News Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 5 Casts Thomas Jane as Dr. McCoy and Kai Murakami as Sulu

The two actors are expected to appear in Strange New Worlds’ series finale

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on December 23, 2025

Photo: CBS Paramount Television

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Photo: CBS Paramount Television

Paramount has confirmed a new casting update for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 5, revealing that Thomas Jane will play Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy and Kai Murakami will portray Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the series’ final season.

Interestingly, both actors will only join Strange New Worlds for the season 5 finale (the show’s final episode, which was shot over the past weekend in Toronto). While it’s a bit odd that Paramount decided to reveal what appear to be elaborate cameo appearances so far ahead of that episode’s air date, it does make sense that these two characters will join the show as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds inches closer to The Original Series timeline. Beyond that, little is known about their appearances at this time.

You likely know Thomas Jane from his work in films like Boogie Nights, The Mist, Deep Blue Sea, and the HBO comedy series Hung. He is, at least in this writer’s opinion, always a welcome presence in whatever he is in. As for Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy, he was first played by actor DeForest Kelley in the Original Series show and movies and later by Karl Urban in the JJ Abrams’ rebooted film universe. He’s Kirk’s best (human) friend, a lovable grump, and a damn good doctor (though don’t assume he’s qualified for other professions). Granted, Jane is perhaps a bit older than what the part strictly calls for, but there’s no good reason to let trivial things such as time get in the way of what is honestly some pretty perfect Dr. McCoy casting.

Kai Murakami is a bit of an unknown. He’s actually more of a theater actor whose credits include various performances in London and Japan. Some of you may actually know him best (relatively speaking) from the motion capture work he’s done for games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows. He also performed as a Kazego (special puppeteer performers) in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of My Neighbour Totoro, which you can actually read a little more about in this fascinating interview with the show’s costume designer. It’s interesting to see them go with a lesser-known performer for the Sulu role following some memorable portrayals of the character from actors like George Takei and John Cho, though perhaps Murakami’s physicality tells us something about the nature of Sulu’s casting and the character’s eventual Strange New Worlds appearance.

Sadly, you’re going to have to wait quite a while to see either performer in Strange New Worlds. As previously reported, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 5 isn’t expected to premiere until late 2026 or early 2027. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Watchlist

Here Are All the Genre TV Premieres Airing in January!

New recruits enroll at Starfleet Academy, a college student tries his hand at vigilante crime-fighting, and a struggling actor becomes the MCU’s newest superhero

By Petrana Radulovic

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Published on January 5, 2026

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There is a lot of entertainment out there these days, and a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror titles to parse through. So we’re rounding up the genre shows coming out each month.

It’s the start of winter anime season, which means a lot of new anime, including the return of some favorite titles like Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and spinoffs of some popular anime like Trigun and My Hero Academia. A new Star Trek show also launches this month, along with the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe series, and a Game of Thrones spinoff.

The Outcast — Crunchyroll (January 2)

(Season 6) A college student discovers a supernatural world after stumbling into a tiny village and being attacked by zombies. A mysterious sword-wielding girl saves him, but that’s only the beginning of his adventures. This anime is based on a Chinese webcomic called Under One Person. 

Sentenced to Be a Hero — Crunchyroll (January 3) 

In this fantasy world, criminals are sentenced to acts of heroism—and this condemned criminal must battle endless hordes of monsters. When he dies, he’s simply resurrected and forced to fight them again. But there might be a way out, if he allies with a mysterious goddess…

Kunon the Sorcerer Can See — Crunchyroll (January 4)

A young blind man named Kunon decides to hone water magic in order to create a new set of eyes. Kunon begins to show great skill in his magic training, even surpassing his mentor in ability. But even as his magical ability grows, his main goal remains out of reach—will he ever be able to see? 

Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I’ll Obtain Ultimate Power — Crunchyroll (January 4) 

A very powerful six-year old has been reborn as the child of an emperor. He has a ton of powers, which increase with every loyal follower who pledges themselves to his cause. But all this wealth, power, and privilege has a hidden cost, especially when it comes to the royal court’s political machinations. 

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes —  Crunchyroll (January 5) 

In a world where most people have some sort of superpower, only a few are chosen to go on and become heroes. But one unlicensed college student decides to test his luck and becomes a vigilante. This series takes place five years before the events of popular anime series My Hero Academia.

The Demon King’s Daughter is Too Kind!! — Crunchyroll (January 6) 

Demon King Ahriman wants to conquer the world—till he’s stopped by his compassionate daughter Dou. She’s just such a sweetheart that everyone who meets her melts immediately! Jahi, the king’s loyal secretary, decides to train Dou into a proper, terrifying demon—but can she overcome Dou’s adorableness and kind heart? 

There was a Cute Girl in the Hero’s Party, so I Tried Confessing to Her — Crunchyroll (January 6)

In this comedic enemies-to-lovers fantasy romance, a demon unexpectedly falls for a beautiful priestess. He’s supposed to destroy her adventuring party, but now all he wants to do is confess his affection for her—even if that means going behind the demon king’s back.

Isekai Office Worker: The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter — Crunchyroll (January 6)

An office worker is transported to a fantasy kingdom… but instead of becoming a hero, he plays to his strengths and gets a job in the palace’s accounting department. His skills attract the attention of the handsome, but icy, Knight Captain and soon a romance blossoms between them. 

Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord — Crunchyroll (January 7)

Van, the child of a marquis, realizes that he has immense knowledge from a past life and becomes a prodigy in magic. His snooty battle magic-favoring family doesn’t care for his crafting magic skill, so they banish him to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. But Van uses this banishment as an opportunity to maximize his crafting magic and tap into the memories of his past life so that he can revitalize the tiny village. 

