the only ones who can stop them are a rag-tag group of misfits who become a “found family” over the course of the season.
Nus Braka.
See, that *could* be Starfleet Academy’s Nus Braka. Or it could be Vadic, Lorca, the Diviner, Mol and La’ak, the super-synths, Nick Locarno, San, the Red Angel… and more.
This, in a nutshell, is Starfleet Academy’s problem. We’ve seen this story before, and not just once. Repeatedly, since Star Trek returned in 2017, we’ve gotten season after season after season where we’ve seen another over-the-top villain who’s mysteriously connected to a main character, and whose evil scheme is galactic in scope. One or two stories like that can work. And Star Trek can do big, Federation-threatening storylines pretty well. But this core concept is utterly, thoroughly burned out, so trying to return to it *again* didn’t work for me.
What’s more, Starfleet Academy didn’t even handle this story outline particularly well. I noted in my coverage of the premiere that giving the main villain a big defeat in his first-ever appearance seldom works well, and it set up the main cadets – Caleb in particular – as being too skilled and too perfect. It felt like we’d seen the end before it began; having seen how easily Nus Braka can be defeated, and how impossibly perfect Caleb is at everything from hacking and computers to hand-to-hand combat… it basically left neither character with anywhere to go as this storyline rumbled on across subsequent episodes.
Behind-the-scenes photo of Paul Giamatti on set.
More so than any other Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy needed to start with characters who had room to improve. What’s the point in someone like Caleb going to school when he already knows everything, and can do things better, faster, and more effectively than most of his teachers? It gave me “Wesley Crusher” vibes from almost the first moment, and it was tough to root for Caleb, sometimes, because of how impossibly perfect he seemed to be – at least in terms of his skills.
Where Caleb did find room to grow – at least for a while – was in terms of his relationships with his peers. I don’t think Caleb came *close* to nailing the “learning to play well with others” kind of arc that I believe was intended for him. But his relationships with Tarima, Darem, and Genesis in particular did evolve over the course of ten episodes, and largely in ways that felt natural and in keeping with this kind of teen/young adult series’ tone. There were some emotional moments in the mix, too, as Caleb clashed with – and later figured out how to befriend – his peers.
Caleb.
I try to review Star Trek (and everything else I review here on the website) without having exposed myself to other viewpoints; that’s just part of my process, and I don’t want to feel like I’m being influenced by the conversation around a film or TV series – I want to judge it on its own merit as much as possible. But, as a Trekkie who follows some fansites and social media pages, I haven’t been able to shut out *everything*Starfleet Academy-related for the last nine weeks.
One thing that definitely caught me off-guard was the negative reception in some corners of the internet to Captain Nahla Ake. I’ve seen fans criticising things like her preference for going barefoot and the way she sits in a chair… things that, frankly, give her a bit of depth and personality, and which I found in no way offensive or off-putting. Imagine criticising the (in)famous “Riker manoeuvre,” where Riker would swing his leg over the back of a chair before sitting down. Or Picard’s tendency to tug at the bottom of his tunic to straighten up his uniform. Maybe some fans did, back in The Next Generation era, genuinely hate those things… but I certainly don’t remember any of that being an issue. And to me, some of the criticisms of Captain Ake feel rather petty.
Director Jonathan Frakes with Holly Hunter on the set of Starfleet Academy.
Captain Ake, for me, seemed to be channelling a bit of Strange New Worlds’ Pelia in the way she came across – and if you know me, you’ll know that Pelia is one of my favourite additions to that series! I like how Captain Ake takes a less-rigid approach, and it makes perfect sense for the role she has to play. She’s not a typical captain, who can afford to be concerned with strict discipline in front of trained officers. She’s a teacher, and most of her crew are cadets who are still learning what it means to serve in Starfleet. Of course she’s going to take a different approach; the best teachers find ways to get through to their students, and that can include taking a more casual or less-disciplinarian approach.
Captain Ake also brings centuries’ worth of experience to the table as a Lanthanite, and that earns her a great deal of respect from the kids. As someone who remembers what Starfleet was like in the years before the Burn – something we’ll talk about more in a moment – Captain Ake is uniquely-poisitioned, within the world of Starfleet Academy, to instil old-school Starfleet values into a new generation of cadets. Her approach may not be rigid and adhering to the letter of the rules, and she may not always keep to a strict uniform code… but she’s clearly a good captain, a respected teacher, and a great leader.
Captain Ake has come in for criticism in some quarters.
I think some of the criticism of Captain Ake – and of Starfleet Academy in a more general sense – is coming from folks who would never have been interested in the series to begin with. There are some “anti-woke” folks crawling out of the woodwork to pick on Starfleet Academy, as well as people (like myself) who are way outside of the target demographic. And some of these criticisms of the way Captain Ake sits on a chair stem from that; they’re indicative of a portion of the fanbase who couldn’t go into the show with an open mind and who want to pick on anything they can find to criticise.
Starfleet Academy isn’t going to be right for every viewer, or even every Trekkie. And if the show’s low streaming numbers hold… well, it doesn’t look like it’s having as much success as I’d have hoped when it comes to connecting with new viewers. But that isn’t because it’s “woke,” or because Captain Ake puts her feet on the seat. There can be many factors behind a series failing to connect with audiences, and I’d posit that franchise fatigue and repetitiveness are bigger deals in this case than any individual performance or storyline.
Robert Picardo with director/showrunner Alex Kurtzman during production on the season premiere.
That being said, I saw nothing across Season 1 that, to be blunt about it, changed my mind on Starfleet Academy’s future prospects. With the series seeming not to make a huge splash for Skydance/Paramount on streaming, and given that the corporation has already cancelled every other Star Trek series that had been in production at the time of the merger, I very seriously doubt whether a third season renewal will happen.
The show doesn’t have any huge strong suits in its corner, really, and it feels like it’s in the same kind of position as Enterprise was some twenty-plus years ago – it just may not have been Starfleet Academy’s moment, coming after so much Star Trek has been on our screens over the past few years. If the show doesn’t get renewed, and hasn’t done enough to demonstrate to Paramount’s new owners that it’s a solid investment… I don’t think we can lay the blame for that exclusively on Starfleet Academy itself and its production team. As I said above, the series feels like it drew the short straw, in a sense.
Several of the main characters.
I criticised Discovery, from Season 3 onwards, for not making more of the Burn – the giant apocalyptic event that *should* underpin everything about this 32nd Century setting. Discovery’s writers wanted to make a drama series; it felt like the Burn very quickly disappeared into the background, serving as little more than the backdrop for other, generally less-interesting stories to play out in front of.
Starfleet Academy did more with the Burn that Discovery had done, and for that I’m grateful. But I still feel like this brand-new setting, this brand-new narrative idea for Star Trek, something huge and transformative for literally *the entire franchise* just… isn’t being used very well. Or very often.
There were *references* to the Burn and the state of the galaxy in dialogue. And some storylines and settings reflected this event and its lingering aftermath more than others. But the main characters, with the partial exception of Caleb, could’ve really been from any pre-Burn era, and even when references were made to the Burn and its post-apocalyptic after-effects… it just didn’t stick the landing much of the time.
Filming Darem’s homeworld.
Let’s take episode seven, Ko’Zeine, as an example. The cadets get a break from their classes and head to different places. Jay-Den and Darem get the A-story, visiting Darem’s homeworld for what felt like a bit of an Amok Time homage. And Genesis and Caleb got the B-plot, getting into hijinks back at the deserted campus. Literally *nothing* about either storyline would have changed if this episode had been set before the Burn. Despite getting an opportunity to do so, with the introduction of a brand-new alien race in the Khionians, there was absolutely no mention of the Burn at all. Did Khionia just… not notice?
Star Trek has always used its sci-fi lens to take a look at real-world issues. And as a series focusing on younger folks that’s being broadcast in the mid-2020s, there was scope to take the Burn as a starting point and view it as an analogy for the disrupted post-pandemic world that kids today are growing up in. To use the Burn as a metaphor to examine what it might mean for young people whose education and formative years were massively disrupted in unprecedented ways. I didn’t want or expect that to be a constant presence, hammered home in *every* story. But I did expect it to be present more often than it was.
The re-opening of the Academy.
I’ve said this before, and I daresay I’ll repeat myself again before too long, but I don’t like what the Burn says about the future of the Star Trek galaxy, and how it challenges and alters how we interpret stories set in the 23rd and 24th Centuries. But, if Discovery and now Starfleet Academy had been able to find stories to tell in that setting, really leaning into what it means to live and grow up in a “post-apocalyptic” galaxy… maybe it would have at least felt justified. But after three seasons of Discovery and one of Starfleet Academy… we’re still stuck with stories and characters which, at best, pay lip service to the Burn and its decades-long aftermath without really exploring what any of it means.
And the result? Unfortunately, I’m still of the opinion that, somehow, we should find a way to push this “post-apocalyptic” far future out of the prime timeline.
That being said, there was *more* of an effort to explore the state of the galaxy after the Burn in Starfleet Academy than there was in Discovery. I appreciated getting a look at the Klingons in this era – though I’m still curious to learn what the Klingon survivors would make of the knowledge that the Burn was caused by the Federation! And seeing Betazed’s accession back to the Federation, and the changes the organisation was willing to make to accomodate the Betazoids, made for a fun and engaging story, too.
Zoë Steiner (Tarima) getting her makeup touched up on set.
Sam was an interesting character, and I particularly enjoyed Kerrice Brooks’ enthusiastic, wide-eyed performance. She really captured Sam’s nature as a “newborn;” someone experiencing the world for the very first time. But unfortunately, Sam also got two of my least-favourite storylines in the entire season – and two stories that felt pretty repetitive, too, if you think about it.
Let’s play another game: this one’s called “which episode am I describing?” This episode, from Season 1 of Starfleet Academy, sees the character of Sam making a connection with a major character from The Next Generation era. She comes to see this character as a major influence, or even a father figure of sorts, and the writers go out of their way to draw parallels between Sam and this legacy character. The legacy character gets an epilogue to their story from The Next Generation era, which – many fans will argue – detracts from their original story or even actively harms their characterisation.
So… was I talking about Series Acclimation Mil or The Life of the Stars?
Sam with the Doctor.
I said a lot of what I wanted to say about Starfleet Academy’s treatment of Sisko in my standalone piece – click or tap here to read that. But to very briefly recap: despite being a well-intentioned effort to celebrate the legacy of Star Trek’s first African American captain, the episode ultimately was an awful ending for Sisko and his legacy, turning him into the very “absent black father” trope that Avery Brooks had argued against more than a quarter of a century earlier. Starfleet Academy asked a question that didn’t need to be asked about Sisko’s survival (because it was already perfectly well-explained in Deep Space Nine), and then set about answering that question in just about the worst conceivable way.
And then, a couple of episodes later, we get a remarkably similar story involving Sam and the Doctor.
I don’t want to linger for too long on legacy characters in this review, and if you join me for my episode breakdown in the days ahead, I might delve into the Doctor a bit more when we discuss The Life of the Stars. But again, this was a story that felt… well, tacked-on, in one sense, but also became one that painted the Doctor in a really negative light.
Filming The Life of the Stars.
The Doctor, it turns out, was not terribly moved by outliving his friends aboard the USS Voyager, nor the cadets of the USS Protostar. He didn’t miss Janeway, Tuvok, or Neelix. But he *had* spent almost a millennium pining for the holographic family he created in the Voyager third season episode Real Life. Not only were these holograms *non-sentient* as defined by the show, but it also paints B’Elanna as a major villain, since she was the one who edited the Doctor’s family holoprogramme, “killing” his holographic daughter.
As above with the Sisko storyline, I think there were good intentions and at least parts of an interesting idea at the story’s core. But the way it came across, with the Doctor not even acknowledging his friends – the people he spent years of his life with and who first helped him explore what it means to be a sentient life-form… it left a bad taste in the mouth. If the plan was always for Sam to view the Doctor as a father figure, why not simply start from that point? Or else find a different route to get there.
I’ll shelve this for now, but stay tuned, because there’s more to say about this element of The Life of the Stars.
The Doctor at the end of The Life of the Stars.
Visually, Starfleet Academy was pretty okay much of the time. There were things the show did well, like using a proper 16:9 aspect ratio instead of the weird letterbox that other shows of the streaming era have employed. I also greatly appreciated getting episodes that all felt sufficiently long: not a single episode was under the fifty-minute mark, which made them feel all feel quite meaty! Compare Starfleet Academy’s ten-plus-hour first season with something like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, where the entirety of Season 1 barely cracked the three-and-a-half-hour mark.
Set design was more hit than miss, but some of the misses were… well, they were pretty dire. In my review of the series premiere, I talked about one sequence involving a low-poly, horribly pixellated “whale” when Caleb and Tarima went to the aquarium. And while I’m pleased to say that nothing else in Season 1 sank quite so far as that awful CGI misfire, there were a few other unimpressive visual moments, unfortunately.
Director Jonathan Frakes on set with members of the main cast.
The sets used for parts of the Academy could feel cluttered, at times, with an overabundance of holographic signs and interfaces. The end result was an environment that looked too busy, with too many things on screen at once. I also felt that some choices, both for outdoor filming locations and using the AR wall, weren’t particularly impressive, and just didn’t leave me with much of an impression at all. I’d call out Jay-Den’s Klingon encampment from Vox in Excelso and Darem’s homeworld from Ko’Zeine as examples of the latter.
In fact, Darem’s homeworld looked an awful lot like a copy-and-paste of the Vulcan set that we’ve seen extensively in both Discovery and Strange New Worlds, which just felt profoundly odd for the Khionians – a semi-aquatic race. I get that we were technically visiting their desert moon, not their watery planet, but that just raises the question of… why? I guess it was an effort to spend less money on prosthetics, or to keep Darem in his humanoid form so he could better emote? Either way, it’s a bit of a shame; I’d have been genuinely quite pleased to visit Khionia and spend more time with this brand-new alien faction.
Jay-Den arrives on the Khionian moon.
I think, on balance, my favourite episode of the season was Come, Let’s Away – the episode where Braka returns and scores a big win at the cadets’ expense. It was well-paced, action-packed, and its emotional moments generally hit the mark. But the major caveat I have to give is that this *kind* of story – where the villain gets a big win, and sets up the next phase of their nefarious scheme – shouldn’t come when we’re past the halfway point. And it shouldn’t have come along *after* we’ve already seen the villain being defeated by a bunch of untrained cadets on their first day at school.
I mentioned this in my review of the premiere, but Nus Braka was not an entertaining villain. The performance was ridiculously hammy and off-putting, and I’m so disappointed that a genuinely wonderful actor like Paul Giamatti – whose performances I’ve enjoyed elswhere, and whose name felt like a big coup for Starfleet Academy when his role was announced – could be reduced by the show’s producers and directors to being so genuinely awful. Braka was, for the most part, a one-dimensional pantomime villian; the antagonist from a direct-to-video kids’ movie who’s “evil for the sake of it” and turns everything up to eleven for no reason.
Paul Giamatti, who played Nus Braka. Image: Star Trek on Facebook
When a series commits to a serialised arc, it’s important for that arc to stick the landing. In Starfleet Academy’s case, Nus Braka was the show’s overarching antagonist, and even in some episodes where he didn’t appear in person, his influence loomed large and he was discussed by other characters. But when a villain is so weak, so one-dimensional, and so uninteresting… it really takes a lot away from that serialised story arc. For me, unfortunately, Nus Braka is firmly in that category, and feels like one of the Star Trek franchise’s least-interesting villainous characters. I don’t doubt that Giamatti had fun playing the role, and I’m also certain that a way could’ve been found for a character like this to have been handled better. But the way Braka came across in the finished product? I’m afraid it’s one of the worst individual elements of the season.
One character I criticised in the two-part premiere (and in the buildup to Starfleet Academy’s debut) was Lura Thok. I felt Gina Yashere’s performance was really… well, amateurish, especially in the opening two-parter. I’m not going to retract that statement, but I will amend it to say that, over the course of her subsequent appearances in Season 1, Lura Thok managed to grow on me, and either I got used to Yashere’s take on the character, the cadence of her speech, and so on, or… maybe she grew into the role somewhat. Either way, I ended the season with more of an appreciation for this Klingon-Jem’Hadar hybrid than I had at the beginning.
Lura Thok with Captain Ake.
One of the really odd, left-field announcements going into Starfleet Academy’s premiere was that Stephen Colbert – a late-night talk show host in the United States – was going to have a voice role as the “Digital Dean of Students.” I said at the time that this felt like little more than stunt casting; an attempt to garner some interest for the series based on nothing but the name of the performer. And so it turned out to be. The Digital Dean had a couple of funny lines here and there – the recurring Talaxian fur-fly bit being one – but overall, I didn’t get the impression that the former Paramount corporation needed to recruit someone so well-known (presumably for no small amount of money) for this complete non-role. Colbert’s voice work was *fine*, but would anything about the Digital Dean have changed if it had been a newcomer? Heck, *I* could have done no less of a job in that kind of voice-only role, for all the impact it had.
When the cadets were first introduced, ahead of the show’s premiere, I thought it was at least noteworthy that we were going to meet a Klingon named Jay-Den – a name that sounds, well, human. And I wondered if there might be a reason for that in-universe; maybe it was indicative of the Klingons having joined the Federation centuries earlier, or Jay-Den’s family having an appreciation for human culture. But, as it turns out, the name “Jay-Den” has a meaning in Klingon.
Filming one of Jay-Den’s scenes in Vox in Excelso.
Someone who speaks Klingon will have to answer this (I can barely manage English), but… does “Jay-Den” really mean “he who crosses oceans of fire,” as he claimed in Vitus Reflux? I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that it doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I didn’t enjoy Jay-Den. Karim Diané put in an exceptional performance, and I really enjoyed getting a Klingon main character who was a bit more complex, a bit softer, and who didn’t care only about honour and suffering a violent death. Jay-Den came from the same Klingon warrior culture that we’re familiar with from past iterations of Star Trek – regressed, arguably, by the impact of the Burn – but he was his own man with his own interests, and his desire to become a healer, not a warrior, added somewhat to his complexity as a character.
I also liked the way Jay-Den’s romantic life was handled. There was definitely a spark between him and Darem in the latter part of the season – a spark that, I would argue, either wasn’t fully justified or didn’t sit quite right because of their initial bully-and-victim interaction in the first episode. But I appreciated how they overcame that and built up a friendship.
Jay-Den and Darem seem to have… a spark.
I’ve always read the Klingons as being somewhat analogous to historical civilisations like the Spartans, at least in the way they were presented after The Original Series. Their warrior culture certainly feels like something Spartan, anyway. And if you know your history… you’ll know that the Spartans (and Ancient Greeks in general) were, to use some technical language from historiography, hella gay. *Hella* gay. So… gay Klingons just make sense, and the only thing weird about it, really, is how we’ve never really explored this aspect of Klingon culture and sexuality before.
At this point in the far future, being LGBT+ (whatever race you are) shouldn’t be a big deal, and Jay-Den’s arc and his relationship with the War College cadet Kyle was handled subtly, without much fanfare. It reminded me a little of Adira’s “coming out” as non-binary in Discovery; it’s something that everyone involved understood, accepted, and just rolled with without making it a big deal in any way. That’s generally how I like to see LGBT+ representation handled in Star Trek; I like the idea that, in the future, these things won’t be controversial in any way, and stories which set up that ideal as a plot point tend to go down well with me.