An Adventurer’s Daily Grind at Age 29 — Crunchyroll (January 7)

Though he grew up poor and hunting for food, Hajime Shinonome enjoys a comfortable life as the local village’s resident adventure: he gets money and food in exchange for going on quests and fending off monsters. But his life takes a bit of a turn when he rescues an orphaned girl from a monstrous slime and decides to adopt her. Adventuring isn’t so easy when you have a hyper sword-wielding child tagging along. 

A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation — Crunchyroll (January 7)

A chancellor in a fantasy realm gets transported to another fantasy realm. But he’s not about to let this kerfuffle get him down. In fact, he’s determined to use this as a chance to get some much needed rest and relaxation from his noble duties. 

Jujutsu Kaisen — Crunchyroll (January 8)

(Season 3) Following season two’s catastrophic Shibuya Incident arc, the third season of Jujutsu Kaisen sees the sorcerers enter the “Culling Game”—a twisted battle royale conducted by ancient sorcerer Kenjaku as a way to evolve humanity. The sorcerers and cursed users must battle each other to the death across different sections of Japan.  

The Holy Grail of Eris — Crunchyroll (January 8)

After a terrible betrayal, kindhearted Constance Grail is sentenced to death. But as she awaits execution, the ghost of Scarlett Castiel, a noblewoman executed for trying to poison the prince’s lover, whispers to her and offers her a chance at salvation. Together, the two of them unravel a conspiracy hiding in the kingdom. 

Roll Over and Die — Crunchyroll (January 8)

Even though she’s prophesied to hold great power and defeat the Demon Lord, Flum doesn’t really understand her abilities. Her party leader sees her as a liability and ends up selling her into slavery. But when Flum is thrown into a gladiatorial death match against some monsters, her power finally ignites.

The Invisible Man and His Soon-to-Be Wife — Crunchyroll (January 8)

Akira Tounome, a polite invisible man, runs a detective agency with the help of Shizuka Yakou,  a mild-mannered blind woman. As they work together day after day, a slow romance begins to blossom between them. After all, Shizuka can always tell where Akira is, even though he’s invisible and she can’t see. It’s a sweet slice-of-life with a magical spin. 

Fire Force — Crunchyroll (January 9) 

(Season 3: Part 2) In a world where people spontaneously combust and turn into fiery monsters, a group of pyrokinetic fire fighters is entrusted to protect humanity. This new season sees the main characters uncovering a big secret, but before they can stop an impending disaster, they’re branded as traitors. 

Dark Moon: The Blood Altar — Crunchyroll (January 9)

In this quiet seaside town, the most popular boys at rival prestigious academies just so happen to be vampires and werewolves respectively. When a new student transfers to the vampire boys’ school, both sets of popular boys find themselves inexplicably drawn to her…. Based on the popular webtoon of the same name, it’s like Twilight, but with even more boys.

Trigun Stargaze — Crunchyroll (January 10)

In the distant future, humanity is forced to leave Earth and searches the stars for habitable planets. On one distant arid planet, an outlaw named Vash wanders the wastelands, hiding from his hostile brother. This series, which is a sequel to Trigun Stampede (itself a reboot of a ‘90s anime), picks up two and a half years after the first show and finds Vash hiding out in a remote village after a catastrophic tragedy. 

Dead Account — Crunchyroll (January 10)

A contentious online streamer who purposefully trolls his viewers with ragebait is actually a soft-hearted older brother who just wants to take care of his little sister’s medical bills. He doesn’t care if the world hates him, so long as the money from his streams helps out his sister. But when the unthinkable happens, he finds himself pulled into the world of digital exorcists who fight digital evil spirits and ghosts who possess the accounts of the deceased. 

Fate/strange Fake — Crunchyroll (January 10)

The Holy Grail is a magical wish-granting device capable of fulfilling any desire—which means people desperately want it and wage full wars to obtain it. After the end of the Fifth Grail War in Japan, rumors point to a new grail in the United States of America. Mages start to gather and a new battle for the grail begins. 

A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans — Crunchyroll (January 10)

A grumpy, misanthropic teacher takes a new job at a remote mountain school, hoping that it will be a relaxing experience. But he quickly learns the school is for demi-humans—werewolves, mermaids, half-rabbit creatures, oh my! His new job is to help them learn to blend in with humans! 

Primal — Adult Swim (January 11)

(Season 3) From legendary animator Genndy Tartakovsky, Primal takes place in a fantastical version of the past, where Neanderthals and dinosaurs coexist. It follows a neanderthal man named Spear who bonds with a female t-rex named Fang. The two bond after both losing their families and form a partnership as they encounter different humans, like Vikings and Ancient Egyptians, and dangerous animals. 

Hell’s Paradise — Crunchyroll (January 11) 

A group of death row convicts are sent to search for the coveted elixir of life on a mythical and dangerous island. In this new season, the main characters arrive at the castle that belongs to the monsters who rule the island. Meanwhile, other expeditions have arrived on the island, also seeking the powerful elixir. 

Kaya-chan isn’t Scary — Crunchyroll (January 11) 

A precocious five year-old constantly gets in trouble in kindergarten… but it turns out that it’s because she can see evil spirits! Her way of getting rid of them is punching them, which is why she’s been getting into trouble! A new teacher aims to help her out. 

The Villainess Is Adored by the Prince of the Neighbor Kingdom — Crunchyroll (January 11) 

A girl is reincarnated into her favorite romance video game! But as the main villainess, instead of one of the main characters! The game’s story progresses as normal, but things take a turn when the prince of a neighboring country swoops in and unexpectedly proposes to her. 

‘Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess — Crunchyroll (January 12)

A warrior princess is captured by a demon army, expecting to be tortured. But the torture comes in the form of delicious food! Can she resist these tempting treats and keep the secrets of her kingdom? 

Oshi No Ko — Crunchyroll (January 14) 

(Season 3) The twin children of a tragically murdered pop idol are actually reincarnated fans of hers, who were also brutally killed. They make their way in the entertainment industry, while also trying to solve the murders of their mother and their former lives.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy — Paramount+ (January 15)

The newest Star Trek spinoff series follows a class of Starfleet cadets as they train to be officers. Starfleet Academy takes place in the far-future timeline of the Star Trek franchise and this class of cadets is the first one in over a century. The students, made up of humans and aliens alike, are taught aboard the USS Athena, which docks in San Francisco. 

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End — Crunchyroll (January 16)

(Season 2) One of the most evocative fantasy anime out there, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End follows the titular elven mage who has outlived all the members of her original adventuring party. She’s determined to journey to the land of the dead, so she can pay final tributes to her old friends. Now, she travels with two young heroes. The show dives into the ramifications of long-lived fantasy races and doesn’t hold back in getting really poignant about the passage of time.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — HBO (January 18)

The latest prequel to Game of Thrones adapts George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas. The stories follow Sir Duncan the Tall (or Dunk), a lowborn knight, and his young squire, Prince Aegon Targaryen (known as “Egg”). And yes, Egg is one of those Targaryens. 

The Beauty — FX/Hulu (January 21) 

Ryan Murphy’s latest is a sci-fi body horror series about a sexually transmitted virus that transforms regular people into absolutely gorgeous ones, but with gruesome and terrifying consequences. Evan Peters and Rebecca Hall star as FBI agents looking into the bloody deaths of international supermodels. 

Wonder Man — Disney+ (January 27)

Struggling actor Simon Williams lands the lead role in the remake of an in-universe superhero flick—and eventually gets superpowers himself. Apparently, in the MCU’s version of Hollywood, superpowers are looked down upon, so Simon has to hide his newfound abilities. He’s joined by Trevor Slatterly, the actor who once “played” the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and also returned for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings after being kidnapped by a criminal organization for impersonating the Mandarin. Hopefully, he can finally catch a break![end-mark]

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News Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Paul Giamatti Chomps Scenery in a New Starfleet Academy Clip

Origami chickens coming home to roost.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on December 8, 2025

Photo Credit: Miller Mobley/Paramount+

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Photo Credit: Miller Mobley/Paramount+

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is off to a difficult start in a new clip—well, it seems like it’s from near the beginning of the series, anyway.

Strange things are afoot in space! Strange things that might be useful teaching experiences, if everyone survives. As the USS Athena flies somewhere near the Badlands, “Subspace instability may be creeping in,” says Number One, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere). This, as it turns out, is the least of the ship’s problems. Captain Nala Ake (Holly Hunter) ominously says, “Well, let’s not total the ship on our first run” … right before that basically happens.

And then we have one of those Star Trek scenes where it makes no sense that anybody gets out of this alive. Swirly red balls attack the ship! Things go boom! Everything goes boom. Weird techno-growth-looking-stuff creeps over the entire hull! The cadets on board are instructed to run for their quarters, but not everyone listens to the little, bossy robots. (I do appreciate Robert Picardo’s Doctor saying, “Don’t panic, breathe! Breathing is your friend!”) The brief moments with a few cadets, though, are far from the point.

The point is Paul Giamatti showing up to gnaw on the bridge.

Giamatti is playing the antagonist, Nus Braka, who clearly has a beef with Captain Ake. That beef that is described using a strange metaphor: Time is not a flat circle; time is an origami chicken. (Nice to know origami still exists centuries in the future.) Giamatti, in hologram form, strolls about, cackling and stalking. It’s been “fifteen long years” since whatever happened with them before. Guy knows how to hold a grudge.

At New York Comic Con, Giamatti enthused about his role to Screen Rant, saying:

His ripping-apart project seems to be proceeding apace.

Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau are co-showrunners of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premieres January 15, 2026, on Paramount Plus.[end-mark]

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News Star Trek

New Star Trek Movie in Development From Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Directors

The new Star Trek project will reportedly tell a standalone story (if it’s ever actually released).

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on November 14, 2025

Photo: Paramount Pictures

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Photo: Paramount Pictures

Deadline is reporting that Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (the filmmakers behind Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Game Night) will write, direct, and produce a new Star Trek movie.

Details are thin at this time, but early word suggests that the new Star Trek movie will not be directly connected to any of the series’ previous universes (including all TV shows and films). Previous Paramount reports stated that the studio is ready to move on from the JJ Abrams reboot universe, and Deadline suggests that Paramount is looking for this movie to star entirely new characters (though that has not been confirmed). That said, there are obviously loose threads of continuity throughout the various Star Trek properties, so this movie could certainly be closer to a standalone story than a hard reset for the entire franchise.

Sadly, that does mean that the filmmaking duo will likely not be able to team up with Chris Pine who nearly stole the show in Honor Among Thieves. Then again, in a world where Peter Dinklage may be the new Natasha Lyonne, let’s not pretend we can ever be too certain of anything.

Speaking of which, you probably shouldn’t hold your breath for updates about this movie. Not only is this a fresh, officially unconfirmed report, but such a movie would likely be years away at this point assuming that the details of said report are accurate. Furthermore, this would hardly be the first time that we’ve received heard of a new Star Trek movie only to watch nothing come of it.