Behind-the-scenes photo of Kyle (Dale Whibley) and Jay-Den (Karim Diané).
The Venari Ral, Nus Braka’s organisation, didn’t feel consistent across the season. When we met Braka, he seemed to be the captain of a pirate ship – or perhaps someone who might be the “commodore” of a small flotilla of ships. And that presentation carried through; Braka was a jumped-up petty criminal, or so it seemed. So it was a real surprise, then, when the Venari Ral, a few episodes later, began annexing entire planets to their “empire,” with Braka painted as the leader of an entire interplanetary faction.
This just wasn’t sufficiently explained within Starfleet Academy itself, and because the Venari Ral are a new faction, we had no frame of reference. If it had been, say, the Cardassian Union or the Gorn Hegemony, there’d be a foundation to build on. Even Discovery’s Emerald Chain could’ve fit the bill. In fact the Emerald Chain is a great point of comparison, because that faction also seemed to fluctuate between “criminal syndicate” and “interstellar empire” – though at least in that case, it never felt quite so small-scale as the Venari Ral did in their first couple of appearances. I think we’d have benefited from seeing a tiny bit more of the Venari Ral, somehow, in the first couple of episodes – something that could’ve nailed down how big, how powerful, and how intimidating the faction was *supposed* to be.
Venari Ral ships. The scale of the faction and its fleet wasn’t adequately explained.
And then Starfleet Academy would’ve needed to stick to that. If the first episode seemed to show Nus Braka as the captain of a pirate ship, later episodes like Come, Let’s Away and 300th Night tried to present the faction as an empire capable of conquering entire planets, with a fleet of ships, a legion of soldiers and paramilitary, and the resources necessary to hold onto all of that territory. But then the season finale seemed to show only about half a dozen Venari Ral ships and a handful of troops.
This inconsistency was also present in the Venari Ral ships themselves. Kids These Days ended with Braka’s ship being destroyed… with a single volley of torpedoes. Come, Let’s Away showed a Venari Ral ship taking the fight to the Athena, and winning. Then Rubincon saw Starfleet massively outnumbering the Venari Ral, beaming through shields with ease, and arresting their troops and leadership. I came away from the season feeling like I *still* don’t know what the Venari Ral was meant to be: a pirate fleet, a crime lord’s militia, a proto-state, or a fully-fledged interstellar empire. And for the main villainous faction of the season… that’s a bit of a disappointment. How am I meant to be invested in a story when I don’t really comprehend who our heroes are facing off against?
Fire on the bridge! Paramount has got a lot of mileage out of those pyrotechnics in recent years, eh?
I was a little surprised when it was announced that Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno would be one of the show’s recurring characters, making the jump from Discovery. Out of all of the Discovery characters, as much as I like Reno, she probably wouldn’t have been my first choice to take a significant role in a spin-off. But I greatly enjoyed Reno’s role this season, particularly in the finale when she was left alone with the cadets, and she really seemed to rise to the occasion – while retaining her usual deadpan style.
Reno’s relationship with Lura Thok wasn’t a big part of Starfleet Academy, but it was another of those subtle, understated LGBT+ moments that I discussed above. It worked very well, and I liked how both characters gained a bit of depth and personality from one another. Notaro and Yashere played off each other perfectly in their moments together, and I felt their relationship went a long way to humanising (if you’ll excuse the term) Lura Thok in particular. I also liked what it said about Reno, and how she was finally willing to embrace new relationships after the loss of her wife – something we learned about in Discovery.
Lura and Jett together.
A ten-episode season won’t have time to do everything, nor focus on every single character – and for me, it was Genesis who seemed to draw the shortest straw this time around. Genesis got an arc of sorts, relating to her father and how she modified her references when applying to the Academy, but that was very much a B-plot in the episode in which it featured. It’s not necessarily a problem; other characters simply got bigger or more central storylines this time around. But, as I said several times in Discovery and Strange New Worlds, it would be nice if, next time, we could get an episode or two to make up for the characters who took a back seat in Season 1.
I liked what we saw of Genesis, though, and how she seemed able to push through her anxieties and fears to step up and become a leader. We saw this with her taking the captaincy of the Academy’s phaser-game team, and this carried through to later in the season, where she was finally able to take the conn of the Athena in the finale. It was never an arc that was centre-stage, but actress Bella Shepard did very well with the material she had to work with, making Genesis into a cadet who felt like she truly fit the Starfleet mould almost better than everyone else. Perhaps that’s a nod to her background, as the daughter of an admiral and who’d been raised around Starfleet from a young age. In any case, the series needed at least one character like this – and we got that with Genesis, even if she wasn’t as present as some of the others in key storylines.
Bella Shepard on set with a member of the production team.
Uniforms can be a contentious point among Trekkies! I appreciated Discovery returning to bold primary colours after Season 3, and Starfleet Academy stuck with a similar design – at least for commissioned officers. The cadets’ uniforms – their main uniforms, anyway – were a bit less interesting in a fairly drab grey. I did like, however, that Starfleet Academy introduced a lot of uniform variants: Jay-Den’s skant, the letterman jackets, away team armour, separate uniforms for the War College… all of these added a lot of depth to the series. None of the uniforms on their own really leapt out at me, but the variety definitely kept things visually interesting.
The USS Athena… well, it didn’t really grow on me, as I hoped it might after its introduction in the premiere. I don’t *hate* the design of the ship, but I don’t really find it as visually appealing as, well, almost any other hero ship from past iterations of the franchise. It feels a bit over-designed, if that makes sense, which is a criticism I’d level at a lot of 32nd Century Starfleet vessels. I did like, though, that the design of the ship was reflected in the design of the cadets’ combadges. That was a neat inclusion.
The USS Athena.
Darem got a potentially interesting arc across the season, but I think it was a bit of a mistake to set him up as being quite so unlikeable in the premiere. Darem had this whole “entitled, wealthy bully” thing going on, and it clashed with his *actual* personality. Part of this was in service to his abortive wedding in Ko’Zeine, but also it was done because – as I’ve said before when discussing Discovery in particular – Star Trek’s modern writers don’t always know how to do subtlety. Darem couldn’t just be overconfident or a bit of a brat – he had to be an aggressive, mean-spirited bully. And that beginning made him hard to root for, at times, even as we got to know the “real” Darem.
In my notes, I called parts of episodes three and seven Darem’s “dickhead to normal guy” arc, which was my way of saying this was the writers demonstrating his growth or his redemption from a poor beginning. And that kind of story can work; in Darem’s case, I think the results are a bit muddled. His spotlight – Ko’Zeine – was one of the season’s least-impressive outings, and his aristocratic background and cancelled wedding weren’t really mentioned again. I love a good redemption story, even for someone who seems unlikable, and there’s merit in doing something like this in a school setting, especially considering the show’s intended audience. But for me… I don’t think it came across as well as it should’ve. And, as mentioned above, I’d have liked to have seen more of the Khionians.
Darem actor George Hawkins getting his prosthetic makeup applied for the series premiere.
In my review of the two-part premiere, I said that I felt sure that Tarima’s condition – which required her to use a device to dampen her telepathic abilities – would turn out to be a “superpower” that would be really useful and end up saving the day. And who’d-a thunk it: I was right about that! In both Come, Let’s Away and Rubincon, Tarima’s magic – which she denied was actually “magic,” but let’s not mince words – turned out to be the only thing the cadets could use to save the day. Sometimes, setting up something in one episode to pay it off later works well and feels right. And sometimes, subtly foreshadowing something that will be important later can be a great way to keep the audience engaged. Tarima’s ability, for me, was neither of those things. It was patently obvious what was going to happen, I called it from the first moment she was on screen, and it played out beat-for-beat not once, but twice.
That aside, Tarima was… well, “okay,” is what I put in my notes. I don’t like to pick on young performers too much, because there’s always room to gain experience, but I felt that Zoë Steiner was the lesser of the main cadets in terms of her performance. Tarima felt stilted and wooden a lot of the time, and while some of that may be the fault of writers and directors as much as (or more than) the performer, it left the character in a weird space for a co-star and the main protagonist’s romantic interest. There were moments where Tarima managed to leave that behind… but overall, she wasn’t my favourite character by a long stretch.
Tarima.
Starfleet Academy was intended to reach new audiences and expand the Star Trek franchise beyond its current niche. From what I’ve seen of its streaming numbers (and even its performance through “less-than-official” means), I don’t think it’s doing that. Starfleet Academy, across all ten episodes of its first season, was routinely beaten by shows like The Pitt, Fallout, and even Bluey, and never once cracked the top ten most-streamed programmes of the day or the week. That should ring alarm bells for Skydance/Paramount… as well as for anyone who hopes to see the show continue beyond its already-produced second season. For context, shows like Picard and Strange New Worlds were regulars in the top ten most-streamed episodes of the week during their runs.
But audience numbers are not a measure of quality. I wish I could tell you that Starfleet Academy is a real hidden gem, something that the masses are unfairly overlooking and missing out on. But the reality is that… well, this isn’t my kind of show, really. And I knew that – which is why I’m pulling my punches, at least a little, when it comes to criticising some of the character arcs and storylines. There’s a ton of “teen drama” that I knew from the get-go I wasn’t going to enjoy… and I didn’t enjoy it. The Star Trek label could mitigate some of that some of the time, sure… but not enough.
Behind-the-scenes on Come, Let’s Away.
This was the first Star Trek project of the current streaming era (well, after Scouts, I guess) not to hold any appeal for me. I watched it because… I don’t know. I guess I felt an obligation to keep up with live-action Star Trek. And I can say that I did genuinely enjoy some parts of it. But overall? It’s a teen/young adult drama set in the Star Trek universe, using the lore of Star Trek for inspiration and to set up some of its stories, but it isn’t really the kind of Star Trek show that personally appeals to me. I’m okay with that – I made my peace with it before the show even aired! But it does make it hard to recommend the series to someone in a similar position to myself.
I tried to keep an open mind, though. And I was pleased to see Starfleet Academy being a more episodic project than I feared it would be, as well as to see attempts to both harken back to older shows and expand the franchise with new factions and alien races. There are good moments, interesting ideas, and some characters and performances that are a lot better than some folks online would have you believe. But for a Trekkie, the measure of success for any show is how often I think I’ll be tempted to return to Starfleet Academy and re-watch it. I can tell you with certainty that I’ll show up for Season 2. But… I can really only think of one episode from Season 1 (Come, Let’s Away) that I might even consider re-visiting in the future. The rest of it just wasn’t my thing, or else didn’t leave much of an impression at all.
The USS Athena arriving at San Francisco.
So that’s all for today.
In the days ahead, I’ll write up my thoughts on individual storylines from episodes 3-10 in a bit more depth, so I hope you’ll join me for some of that. I plan to touch on a few topics that I didn’t get around to on this occasion. Splitting up this review made sense to me – this piece is already running very long, even by my standards, so writing even just three or four paragraphs about each episode would be too much! But stay tuned, because that compilation of mini-reviews is still to come.
I hope this has been interesting, and I hope I didn’t treat Starfleet Academy too unkindly. I keep saying this because I think it’s important, but I know someone who’s the wrong side of forty isn’t the target audience for a series like this. I tried to keep that in mind while writing this review! I can say that I’m glad Starfleet Academy was produced, and I maintain that the Star Trek fan community needs a project like this to reach out to new, younger viewers if the franchise is to have a shot at surviving long-term. Unfortunately, however, I fear circumstances have conspired against Starfleet Academy, with the show coming along at a difficult time for Star Trek, after franchise fatigue has set in, and with a new corporate merger shaking things up. Even if the show was never going to be for me, I still hoped that it would find success with its target audience… but that seems not to have been the case. Maybe Season 2 will “grow the beard” and improve things… but whether you’re a fan or not, I wouldn’t bet on that third season renewal going ahead.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Starfleet Academy and everything else discussed above – remains the copyright of Paramount/Skydance. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and for Star Trek: Voyager.
After I wrapped up my review of Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown (which you can find by clicking or tapping here; don’t miss it!) I went back to the game for another run! That’s something I almost never do; re-playing a game so soon after finishing it usually doesn’t hold much appeal. But I think that alone is testament to how enjoyable Across The Unknown was for this old fan of Voyager.
That second run unfolded quite differently, as I made some deliberate choices that I hoped would lead to completely different outcomes. I ended my first run through the game without having unlocked some optional hero characters; I went out of my way to grab some more of them this time. And I tried to set up the USS Voyager differently, too – different rooms, different weapons arrays, and so on, having run through the tech tree in a different order.
I’m back for round two!
And that’s really my first point about the game: it genuinely plays very differently depending on how you set up the ship and which heroes you have at your disposal. In my first run, I found myself struggling with crew morale quite a lot, so this time, I went out of my way to try to unlock more morale-boosting options. I subbed out emergency quarters for officers’ quarters, upgraded the holodeck, built an observation lounge, and upgraded the quality of meals in the Mess Hall. My morale was hampered this time because I chose to keep Tuvix – meaning I lost Neelix – but those other upgrades and unlocks were fun. Though I had to swap most of the officers’ quarters for standard crew quarters and Borg alcoves later in the game!
Unlocking different heroes was fun, too. I noted in my original review that some decisions – like keeping Tuvix instead of restoring Neelix and Tuvok – lead to “worse” outcomes, and I stand by that to an extent. But, having deliberately tried to unlock more heroes this time around than I did in my first run, I think at least *some* of that can be offset. For example, my first run through the game utilised Tuvok in almost every combat encounter for his unique ability; I found that Tuvix, while weaker, was an okay substitute, especially when teamed up with other heroes. And although I managed to save B’Elanna this time, her unique combat ability (recharging shields) could be replaced in a way by one of a couple of other heroes who also have defensive powers.
Not a retraction, then, but an amendment!
Selecting a hero for a combat encounter.
I encountered a bug this time that forced me to re-play part of a side-mission. The mission based on the episode Child’s Play, which can result in Icheb being unlocked as a hero character, bugged out in its final act. After racing back to the Borg Cube to rescue the away team, I managed to convince Icheb to stand down, allowing me to beam everyone out. But rather than getting the final cut-scene in sickbay, after the dialogue box popped up telling me what was happening, I was back to the system screen with the Borg Cube still intact. I had to re-play that final section of the mission, complete with random rolls of the digital dice, and at the second time of asking, it was fully completed. I don’t know if that’s a common bug, but I hope it can be fixed.
Let’s stick with the digital dice for now – also known as “random number generation,” or RNG for short.
On one occasion, I think it was in Sector 6 or 7, I was soft-locked and unable to progress any further because of a roll of the digital dice. In short, in order to complete the main mission of that sector – which is essential for moving on to the next one – I needed about ten dilithium crystals (one of several in-game resources that you can spend on ship upgrades, tech unlocks, and so on). I didn’t have enough dilithium to unlock the required technology or build… whatever it was that I needed to build. But, as luck would have it, there was *one* remaining planet in the entire sector that contained dilithium. So I warped over to it, chose the option that has the largest chance of a positive outcome… and got fucked over by the digital dice.
RNG can really mess things up, sometimes…
In a game about balancing and managing your resources, you have to keep on top of things to make sure you have enough of everything, that you aren’t wasting resources, and so on. I get that that’s how the game is designed. But mission-critical technologies and unlocks shouldn’t depend on resources – especially not rare ones like dilithium, which only have a few available points of interest per sector. Something like this is inevitable in that case.
This example hammered home how reliant the game is on RNG because of how annoying it was to get to this point of interest and come away with zero dilithium when I needed it to progress. But really, this kind of thing could happen at any point in that sector’s main mission. Suppose I’d decided I wanted to unlock the next tier of the combat tech tree, which requires dilithium, or that I’d wanted to upgrade main engineering, which also requires dilithium. I could’ve used up my available supply well before I even knew I’d need that resource to progress the main story, and I could end up ruining my playthrough of that entire sector completely by accident. Even if these mission-critical technologies or builds normally require certain resources to progress, I really think there should be a way around this for players who literally cannot get those resources. Otherwise the game is effectively soft-lockable every time this arises. And to add insult to injury, Across The Unknown autosaved as soon as the digital dice failed to deliver my dilithium – meaning my *only* choice was to re-play that entire sector.
The system view.
RNG also plays a role in away missions – and again, this can lead to some pretty silly outcomes. In the mission based on Dark Frontier, which is another main quest, I ended up at the Borg Queen’s unicomplex to rescue Seven of Nine. I chose three heroes for the away team based on what the game suggested I needed: a pilot, most notably, and then someone with engineering skills. I made it to the final dice-roll screen, and I had what looked like a relatively good two-thirds chance of success. But, of course, RNG did its thing and that final dice roll ended up as a failure.
That’s fine, you might say, that’s how it goes. But this particular dice roll leads to an instant game over if you fail it.
In this case, I’d manually saved right before the trip to the Borg base, so I could re-load and try again. But it really didn’t feel good, or like the game was reacting in any way to my choices or the way I’d set things up, by randomly deciding that I’d failed that final hurdle and that that was going to be fatal to *the entire ship and everyone aboard*. If I’d been defeated in a real-time combat event, then sure. Or if I’d had some other way to feel like I was in control of events. But because it was literally just a roll of the digital dice – a roll that had a relatively high chance of success, too – it just felt wrong that it should lead to an instant game over.
It’s annoying to lose because of an unlucky roll of the dice.
I noted earlier that, on this run, I was deliberately making different choices to try to see some different results. Many of these were fun, but one… well, it really wasn’t. And I think it makes the story significantly worse and less comprehensible, especially for anyone new to Voyager or who doesn’t remember the episode in question. The mission based on the episode Equinox – which is a main mission and must be played – can go one of two ways: either Janeway and the crew are able to uncover what happened aboard the Equinox, revealing the truth behind why Captain Ransom and his crew are under attack by aliens from another realm, or… they just never find out anything at all.
Ransom’s actions in the second case make absolutely no sense. You make one choice, relatively early into the mission, and begin working on defensive measures to protect against the aliens. Then, for no reason at all – not just a reason that doesn’t make narrative sense, but literally no reason whatsoever – Ransom’s crew attack Voyager, steal the technology, and warp away. The rest of the mission plays out similarly – you face off against the Equinox in combat, beat them, and then you can either try to save some of their crew or not. But there’s still no explanation at all for what happened… and it just felt pretty unsatisfying, and like a way, way worse version of the story of that episode.
The Equinox.
I think, in this case, a combination of factors came into play. Firstly, I didn’t have the Doctor’s mobile emitter for away missions, so he couldn’t go to Equinox’s lab (I think). Then, I didn’t have Tuvok to lead an investigation, as I had Tuvix instead. And finally, I made a different choice at the beginning of the mission, which set me on that path.
I’m really in favour of the game plotting out different outcomes to key events in Voyager’s story – that’s the whole point, and I think it’s pretty fun. But when one of the main stories you get to experience has one canon outcome that makes sense and a non-canon one that’s just incredibly random… it makes it less fun and less interesting. It would be neat, for example, if you uncovered the truth, arrested Ransom, made peace with the aliens, and got to keep the Equinox as an allied ship to join you in combat. Or if you never uncovered the truth, you’d maybe have to sacrifice the Equinox but unlock Ransom as a hero character. Just a couple of examples of how this mission could unfold differently from how it did in the show, but in ways that would make narrative sense based on choices which players can make.
Encountering Captain Ransom.
Next, I’d like to talk about a few absences that I felt more strongly this time around.
It’s odd that Janeway can *never* go on away missions. Even away missions that, canonically in the show, Janeway did take part in, she can’t go on in Across The Unknown. I’m sure there’d be a way to make this happen – maybe Janeway cannot die no matter what, if that’s important to the way the game works. Or maybe if she does die, Chakotay steps up to be captain with Tuvok as second-in-command? I’d love to have the freedom to pick Janeway for *all* away missions, but I understand if that’s difficult for some reason. Still, I think making her available for *some* specific away missions, those we know she canonically went on, would be a huge improvement.
Secondly… where’s the Delta Flyer? I thought I’d just missed this, or not unlocked it, on my first playthrough, because I wasn’t using the shuttlebay very much. But this time, I went out of my way to keep the shuttlebay functional all the time, and unlocking upgrades and everything. But… no Delta Flyer.
The shuttlebay… with no Delta Flyer option.
A game like Across The Unknown, where you have a tech tree, upgrades, resources, and literally already have buildable shuttles, would’ve been *perfect* for including the Delta Flyer! I just cannot fathom why it wasn’t included, especially given its prominence in later seasons of the show. The Delta Flyer appeared in 29 Voyager episodes from Season 5 onwards, and I just find it very strange that it’s not part of the game at all.
As an example of how it could work, the Delta Flyer could either function like an upgrade to the standard shuttle, increasing the chances of successful outcomes for shuttle-based missions/points of interest. Or it could be its own thing entirely, unlocking different pathways to progress through certain missions – like the way the Vidiian Surgical Device or Pralor Shield Technology can be used to bypass certain checkpoints in some missions, or grant 100% successful outcomes. It could be a fun thing to unlock, too, requiring its own side-mission and a lot of resources to construct. Just… an odd omission. And no, I don’t think the trading-only aeroshuttle makes up for it in any way.
Tuvok and Paris designing the Delta Flyer.
I mentioned this in my review, but the game’s finale still feels pretty underwhelming. You get a text-only log, told from Janeway’s perspective, as the ship is seen cruising towards Earth… and then that’s it. In Endgame, the final shot showed Voyager being escorted by several other Starfleet vessels as she finally made it home – that would be a huge improvement. And I’d love – *love* – to see the ship swooping over the Golden Gate Bridge. That would really be a perfect way to end the game.
It would be great if that final log entry could be fully-voiced, too. I know that the developers went out of their way to recruit Robert Duncan McNeill and Tim Russ to reprise their roles and record log entries, and those logs have been a ton of fun. I don’t know whether getting Kate Mulgrew is in any way realistic – especially if it’s only for one scene. So maybe Tuvok and Paris could narrate that final scene between them? I don’t think it would be so glaring or so notable if we hadn’t had those logs from Paris and Tuvok throughout the game, but I think it does feel like something is missing from those final moments. At the very least, I’d like to see updated cut-scenes depicting Voyager, accompanied by more Starfleet ships, and ideally, that shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, too.
How incredible would it have been to get this scene as the final ending?
There are a few memorable episodes from the show that I feel would’ve made for fun inclusions. I know that, with 168 episodes, Across The Unknown couldn’t possibly adapt all of them! That’s fine – some episodes wouldn’t really suit a game like this, anyway. But some genuinely would, and while I’m not surprised that they’re missing, I think adding them in would be a great way to improve the game.
Let’s start with Year of Hell. This would, in my view, work best as a new main mission with a whole sector entirely built around Voyager’s conflict with the Krenim. Imagine slowly having to deactivate entire decks, seeing heroes die, rooms destroyed, and eventually having to make a final, consequential choice: sacrifice this version of the ship and this version of Janeway, who you’ve spent the whole sector with, to potentially restore an earlier version of the ship and the timeline, or try to escape the Krenim having basically lost everything. Making the canon choice would reset Voyager back to the way it was before the sector began – all your unlocks and collected resources would be gone, but the ship and any dead heroes would be restored. Alternatively, trying to press on could mean the ship is permanently crippled – unable to increase the warp core cap, or perhaps with entire decks permanently destroyed and unusable. It could be an *incredible* inclusion if handled well.
The badly-damaged ship in Year of Hell.
The 37’s could see you gain Amelia Earhart as a hero – or else lose half the crew to staying behind on the colony, if you don’t play your cards right. Dreadnought could put B’Elanna at risk, but could unlock torpedo upgrades, perhaps. False Profits could unlock a Ferengi hero. Future’s End would be a fun blast of ’90s nostalgia with an away mission to Earth! The Omega Directive could be another, like Juggernaut, that has potentially run-ending consequences, but which could unlock a powerful new technology or something of that ilk. Relativity would send Seven to the future, building on the events of Future’s End, and could unlock Ducane as a hero. Pathfinder could unlock Barclay as a hero, and that would be a lot of fun. The Haunting of Deck Twelve would be a fun, spooky nebula story that could unlock a new tech to help make navigating nebulae easier. Prophecy could net you a classic Klingon D7 Battlecruiser as a combat ally. And so on – I’m sure you have your own examples.
Maybe, given the game’s success, some of these ideas will be considered for free updates or even as paid DLC. I’ve had a blast with Across The Unknown so far… and I genuinely wouldn’t mind paying for DLC if it expanded the game significantly. I said in my review that the “deluxe edition” felt a bit steep for what it was, but an expansion which would add one main story mission in Year of Hell, half a dozen side-missions as suggested above, a few new characters, a couple of new techs, and more… I mean, I’d buy that.
Imagine getting a mission based on Future’s End with all its ’90s nostalgia!
I’d like to see some potential late-game upgrades to both the transporter and the ship’s combat abilities. In short, I think it would be a lot of fun if you could work your way up to being able to have *four* heroes, instead of three, for both away missions and combat. There are a few heroes who I didn’t really get to use very much, and I just think it would be fun to add that in as an option.
Sometimes in games like this, I scout out the tech tree and decide which prizes are worth racing to get! And in Across The Unknown, it could be worth speed-running something like a transporter upgrade if it meant you could send four people on away missions, increasing both your chances of success *and* the XP those characters would gain. It would need to be balanced carefully, so that other aspects of the game don’t end up feeling too easy, but I think it’s achievable. And, again, it would be an improvement – as well as something for players to work towards.
Three heroes on the transporter pad.
Something I didn’t mention in my review, but really should have, pertains to balancing. In short… I kind of feel like Across The Unknown is a game divided into two halves. You have the early missions, leading up to the conflict with Seska and Culluh, and then after that… you have the rest of the game. The early game is much, much harder, and I would personally rate the fight against Culluh as the toughest boss battle in Across The Unknown. That entire sector beats you up, with random Kazon encounters a near-constant threat, and it comes at a point when you won’t have had time to either properly build up the ship or unlock all of your capabilities.
But after beating Culluh (which took me two attempts even on my second run), the game kind of eases off – or at least, it feels like it does. The result of this is that you kind of have a game of two halves: before and after the Culluh fight. A tougher early game culminates in a very tricky boss fight, but then things seem to let up and you get what feels like an easier ride through the remainder of the game. I don’t think that’s a criticism, necessarily – more of an observation. But if you’ve been struggling, wondering if it’s worth sticking with the game because of how difficult it feels at first… definitely persevere. Once you’re past Culluh, I found it got a lot easier (and more fun!)
The game gets easier once you get past Culluh and Seska.
I really like the artwork used to depict away missions. I like the “painted” style, and how these images give each away mission a unique flavour. But if I could make one request, it would be this: please make new art assets that depict a variety of different heroes taking part in these missions! It feels a bit immersion-breaking, sometimes, to have sent Chakotay, Tom Paris, and Harry Kim on an assignment… only for all of the art to depict Seven of Nine and B’Elanna. These are static images, and I’m sure it’s possible to make more of them to depict different heroes in different missions. I’m no graphic design expert (clearly), but I’m sure that, with a combination of transparent layers and such, the same character models could even be re-used.
I just think it would be more fun and more immersive if away missions genuinely reflected the characters I’d assigned to them. Not *every* scene needs to be remade from scratch – there are plenty of moments where artwork depicts a villain, a landscape, or a hero who is mandatory for the assignment in question. But it’s a bit disappointing, sometimes, to see the “wrong” characters depicted in the artwork, especially when, sometimes, the characters who *are* shown aren’t even the recommended ones for the mission in question.
This screenshot shows Neelix and Harry Kim in the artwork even though neither character was present on the mission.
So that’s it.
I think I’ve *finally* said everything I wanted to say about Across The Unknown!
If it’s not clear from my review and this piece… I really love this game. It’s 100% a “game of the year” contender for me, as it brings one of my favourite parts of the Star Trek franchise to life in a new and unexpected way. I had a blast playing – and re-playing – Across The Unknown, and I may very well jump back in for a third run later in the year. If you’ve been on the fence about the game at all… I really think it’s worth trying out.
The USS Voyager.
When making suggestions for improvements or potential DLC, I tried to be realistic. I don’t think the game needs to be fully-voiced by the entire main cast, nor do I think that would be a realistic request. I don’t think the game needs first-person, Doom-inspired away missions… nor is that a realistic ask, at this stage! But I think there are a few things that need to be tweaked, a few ways the game could be improved, and some additions that could make for an incredible DLC bundle, if developers GameXcite are interested in going down that road. Across The Unknown seems to have sold really well, which is great news. So maybe DLC is a possibility.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ve enjoyed my coverage of Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown. If you missed my original review, you can find it by clicking or tapping here. And I also have a gallery containing more than 180 screenshots from the game, which you’re free to use in your own reviews or other projects. You can find that by clicking or tapping here.
As Star Trek’s landmark 60th anniversary year rolls on, I’ve got plenty of other things planned right here on the website! There’ll be a review of Starfleet Academy Season 1 later in the month, episode re-watches, and more. So stay tuned. And… Live Long and Prosper!
Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown is out now for Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. Across The Unknown was developed by GameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. Star Trek: Voyager remains the copyright of the Skydance/Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the modern Star Trek franchise, including Discovery, Picard, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, Section 31, and Starfleet Academy.
It was recently announced that the second season of Starfleet Academy has finished filming. This comes a few weeks after the fifth and final season of Strange New Worlds also wrapped up – and it means that, for the first time since Discovery entered production in 2015, there’s no new Star Trek being produced.
Since Star Trek peaked in 2022, with a whopping fifty-one episodes of TV being broadcast across five different shows, we’ve seen a growing swathe of cancellations. And while it’s very much unconfirmed at this stage, I wouldn’t be surprised if Starfleet Academy won’t get that third season renewal. The newly-established Skydance-Paramount corporation doesn’t seem interested in pursuing Star Trek on the small screen right now – or at least, had no interest in retaining and renewing any of the Star Trek shows that were in production at the time of the merger – so when Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy finish their runs in 2027 or 2028, there’ll be one new Star Trek movie… and that could be it.
The USS Stargazer.
I’ve said a few times here on the website that I think it’s an awful shame, in this milestone 60th anniversary year, to be thinking negatively and potentially seeing Star Trek reaching the end of the line. But this time… I want to try to flip the script. Taking a break can be a positive thing, and no franchise can realistically keep up the pace that Star Trek attempted in the first half of the 2020s. Add into the mix the poor way the previous incarnation of Paramount handled the franchise, and I think we can make the case for a hiatus not being the worst possible news.
Let’s begin with an observation – one which you may share, or may not!
I haven’t watched every single Star Trek episode. I’ve only seen about half of Lower Decks, Prodigy’s first season but not its second, hardly any of Scouts (and yes, I think Scouts counts as part of Star Trek), and I’m a couple of weeks behind on Starfleet Academy, too. I’m a pretty big Trekkie – I run a Star Trek fansite, for goodness’ sake! But even *I* have found the Star Trek franchise to be a lot to handle over the past few years.
Michael Burnham on a Discovery promotional poster.
In 2023, I wrote about the burnout I’d been feeling with Star Trek, and it was at that point that I paused my episode reviews for both Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks. I did resume watching SNW – belatedly – but Lower Decks just… ended up sitting in the pile. I plan to return to it, of course, and I know for a fact I’ll enjoy it when I do. But… well, sometimes it’s okay to take a break.
One of the problems I’d argue Star Trek has faced in this streaming era is a lack of overall direction and consistency. I’m all in favour of trying out different genres, styles, and trying to reach new audiences – those are all good things. But since 2020, Star Trek has broadcast two serialised dramas, an animated comedy, a kids’ show, a preschool-age web series, a spy-thriller TV movie, a young adult/teen drama series, and one semi-episodic, somewhat “classic” feeling series.
The Doctor in Starfleet Academy Season 1.
Moreover, the franchise’s timeline has become completely fractured. Discovery was set in the 23rd Century, but then leapt forwards in time by 900 years to the 32nd. Picard was set decades after Nemesis and Voyager, but nowhere near as far forward as Discovery. Strange New Worlds was set after Enterprise and Discovery but before The Original Series. Prodigy was set after Voyager, but not at the same time as Picard. Section 31 was set after Discovery and the TOS films, but before The Next Generation. Lower Decks was set in between Nemesis and Picard, but still managed a crossover with Strange New Worlds. And, of course, Starfleet Academy is now set after Discovery in the far future.
Did I miss one? I feel like I missed one.
One thing I really hoped Star Trek could do, after Enterprise was cancelled and a reboot film was in production, was shake off its image as a convoluted franchise that only nerds could possibly keep up with. And it did… briefly. But the franchise’s streaming era didn’t just bring back the complicated prime timeline, it doubled- and tripled-down on making it even *more* convoluted than ever. And what’s been the result of that? It’s increasingly difficult for new viewers to know where to start, it’s hard for audiences who’ve enjoyed one series to try out another and fully join the fan community, and even for long-time Trekkies… it can be hard to keep up.
Star Trek has gotten even more convoluted in recent years.
I don’t believe that Star Trek should do the Marvel thing of making *every* film and series share a single setting, with characters and storylines criss-crossing the franchise. That brings with it its own issues, as Disney and Marvel are slowly discovering. Nor do I believe that Star Trek should take the Star Wars approach of only focusing on a handful of legacy characters at the expense of everything else. Again, that’s small-minded and has left that franchise with fewer and fewer options as time has gone on.
But what I do think is necessary, at this point, is for Star Trek to slim down and try to refocus. The days of producing five series at once, all in different time periods, has to be over. Star Trek’s corporate owners spread the franchise too thin in the first half of the 2020s, and simultaneously expected it to be one of the principal flag-bearers for a streaming platform. There’s a good case to be made for picking a single era, producing a single series, and sticking with it until it finishes its run.
Riker in the captain’s chair in The Next Generation Season 2.
With Alex Kurtzman’s contract at Paramount having run its course, and with a new feature film (allegedly) in early pre-production, this is as good a time as any for the franchise to take that break. When the current shows have run their course, and the film has premiered in cinemas, there’ll be time for Skydance to assess what’s worked, what hasn’t, and perhaps find where there could be a place for Star Trek in the future. And I do believe there should be a place for the franchise in the future! I’m just… not entirely certain what that looks like as we get closer to 2030.
Taking a break – having a clear twelve months or so without any new shows or films in production or on the air – will give the franchise breathing room. It’ll give all of us a chance to think about what we enjoyed, what we didn’t, and what we’d like to see more of. Star Trek – like any franchise, really – can’t be everything to everyone all the time, and decisions will have to be taken about where to focus and where to spend that energy. And it could be the case that a break is exactly what’s needed to give everyone involved a bit of clarity – the ability to see where Star Trek can and should go next.
Behind-the-scenes on the set of Starfleet Academy.
Unlike a lot of entertainment franchises, Star Trek has always felt pretty open-ended. There’s no overarching story that’s drawn to a close, and really, the only limitations should be the imagination of the folks in the writers’ room. As long as you can invent new planets, aliens, and weird space phenomena, you can make an exploration-focused, episodic Star Trek show pretty much… forever. It’s not like Star Wars, where Palpatine and Vader rose to power and were defeated, or The Lord of the Rings, which couldn’t very well continue after Sauron’s defeat. There *are* more stories to be told in this galaxy… if someone can be found to tell them.
When we look back on Star Trek’s streaming era, I think we’ll come to regret the franchise’s over-use of legacy characters. Strange New Worlds prioritises Spock, and latterly Kirk, Scotty, and Uhura, at the expense of its original creations – and even Captain Pike, sometimes. Picard jettisoned its new characters in favour of bringing back the cast of The Next Generation – even though doing so made no sense in at least one instance. And I’m afraid that, for all of its successes, making Prodigy a half-kids show, half-sequel to Voyager left it in a very odd narrative space, one that worked against its core function of attracting younger viewers. For you and I, long-standing Trekkies who love this franchise, some or maybe even all of those shows worked well. But for the franchise’s longer-term prospects? Doubling-down on legacy characters has left Star Trek with a lot less room for manoeuvre.
Spock and Kirk in Strange New Worlds.
Pitches abound from ex-Star Trek stars – whether it’s the Ceti Alpha V idea that eventually became the Khan audio drama, Scott Bakula’s “President Archer” series, the unironically-pitched Captain Proton show, a Strange New Worlds spin-off called Year One… and more. But are any of these ideas what Star Trek needs at the current moment? We’re coming off a long run of prequels, sequels, and shows with legacy characters shoehorned into them. And if the people in charge believe that what Star Trek *used to be* is all it can ever be in the future… well, maybe we really do need a break.
Why did Star Trek succeed in the 1980s and 1990s when The Next Generation and its spin-offs were on the air? It wasn’t because the writers and creatives kept going back to the same handful of characters and alien races over and over and over again. It was because there were passionate people who loved the franchise – but who were also willing and able to take it to new places. We’ve seen some of that on streaming, too – don’t get me wrong. But… not enough.
Robert Duncan McNeill directing an episode of Voyager.
At the same time as Star Trek has continually revisited legacy characters and familiar settings, we’ve also seen the franchise repeatedly forced into a modern, streaming TV mould that – I would argue – simply is not a good fit. Season-long, fully-serialised stories with big, galaxy-threatening villains… I mean, that kinda thing might work for Star Wars, but it’s just not what this franchise has ever really been about. Even when Deep Space Nine ran its Dominion War arc, the show was still largely episodic, and in twenty-plus-episode seasons, there was a lot more room to tell different kinds of stories within that framework.
I’m trying not to dwell too much on decisions that have already been taken. But I can’t shake the feeling that, in five or ten years’ time, we might look back at this streaming era as a huge missed opportunity… perhaps Star Trek’s last great opportunity to reach new audiences. By the time we got Strange New Worlds – the show I consider to be the high-water mark of the modern franchise – Discovery, Picard, and, to an extent, Prodigy as well, had already burned a lot of goodwill and a ton of cash. By the time the higher-ups at the former Paramount corporation realised that the best way to make a Star Trek show was to… y’know, *make a Star Trek show*, it was already too late. The merger was inbound and cancellation loomed.
The wreck of the USS Protostar…
I don’t want to say that I regret ViacomCBS and Paramount trying new things with Star Trek, nor trying to modernise the franchise, either. Both Discovery and Picard were well-intentioned efforts to take this classic franchise and see if it could slot into a modern, serialised, short-season format. But I think we also have to acknowledge that the results of those experiments were more miss than hit, and Strange New Worlds’ success is what’s proven to me that Star Trek *still* works best when you have the freedom to warp away to a new planet and a new adventure pretty much every week.