There’s also the Paramount of it all. With the company undergoing some massive transitions that include the possible acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and cozying up to the current administrative regime, there are a variety of factors that could sink this arrangement or otherwise keep it from reaching its full potential.

But there is potential here all the same. With Honor Among Thieves, Goldstein and Daley demonstrated a remarkable ability to manage a sizable cast of personable characters while offering genuinely fantastic humor and surprisingly creative action across a rich universe. In theory, those are all things you’d want to see in a new Star Trek movie (especially if you’re rooting for a Voyage Home-style adventure).

We’ll keep you updated if and when there is any movement on this project.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Khan

Reigning in Hell — Wrapping Up Star Trek: Khan’s First Season

The Trek audio drama tells a complete story, but leaves the door open for more…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on November 6, 2025

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A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I’m sitting listening to Star Trek: Khan, and I get to a bit where Khan and one of his followers are opening a bottle of Barolo, a red wine from Italy, which they’ve been saving for a special occasion. I immediately emailed co-writer David Mack, who is one of my best friends and also a major oenophile. In fact, Dave and I are part of a group of people who do regular wine tastings and have even made our own wine a few times. I said in my email, “Well, I know who wrote that bit.”

And then Dave emailed me back and told me that no, his collaborator, Kirsten Beyer, also a friend, wrote that particular sequence.

Oops.

This is a very long way of providing full disclosure and saying that the co-scripters of the Star Trek: Khan audio drama are friends of mine.

Please don’t let that get in the way of me telling you that this audio drama is very good. Also, there are some SPOILERS here, so you’ve been warned.

Khan’s time on Ceti Alpha V is one of the great storytelling gaps in Star Trek’s fictional history, as it is the transition between two very popular pieces of on-screen Trek, the first-season episode “Space Seed” in 1967 and the franchise’s second feature film The Wrath of Khan in 1982 (which was co-written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, who provided the story outline for Khan). The latter also provided several unanswered questions.

Interestingly enough, Khan only provides answers to some of those questions. But it also ends its flashback portion with several years still to go in Khan’s exile on CA5, presumably leaving things open for a potential second season.

But even if there isn’t one, this storyline does a nice job of filling in most of the gaps.

One of the best things about the audio is that it shows the process by which Khan and the gang assimilate to CA5, which is a very difficult and complicated process. We know about the Ceti eels, which were used to nasty effect in Wrath of Khan. The discovery of them and what they can do is brutal and nasty in the best possible way,

I really like the fact that it was established back in the very first episode, “Paradise,” that there were a bunch of young Augments on the Botany Bay whom Khan did not revive initially in “Space Seed,” but who were revived when they were exiled to CA5. This goes a long way toward explaining how Khan went from his followers being a multicultural group of contemporaries in the 1967 TV show to his followers being a bunch of young people in the 1982 film.

But Meyer, Beyer, and Mack subvert expectations there, too, because you figure that the adults will all die off and the young ones will have plot armor because we saw them in the movie. Not so much—the first two victims of the Ceti eels (one directly, one indirectly) are among the young’uns. One of them, Richter, is “possessed” by a Ceti eel, with nobody understanding what’s going on with him yet. Because Khan told him to fight what was happening to him, and because the eel made him suggestible, when he unexpectedly awakens from being sedated and sees his girlfriend Sylvana, who is sitting with him, he follows the instruction to fight and beats her to death.

This is one case where this being audio is devastatingly effective, because the imagination does a pretty good job of filling in the visuals. And the added bonus is that if you don’t want to imagine the bloody brutality of it, you don’t have to. On top of that, Khan has to kill Richter, because the only way to study this thing is via autopsy, and he’s already committed one murder, even if he doesn’t realize it. It’s a haunting scene, beautifully performed by Naveen Andrews as Khan and the voice actor who played Richter (I’ve been unable to determine which of the credited additional voices was him).

Indeed, one of the impressive things the audio accomplishes is making you care about the people who die, even though you know from Wrath of Khan that most of them are toast anyhow. The first casualty is the only other Augment who had a speaking part in “Space Seed,” Joaquin. (We also get to follow the journey of his son Joachim, played by Judson Scott in the movie, voiced by Paul Castro Jr. here, whom Khan takes under his wing, thus setting up his role in the film.) In particular, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper does a superb job of giving Paolo a distinctive personality with only a few lines of dialogue over several episodes just by his tone, which is a kind of laconic enthusiasm. So when he’s killed—which is quick and brutal—it’s a punch to the gut.

Probably the most effective is the death of Marla McGivers, another death we know is coming from Wrath of Khan. McGivers’ journey is the most interesting, mostly because the biggest challenge faced by Meyer, Beyer, and Mack in this audio is to elevate the character of McGivers from the horrifically sexist portrayal of her by Carey Wilbur and Gene L. Coon 58 years ago. The script and Wrenn Schmidt’s performance do excellent work to accomplish that goal, giving us more of a reason than “Space Seed” did for why McGivers fell for Khan so hard that she committed mutiny, and why Khan thought a non-Augment woman would even be worth his time.

We also know from Wrath how McGivers died: from one of the Ceti eels. Here the script nicely sets things up, because the eels are discovered early on, and Khan and his Khanettes are able to defend their encampment against them, so after the initial problems, they have them at bay by the end of the fourth episode. And then in the seventh episode, foreshadowingly titled “I am Marla,” we see the pregnant McGivers get into a hot spring that they’ve found in the underground caves where they intend to live once the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI starts to affect the surface of their world—

—and an eel shows up. It’s been three episodes since they’ve even been an issue, so both characters and listeners have all but forgotten about that particular threat. Especially since there have been much bigger fish to fry, like the destruction of the next planet and the new arrivals (more on them in a minute).