And that’s what I hope the new Skydance/Paramount leaders will reflect on in the months and years ahead.
I would say, to its credit, that the six episodes of Starfleet Academy that I’ve seen so far have also been more episodic than I initially feared, and that there are some fun standalone stories in Discovery, Prodigy, and of course, in Lower Decks as well. But where those shows fell down, in my opinion, was in trying to use (and then re-use) a serialised streaming mould that may have worked elsewhere… but just wasn’t the right fit for Star Trek.
David Ellison, CEO of Skydance-Paramount.
If you’ve been a regular reader for a while, you might remember me saying this shortly before Picard Season 1 landed back in 2020: “I’d like to give the new cast a chance to become fan favourites for the next generation (pun intended) of Star Trek fans. I really hope that in another thirty years’ time they’ll be clamouring to find out what happened next to some of these characters the way we are for those of the TNG era.”
That was genuinely what I hoped for as Picard premiered; that fans would be just as enamoured with the likes of Dr Jurati and Elnor as you and I were for Dr Crusher or Worf. Unfortunately, I really can’t think of a single character from modern Star Trek – across all of the shows – who might genuinely be in that category. Can you?
The main cast of Discovery’s fifth and final season.
But… I could be wrong about that. And perhaps, with the passage of time, we’ll gradually fold these newer shows into the broader lore of Star Trek. I wasn’t a huge fan of Enterprise when it premiered, and I only tuned in sporadically during its original broadcast run. But I’ve since come to appreciate the stories it told a lot more, so… maybe there’s hope there, too. Sometimes, you need a bit of time and space before you can fully appreciate a good story, and maybe that’s going to prove the case with modern Star Trek.
Another benefit of taking a break is that it gives a whole new crop of writers and creative folks a chance to step up. There may be folks out there who have great ideas for Star Trek – or who *will* have a great idea in a few years’ time – who simply wouldn’t get a look-in with Paramount right now because there’s already a full creative team in place. I note that some of the same folks have been hired to work on the production side of multiple shows of the current streaming era – as also happened, by the way, from the ’80s through to Enterprise’s cancellation. But when the same people have been at the helm for a while, any franchise is going to need an injection of new talent. New writers, new producers, new directors… people who have different ideas.
Leonard Nimoy with the writers and producers of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Some of those folks may be Trekkies already, and they’re just waiting for their chance. Others may have only come to Star Trek recently, in this current streaming era, and are just beginning to explore the franchise and what they might be able to do with it one day. Either way, having a clear-out at the top and opening the door to new pitches and new ideas from different people… it’s not a bad thing. Star Trek, in its current form, has been in production for over a decade, and Alex Kurtzman – the franchise’s current head – has been involved with Star Trek since the reboot film back in the 2000s. I’ve *never* been a “fire Kurtzman now!!1!” person. But if his contract has run its course, and a new executive team is in charge at Skydance… it could be a natural break; the right time for everyone to go their separate ways.
And to be clear: I think Alex Kurtzman can hold his head up high and revel in the genuine successes he had. No showrunner or executive producer is gonna hit it out of the park every time, and I respect his willingness to be experimental and to give shows like Lower Decks a chance. And I respect how he was willing to listen to fan feedback when we were desperate for “the Captain Pike show” to be created. So I’m not saying he “should be fired,” or that I’ll celebrate his departure. I’m simply saying that, after several years at the top and having overseen such a broad expansion of the franchise, it’s probably time for new creatives to step into that role.
Alex Kurtzman (right) with Bella Shepard on the set of Starfleet Academy.
And for us, as fans… as tempting as it may be to say we want to get new episodes of Star Trek all day, every day, I think *we* need breaks sometimes, too. You need a break to appreciate a franchise, to avoid burning out on it or finding it stale, and to branch out. There are some great sci-fi and fantasy stories out there in other properties – some of which are similar to Star Trek, and some of which are very different. But as fans, we don’t need to be *only* interested in one thing at the expense of everything else. Look at my website as an example: yes, I’m focused on Star Trek a lot of the time, but I also talk about gaming, movies, and TV shows outside of the franchise, too.
I wasn’t around in the dark days of the 1970s after The Original Series was cancelled. But I can vividly recall the shock and disappointment I felt on learning that Enterprise was being shut down after just four seasons… and that *no* new Star Trek at all was going to be produced. And I don’t long to repeat that feeling, believe me! But at the same time, as I reflect on those days with twenty years of hindsight… I think that missing Star Trek is what helped me to fall in love with the franchise all over again.
It took Enterprise’s cancellation for me to really appreciate the show.
In 2005, when Enterprise was cancelled, I had quite a few Next Generation episodes on VHS, as well as most of the Star Trek films, and I’d begun my DVD collection with The Original Series. But I wasn’t a regular Enterprise viewer, and it had been a while since I’d watched much DS9 or Voyager in particular. But cancellation, and the thought that there might be no new Star Trek at all? That spurred me on to re-watch some of my favourite stories, and as I expanded my DVD collection in the second half of the ’00s, I spent more time with Star Trek than I had in years. By the time the reboot film arrived in 2009, I owned the entire franchise on DVD, and I was regularly re-watching all of it.
I don’t think I would’ve been so committed to doing all of that were it not for the cancellation. Having that break – though it didn’t feel good at the time – led me to doubling-down on Star Trek, watching old episodes that I hadn’t seen in years, and really coming to appreciate the *entire* franchise – even those parts, like Enterprise or The Animated Series, that I was less familiar with.
The Enterprise-D, drawn in the style of The Animated Series.
I’m not saying the same thing is guaranteed to happen again. But if Star Trek does go off the air for a while, all we’ll have are re-runs of old episodes on Paramount+ (or whatever it’ll be called by that point!) I don’t think it’s impossible to think that the passage of time, and the lack of any new stories being told in the franchise, will lead us to re-evaluate some of what we’ve seen over the past decade or so. Who knows… I might even discover an appreciation for Picard Season 2. I mean… it’s *possible*. Right?
At the end of the day, there are examples of franchises disappearing for a while and coming back stronger. And I would *hope* that Star Trek could be in that category. I mean… it’s happened before. Twice. And the likes of Star Wars, Doctor Who, and others… they’ve all gone on hiatus for a while, only to return to critical acclaim and praise from their fans. A break doesn’t have to be fatal… and it doesn’t have to be permanent. And sometimes, it’s just what a franchise needs – even if, as fans, it can be hard to recognise that in the moment.
A break doesn’t need to be the end…
So I hope this has been interesting.
I was prompted by the news of Starfleet Academy’s second season wrapping principal photography, and also the recent news that Skydance-Paramount looks set to acquire Warner Bros.-Discovery. Presumably becoming Para-Disco-Dance-Bros… with a streaming platform called HBParaOPlusMountMax? Who knows!
But assuming the takeover goes through, and survives all of the regulatory scrutiny it’s sure to endure… there could be interesting times ahead. I understand that the new corporate entity will be heavily indebted, which could provide an incentive to return to big-name franchises, like Star Trek, to attract cinemagoers and subscribers. But that will have to be a conversation for another day!
Jeri Ryan with a poster teasing Seven’s return in Picard Season 1.
I wanted to tackle the thorny question of Star Trek’s possible cancellation from a completely different angle. And while I must concede that I’m not thrilled about the franchise potentially going off the air again… I can see glimmers of hope, at least, that a change in direction and perhaps a tighter focus could lead to better things somewhere down the road. I have no idea if I’ll live long enough to see any of that, of course! But if I do… hey, come back to Trekking with Dennis, and we can watch those new episodes and films together.
And until then… I’ll be here. It’s still the 60th anniversary year, and I’ve got plans for reviews, re-watches, and more right here on the website.
Thanks for joining me today, and Live Long and Prosper, friends!
The Star Trek franchise – including all properties discussed above – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5, and minor spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1.
With Starfleet Academy’s first season currently on the air, I got thinking about the institution. Although we caught a glimpse of the Academy in The Wrath of Khan, its first major on-screen appearance came a decade later in Season 5 of The Next Generation. I thought it could be interesting to return to that episode today, in light of the different approach taken by the new young adult-focused series, and re-watch The First Duty.
I was surprised, when I looked into it, by two things: firstly, how Starfleet Academy only appeared relatively late into The Next Generation’s run. By the time we made our first visit to the Academy, DS9 was already in production, less than a year away from launch, and The Next Generation was well past its halfway point. And secondly, I was surprised at how few appearances the Academy itself actually made during The Next Generation era. Starfleet Academy only appeared twice in The Next Generation and once in Voyager – in simulated form – though the same filming location was re-used as Starfleet Headquarters in Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, which is probably where my confusion stemmed from.
The Tillman Water Reclamation Plant and Japanese Garden was the filming location for parts of The First Duty. Photo: City of Los Angeles/L.A. Times
Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? The Academy feels like an iconic institution within the broader lore of Star Trek, yet it made relatively few on-screen appearances in The Next Generation era – and none at all in The Original Series.
The First Duty is one of a few episodes that I managed to watch *before* its terrestrial broadcast here in the UK – because I rented it on VHS! I couldn’t tell you exactly when; I’d guess sometime in 1993 or 1994. Star Trek video cassettes were a rarity in rental shops in the small towns around where I grew up, so I’d usually jump at the chance to grab a pair of episodes to watch! I’m almost positive I also caught the episode’s first broadcast on the BBC, too, which would’ve been in 1995. After acquiring The Next Generation on DVD, I watched the episode again multiple times, and I’ve since re-watched it on streaming, too.
Who else remembers watching The Next Generation on VHS?
What’s the point of explaining all of that? Well… my occasional “episode re-watch” series isn’t a “review.” It’s way too late for me to write anything like an “episode review” for a series I adore and for an episode I first watched more than three decades ago! This is going to be my thoughts on the story, but some of how I feel about The First Duty has probably shifted with the benefit of hindsight, with ageing, and after having viewed literally hundreds more Star Trek episodes that have premiered in the intervening years. It should also go without saying that everything we’re going to get into today is the *subjective, not objective* take of just one person. If you hate The First Duty, love it more than I do, disagree with my take, or think I’ve completely missed the point… that’s okay! We’re all here to just geek out about Star Trek, at the end of the day, and I share my take on this classic episode with the Trekkie community in that spirit.
The First Duty has a couple of interesting characters and narrative elements when considering the broader Star Trek franchise, and I’d like to begin there. This episode was only the sixth appearance of a Bajoran character, with the Bajorans having debuted earlier in Season 5. With Deep Space Nine in early production, the Bajorans (and the Cardassians, too) were being set up in The Next Generation ahead of their prominent role in the upcoming series. The character of Sito Jaxa was, after Ro Laren, the second Bajoran to be seen on screen serving in Starfleet. Sito would re-appear in the episode Lower Decks in Season 7.
Cadet Sito.
We talked about Nick Locarno recently – click or tap here for more on that! But Locarno is an interesting character, as it’s pretty clear he was, at the very least, a partial inspiration for the character of Tom Paris in Voyager, which would premiere less than three years after The First Duty aired. Paris and Locarno share an actor in Robert Duncan McNeill, but they also share a piloting career and a lax approach to Starfleet regulations. I’m not fully caught up on Lower Decks yet, but I understand Locarno appeared in that series, too.
I just find it interesting that, in a single episode, we have elements from all three shows of The Next Generation era. In addition to characters from TNG itself, we have a Bajoran, whose home planet and people would be massively important in Deep Space Nine, and Nick Locarno, played by a future Voyager star, and who’s arguably a prototype or inspiration for one of that show’s main characters. It makes The First Duty feel – in hindsight – almost like a crossover! At the very least, it’s an episode that has those different components – even if, at the time, no one watching could’ve known!
The cadets bring together all three shows of The Next Generation era.
And this is what I mean about the benefit of hindsight. Watching The First Duty more than thirty years after its original broadcast means we can see how Star Trek’s production team were already laying the groundwork for their new spin-off. And we can see how Robert Duncan McNeill basically talked himself into getting the role of Tom Paris some three years before Tom Paris ever existed! It makes returning to the story a completely different experience than it was on that first viewing in the first half of the ’90s; nothing about the episode or its narrative has changed, but the way we interpret it arguably has.
At the core of the episode, we have two key character pairings: Wesley Crusher and Nick Locarno on one side, and Captain Picard and Boothby on the other. The First Duty follows Wesley, Nick, and the other members of Nova Squadron as they try to cover up the events leading to a fatal accident. Picard reconnects with Boothby – apparently for the first time since being promoted to the rank of captain, at least – and also relies on the Academy’s groundskeeper for advice as the inquest into Cadet Albert’s death unfolds.
Boothby’s reunion with Picard.
Wil Wheaton returns to The Next Generation for the second time since departing the series midway through the previous season. Wesley’s departure was written in such a way as to allow the character to return, and The First Duty was one of four episodes in which Wheaton reprised the role.
I don’t know if you were around while The Next Generation was airing, or during those early years of Star Trek fan forums on the interweb, but Wesley was often a controversial character, even for big fans of the series! A “Mary Sue,” according to some, Gene Roddenberry’s “self-insert” according to others, Wesley was perceived as being annoying, too smart or too skilful for his lack of training, and worse, by some viewers. I wouldn’t say that The First Duty was Wesley’s first defeat – see episodes like Justice, Coming of Age, or The Dauphin – but it certainly represents one of Wesley’s low points as a person – and, ironically, one of his most *human* moments, too.
The First Duty shows Wesley at his most human.
I’m personally of the opinion that Wesley is unfairly disliked by viewers of The Next Generation, and while I get some of the criticism – particularly surrounding his near-perfect skills – I generally enjoy his characterisation in the show. The First Duty, though, shows us a much more vulnerable, weak, and human side to Wesley, showing us that, whatever intelligence and skill he may have, he can still make mistakes, he can still be caught up in the wake of someone more charismatic, and he’s still learning. Wesley is a kid – a university student or military college cadet, as of The First Duty. And… he acts like it.
We’ve seen this side of Wesley before, but in a relatively limited number of stories. And, I would argue, never to this extent. Despite the heavy adult themes of death, conspiracies, duty, and conflicted loyalties, this is a version of Wesley that feels *young* in a way that the character didn’t always manage to when he sat on the bridge of the Enterprise-D. And this is a story that looks at how a young person can feel peer pressure, can be pushed into doing something they know to be wrong, and how easily a charismatic friend can influence their life. Wesley slips into this role effortlessly, and Wil Wheaton puts in a fantastic performance, showing us how torn Wesley feels between his friendships with Nick and the rest of Nova Squadron and his desire to do the right thing by telling the truth.
Nick Locarno with Wesley.
Although never to such an extreme degree, I think a lot of us can relate to getting in trouble at school, or not wanting to “grass up” a friend. I certainly found myself in detention or sent to the headmaster’s office on more than one occasion when I was at school, and I can vividly remember how that felt – that fear of getting in trouble, and how serious it all seemed to be at the time. And I can recall occasions where friends at school would do something stupid – sneaking alcohol on a school trip, smoking behind the woodworking classroom, or cutting class to sneak into town. I covered for them when they misbehaved, and they probably did the same for me!
My point is that a big part of what makes The First Duty work is that, despite its heavy subject matter, it’s an incredibly relatable feeling. I’ve been in a position not unlike Wesley’s – where my schoolfriends expected me to cover for them while teachers demanded the truth. And it’s that near-universal feeling, something a huge number of folks in the audience will have experienced at least once in their lives, that makes Wesley feel so relatable and so human within the story.
Nick Locarno put a lot of pressure on Wesley and the other cadets.
One thing that I think is a bit of a shame when it comes to The First Duty is that the episode didn’t have enough time to really flesh out Captain Picard’s backstory. We glimpsed, through his chat with Boothby, that Picard had made a mistake of some kind during his own Academy days, and that Boothby helped him understand what he’d done. Picard says that, without Boothby’s advice, he might not have been allowed to graduate – combined with his earlier recollection of being summoned to the Superintendent’s office, we can assume it was something pretty serious. We know Picard had a rebellious streak in his youth – something that the episode Tapestry would hammer home in Season 6. But what this incident was… it was never followed up on in the remainder of the show, unfortunately.
Picard and Boothby’s conversations were interesting, but they also leave me wanting more! I wish we could’ve got a flashback to Picard’s Academy days, perhaps, or even just a bit more of an explanation from one of the characters about what Picard did. The chat had a “we both know what this is, so there’s no need to go into detail” thing going on, which makes sense in-universe – both characters know what they’re referring to – but it’s a tiny bit frustrating as a viewer!
What did Boothby do for Picard all those years ago?
Given the importance of this conversation to Picard, as he pursues the investigation into what happened with Wesley and Nova Squadron, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to know more about this mysterious event in Picard’s past. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that Picard broke a rule that resulted in endangerment or injury, perhaps, and Boothby was the one to convince him that he needed to come clean. It’s clearly something at least somewhat comparable to Wesley’s situation – but I doubt Picard would’ve done anything as severe as covering up someone’s death.
I kind of feel that Dr Crusher is a bit flat, especially at the beginning of the story. She’s learning for the first time that her son has been injured in an accident that killed one of his friends, but her reaction throws me off just a little. A lot of people don’t have big, over-the-top emotional reactions to events, but even by that standard, Dr Crusher just seems a little bit underwhelmed by what should be such a seismic and shocking event. Subsequent scenes show her a bit more animated when coming to Wesley’s defence, but that moment in her office at the beginning of the episode just… I’m not convinced it was played right, considering the seriousness of the accident.
Dr Crusher felt a bit flat to me, especially at the start of the story.
What I adored about Dr Crusher in The First Duty, though, was how she leapt to the conclusion that the sensor data had to be wrong – because, in her mind, there’s absolutely no way that Wesley could’ve been lying. It piled pressure on Wesley, of course, which is something we saw building up over the course of the episode, eating away at his conscience and making him feel ever more guilty. But I like what it says about Dr Crusher, and how she’s so willing to believe her son – even when it seems obvious to everyone else that he’s not being honest.
The downside to this, unfortunately, is that we never got any resolution to this mother-and-son story. Dr Crusher arrives on Earth to see Wesley, goes through the inquest with him, supports him even when he’s lying, but by the time his lie is exposed and he’s pushed into making a confession, she’s gone from the story. Picard is the one to deliver the news to Wesley about his academic punishment, and we never get to see whether Dr Crusher is upset, angry, disappointed, or some combination thereof. It’s not something that feels like a glaring omission until you stop to think about it – but as Wesley’s biggest supporter, Dr Crusher is yet another person that Wesley let down by his actions in The First Duty. And there’s no resolution to that story thread.
Commander Albert.
Obviously, a forty-five-minute episode can’t do everything. And given the characters and storylines in play, it was probably the right call for the writers to focus where they did. I just think that, if I had to pick on one thing that I’d say is missing from The First Duty, it would be some kind of closing scene between Dr Crusher and Wesley – some way for her to express her disappointment, perhaps even feeling like he’d broken her trust.
Maybe we should infer from Dr Crusher’s absence that she was so *livid* with Wesley in that moment that she couldn’t even look at him! That could be why Picard had to be the one to deliver the news, to express his own conflicted feelings – pride that Wesley eventually did what was right, understanding that it was difficult, but anger, frustration, and disappointment that the situation occurred in the first place. I don’t believe that was the writers’ intention, but that interpretation of Dr Crusher’s absence is there, if you want to read between the lines, and if you desperately need a way to resolve her arc in the episode.
Where was Dr Crusher in the episode’s final act?
And I happen to really like Picard’s closing scene with Wesley as the episode concludes. Picard went from sympathy to suspicion to righteous anger as he uncovered the truth about the accident, resulting in an incredibly impressive scene in his ready-room aboard the Enterprise-D in which he absolutely tore into Wesley. But the closing scene, after Wesley confessed, showed that Picard recognised how difficult the whole situation was, perhaps sympathised to an extent based on the mysterious event from his own Academy days, and even showed some measure of respect for Wesley’s ability to do the right thing in light of the pressure he felt.
Though they contrast in tone, both scenes between Picard and Wesley – in the ready-room and after the inquest – were played incredibly well. It’s performances like that from the venerable Sir Patrick Stewart that led to the character being so beloved by Trekkies… and eventually returning, some three decades later, for his own spin-off series!
Picard was furious.
Though they aren’t in focus for a lot of time, I enjoyed the moments we got with Data and Geordi in this episode. Working in main engineering, they analysed the sensor data that poked holes in Nova Squadron’s story, setting the stage for Picard to understand what really happened. The slow reveal of discrepancies or oddities in the recovered Data from Wesley’s ship was a really well-paced scene, and Geordi and Data both had roles to play in explaining (or technobabbling) parts of that.
Starfleet ships of The Next Generation era are almost always my favourites in terms of design. But I gotta be honest: the Nova Squadron ships… they don’t really do much for me. Nothing about the design screams “Star Trek” at all, and they feel almost like single-pilot fighter ships from a franchise like Star Wars. Nothing about the design is *bad* per se, and I don’t dislike the way these ships looked. But in a franchise where there are so many fun and interesting designs, they’re nothing special.
The Academy ships as they appeared on the inquest viewscreen.
Perhaps this is because these ships were mainly seen as CGI models, with a physical prop only appearing very briefly. The ’90s was a weird time for CGI – with the technology pretty limited. Given that Nova Squadron’s ships were all destroyed prior to the events of the episode, only depicted in logs and sensor data, I guess you could say that it’s fair enough that we didn’t get a more detailed look at them. But still… I just don’t feel like the aesthetic of the ships, the way they look, was particularly strong.
But your mileage may vary! Aesthetics and designs are very much a matter of personal taste. And I would say, having seen a photo of the original model of the Nova Squadron ships, up close, I don’t think it looks that bad. But the way it came across on screen, particularly in those CGI-heavy scenes, just didn’t leave a strong impression. The Next Generation era has way better shuttlecraft, shuttlepods, and smaller vessels.
The filming model (or a replica) of Nova Squadron’s ships. Photo: StarTrek.com
Sticking with the look of the episode, one thing I found particularly interesting was the design of Starfleet Academy itself. Remember, this is our first real look at the campus anywhere in Star Trek, and obviously, there’s a lot of time spent both on the grounds – which were filmed at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles – and the room where the inquest took place. The gardens are an iconic part of Star Trek, I would argue, having been seen as both the Academy and Starfleet HQ. But I want to focus on a different space for a moment: Wesley’s dorm room.
This is going to sound like a totally minor thing to focus on, but why do the doors on Starfleet Academy’s campus have… handles? Surely the Federation has moved beyond such things, right?! I don’t remember it being something I paid much attention to until this re-watch of the episode, but I found that, once I started to think about it, it stuck out like a sore thumb every time Wesley opened the door to his dorm. It’s not *totally* out-of-place in Star Trek, but for a location on Earth like the Academy? I dunno… you’d think they’d have sliding doors like on the Enterprise!
The offending door handle…
In light of Robert Duncan McNeill’s role in Voyager, I can’t help but wonder how similarly (or differently) we might’ve received his performance if a decision had been made to bring the character of Nick Locarno into that series. Would a similar “redemption arc” story have been possible for Locarno in the way it was for Tom Paris? I think it would have been interesting, and could’ve added another layer to this character, to say that Locarno joined the Maquis after being expelled from the Academy, only to be captured, imprisoned, and really hit rock bottom.
We still got a lot of that with Tom, something that the revelation about his father being an admiral certainly compounded, but part of me will always wonder how differently we might’ve received the character had Nick Locarno been the one assigned to Voyager. It would’ve been another connection point, a through line from The Next Generation to its sister show. I haven’t seen Locarno’s arc in Lower Decks yet, and perhaps I should’ve delayed this re-watch until I have! But maybe that will also change the way I look at the character in The First Duty.
Nick Locarno.
Star Trek has done courtroom drama going all the way back to the first season of The Original Series, and within The Next Generation, we have several other examples, too. I wouldn’t necessarily rank The First Duty’s inquest sequences as being among the best or most compelling courtroom-esque that the franchise has to offer, but they get the job done, and they’re sufficiently tense. When the cadets are caught in their lies, especially by the Vulcan captain, there are some moments of real jeopardy, moments that really captured that feeling of being a kid and getting in trouble that I talked about earlier.
Admiral Brand – the Superintendent of Starfleet Academy – is a fun character. I liked Picard’s description of her at the beginning of the story; it set her up pretty well as a “no-nonsense” type of educator. I think we all came across teachers like that when we were at school! Brand is the first one to question the cadets’ version of events, and her presence adds a lot to this side of the story.
Admiral Brand and Captain Satelk.
In The Measure of a Man – another classic courtroom story from The Next Generation – it never made a lot of sense to me that Starfleet would pick Picard and Riker to argue the case. So I like how, in The First Duty, we don’t get the contrivance of having Picard or another Enterprise officer serving on the inquest panel. The inquest works better for having Admiral Brand and Captain Satelk as its members.
If I were to nitpick – and you know I must – it never felt realistic to me that Starfleet Academy would be content to basically say “a student died, we know you’re lying about what happened, but there’s nothing more we can do, so nevermind.” Which is, in effect, what Admiral Brand was going to do until Picard pushed Wesley into making a confession. It just doesn’t seem to gel with what we know of Starfleet that they’d give up on the investigation so easily when someone – a student, no less – had actually died. And while this works in the context of the episode as a way to raise the stakes for Wesley, part of me has always felt that Starfleet wouldn’t have been content to let it lie.
The inquest.
Narratively, The First Duty does an exceptional job of building up the pressure Wesley feels. There’s his initial guilt at Cadet Albert’s death, which is swiftly compounded by his mother fussing over him and his reunion with Captain Picard. Then there’s Nick, insisting that they all collude to cover up what really happened to save their own skins – even if that means Joshua’s reputation gets dragged through the mud. Commander Albert then comes into the story, apologising to Wesley for Joshua “letting Nova Squadron down,” and really just making Wesley feel awful. Next, as the inquest rolls on, the evidence from the satellite shows the team out of formation. Again, Dr Crusher compounds this by insisting that Wesley must be right and the data wrong. And finally, we come to the confrontation with Picard – after we’ve seen this slow buildup of various factors all combining to really weigh on Wesley’s conscience.
Picard’s blow-up would have had an impact regardless, but when you watch that scene after seeing all of those other moments of guilt and pressure… it works a whole lot better. Picard’s harsh words to Wesley come after we’ve already seen the cover-up slowly unravel, and they hit so much harder because we know that Picard is 100% in the right. And for Wesley, this is the final straw: the moment where he has to choose between his loyalty to Nick and his friends… and doing the right thing. The titular first duty.
Picard.
I think if you forced me to choose my favourite season of The Next Generation, Season 5 would be my pick. It has so many fantastic episodes: Disaster, Unification, Cause and Effect, The Next Phase, and fan-favourites like Darmok and The Inner Light, too. So The First Duty has some tough competition, but I think it fits in pretty well with many of those outstanding stories. It’s an episode that does a lot for Picard and his sense of duty, pushing Wesley to do the right thing. And it’s also an episode that takes the “impossibly perfect” Wesley Crusher and brings him down to earth, really humanising him and showing us that he can make mistakes, too.
I had fun returning to The First Duty, and I think it makes for an interesting point of comparison to the new Starfleet Academy series, too. Starfleet Academy has picked up criticism in some quarters for its tone and some of its stories – and there will always be folks both inside and outside of the fan community who aren’t happy when Star Trek doesn’t give them *exactly* what they want! For my money, I think you can see a through line from The First Duty to Starfleet Academy, even if some of that comes in exposition and dialogue! Boothby, for instance, talks about how the cadets’ celebrations in Picard’s day and for Wesley’s Nova Squadron caused a lot of damage to the grounds – something we see firsthand when the Academy cadets get into a “prank war” in the new series. That’s just one example, but I think it shows that, despite some changes in approach, Star Trek is still Star Trek even all these years later.
The final shot of the episode.
So that’s all for today. I wanted to step back to the Academy’s first big appearance now that we have the new Starfleet Academy show – more out of curiosity, really, than for any other reason. When I write up my thoughts on Starfleet Academy’s first season later this month, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about how the show fits in with the wider Star Trek franchise, and this re-watch has certainly given me a lot to think about in that regard!
Thanks for tuning in for this episode re-watch. I had a lot of fun revisiting The Next Generation and catching up with Picard, Wesley, Dr Crusher, and the rest of the crew. The First Duty is a fun episode, and one that feels, with the benefit of hindsight, like it brings together all three shows of The Next Generation era in a pretty fun way. I’m not sure which episode will be getting a full write-up next, but in this milestone 60th anniversary year, I’d love to do more to celebrate. Have fun out there… and Live Long and Prosper!
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available, and is also available to buy on DVD/Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including The Next Generation and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and for Star Trek: Voyager.
When I review video games here on the website, I often take a whole lot of screenshots! With over 1,000 screenshots for Across The Unknown just languishing on my computer, I thought I’d put together a gallery of some of the better or more interesting ones. This piece isn’t my review of the game – you can click or tap here if you want to read that. Instead, this is a gallery of more than 180 screenshots that I took but didn’t get to use in that review.
I’ve organised the screenshots into categories, and within each category, I’ve tried to go chronologically through the game. All screenshots are in 720p resolution (1280×720 pixels), which I find adequate for use here on my website; it’s a good balance between detail and size, in my opinion! And… yeah. That’s all. Feel free to use any of these screenshots in your own projects about Across The Unknown; unedited video game screenshots are generally considered to be the copyright of the developer/publisher, not of the person who took the screenshot. However, if you *do* find some of these to be useful for whatever you’re working on, I’d appreciate being acknowledged, and/or a link to this post!
It goes without saying that there are spoilers ahead for Across The Unknown and Star Trek: Voyager. I hope you find some of these screenshots useful, and… enjoy!
System View:
The system view is where you’ll spend a lot of time. Scanning planets, navigating nebulae, starting main quests and side missions… it all happens here.
Scanning a gas giant…A Class M planet.Warping between systems.Scanning a planet…Who’s this?Approaching an abandoned Borg Cube…A promise fulfilled.Flying through a system.A completed side-mission.En route to a Class K planet.Traveling through a nebula.
…and the results of the scan.Starting a mission.A Class P planet.Reaching a destination.A random event.A nebula.A mission to a planet.A successful outcome.A terrible outcome.A classy planet. Sorry, a Class Y planet.The start of a major story arc.
MSD/Ship View:
This is Voyager’s MSD (or Master Systems Display; a visual element from the TV series). It’s also where you’ll customise Voyager, clearing debris from damaged rooms, building replacement rooms, and assigning hero characters to be in control of key systems, like weapons, food production, and more.
Things look bleak at first…In memoriam…The MSD with a text box.More decks are coming online.Managing a battery compartment.Assigning a hero to manage a room.
The MSD in the early game.Failing a side-mission.Power has been restored to several decks.Meeting Nine of Nine.Sector complete!All systems and decks operational!
Zoomed-In Rooms:
These are a few of the rooms that you can build aboard Voyager. These are from the same MSD/ship view as above, just zoomed in to the individual rooms. It’s fun to see NPCs milling around, keeping the ship flying! Some story moments also take place in rooms like Main Engineering or Sickbay, and you can make some major, run-impacting decisions here.
The Bridge.The Mess Hall without Neelix…The Transporter Room.Disruptor Control.A Shield Generator.Stellar Cartography/Astrometrics.An Observation Lounge.Emergency Quarters.Main Engineering.Hydroponics.
Sandrine’s on the Holodeck.…and the Mess Hall with Neelix.The Shuttlebay.The Torpedo Bay.A Bio Lab.A Cargo Bay.A Life Support Room.Borg Alcoves.Sickbay.Rubble in a ruined room.
Sector View:
I didn’t spend a lot of time here. All you can really do is choose which system to scan or visit next.
The sector view.This screen appears in between sectors.
A different sector later in the game.Setting course, captain!
The Tech Tree:
The tech tree is where you unlock new technologies, rooms, and such like. Some of these are available to research at any time if you have the right resources and enough Science Points, but others must be unlocked via missions. There are 5 categories: Engineering, Crew, Science, Combat, and Borg.
Engineering.Science.Borg.
Crew.Combat.A new tech has been unlocked.
Cut-Scenes:
There are a few cut-scenes (or cinematics) in the game, all of which depict Voyager. The ship can be seen in flight, approaching points of interest, in combat, and so on. I cropped a few of these to be a bit more interesting/focused.
The opening cut-scene.Voyager at DS9.Voyager enters the Badlands.Voyager and the Val Jean.Neelix’s ship.Arriving in a new sector.Battling the Kazon.A Species 8472 bio-ship.Flying into a portal.A Hirogen station explodes.Slipstream.Escaping the Borg.Under attack!A surprise in the nebula…Approaching the transwarp hub.Destroying the transwarp hub.A bad outcome!
Tom’s shuttle.En route to the Badlands.The displacement wave.Arriving at Ocampa.Destroying the Array.Jumping to warp.The battle rages on…Borg Cubes.Orbiting a planet.The “USS Dauntless.”Arriving at Unimatrix-01.Using a transwarp coil.The USS Equinox.The Klingons arrive.Voyager’s ablative armour.Inside the transwarp network.Back to Earth.
Away Missions:
Away missions involve heroes visiting planets, ships, or other locations off of Voyager. They’re communicated through text and images, with the images having a kind of “painted” art style. Away missions also involve skill checks and rolls of the digital dice.
Caretaker, Part I.Caretaker, Part III.Phage, Part I.Phage, Part III.Phage, Part V.Night, Part I.Night, Part III.Night, Part V.Live Fast and Propser, Part I.Live Fast and Prosper, Part III.
Caretaker, Part II.Caretaker, Part IV.Phage, Part II.Phage, Part IV.Phage, Part VI.Night, Part II.Night, Part IV.Night, Part VI.Live Fast and Prosper, Part II.Live Fast and Prosper, Part IV.
Transporter Room:
Before you start an away mission, you have to pick which hero(es) are going to take part. This takes place in the transporter room, and the game gives you hints about which heroes might be better-suited to the mission at hand.
The transporter pad.Tuvok, Kes, and Tom Paris.Marla Gilmore, the Doctor, and Kes.Chakotay, Tuvok, and Seven of Nine.
Tom Paris and Harry Kim.Kashyk, Neelix, and Joe Carey.Chakotay, Harry Kim, and B’Elanna.Choose your team!
The View from the Bridge:
These scenes depict various characters conversing on the bridge. This is also where you get to make consequential choices.
Harry at his station in Caretaker.Meeting the Maquis.Tuvok at his post.Seska.“We’ve got Neelix at home.”Making a consequential choice.The Doctor brings news…B’Elanna.Success!Who’s that Borg?Admiral Janeway.
The damage caused by the Array.Chatting to the Caretaker.Evasive maneuvers!Mabus on the bridge.Unlocking the Borg tech tree.Options and chances for success.Arturis.Chakotay? You… okay?Planning a heist.Red Alert.The Borg Queen.
Combat:
Combat takes place in real-time, and there are a variety of enemy ships you’ll encounter. Some are akin to boss fights, with big, imposing enemies who need to be defeated. Others are random encounters or ambushes at points of interest.
This is not going well…An early boss battle.Choose your fighter!Fire the disruptors!Oh no, it’s an ambush!Battling the Borg.Eww, the Borg are revolting.Another ambush, eh?Fire the cutting beam!
Defeat!Fighting Culluh.Idrin was a mid-game boss.Defeating the Malon.Facing off with the Equinox.Choosing which system to target.Take that, Borg Cube!We’ll hit ’em with everything we’ve got!The final boss battle.
The Main Menu:
The game’s main menu and difficulty options.
The first screen you see on booting up the game.Difficulty options.The DLC part of the main menu (I bought the deluxe edition).
The main menu.Main menu + sector list.Accessibility settings in the main menu.
Endings:
These are a selection of ending cards for various hero characters, as well as a couple from one of the “bad” endings.
The ending screen.Seven of Nine’s ending.Chakotay’s ending connects with Prodigy.Kashyk’s ending.Neelix can make it to Earth.Tom Paris’ ending.
A better ending!Tuvok’s ending.B’Elanna’s ending.Kes’ ending was bittersweet.Marla Gilmore’s ending.Harry finally gets his promotion!
So that’s everything I have!
I hope some of these screenshots will prove useful to you – or just interesting, if you’re curious about the game but haven’t yet decided whether or not to commit to it. If you want to get my full thoughts on Across The Unknown, including the positives, some points of criticism, and why I’m happy to recommend it to fans of Voyager, please check out my full review. You can find it by clicking or tapping here.
That’s all for today. Screenshot galleries aren’t usually something I publish here on the website, but I had so many spare ones after my review of Across The Unknown that I thought I’d give it a try. Hopefully someone out there found these to be useful, in any case!
Have fun in the Delta Quadrant, friends!
Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown is out now for Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. Across The Unknown was developed by GameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. Star Trek: Voyager remains the copyright of the Skydance/Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware spoilers for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and for Star Trek: Voyager.
I’ve been getting acquainted with the brand-new Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown over the last few days. Last year marked Voyager’s 30th anniversary – which is insane to think about, by the way, and makes me feel oh so very old! But it also made it the perfect time for a new Voyager game’s announcement, and with Across The Unknown looking like my kinda thing, I was excited to give it a try. I picked up the “deluxe edition” of the game as soon as it became available, and I’m ready to share my thoughts with you today.
Firstly, though, a couple of important caveats.
Everything we’re going to get into today is the entirely *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one person. If you have a different perspective on Across The Unknown or Voyager in general… that’s okay. I offer my take to the Trekkie community based on how I experienced the game. And in addition, Across The Unknown is a deceptively big game, with some procedurally-generated elements, luck-based mechanics that play a role in determining outcomes, and multiple pathways and even multiple endings. I have not experienced all that the game has to offer, and I’m basing this review on one “run” through the game, plus one abortive “half-run” that ended too soon.
Ready to get lost in the Delta Quadrant?
So let’s talk Across The Unknown – or, as I keep mistakenly calling it, Into The Unknown. Remember that song? The one from Frozen II? It’s stuck in my head now.
Big-picture talk: I like Across The Unknown. I think it’s a game designed from the ground up by Trekkies, with Trekkies in mind, and it really leans into all aspects of Voyager, coming across as a true celebration of the series. Gameplay-wise, though? There are some flaws and deficiencies which hold it back a little as things stand. I’m buoyed by developer GameXcite’s commitment to acting on feedback, but there is one basic missing feature that even a first-time amateur developer should’ve known fans would want to see included, and it’s a shame it’s absent from Across The Unknown at launch.