McGivers and Khan have developed into a fascinating couple. I particularly like their arguments about Romantic poets, as McGivers likes Coleridge, and Khan assumed she’d be more of a Wordsworth person. (Beyer and Mack avoid the obvious use of Oxymandias by Percy Shelley, which is a little too on the nose for Khan…) McGivers has also spent the entirety of the audio to that point working very hard to earn the trust of the other Augments, who don’t like her, don’t see what Khan sees in her, and don’t want her there.

Andrews does fantastic work here, showing the transition between the calm charisma of 1967 Richardo Montalban to the pissed-off vengeance-fueled anger of 1982 Montalban. And it’s a slow but inevitable process. At one point, in the third episode, “Do Your Worst,” Ursula mentions that she’s seen Khan up against terrible odds, and he just changed the plan, refusing to accept defeat.

And that’s probably the most telling thing: until he woke up on the Enterprise, Khan has never lost. Even the exile on the Botany Bay was something he saw as a victory, a chance to conquer a new world the way he was denied the ability to conquer the old one.

But CA5 continues to absolutely kick his ass. Every single plan he makes for how to survive winds up only being a stopgap, when it doesn’t fail completely. And his changing the plan last-minute, which Ursula said served him so well on Earth, fails miserably on CA5. Ursula and her love Madot are able to get past the enforced sterilization of the Augments and get Madot pregnant, but then the baby is lost in an accident while they are setting up the underground caves to protect them from the devastation that CA6’s destruction will wreak. When told by Khan that they can try again, Urusla angrily points out that she has absolutely no desire to bring a child into the world that CA5 has become.

One of the biggest unanswered questions created by Wrath of Khan was how and why CA6 blew up and why the Enterprise didn’t even notice that the planet was unstable, as that was something that should’ve been predicted. Indeed, in the framing sequence on the U.S.S. Excelsior, the historian who is going over the log tapes from CA5, Dr. Rosalind Lear, is convinced that Captain Kirk deliberately stranded Khan on CA5 knowing that CA6 would go boom. However, Captain Sulu makes the sensor logs from the Enterprise available to her, and it shows that CA6 had some magnetic weirdness, but was stable and shouldn’t have blown up.

Shortly after CA6’s destruction, a ship crash lands on the planet containing a group of aliens called Elboreans. The Elboreans are delightfully alien. They’re telepathic, telekinetic, cooperative, and do everything by consensus. It’s pretty much the diametric opposite of the single-person charisma-focused rule of Khan over his people. And their arrival exposes one of the biggest cracks in Khan’s rule, as the destruction of CA6 means that he needs to cooperate with the aliens so that they can all survive, while many of his followers—notably Ivan, voiced with gleeful brutality by Maury Sterling—think that they should kill the Elboreans. Credit to Olli Haaskivi, who voices Delmonda, the spokesperson for the Elboreans, whose calm rationality is a sharp contrast to the anger and frustration of the Augments.

Eventually, Khan learns that the Elboreans were responsible for the destruction of CA6. In return, they put together a new ship from the wreckage of theirs that can carry a complement of four, with the idea that they can find help to get them off the deteriorating world. Doing so results in most of the Elboreans—who have already been weakened by the awfulness of life on CA5—sacrificing themselves to try to get the ship offworld (necessary to explain why there were no Elboreans around by the time of Wrath of Khan). In the end, though, Khan believes that the ship is destroyed, eliminating one of his last shots at hope.

The storyline has a few head-scratchers. While having the Elboreans be responsible for CA6’s destruction goes a long way toward explaining how it happened so unexpectedly, it causes another problem: Khan’s animus toward Kirk, which drives the plot of the 1982 movie, is cut off at the knees. On top of that, the one part of that that could explain it—Khan’s anger that Kirk never came back to check up on him—is also cut off by Khan himself saying that Kirk would be an absolute fool to come back here. Indeed, he thinks Kirk should have set up a quarantine of the world to keep everyone away.

There’s a revelation that, despite my warning above, I won’t spoil, about one particular character’s true identity, as I think that is a genuine spoiler that should be experienced while listening. Having said that, I predicted it way before it actually was revealed, and I’m curious as to how other folks responded to it…

If this isn’t picked up for a second season, there’s plenty of story here to satisfy folks who want to know what happened to the Augments on CA5 after “Space Seed.” If it is picked up, there’s plenty more story to tell as there’s about a decade of time on CA5 left untold. What we have here is a fascinating tale, one that has action, adventure, pathos, character development (not just of the folks on CA5, but also of Captain Sulu and Ensign Tuvok; the familiar voices of George Takei and Tim Russ help ground this very firmly in the Trek universe), the redemption of a female character badly served by 1960s male writers, and some absolutely delightful discussions of literature—not just the Romantics, but also Shakespeare.[end-mark]

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News Star Trek

Star Trek 4 Reportedly Dead as Paramount Moves On From Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto-led Cast

We may never see Chris Pine as Captain Kirk again.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on November 5, 2025

Photo: Paramount Skydance

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Photo: Paramount Skydance

It’s been nine years since Star Trek Beyond, and I still like the beats and shouting. Overall, though, that movie was something of a disappointment—especially now that it’s the last time we’ll see that cast on the Enterprise. An in-depth Variety piece on the new CEO of Paramount, David Ellison, includes this disappointing sentence: “The hope is to have a fresh Star Trek movie, though the studio has moved on from the idea of bringing back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest of the ensemble from the J.J. Abrams reboot.”

The long-gestating, now-dead fourth film went through a lot of change before never actually coming to fruition. Last year, Steve Yockey (The Flight Attendant) was brought on to write a screenplay. At various points, Matt Shakman (WandaVision) and Noah Hawley (Alien: Earth) were attached to the film in some way.