There are also a handful of bugs that impacted my experience, including one that stopped me from navigating between the game’s three main menus, effectively soft-locking me out and forcing me to reload my most recent autosave. Again, GameXcite seem willing to continue to work on the game post-launch, with a couple of patches having been rolled out for the PC version already. Hopefully, these issues (and any others I may not have encountered) will be resolved – but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re sitting on the fence about the game right now. Perhaps waiting as little as a couple of weeks will mean the version you download and install will be a tad smoother and better across the board.
An example of a minor text bug.
Across The Unknown is missing an incredibly basic function of video games that I almost can’t believe wasn’t included at launch: a proper save system. The game relies on an autosave, with the intention of playing like a “rogue-like” experience, complete with permanent, run-impacting choices.
The problem with that is the sheer *randomness* to too many of the outcomes. To give one example from my first run, I encountered a mission based on the episode Faces, which involved the Vidiians splitting B’Elanna into two separate people. This mission, despite me having an upgraded sickbay, the Doctor being present, being fully-equipped with resources, and – for want of a better term – doing everything “the right way,” resulted in B’Elanna’s death. This came in my first run through the game, at a relatively early stage, leaving me without one of Voyager’s main characters. I’d have wanted to go back and undo that, but doing so meant either restarting the entire sector or starting again from scratch.
Some outcomes feel very luck-dependent.
I admire the intention to go for an “old-school” style of gameplay. But I’m someone who believes games should give players options. I’m on the record supporting the practice of “save-scumming,” at least in single-player experiences like Across The Unknown. A game like this, which demands hours of your time, should be customisable to an extent, and should be able to be tailored to the way you want to play. By all means, do what Baldur’s Gate 3 does and have a mode where save-scumming is disabled and players have to rely on one single autosave only. But for folks who either don’t have a lot of time to play, or who want a more relaxed approach to the game? A proper free save system is *essential*, and I find it hard to believe that no one at GameXcite didn’t raise this as an issue before launch.
Responding to this exact line of criticism, GameXcite has pledged to “find a solution that brings you there,” to quote one of their recent updates. I don’t know what the time-frame might be on something like that, but it will be a *major* improvement to the game, assuming the developers can find a way to get it over the line. I sympathise, to an extent, because this is clearly not the way the game was envisioned or originally designed. But the ability to freely save – or at least to have multiple autosaves to choose from, perhaps – is something so incredibly basic, something that has been part of video games for decades… the fact it’s missing is a glaring omission. The sooner this is fixed, the better Across The Unknown will be.
Having to re-play whole sectors because you got a bad outcome (that was impossible to predict)? Not a lot of fun for me!
In my playthrough of the game’s demo version last year, I made note of the lack of voice acting, and how it was text-only. I didn’t mean that as a criticism, really, but I wanted folks to be aware of the kind of title Across The Unknown was before jumping in. Since then, however, GameXcite managed to recruit two of Voyager’s original cast members – Tim Russ and Robert Duncan McNeill – to reprise their roles and record a series of logs. These logs are played at the beginning of each new sector (assuming the characters are both alive and part of the crew), and it’s a nice addition.
Unlike a proper save system, I don’t think Across The Unknown would’ve felt incomplete without these logs, but it’s an example of GameXcite responding to the feedback they picked up from the demo version of the game, and it’s nice that they chose to expand the title to include this extra feature. The logs are a lot of fun, they’re very “Star Trekky,” and it’s always great when a project like this can bring back members of the original cast in some form.
One of Tuvok’s logs.
In addition to the soft-locking bug I mentioned above, I encountered another, comparatively minor bug. At one point, my ship was afflicted by a “deuterium infestation,” which gradually depleted my deuterium stockpile over time. Despite taking the appropriate actions to fix this problem, the pop-up notification (which is on the left-hand side of the screen) never disappeared for the remainder of that run. I don’t know why it didn’t, and after a while, I just sort of tuned it out. But I’m pretty sure this *is* a bug, and the notification should’ve been removed after the issue was resolved.
A more serious bug soon followed. In short, if you’ve had to re-play a section of the game, or if you’ve been defeated in combat and need to re-load the sector, you have the option to choose to skip chunks of dialogue. That’s fine – good, even, because there’s nothing more frustrating, sometimes, than having to sit through an inspiring speech or villain’s monologue that you’ve heard a dozen times! But choosing to skip dialogue *after* locking in an optional choice seemed to mean that the desired outcome didn’t happen – even if it literally had a 100% chance of happening.
The system view. You’ll spend a lot of time here.
This next part is spoiler-y, so skip this paragraph if you really want to avoid that.
After playing through the Kazon-Nistrim/Seska storyline (which is mandatory), and arriving at the final combat encounter, Harry Kim has the idea to use holographic projections to make it seem as if Voyager has allied vessels fighting alongside her. If you succeed in this check, which, in my run, had something like a 90% chance of success, it removed two of the Kazon vessels from the subsequent fight. But if you skip the remainder of the conversation *after* choosing this option, even if the game told you you’d succeeded, the enemy ships would be present. An annoying bug, if a specific one.
There were no hard crashes during my playthrough, and compared to the demo version (which seemed to be putting a lot of strain on my CPU for some reason, making the fans work overtime to keep things cool), I’d say Across The Unknown ran pretty well on my PC. This shouldn’t be a massively demanding game; it’s less than 9GB in total, and there aren’t a ton of models or animations. But there are still characters to animate, as well as real-time ship battles. It’s nice to see a game that runs well out of the gate – not something that’s always guaranteed any more, sadly, in this age of “release now, fix later” titles and endless patches.
The climactic battle against Seska and Culluh.
Let’s talk about the “deluxe edition.”
I usually don’t go in for day-one DLC, but I violated that rule for Across The Unknown. I did so primarily as a show of support for the development team, but I think it’s worth saying that this additional content… didn’t really add a lot. The deluxe edition content adds three technologies and five side-missions (all of which are based on episodes from Voyager). I didn’t get to play all of them, but the ones I saw were fun. The DLC also adds two “heroes;” named NPC characters who can be assigned to a variety of different roles. Neither are what you’d call a major character on the show, though.
I’m in two minds about this, really. I don’t really think it’s asking too much for games to be released in a complete state, and day-one DLC – i.e. content that was developed alongside the main game and fully-integrated into it – has never sat right with me. Not every game needs a “deluxe edition,” and when you compare the price of the base game (RRP £29.99 in the UK) to the price of the “deluxe edition” (£37.99 in the UK), I’m not sure the extra content is really worth it. I hope that, *if* any future DLC is planned, it will either be significantly better value, or else have something totally different to offer besides new random characters and a few basic missions. This isn’t to say the content is *bad*; it’s not. But your mileage may vary when it comes to determining the value, and if price is a concern, I don’t think you’re missing out by not paying the extra money on this occasion.
The “deluxe edition” content.
Something that came to irk me, a little, was how the game became quite pushy at insisting I advance the story and move on, leaving a sector before fully exploring and encountering everything. As above with saving, the intention behind this may be admirable, in some ways; Across The Unknown’s developers want you to feel the pressure of Voyager’s long journey home, and want you to have to make choices between exploring every corner of a sector and maintaining crew morale.
I get it.
But when, in every single sector, you’re getting pop-up after pop-up telling you that the crew are getting angsty and want you to move on… it becomes more of an irritation than anything else.
Piss off, Tuvok…
This can happen even *before* completing the main objective in a sector, meaning that you can be feeling the pressure to move on when you literally cannot move on, as that option is still locked. And you can argue that I should’ve gotten a move on and prioritised the main story! Fair point. But isn’t the point of a game about commanding a starship that you have *some* freedom to explore? In most games, I’ll try to do side-quests first, then the main mission, and go through each level that way to maximise the amount of stuff I get to explore. Across The Unknown wants to limit this… and I don’t think the way it’s implemented is quite working right.
As with free saving, I’d be fine if this was a toggleable option – if you had the ability to turn this feature on or off. But if I may propose a compromise: why not limit this so it only happens after the main mission in a sector is complete? That would still keep the pressure on, but it would give players a bit more freedom to play the game in different ways.
Main engineering.
Speaking of freedom, one thing I was concerned about before Across The Unknown launched was the extent of player freedom when it comes to making key narrative decisions. This is absolutely *crucial* to the game’s potential replayability, and any narrative adventure – even a rogue-like experience – needs to make decisions feel impactful. Moreover, a game based on an existing story that aims to give players the ability to deviate from that story needs to find a way to balance different outcomes.
There were several places where, to be blunt about it, I felt like the game was very much on rails. These two examples are spoiler-ific, so feel free to skip a couple of paragraphs if you want.
At the end of two sectors in the first part of the game – the battle against Culluh and Seska and the Borg/Species 8472 conflict specifically – I felt like the game almost railroaded me into getting a specific outcome. In the case of the Kazon, no matter who I chose to accuse, whether I chose to pursue or let Seska escape, and whatever other choices I had… it still culminated in a conflict and a battle I had to win. And with the Borg, even choosing not to engage and trying to seek an alternate route eventually led to the events of Scorpion unfolding exactly as they did in the show. There are *smaller* differences along the way – it’s possible to recruit Seska after the Kazon war, Kes can survive the events of Gift, and Seven can die, preventing her from joining the crew, to give three examples.
This “deal or no deal” moment felt like a false choice.
The real issue, when you boil it down, is that these outcomes *still* feel pretty random. Seska’s choice to join or not join the crew was basically a 50/50. Seven’s survival odds were pretty good, if you’d completed most of the required upgrades, but it still depended on the roll of a digital dice. These storylines were mandatory, which I get, in a game like this; there are limits on how far the game could diverge from Voyager’s actual adventure, after all! But in a way, that makes offering alternate pathways and different endings even *more* important. If, for instance, Seven could refuse to join the crew if you hadn’t done something, or if she could be replaced by a Klingon or Romulan ex-Borg, for instance, there’d be a bit more interest, a reason to do things a certain way, and consequences or rewards that made a run through the game feel a bit more tailored and personal. As it is, the game pushes you down certain paths to outcomes that feel either guaranteed or totally random and disconnected from your choices, neither of which is especially compelling.
Okay, the worst of the spoilers are over for now.
Because the game does have a risk-reward system in place, practically any main character can die during a run. As I noted, B’Elanna died during my first abortive run, and I also did the “meme” thing of keeping Tuvix rather than forcing him to be separated back into Neelix and Tuvok. Both of those events unquestionably shook things up.
Tuvix.
But… here’s the next issue. Each hero character has a backup. Lose Tuvok, you get Nunez, whose dialogue looks to be word-for-word identical. Lose Neelix, and you get a “wish.com” generic Talaxian. Lose Seven? You get her slightly less useful twin: Nine of Nine. All of these characters are functionally the same as the heroes they stand in for, but slightly worse or less effective in their roles.
This has a double-whammy of an impact: there’s really only *one* ideal set of characters, heroes that have the best skills and the best chance of surviving away missions and combat encounters. And if you lose them, you don’t even get any kind of different dialogue or new storylines involving their replacements. Voyager didn’t have the same kind of expansive secondary cast as, say, DS9 did, but there *are* secondary characters or even one-off guest stars who could and should be able to fill some of these roles – and crucially, do something a little different with them.
“We’ve got Seven of Nine at home.”
Suppose you choose to keep Tuvix, permanently losing Neelix and Tuvok in the process. Tuvix has some skills, sure, but he’s neither the combat expert Tuvok was nor the morale officer Neelix was – he’s demonstrably worse in both roles, *and* there’s only one of him. So, yes, you have the “moral conundrum” of killing Tuvix, as Janeway did in the story… but you can also totally ignore this side-mission, as I found myself consciously doing in my second run through the game. There were basically zero narrative or gameplay consequences to doing so, and I got an outcome that is almost “objectively” better.
And this is true with all of the heroes – at least, all of the ones I encountered during my playthrough.
This leaves the game feeling… well, tense, sometimes, if you’re worried about a hero on an away mission or during a side-mission. But also, more importantly, it feels like there’s really only “one” right way to approach the game: Janeway’s way, the way she did things in the show. This was another thing I was concerned about before launch, and it’s disappointing to see it pan out.
Your choice has consequences…
A game like Across The Unknown absolutely *should* have storylines and side-quests where the TV show outcome is the best one, and there should be irreplaceable characters, whose loss impacts the remainder of a playthrough. But… is it too much to ask that some of these potentially different outcomes are better? Or at least, that their impacts are neutral, with losses somewhere being offset by gains elsewhere? Because right now, Across The Unknown is great if you want to faithfully replicate Voyager’s journey as seen on TV. It’s less interesting if you feel like you could’ve done better, or that there might’ve been other approaches to certain storylines that might’ve led to verifiably better outcomes.
Because of this kind of dual impact of hero losses having a gameplay downside while also being narratively irrelevant… I found it made many side-missions unappealing. We talked about Faces and Tuvix above, where B’Elanna, Tuvok, and Neelix can all be removed from your run through the game. But those are far from the only instances where this happened, and it feels like something that’s just… built into the game at a fundamental level.
Some characters can choose to leave, too.
In any game with both random elements and characters with different stats, there are always going to be more optimal configurations and less optimal ones – that’s unavoidable, and not really the point of this line of criticism. My point is that, for a game that bills itself on putting you in “the captain’s chair,” it then really goes out of its way to push you down one narrative path, to take exactly the same decisions as in the TV show, and just generally feels unwilling or unable to open things up to potentially different and better outcomes.
This is not a fatal flaw. And I still found Across The Unknown fun to play. But I would argue that it impacts the game’s longer-term replayability; unless you want to go back and have basically the same narrative experience again, just with a few resources, planets, and nebulae in different configurations, then you’re kind of out of luck. The relatively minor, roll-of-the-dice outcomes – like a secondary character joining the crew, for instance – don’t make up for the fact that these storylines and practically all of their content unfold the same way each time.
You can choose to re-play sectors if you get a bad outcome.
Sticking with hero characters, I like how the system works at its core – but it is pretty limited. For instance, Janeway isn’t a “hero,” and can’t take part in any away missions. And while you do get some choice during away missions about which characters to use and in what configurations, there isn’t a ton of variety to this. Unless you’re deliberately trying to punish yourself, sending an away team you *know* will struggle to complete a task or mission… the worst you’re gonna get, unless you get unlucky with the digital dice, is a temporary injury to a hero.
Even then, the game pushes certain crew members into away missions, sometimes. Again, there’s that sense of being railroaded; forced by the developers to go down a specific path, even if you might’ve wanted to try something a little different. It doesn’t happen all the time, fortunately, but it happens enough to be noticeable. As above with storylines, there’s a balance to strike between allowing Voyager’s journey home to unfold the way it did on TV and giving players the freedom to explore. Sometimes, that balance has been struck reasonably well. But at other times… I felt it wasn’t.
Preparing for an away mission.
One final point of criticism relates to the final act of the game – so skip ahead a couple of paragraphs if spoilers are a concern.
Upon returning to Earth – in two of the game’s multiple endings that I saw, at any rate – we’re treating to a (text-only) log from Admiral Janeway. And for me… this scene just felt a tiny bit underwhelming. We see Voyager *approach* Earth, but that’s it. Janeway’s log mentions Voyager being escorted home, flying to San Francisco… and I just can’t help but feel I’d have liked to see that. A short, sixty- or ninety-second cut-scene depicting other starships alongside Voyager, and/or the Golden Gate Bridge flyover, would’ve done *wonders* for making the end of the game feel just that bit more special.
I like that there are multiple endings; a game like this needs that kind of diversity to reflect player choice. But as we said above… there’s kind of one “good one,” i.e. the canon ending from the show, and at least two lesser ones. Maybe I didn’t see them all, and maybe there are other ways to make it home ahead of schedule, or with even better outcomes; I’m admittedly not the best player, even on Across The Unknown’s easy mode! But for the endings to Endgame, the ones I saw were either the canon ending, or a much, much darker one.
Voyager approaches the transwarp hub.
With all of that being said, recreating Voyager’s journey home – and tweaking it sometimes, as well as experiencing it in a new medium – was a really enjoyable experience. Saving Seven of Nine from the Borg Queen and Voyager finally seeing Earth for the first time – I won’t lie, I felt myself getting a little teary-eyed, just as I did some twenty-five years ago, when I saw Endgame for the very first time. Although the game was an imperfect experience… I enjoyed it for what it was.
I also adore Across The Unknown’s sense of humour. The game really leaned into some of the jokes and even the memes that Voyager has spawned within the Trekkie community: Paris becoming a “lizard,” in his words, Harry Kim’s lack of a promotion, and yes, of course, Tuvix, too. These little in-jokes didn’t go too far, nor did they feel like they were laughing *at* the show and the Trekkie community – at least, not for me. Instead, these light-hearted moments really hammered home how this is a game made by fans, for fans.
Across The Unknown has a sense of humour.
And that feeling extended far beyond humour. There were deep cuts to episodes across all seven seasons of the show, with outcomes that felt logically consistent with Voyager, even as the game deviated or made things up. Narratively speaking, it really was a fun time, in spite of some of the negative points mentioned above.
I suppose we should talk about *gameplay* since this is a video game! Across The Unknown has two main gameplay modes: managing the ship and guiding away missions. There are a lot of stats and numbers to keep track of – miss something, and you might have to wait longer to unlock a technology, or even miss out on one of the many missions with a time limit. It can seem overwhelming, especially at first, but in-game tutorials certainly helped.
An example of the game’s HUD, showing resources and yields.
Building rooms and getting Voyager exactly how I wanted it made for a fun challenge – even on easy mode!
Getting the right balance between tactical, scientific, and crew-focused rooms and systems isn’t easy, and one wrong move can lead to morale dropping, the ship being unprepared for combat, or that certain upgrades can’t be unlocked. There are various resources you have to keep on top of, which operate similarly to other resource-management titles, only… Star Trek-themed! You have to keep on top of things like the ship’s power level, battery banks, and even the number of crew members, too – all of these affect gameplay in a big way. At one point in my run, I found myself taking a diversion to any planet or point of interest that had a chance of giving me new crew members! That was a resource I seemed to run out of, especially as crew can be killed, or take long periods of shore leave.
It was really only when I got into the final act of the game that I felt I’d got the ship exactly the way I wanted it. I was generating just enough food from hydroponics bays to keep on top of the food supply, I had two science labs on the go for researching upgrades and unlocking new technologies, and enough quarters and cargo bays to store everything and accommodate everyone. Earlier acts of the game saw me turning off even some important rooms and systems just to keep the ship flying. You may be better at that kind of micromanagement than I am, but for me, it was part of the fun.
Voyager’s star-drive section.
Both random exploration and progressing through missions unlocked combat encounters and away missions, and both of these were fun. Occasionally, I think only really in one sector, I found frequent, repetitive combat encounters that started to get stale, but for the most part, I enjoyed tweaking Voyager’s systems and trying to get the best possible balance of shields and weapons. I installed disruptors and a Borg cutting beam on my version of Voyager – and these powerful weapons made short work of even the Borg, later on in the game!
Away missions were fun, and I especially liked the “hand-drawn” art style that the game employed for these moments. Across The Unknown makes recommendations and occasionally pushes key crew members into away missions, but there’s a decent amount of freedom there, too. Missing a crew member with specific skills can make things harder, but even on easy mode, I never felt that away missions were too easy. That randomness I mentioned? That’s a big part of why, I suppose!
An away mission.