(There’s no word on what this means for the “origin” Star Trek movie that was also maybe going to happen.)

Ellison founded Skydance Media in 2006; in August, Skydance and Paramount merged, and Ellison is now CEO of the Paramount Skydance Corporation. This isn’t his first experience with Star Trek; he was an executive producer on Star Trek Into Darkness. But it’s an odd fit.

As Variety describes, Ellison seems to lean in the opposite direction from Star Trek‘s generally progressive perspective. Variety notes, “Sources say that President Donald Trump has greenlit plans to host one of the first UFC fights under Paramount’s $7.7 billion deal with the MMA league on the lawn of the White House,” and goes on to observe, “While the spectacle might sound like a discarded scene from the 2006 dystopian comedy Idiocracy, it provides a glimpse into Ellison’s rising empire, one that skews alpha male and that some fear will entwine the studio’s content more closely with MAGA messaging.”

Ellison—whose father is Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and the world’s second-richest person—is also interested in making his company even bigger: “Most of Hollywood is buzzing about what the U.S. cultural landscape might look like if the Ellisons succeed in acquiring CNN — and the rest of Warner Bros. Discovery. The Ellisons have made two offers for Warner Bros. Discovery after floating a trial balloon in September about its plan to bid, which had the effect of putting the company in play,” says Variety.

What a “fresh” Star Trek looks like under this leadership remains to be seen. Some of the future of Trek is certain: Two more seasons of Strange New Worlds, and at least two seasons of Starfleet Academy. But what the franchise will look like when it next warps onto the big screen is a sizable question mark.[end-mark]

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News Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Showrunners Say Seasons 4 and 5 Will Have Fewer One-Off Concept Episodes

Thankfully, we’ll still get a puppet episode.

By Matthew Byrd

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Published on October 21, 2025

Photo: Paramount+

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Photo: Paramount+

In an interview with Screen Rant, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman said that the series’ final two seasons will focus a bit more on wrapping up the show and less on the kind of one-off concept episodes that have gradually become a bigger part of the story.

“We’re making season 5 now, we’re trending towards that, which is probably the center line of Star Trek, right?” Goldsman said. “We’re trending now, and beginning with season 4 and through season 5, to a much more singular sci-fi, action-adventure, emotional storytelling. And you know, the outliers are getting less and less, as we kind of focus on saying goodbye to each other and the fans.”

As we have previously discussed, Strange New Worlds’ third season offered significantly more one-off concept episodes to… mixed results. While some (many, one could argue) of those episodes were quite good in their own right, they began to eat into the show’s meager ten-episode seasons. Character arcs and longer plotlines were often shelved during those episodes, which contributed to the previous season’s generally disjointed nature.

Yet, you shouldn’t expect Strange New Worlds‘ final seasons to completely abandon such episodes or the creative spirit behind them. We already know that we’re due for a “puppet” episode of the series, and co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers explains that the crew want to keep the spirit of those one-off adventures alive throughout the series.

“The thing I will say about season 4 is, it’s in line with what we have done with the previous seasons, in the sense that we look at this like, ‘this could be our last season.’ So we treat it that way,” said Myers. “What’s something that we want to try to do, that [we] have never done before? What is something we want to try to do a version of, that [past shows] have done before, but never in this way. So that’s what we do in season 4.”

The comment about treating the upcoming season like the show’s last season is particularly interesting given that it seemed like there really wasn’t a guarantee that the show would get its final (abbreviated) fifth season. Yet, as Myers says, the showrunners have spiritually been treating the series like it could go away at any moment. That would help explain the “go for broke” nature of the show getting so many ideas out there in such a short period of time.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 is expected to premiere sometime in 2026. [end-mark]

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News Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Trailer Offers Drama, Trauma, and Too Little Tatiana Maslany

Adults aren’t lacking in drama either, really.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on October 14, 2025

Image: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+

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Image: Brooke Palmer/Paramount+

There are no massive Easter eggs in the latest trailer for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which debuted this past weekend at New York Comic Con. Nope: This one’s about feelings. But with those feelings comes just a tiny bit more plot. And those plot hints suggest a long connection between the series’ leading adult, Chancellor Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter); its antagonist, Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti); and one young cadet, Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), who seems to be searching for his missing mother—played by none other than guest star Tatiana Maslany.

Do you cast Maslany, she of ever so many roles in Orphan Black, just to have her play a lost mom? Reply hazy; try again later.

But there’s plenty of other drama to go around: Caleb gets a girlfriend! An instructor yells at the cadets! Sam (Kerrice Brooks), the very first hologram to attend the Academy, is sweet and awkward (her own word)! We get to hang out with our Discovery pals Jet Reno (Tig Notaro) and Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) for a few seconds! A Klingon cadet (Karim Diané as Jay-Den Kraag) says that a warrior doesn’t let his friends face danger alone!

Starfleet Academy’s cast already feels a bit sprawling, and we barely know these kids yet. Along with Caleb, Sam, and Jay-Den, the cadets include George Hawkins as Darem Reymi, described as “an aspiring captain from a wealthy home world,” and Bella Shepard as Genesis Lythe, “an admiral’s daughter determined to make her own name in Starfleet.” (Is it just me or would “Genesis Lythe” be a rich kid’s name on just about any world?)

What’s more, famous nerd Stephen Colbert is playing the digital dean of students, which he announced in a cute little video. More returning-to-the-franchise adults include Oded Fehr as Admiral Vance and Robert Picardo as the Doctor (formerly of Voyager).