Unlocking new heroes gives you more freedom when it comes to away missions, and heroes can also be assigned to various rooms aboard Voyager, increasing yields and outputs. This was a fun aspect of the game, and I found myself trying to balance which heroes I took on away missions – because that’s how to level them up, further increasing their skills and bonuses. All in all, a fun element of the game.
The key to a game like this is to set your expectations appropriately. This isn’t a big-budget title with the greatest graphics, and there’s a lot of text-based conversations and clicking through menus. But for a Trekkie, and for a fan of Voyager in particular, it’s hard *not* to recommend the title, even with the caveat that updates are coming which should improve the gameplay experience somewhat.
A close-up look at a Borg-ified room.
I was thrilled to see a positive reaction to Across The Unknown’s launch. GameXcite said it exceeded their wildest expectations, and if recent reporting is accurate, the game sold more than 100,000 copies within its first few days on sale. That’s absolutely fantastic news, and kinda crazy, if you think about it! A game based on a TV series which has been off the air for a quarter of a century doing numbers like that? I guess Paramount was wrong: fans *do* want more from Voyager. Something like, oh, I don’t know… a remaster of the series?! The game’s success is, at the very least, proof positive that there’s still an audience for that incredible TV show.
I spent just over thirteen hours with the game – and in that time, as mentioned, I aborted one run after the third sector, I think, and then completed one full run. In my full run, I went back to replay the ending once, to see if I could get a different outcome. So I reckon there’s a solid eleven or twelve hours’ worth of content per run, at the very least – perhaps more, if you do more side-missions and spend more time in each sector harvesting resources and building upgrades. The length of time a game lasts can be important, and for me at least, Across The Unknown lands in that sweet spot of feeling like good value for money.
The gorgeous USS Voyager. What a ship!
Most of my criticisms of the game – with the exception of the missing save system – arguably fall closer to nitpicks than anything else. And I always knew, going into Across The Unknown, that there’d be limitations to exploration and that the game couldn’t possibly be all things to all players. I tried to keep that in mind as I bumped up against these limits, and I hope I didn’t sound too harsh. Perhaps, if GameXcite is listening to feedback – and my points of criticism are shared more widely among players – future patches or updates can tweak the experience, at least a little.
I’m glad GameXcite managed to license the official Voyager theme music. When that announcement was made late last year, I kind of rolled my eyes; it didn’t feel like a glaring omission from the demo version, and I felt the developers could’ve spent that time and especially that money elsewhere. But you know what? I was wrong – having the proper theme music, and being careful to use it sparingly, genuinely elevated Across The Unknown in a way I didn’t anticipate, and made some of those emotional moments – Captain Ransom’s sacrifice, Seven’s rescue, and the ship making it home – feel so much more impactful.
The game has sold well.
At time of writing (less than a week after launch), Across The Unknown has had almost 10,000 concurrent players on Steam, and was number 49 in the sales charts and number 23 for most-wishlisted. Those are great numbers, and with the game also being available on PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox, that won’t be the sum total of its success. I’m really glad that the Trekkie community showed up for Across The Unknown in such a massive way. This game really does deserve all of its success.
It was a blast to return to Voyager, and to experience the long journey home in a totally new way. I loved Voyager when it was on the air, and I’ve pretty much worn out my old DVDs with how often I’ve re-watched the series over the years! I also had a lot of fun with Elite Force, back in the day, so this isn’t my first time playing a game based on this wonderful series. I really did have a good time with Across The Unknown, in spite of a few drawbacks and downsides. And it’s an easy recommendation to anyone who loves Voyager even half as much as I do.
Can you make it home to Earth?
Having completed Across The Unknown, I’m actually contemplating a second run sometime soon – there are side-missions I didn’t explore, several characters I didn’t get to unlock, and more. I’ll keep my ear to the ground about upcoming updates, and I’m not going to *immediately* dive straight back in! But I think it’s testament to the game’s success that I’m willing to go back for that second run so soon after the first.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I hope it’s clear that, despite some nitpicks and criticisms, I genuinely enjoyed Across The Unknown and recommend it to Trekkies. I’m not so sure that folks unfamiliar with Star Trek will have as much of a fun time as I did; perhaps management/base-building fanatics will find things to enjoy, though. But some games can and should be made by fans, for fans. And to me, that’s exactly how Across The Unknown felt.
Stay safe in the Delta Quadrant, friends… and Live Long and Prosper!
Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown is out now for Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. Across The Unknown was developed by GameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. Star Trek: Voyager remains the copyright of the Skydance/Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The first part of this review is free from major story spoilers. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.
Last year, I reviewed 28 Years Later – the long-awaited sequel to one of my favourite zombie horror films of all-time. I knew then that a second film was underway, but I’ve since learned that 28 Years Later was intended to be a trilogy. That explains a lot, and I’m glad I knew that *before* I sat down to watch what is apparently intended to be the middle instalment of this story!
I said last time that 28 Years Later felt less scary, less impactful, and just less entertaining overall than I’d hoped or expected it would be… but that there was still the potential for its sequel to re-frame some of those story beats, or pull out a creditable ending to the story. It was with that mindset that I approached The Bone Temple. I wanted this film to thrill me, but the way I felt about last year’s instalment was certainly a cause for concern.
If you missed my review of 28 Years Later in 2025, click or tap here to check it out. I think it’ll add a bit of context to a few of the things we’re going to discuss today.
A trio of promotional posters.
One thing that I don’t think I explained very well last time was how 28 Years Later’s zombies – surely the most important part of any zombie movie – felt like they’d lost at least *some* of their fear factor. And that trend seems to have continued this time, unfortunately.
In 2002, 28 Days Later breathed new life into a horror sub-genre that had started to feel stale. Making zombies faster and more aggressive, and the virus that caused the outbreak, were a huge part of that. I can vividly remember watching 28 Days Later for the first time, practically wetting my pants at how utterly terrifying these infected monsters were, how they moved with such pace, and how they were so unlike anything I’d seen before.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on what had changed at first, when I watched 28 Years Later. Was it simply the passage of time, and the way Danny Boyle’s fast-moving “infected” have been rolled into the broader lore of zombie fiction? Probably to an extent. Was it because the zombie genre has been pretty oversaturated for pushing twenty years, with The Walking Dead and its spin-offs on TV, films like Zombieland and Train to Busan, and interactive titles from The Last Of Us to Dying Light? Again… to an extent, yeah.
Other zombie films, like Train to Busan, have done similar things to 28 Days Later in the years since that film’s release.
But there’s one more factor that, last time, I don’t think I really appreciated:
In 28 Years Later, and in The Bone Temple, too, many of the zombies are naked.
Naked zombies… they end up looking more *comical* than frightening, I’m afraid. And I really do believe that this costuming choice – or lack of costuming, to be specific – is a major contributing factor to these zombies not having the impact they once did. And yeah, it makes sense in-universe – almost three decades on from the apocalypse, surviving zombies have lost their clothes due to exposure to the elements. But… making sense doesn’t actually help make these zombies as scary as they need to be. And while I respect the decision to put realism first, it came at one heck of a price.
Samson and his (mostly) nude friends.
This highlights one of the dangers of filming back-to-back. I can’t be the only one to comment on the zombies and their… nudity… so if that feedback had been available to Nia DaCosta, Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and the rest of the team, maybe some changes could’ve been made before The Bone Temple entered full production? I’m not saying that was the film’s only issue – nor am I saying that 28 Years Later or The Bone Temple were out-and-out “bad” – but sometimes, being able to receive and act on feedback in between titles is a positive thing. And unfortunately, producing two films back-to-back leaves no room for manoeuvre in that sense.
There’s another point to consider, though, and it’s one that’s much more fundamental than whether or not zombies need clothes!
28 Days Later was unapologetically a horror film – in fact, I’d call it one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen. 28 Weeks Later retained that horror tone, though it introduced other themes. But both 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple aren’t really horror films… at least, not in the same way. There’s torturous gore, there’s literal Satan worship, and, of course, there are still zombies… but at their core, these films feel much more character-driven, much more exploratory, and much more personal. Perhaps they fall closer to “psychological horror,” at least in parts, as well as films that explore the post-apocalyptic world that their predecessors created.
Crop of the film’s promo poster.
That disconnect between the genre of film I was expecting to see and the kind of film I ultimately saw… maybe that’s what’s driving some of my disappointment with The Bone Temple? And perhaps I should make a conscious effort to appreciate the film for what it is rather than what I expected or wanted it to be?
The counterpoint to that, I suppose, is that, if Alex Garland, Danny Boyle, and director Nia DaCosta wanted to create a post-apocalyptic psychological thriller, exploring things like coming of age, mental illness, trauma, religion and religious extremism, and the nature of life and death… maybe they shouldn’t have called it “28 Years Later.” These films were consciously created as sequels, picking up the post-apocalyptic setting almost three decades later. Yet the kinds of stories that have been told in that setting don’t feel like they bear much resemblance to what came before. And as we look to the future and a potential third instalment – which, rumours suggest, may have dipped into the dreaded development hell – I can’t help but wonder what could lie in store.
Director Nia DaCosta (left) with Jack O’Connell on set.
There were some interesting and creative choices made across The Bone Temple, with close-up, shaky, focused camera shots lingering on characters to hammer home feelings of fear and confusion. In some ways, these felt like they were lifted from a low-budget, experimental, almost “arthouse horror” project – if that makes sense. I could feel the creative team’s intentions – and see, perhaps, where they lifted some of these ideas from. It could feel intense, yes, but that intensity served a purpose for the most part, and carried some of these heavy themes.
I think I’ve said all I can without crossing the line into narrative spoilers.
If you want to know whether or not I recommend The Bone Temple, here’s what I’ll say. If you enjoyed 28 Years Later, this film is the natural next step, and I think you’ll find it interesting, at the very least. If you were a fan of 28 Days Later a while back, and you didn’t really gel with the changes made in 28 Years Later last year… then The Bone Temple doesn’t redeem it, nor undo those changes. If you want an interesting and occasionally thought-provoking picture with themes of mental health, religion, and trauma, The Bone Temple might be your jam. But if you want a terrifying zombie flick that’s gonna keep you awake at night? This ain’t it.
This is the end of the spoiler-free section. There are major narrative spoilers for the 28 Days Later saga – including The Bone Temple – from here on out.
I said last time that I hoped The Bone Temple would find a way to narratively justify the “Jimmies;” the gang of Jimmy Savile impersonators who showed up right at the end of 28 Years Later. I was worried that this choice was made purely for shock value rather than because the creative team actually had something to say… and I feel like I was, unfortunately, right about that.
Jimmy Savile was one of the worst criminals in the history of this country, and it’s appalling that he was able to get away with it, with his crimes only being uncovered after his death. Any film that chooses to lean into any aspect of Savile really has to justify why it wants to do so, why it needs to bring up those memories and what it wants to say about his offending and the establishment that covered it up. And for me, The Bone Temple really didn’t have much to say about any of that.
The Jimmies.
Was it ironic, in a sickening sort of way, that the leader of the Jimmies was a literal Satan-worshipper? I mean, sure, I guess. But Satanism is a pretty basic horror trope, and in a story that doesn’t lean on the supernatural very much, it almost feels out of place. I get it: this is a commentary on the nature of trauma, and especially how traumatic events in childhood – and a lack of support – can shape a person’s mental health and their outlook on life. Jimmy was a young boy when the rage virus outbreak occurred, and his inability to process that trauma – combined with having to scrounge for survival in a post-apocalyptic world – contributed to his mental illness. At least, that’s how I think we’re meant to read the character.
And there is something to be said about how folks who experienced traumatic events in childhood can reach for something that feels safe – a character, a TV series, a celebrity. Jimmy clearly did that, not only with Jimmy Savile, but also with the Teletubbies, a kids’ TV show that was referenced a couple of times in the film. Because 28 Days Later establishes that the viral outbreak happened circa 2002, Savile’s crimes would never have come to light in this world. Again, that makes sense narratively.
Sir Lord Jimmy.
But, as with the naked zombies, it isn’t enough for something to be logical in the confines of its world – it has to have meaning to us as the audience. And yes, it’s profoundly ironic that someone would consider Jimmy Savile, of all people, a heroic figure, someone “safe,” or anything like that. And it’s a weird kind of critique, I guess, of Savile’s own offending. But does that explain and justify this presentation? Because it feels, to me, like the point was to shock, the point was to be as offensive as possible. Being offensive has decades of precedent in horror – from the rape in Rosemary’s Baby to the gore of The Human Centipede. But when it’s done purely to offend, purely to shock, and without any real narrative justification, nor for any real reason… it feels gratuitous. And that’s how the Jimmies felt to me: gratuitous.
28 Years Later focused on young Spike, and his journey as he left his safe home for the first time to venture into the fallen world beyond. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect that The Bone Temple would pick up Spike’s story – and it did, for a few minutes at the beginning, but Spike felt sidelined a lot of the time; less a driving force behind events than someone swept along in the wake of other characters. We got a few moments from Spike’s perspective as he tried to escape from the gang, but the film largely had its focus elsewhere.
28 Years Later had been Spike’s story. The Bone Temple was not.
The Bone Temple draws on 28 Days Later’s introduction of the rage virus, which began in an animal testing lab, suggesting that there’s a psychological component to the infection. This story, told from the perspective of Dr Kelson, was perhaps the film’s strongest element – even if I wouldn’t have expected it to be at first! We gradually saw Dr Kelson dosing Samson – the “alpha” infected – with morphine, stripping away some of the most extreme effects of the infection.
This culminated in Dr Kelson’s research into anti-psychotic drugs, which he gave to Samson, finally allowing his mind to break free of at least part of the infection for a time. As an analogy for mental illness and mental health conditions, this is interesting. I myself manage a mental health condition with medication, and I don’t object to the way Dr Kelson and Samson were presented in The Bone Temple. If anything, I find it interesting that, of all things, a zombie film would draw this kind of comparison or create this kind of metaphor for mental health. It’s something that has to be handled with care; there’s a fine line between saying “we’ll explore themes of mental health” and inadvertently leaning into harmful tropes and tired old clichés. But speaking for myself, I think The Bone Temple broadly stayed on the right side of that line.
Dr Kelson, researching anti-psychotic drugs.
The Bone Temple underperformed at the box office, and may make either a small loss or barely break even, depending on exact figures after video-on-demand and streaming are accounted for. Because of that, it’s recently been suggested that plans for a sequel are no longer certain. With this being part two of three, ending on somewhat of a cliffhanger, and with themes and storylines unresolved… that would be a real shame. Particularly when it comes to Dr Kelson’s apparent breakthrough in terms of understanding the rage virus, and the interesting real-world parallels it draws on, I think a conclusion is pretty important. But them’s the breaks in the entertainment industry, sometimes.
I’d like to pick out a couple of performances that I felt were particularly strong in The Bone Temple.
First, we have Erin Kellyman, who played one of the Jimmies – later revealing that her character’s name was Kellie. Kellyman, who I’d seen before in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, as well as Solo: A Star Wars Story, put in a really great performance as the conflicted member of the gang, simultaneously believing Jimmy’s claims about “Old Nick,” and remaining sceptical.
Kellie – a.k.a. Jimmy Ink.
Then we have Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes may be known to some of you as Voldemort, though he’s a prolific actor who’s played a lot of other roles, including in 2024’s Conclave. I found his take on Dr Kelson to be incredible – nuanced, interesting, and with flashes of history and emotion that kept a genuinely odd character feeling human and grounded. Fiennes captured Dr Kelson’s eccentricities perfectly, but also his humanity, too. The sequence where he sat and talked with Jimmy was definitely one of the highlights of the whole film.
And, of course, we can’t mention Ralph Fiennes and Dr Kelson without talking about *that* iconic Iron Maiden sequence! I went through a heavy metal phase as a teen, and I got really into bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. The Number of the Beast is a classic, really leaning into the idea that heavy metal was, well, “the devil’s music,” and I felt this sequence in The Bone Temple really captured that ’80s heavy metal feel. Ralph Fiennes was absolutely exceptional through it all, and the music made the whole sequence feel otherworldly and intense in the best way possible.
Dr Kelson’s Iron Maiden sequence was incredible.
One thing that The Bone Temple did quite well was convey how brutal the post-apocalypse can be. We saw a few different groups and individuals, some of whom were hunters, foragers, or scavengers – but all struggling to survive. The Jimmies are kind of the embodiment of the chaos of survival in this kind of environment: lawless, brutally violent, incredibly aggressive, and dominated by the strong will of a single leader. That isn’t a unique concept; many post-apocalyptic stories feature similar gangs, from The Walking Dead’s Saviors to Fallout’s Legion. But that side of it was well-executed here.
There was an interesting contrast between how the people at the farm lived with how the Jimmies and Dr Kelson lived. The farm group – and, at the very end, Jim and his daughter, too – seemed determined to reclaim at least some elements of pre-apocalypse life, with a well-kept home, fences, padlocks, and hot food cooked in a kitchen. The contrast this presented was stark, and it shows the difference between how different groups might respond to this kind of total societal collapse. In the absence of Spike’s hometown and the folks he had to leave behind in the previous instalment, these characters stood in for the – for want of a better term – more “normal” denizens of post-apocalyptic Britain.
The farm.
I mentioned Jim, so let’s talk about the film’s closing sequence. Jim was the protagonist of 28 Days Later, and it was great to welcome back Cillian Murphy to the role – albeit that Jim didn’t get a ton of screen time this time around. A zombie glimpsed in 28 Years Later bore a striking resemblance to Jim, and I wasn’t alone in speculating that the zombie’s appearance might’ve been the film’s way of conveying that Jim had finally been defeated by the rage virus. I’m glad to see that wasn’t the case!
Jim having a daughter certainly seems to imply that he and Selena continued their relationship beyond the events of the first film. I wonder if Selena is planned to be a major character if the next instalment were to get off the ground? I liked seeing Jim apparently quite settled, doing what he could to preserve a sense of pre-apocalypse normalcy for his daughter. Their appearances raise a lot of questions; I just hope that answers will, one day, arrive.
Jim and his daughter.
As Samson’s cocktail of drugs helped him come around from his years-long infection, we got an interesting flashback-come-coma-dream sequence of him on a train. This was especially creative, I felt, showing how memories were slowly coming to the surface. It led into one of the film’s only real jump-scares, as the conductor’s face seemed to morph into that of an infected zombie. That was probably the only moment in the film that I could say genuinely caught me off-guard.
Again, though, Samson’s story ends with unanswered questions. Without access to more drugs – both morphine and antipsychotics – will he remain free of the virus and in control of his faculties? Was his status as an “alpha” infected part of what made him susceptible to treatment? With Dr Kelson dead, is there *anyone* left in the area who could carry on his work – or even understand it? All of these points should be addressed… but only if a sequel is forthcoming, which, as mentioned, may no longer be guaranteed.
Samson on the train.
How do we feel about Satanism as a plot point? I get where it was coming from, and I think Jack O’Connell made for a really interesting and complex antagonist. There were points where I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he believed in “Old Nick” for certain, whether he was wavering in his belief, or even if he’d been faking some of it to maintain control over his gang. That kind of presentation is not easy to get right, and O’Connell deserves a lot of credit – as does Nia DaCosta’s direction.
However… I can’t help but feel that falling back on Satanism – literally one of the oldest tropes in the horror movie or shocking story playbook – feels anything other than cheap. As a critique of religious cults and overbearing leaders, I get it. And I think the character side of it worked reasonably well… Jimmy Savile aside. But Satanism itself, while it worked with some of the imagery and the music, just feels a bit played out and clichéd for a story like this. I think part of what made the Jimmy Savile stuff feel so underwhelming and like it was being played for pure outrage bait is the Satanism angle; perhaps The Bone Temple needed to pick one or the other. The story might’ve worked better if it hadn’t tried to have the gang do both.
The film used a lot of Satanic imagery.
I think that’s where we’ll start to wrap things up.
The Bone Temple was an interesting film. But it wasn’t a great film, and as the continuation of a sequel I’d been very interested in for some twenty years or so… I think I have to say that it came up short. There were creative ideas in the mix, but some of them felt tropey, others felt like they were done purely to shock and offend, and while the film’s core themes and some of its characters worked well, there are enough downsides and drawbacks to consider it an imperfect motion picture.
I would recommend The Bone Temple to fans of last year’s instalment. But for anyone else – general horror fans, zombie connoisseurs, and even fans of 28 Days Later from back in 2002 – I’m not so sure. If it comes on streaming or it’s on TV one day and you’ve got nothing to lose by checking it out, then sure. I made it to the end, it killed a couple of hours, and I didn’t need to switch off partway through. But I can’t shake the feeling that such an iconic and genre-redefining work as 28 Days Later deserved better than this. And if it’s true, as has been suggested, that no sequel will be coming? The Bone Temple ends with Spike, Kellie, and Jim’s stories all incomplete.
Will there be a sequel?
I’m a big ol’ scaredy-cat when it comes to horror. So if Trekking with Dennis, of all people, is saying that a film wasn’t all that scary… then it genuinely wasn’t all that scary. So if what you want is a horror film to give you nightmares and take you to the edge of your seat, I don’t think you get that from The Bone Temple. I certainly didn’t. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t interesting ideas in the mix, fun character moments, and a pretty epic heavy metal song sequence to cap it all off. A mixed bag.
Earlier this year I reviewed a very different film: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. Click or tap here to check that out if you’re interested! And if you want to see a handful of titles that are on my radar as 2026 rolls along, click or tap here to see those. I’d like to review a few more films this year, though probably not too many in the horror genre – at least, not till October! And I have plans to check out a few TV programmes and video games, too. I hope you’ll join me for some of that here on the website.
Until next time… and don’t have nightmares!
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is available to purchase now on video-on-demand via Amazon and other platforms. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the copyright of Columbia Pictures and/or Sony Pictures Releasing. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are major spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1. Spoilers are also present for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and the comic series Star Trek: Godshock.
We’re going to get into serious spoiler territory for one of the recent episodes in Starfleet Academy’s first season, so if my little spoiler warning graphic didn’t put you off… just beware. I don’t want to ruin the show for anybody!
This isn’t going to be a “review” of the episode Series Acclimation Mil. I’m not doing individual episode reviews for Starfleet Academy this year, and in this piece, we’re really only going to get into one of the episode’s storylines. There will be a review of Season 1 as a whole in March, and I’m sure I’ll touch on the episode (and this storyline) again at that point. So check back for that if you want to get my thoughts on the entire season more broadly. And I have a review of the two-part premiere, which you can find by clicking or tapping here.
Sam “confronts the unexplainable” in Starfleet Academy.
Series Acclimation Mil returned to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in a pretty big way, and I wanted to talk about that element in a longer format, in a way that I don’t think I could do justice to in my season review piece. DS9 is a hugely important series for me, and this episode was clearly well-intentioned, with writer Tawny Newsome wanting to draft a “love letter” to the series and to Captain Sisko in particular.
But… is that how it came across?
Captain Sisko is, on balance, almost certainly my favourite Star Trek captain. And if you put my back against the wall and pushed a phaser to my head, forcing me to choose, I’d also name Deep Space Nine as my favourite Star Trek show. Out of all the Star Trek shows, DS9 got what is arguably the most definitive and complete series finale, but Captain Sisko’s story was deliberately left ambiguous. In Starfleet Academy, the episode Series Acclimation Mil picked up this narrative thread and aimed to tell a story about the intersection of religion and science, as well as one that really celebrated the legacy of Star Trek’s first African American captain and series lead. I admire the intention, and I don’t doubt that everyone involved, from the writers and producers to the performers, came into this story for the right reasons and genuinely intended for it to be a celebration of Sisko and DS9.
Tawny Newsome (left) wrote and had a role in Series Acclimation Mil, along with series regular Kerrice Brooks (right).
Fundamentally, I think Starfleet Academy was the wrong choice of series for an episode like this for one simple reason: its place in the timeline. If this were a Picard-era series (as I argued it should be once upon a time), we might be having a different conversation. But because Starfleet Academy takes place in the 32nd Century, more than 800 years after the events of DS9′s finale… the story it was able to tell, far from celebrating Sisko and his legacy, arguably detracts from it.
When work on What You Leave Behind was ongoing, Sisko actor Avery Brooks insisted on a change to the script. The original version of DS9′s finale saw Sisko “ascending” to become a Prophet, permanently leaving the world behind as he moved to live in the Celestial Temple. But Brooks felt that the idea of a black man (Star Trek’s first African American captain, too) effectively “abandoning” his pregnant wife and son wasn’t the right message for Sisko’s story to end on. And so that ambiguity was written into What You Leave Behind, allowing Sisko to one day “return,” as he said to Kassidy in his final vision.
Sisko’s final appearance to Kassidy.
For years, that was the end of it. DS9 was over, but fans could speculate about how and when Sisko would return. There was even a comic series – Star Trek: Godshock – in which Sisko returns from the Wormhole about three years after the events of DS9′s finale. I’m not a comic book fan myself, but this was an officially-licensed publication, and while comics aren’t strictly part of Star Trek’s canon, they can be a good format for telling stories involving legacy characters who can no longer be involved in Star Trek on the screen.
Avery Brooks, who played Sisko in all seven seasons of DS9, has effectively retired. His last on-screen credits came shortly after Deep Space Nine ended, and his final involvement with the Star Trek franchise came in the 2006 video game Star Trek: Legacy (not to be confused with the proposed Picard spin-off of the same name), in which he reprised his role in voiceover form. Following DS9, Brooks worked as a professor at Rutgers University, and was also involved with the Smithsonian Institution. As far as I know, an on-screen return to Star Trek or the role of Sisko was never officially proposed, but it seems, from what I can gather, that Brooks would have turned down such an approach. He may have done so if the writers of Starfleet Academy had asked.
Jake and Ben Sisko’s reunion in Godshock.
Recasting such an iconic and important character wouldn’t sit right with me – nor with a lot of other Trekkies, I suspect. So with Brooks effectively out of the picture, not wanting to return as Sisko… the idea of a Godshock type of story, in which Sisko very definitely kept his word and came back from the Celestial Temple, is off the table. Starfleet Academy was left without the most important element of any Sisko story – the man who portrayed the character – but tried to go there anyway.
I will concede that, given the restrictions and limitations placed on the story by Avery Brooks’ absence, the kind of story told in Series Acclimation Mil was probably about as good as it could get. But that’s not really the point. My argument is that, without Avery Brooks being involved, and without Sisko able to keep his word and return from the Wormhole during the lifetime of his wife, son, and other friends… this story shouldn’t have been attempted. If they asked Brooks to return and he said no, or if it was communicated to them clearly that Brooks was unavailable, this story should simply have been set aside, and something else written for the character of Sam.
Sam in Series Acclimation Mil.
There are other ways to celebrate DS9, and other characters from that series who could’ve been included. Series Acclimation Mil introduced us to a brand-new host for the Dax symbiont, for example – something I argued Discovery should’ve done during its various Trill episodes – but we spent very little time with her and learned practically nothing about her. Or Starfleet Academy could’ve picked up on Lower Decks’ idea that O’Brien was widely celebrated in the far future, doing something with that character’s legacy. The Klingon story could’ve revisited Worf and his ties to Starfleet, with Starfleet Academy having already visited Bajor there was scope to do something with Kira, or we could finally learn more about Cardassia, perhaps touching on the legacy of someone like Garak.
But really, DS9 wasn’t the point. This was an episode intended to celebrate the legacy of Star Trek’s first African American captain. So… what else could Starfleet Academy have done to acknowledge Star Trek’s African American connections? A great choice would be Uhura – the first African main character in Star Trek. I’d have loved to see a crossover, perhaps involving Cadet Sam meeting Strange New Worlds’ Uhura on the holodeck. Or the show could’ve called back to the legacy of Geordi La Forge, or Travis Mayweather – two characters brought to life by African American performers. Avery Brooks may have been the first to be a series lead, but there are other African American performers Starfleet Academy could’ve called on for this kind of celebratory story.
Uhura in Strange New Worlds Season 3.
And I am firmly in the camp that says “celebrate DS9″ and “celebrate Star Trek’s African American performers and heritage!” I think those are fantastic ideas, especially in this landmark 60th anniversary year. The Original Series was groundbreaking for African American representation on television, thanks to Nichelle Nichols’ main role, with even the venerable Martin Luther King saying so. There is a lot to celebrate on that front, and I don’t begrudge the writers of Starfleet Academy wanting to do so.
Unfortnately, though, the very celebratory episode that they set out to create has, I would argue, done a bit of damage to Sisko’s character – turning him into the very “delinquent dad” that Avery Brooks argued against almost three decades ago. By choosing Sisko over other characters, and because of the limitations placed on the story by both Starfleet Academy’s place in the timeline and Brooks’ retirement from acting, Series Acclimation Mil answered one of Star Trek’s “unanswerable” questions in pretty much the worst way possible.
Sisko’s first words after returning in the comic Godshock.
Regardless of where you stand on the episode’s crucial question of “did Sisko die or enter the Celestial Temple,” Series Acclimation Mil confirmed that, in Star Trek’s canonical prime timeline, Sisko never returned. He stayed away from the galaxy for more than eight centuries, breaking his promise to his wife, never seeing his son grow up, and never contacting Dax or any of his other friends.
And I would further argue that the episode’s central question, which Sam sets herself the task of answering, *was already answered a quarter of a century ago*!
Deep Space Nine’s finale didn’t end with Sisko falling into the Fire Caves. There was one final scene involving Sisko: his vision to Kassidy Yates. This was presented in the story as a vision from the Prophets, and the character was not a random Prophet impersonating Sisko, but Sisko himself. What You Leave Behind definitely and clearly stated that Sisko didn’t die and was taken by the Prophets to their Celestial Temple. And his final words to his wife? “But I *will* be back.”
Sisko promised Kassidy that he would return.
I never read that scene in What You Leave Behind as leaving any room for doubt or ambiguity. Sisko didn’t die – he was taken to the Wormhole by the Prophets. And he intended to stay with them only for as long as necessary to learn whatever they needed to teach him, but he absolutely, categorically planned to return.
So what does Series Acclimation Mil have to say about that? What does this episode now mean for Sisko, the Prophets, and DS9?
There are a couple of ways we can interpret things, I guess, if we go back to DS9′s finale. Firstly, we could say that Kassidy either didn’t receive a vision from the Prophets at all, and hallucinated a reunion with Sisko out of grief, or that she received a vision from a different Prophet who pretended to be Sisko to give her a bit of hope to tide her over. That kinda sucks.
Captain Sisko.
Alternatively, we could say that Sisko wanted to leave the Wormhole… but was unable to do so in time. Maybe his lessons with the Prophets went on longer than he thought. Maybe he “lost track of time” in a dimension that exists… outside the normal flow of time? Maybe the Prophets kept him prisoner and prevented him from leaving, even though he really wanted to. Or maybe only Sisko’s “soul” still exists, and with his physical body having been destroyed, he had no way to come back.
Again, none of those ideas hold *any* appeal whatsoever, at least not for me.
So we’re back to some fundamental questions: was this the right moment for an episode like this? Was Starfleet Academy the right series – or the right *kind* of series? Without Sisko himself, and without recasting the character, was it wise to attempt this kind of story? Could other ways have been found to celebrate Star Trek’s African American performers, Deep Space Nine as a series, or both?
Kerrice Brooks, who plays Sam in Starfleet Academy.
I wouldn’t have given the green light to this episode, if I had the opportunity over at Paramount. Not because I don’t want to pick up the dangling thread of Sisko’s story, and not because I don’t want Star Trek to do more with DS9, but because of what this story does to Sisko’s character. Despite what Newsome, Cirroc Lofton, and others have said on behalf of Avery Brooks – that he gave the episode “his blessing,” and that that was important to them – Series Acclimation Mil, in my view, harms Sisko’s characterisation, it harms Star Trek as a whole, and it gives a fundamentally unsatisfying answer to a question that didn’t really need to be asked.
We already knew that Sisko was alive in the Celestial Temple; Starfleet Academy didn’t even need to ask that question. And we already knew that he planned to return. What We Left Behind – Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine even saw the show’s original creators and writers putting together their own idea of what Sisko’s return might’ve looked like. Combine that with the comic book, fan theories, and more… and I think us Trekkies have had more than enough ways to envision Sisko’s return, even if none of that could ever be “officially canon.”
Sisko’s return as imagined in What We Left Behind.
By sidelining all of that, Starfleet Academy’s writers set out to answer the question of what happened to Sisko using their own ideas – but also being severely hampered by the unavailability of Avery Brooks, and the show’s place in Star Trek’s timeline. The result was an episode that betrayed Brooks’ final intervention on Sisko’s behalf at the end of DS9′s run, turning the character into the “absent black father” trope that has been so harmful on TV and in movies. Whatever in-universe reasons we might try to concoct to excuse Sisko, or whatever successes Series Acclimation Mil may have had elsewhere – and there absolutely were highlights and successes – that point is so basic, so existential, and so fundamentally awful that it would warrant scrapping the entire thing and writing it off.
In defence of the episode, I will say that Cirroc Lofton’s appearance hit all of the right emotional notes for me, and especially towards the end, I felt myself tearing up. Jake Sisko’s return to Star Trek – in holographic and visionary forms – made the best of a bad situation, and I don’t want to take away from Lofton’s masterful performance in Series Acclimation Mil. Nor from the work of Kerrice Brooks, who stepped up to take on a spotlight episode for the first time and really nailed it. Both performances were exceptional, and I can tell that Lofton, in particular, really wanted to celebrate the legacy of his on-screen dad and the series he’d been a part of.
It’s just such a shame that, to tell a story about Sisko at this moment and in this series… it had to be *this* story.
Concept art of Jake Sisko, created for Starfleet Academy.
Series Acclimation Mil conflicts with, or changes how we have to interpret, other Star Trek episodes, too. What was the message of The Visitor? Widely considered to be one of DS9′s finest episodes, The Visitor depicted an older Jake Sisko trying to figure out a way to rescue his father from a temporal anomaly. The older Jake argues passionately that his younger self needed his father, and it also seems as if Sisko’s absence from the timeline ultimately proved harmful to the Federation – DS9 had fallen into disrepair, and Starfleet needed to get permission from the Klingons to even enter the Bajoran system.
That timeline’s Jake Sisko gave his life to send his father back to the Defiant, so that his younger self would have the dad he needed. Now we know that Jake’s sacrifice bought Ben… what? A couple of extra years? And that Kassidy had to raise their child alone, while Jake’s writing career seems to have unfolded similarly to how it did in The Visitor, with only a couple of books being published. I just… I just don’t like what it says about Sisko, his promise to return, and how he ultimately ended up abandoning the family he seemed willing to do anything for.
Anslem, Jake Sisko’s finished book.
I respect the good intentions behind Series Acclimation Mil, both as an episode that aimed to celebrate Deep Space Nine and Star Trek’s first African American captain. And Jake Sisko’s appearance, in particular, did a lot to elevate the story, connect it back to DS9, and lean into the legacy of Benjamin Sisko. This wasn’t an episode concocted thoughtlessly, nor purely as a business decision to play the nostalgia card and make money. There was genuine artistry behind it, and it was a well-intentioned effort.
Which makes it all the more disappointing, in a way, that the final cut of the story does so much harm to Sisko’s character. If Series Acclimation Mil had been just a cheap overplaying of the nostalgia card by a corporation running out of ideas… maybe I’d feel less bad or less guilty at tearing into it so much. Because this isn’t an easy essay to write, to be blunt about it. I don’t take any pleasure in writing these words, nor in crapping all over the hard work and good intentions that went into the story’s creation. But I have to be honest with you at how the episode made me feel, and how I feel it harms the last words of the man who is still my favourite Star Trek captain.
Captain Sisko.
When Picard went off the air, and Lower Decks came to the end of its run… that was realistically the last chance to do a Sisko story that could’ve worked, and that might’ve felt right. I would have thoroughly enjoyed a story about cadets learning about Captain Sisko and his legacy in that era, too, had Starfleet Academy been a different show. But because of its place in the timeline, and because of the kind of episode it had to be in the absence of Avery Brooks… I’m firmly of the opinion that no episode at all would have been better than this.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably have to say it again before too long: stories end. Every story eventually reaches a natural end point. While, as fans, we might like to imagine what came next for our favourite characters… when the credits roll, the curtain falls, or we reach the last page, that should be it. Too often in the modern entertainment industry, characters or stories are unnaturally resurrected for unnecessary epilogues, telling us more than we needed or wanted to know about what came next. And for me… Series Acclimation Mil falls into that category, even if there were genuine reasons for its creation beyond a mere corporate nostalgia play.
DS9′s Cirroc Lofton (left) with Kerrice Brooks (centre) and Tawny Newsome.
It’s no exaggeration to say that I’d rather have seen no continuation of Sisko’s story than this one. And even with Avery Brooks’ “blessing,” and his willingness to allow the Starfleet Academy team to use one of his spoken-word recordings to close out the episode… I’d rather Sisko had remained in What You Leave Behind, his fate confirmed, his return scheduled… and for Star Trek to never acknowledge it again. That would have been better, and more respectful, than the story this episode told.
So that’s my take on how Sisko was handled in Series Acclimation Mil.
This is a delicate subject, as it touches on themes of race, and modern Star Trek’s handling of the franchise’s first African American captain. As you may know, I’m British, not American, so I don’t have the same connection to Sisko as perhaps some folks out there might. But he’s a character I love and I’ve always respected, and I really do mean it when I say that a better end to Sisko’s story would have been his ambiguous promise to return at the end of What You Leave Behind. I can’t *hate* the episode Series Acclimation Mil, because seeing Jake again was a treat, it’s nice to know Dax is still around, and the cadets got into some interesting scrapes while Sam was chasing down Sisko’s legacy. But, damn… what a horrible fate for Sisko in canon, just to disappear and never be heard from again.
The final shot of the episode.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I tried to approach the subject as sensitively as possible, and despite my feelings about Series Acclimation Mil, this piece shouldn’t be interpreted as an “attack” on the writers, producers, performers, or behind-the-scenes folks. I genuinely respect and appreciate the intentions behind the story, even if the end result isn’t something I enjoyed or wanted to see.
Next month, when Starfleet Academy’s first season wraps up, I’ll write up a full review, which may touch on other elements of Series Acclimation Mil that I didn’t discuss this time. I wanted this piece to be laser-focused on Sisko and what the episode said about him, rather than a broader review of the episode. So I hope you’ll join me for that.
Thanks again for reading… and Live Long and Prosper.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 is streaming now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the service is available. The Star Trek franchise – including Starfleet Academy, Deep Space Nine, and other properties discussed above – is the copyright of the Paramount-Skydance Corporation. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 