And finally, we have a premiere date: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy begins January 15th, 2026, on Paramount Plus. You can “enroll” (or maybe find out a little more first) here. [end-mark]

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News The Purge

How A Classic Star Trek Episode Helped Inspire The Purge

In a new book, writer-director James DeMonaco describes the three things that inspired the franchise.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on October 7, 2025

Credit: Paramount and Universal Pictures

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Credit: Paramount and Universal Pictures

James DeMonaco’s 2013 film, The Purge, spawned a franchise based on the question: What would happen to humanity if we had a holiday that legalized murder and every other thing society deems illegal, for just one day?

It’s a question that brings up a lot of answers, which have given the franchise its staying power. And it turns out that DeMonaco’s inspiration for the film came from three sources: a road rage incident he had with his wife, his hatred of guns, and a certain episode of Star Trek.

In the recent book, Horror’s New Wave (via People), DeMonaco dishes on how his father was a major Trekkie and forced him to watch The Original Series. One of the episodes they saw together was “Return of the Archons,” which the writer-director said stayed in his head.

“I can’t say it was a direct inspiration,” DeMonaco said. “I think it was one of those inspirations that came almost after I came up with the idea.”

DeMonaco goes on to describe “Return of the Archons” as a “Star Trek episode where a seemingly peaceful alien civilization engages in a yearly orgy of violence called ‘Festival.’” As Reactor’s reread of the episode explains, the planet turns out to be controlled by a supercomputer that allows everyone to go batshit for twelve hours. The episode is generally agreed to not be one of Star Trek’s finest, and while The Purge wasn’t well received by critics either, the film did well enough to spawn four additional films to date as well as a short-lived television series.  

Jason Blum sums up the franchise’s staying power well in his interview with People: “To me, The Purge always carried with it a sense of ‘it could happen here.’ That’s part of what makes it so disturbing. It’s not anything I’d like to see in real life, and I hope I don’t. That movie was always meant as a warning—not a suggestion.” [end-mark]

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Featured Essays Star Trek

Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains

The “villains” of Trek are meant to be foils to the Federation’s worldview, not blindly evil antagonists.

By Jaime Babb

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Published on October 14, 2025

Image: Marni Grossman/Paramount+

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Image: Marni Grossman/Paramount+

The critical moment of my entire life came a few weeks after my third birthday in a hotel room in Grand Forks, North Dakota. 

I am sorry to say that I have no memory of this supreme event. I have heard of it only second-hand from my family, among whom it has achieved the status of legend. As they tell it, they had just spent several hours driving down from Winnipeg, listening to a high-stakes attempt at constitutional reform in Canada come unravelled on the radio. My dad, wanting a reprieve from the day’s driving and politics, laid down on the hotel bed and put on the TV. It was a new episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation—the season three finale, in fact: “The Best of Both Worlds,” soon to become one of the most infamous cliffhangers in the history of television. And I—a tiny, wide-eyed blonde child who’d never before paid much attention to my parents’ viewing habits—sat there watching, transfixed by terror and fascination as our heroes in their silver starship faced-off hopelessly against an ominous black cube and the pale, merciless robot people—the Borg—who dwelt within. I could only watch helplessly as they kidnapped the dashing, bald-headed captain and altered him. 

     “Altered?” 

     “He is a Borg!”

 I can only imagine the horror that must have tinged my young soul in the final minute of the episode, as the corrupted hero appeared onscreen, announced that he was now Locutus of Borg, and promised that my life, as it had been, was now over. There was an orchestral swell, a bearded man ordering someone called Mr. Worf to “Fire”—and the rest, as they say, was history.¹

Locutus, as it turned out, was right. My life was never the same after that. I have only documentary evidence to go on, but even a cursory glance at my childhood drawings shows the sudden appearance of darkly greebled cubes and anemic cyborgs with laser-pointers mounted on their heads as motifs in my artwork (together, it must be said, with endless representations of the Reading Rainbow guy in a golden visor). I had become a Trekkie. I had been drawn into the fandom—assimilated, if you like—by its most famous villain, as much as by anything.

Which is why it so grieves me to admit that the Borg are actually kind of boring.

Don’t get me wrong! I love them as a concept; I still think that they feature prominently in many of the greatest Star Trek stories ever told. I even love some of the weaker stories with them—I will defend the Agnes Jurati/Borg Queen subplot in Picard season two unto death. But, well… there just aren’t that many stories you can properly tell with them, or at least, not if you continue to write them as villains.² In their first appearances, they worked brilliantly as an apocalyptic threat to the Federation; but you can only defeat an enemy onscreen so many times before the dialogue about how invincible they are starts to ring a little hollow. Worse than that, the writers had to water down the Borg’s original concept almost immediately for dramatic interest; you just can’t have many compelling conversations with a faceless swarm announcing that resistance is futile. The Borg are great every so often, but it doesn’t take long before you want to go running back to the Klingons, Romulans, Vorta, or Cardassians—baddies with whom you can actually manage a compelling tête-à-tête³ about Great Power politics or competing cultural philosophies. It may have been the action-packed spectacle of “The Best of Both Worlds” that first drew me into Star Trek, but it is this—the intellectual back-and-forth, the radical project of trying to imagine yourself in the Other—that has kept me here these many years, and that I have tried to emulate in my own novel.

So why is it, then, that on those rare occasions when Secret Hideout-era Star Trek has tried to actually introduce major new threats, so many of them have tended to be in the model of the Borg—monstrous, generic, doomsday villains? Let’s consider our track record: Discovery season two introduced CONTROL, an evil AI who wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy for reasons that were never made clear, with a catchphrase that sounded like someone ran “Resistance is Futile” through a thesaurus app. Picard season one ended with a brief face-off against a similar, extragalactic AI so powerful that it could scour all organic life from the Milky Way at the drop of a hat; season two ended with an even more generic threat from… something… that randomly opened a transwarp conduit that almost devastated the Alpha Quadrant for reasons that were never explored.

And of course, the recent third season of Strange New Worlds has given us the Vezda, an enemy against whom reason and diplomacy are ontologically useless; they’re Evil, you see—“the evil that predates doing evil,” as Captain Batel memorably puts it in “New Worlds, New Civilizations.” Essentially, they’re the Devil: they desire only to wreak death and destruction across the Cosmos; the portals to their realm are kept in vast and ancient temples that seem to radiate menace; their leader, possessing the corpse of the unfortunate Ensign Gamble, goes about in a terrifying horned mask, compelling his followers to gouge out their own eyeballs for no apparent reason. And like all devils, there can be no reasoning with them; any attempts to understand their motivations or to seek peaceful coexistence are futile. They are, in other words, extremely one-note. 

To be fair, this is a well that Star Trek has dipped into before—although mostly in episodes that I generally consider to be on the weaker side. On the original series, Scotty was once possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper, who fed off of the fear generated by sadistically murdering women⁴; on The Next Generation, Tasha Yar was killed by a tar monster somehow agglomerated from the discarded evil thoughts of a “race of titans.” The closest antecedent, though, are the Pah’Wraiths from the last few seasons of Deep Space Nine: a race of infernally evil “fallen angels” eternally longing to escape their prison and wage war against the forces of good, kept in check only by the noble self-sacrifice of a Starfleet captain in a climactic battle heavy in both CGI and cheesy dialogue.

And yet, Deep Space Nine gets away with it because it gave us enough antagonists who were genuinely compelling to excuse one who was not. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Strange New Worlds, whose main prior contribution to Star Trek villainy, besides occasionally dusting off the Romulans and the Klingons, has lain in reimagining the Gorn as slavering, Xenomorph-like beasts driven into murderous racial frenzies by solar flares. To its credit, the latest season has finally walked this back somewhat, showing us that some Gorns at least are perfectly reasonable individuals capable of conversing civilly over a game of chess—and yet, there has been no attention given to how this can be reconciled with their predatory disregard for other forms of life, nor to how their culture works at anything beyond a surface level. And even when La’an kills Ortegas’s Gorn friend in a misunderstanding, the episode seems more interested in tying itself into continuity than it is in sitting with the morality of such an act. The Gorn might narrowly avoid the “always chaotic evil” trope, but the ideological tension that has so animated previous Star Trek villains (including even the Borg, when they are written well) has remained depressingly absent.

It didn’t have to be this way. When Star Trek: Discovery was released back in 2017, its very first scene featured the Klingon warlord T’Kuvma laying out his critique of the Federation. The scene is hampered by the decision to film in glacially slow, distorted Klingonese, and it would have been nice to get some sense as to how much ideological diversity there was amongst the Klingons themselves, but the dialogue itself is gripping stuff, comparable to Michael Eddington’s “You’re worse than the Borg” speech or Quark and Garak’s “root beer” conversation back on Deep Space Nine.

The first season of Picard, meanwhile, teased the fascinating idea that the Federation itself had become infected with the same culture of paranoia that had brought down the Romulan Empire—an important commentary on the psychological effects of death anxiety and living under a rampant security state that was unfortunately somewhat lost in the noise of too many competing plotlines. And the Vau N’akat story arc in the gravely underappreciated Star Trek: Prodigy centred around an all-too-timely conflict between pluralism and xenophobia. Hell, even Lower Decks, a comedy, managed to retool the Pakleds into the franchise’s single best commentary on the new era of authoritarianism, though the joke, admittedly, had run its course by the end of the second season.

But all of that appears to have fallen by the wayside. Our enemies have become monsters, mindless killing machines, manifestations of Satan on Earth against whom we can enact consequence-free violence. Meanwhile, in real life, we spend every day watching genocidal violence play out on our handheld devices, underwritten by American taxes, with leaders commanding us to despise and drive out the Other—the immigrant, the disabled, the person of colour, the transgender, the Palestinian—with other Others soon to come, and don’t you doubt it. 

So yes, Star Trek needs new villains; and I don’t just mean another “Gabriel Lorca”-style pastiche of MAGA politics (though even that might be too much to hope for under America’s—and Paramount’s—new censorship regime). Rather, we need Star Trek to do what Star Trek has always done best—present us with an Other in whom we can see ourselves. Recall that back before the Gorn were “monsters,” they were a rival spacefaring power who sought only to protect their own territory from colonization—a motive that Kirk found sufficiently resonant to spare their captain’s life. And one of Trek’s few “satanic” aliens who actually worked for me was the entity from “Day of the Dove,” who stood-in for the dehumanizing horrors of war and could only be defeated by finding common ground with the Klingons. A good villain is a foil for the heroes—illustrating who they are by way of contrast and forcing them to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about themselves. So the question becomes: what do we want to illustrate about the Federation, a fictional civilization that pulls an increasingly awkward double duty as both an imaginary ideal and a mirror for the liberal world order? 

Once we put it in these terms, a plethora of options start to unfurl themselves. Perhaps some space capitalists; not scheming used-car salesmen like the Ferengi, but something closer to what they were originally intended to be: a sort of East India Company in space. Discovery tried to do something similar with the Emerald Chain back in season three—they were only particularly interesting in one episode and otherwise mostly came across as generic pirate-y types, but I think that the idea is a sound one. Or perhaps an enemy to represent pushback against the Federation’s insidious “soft power”? The old novelverse did something similar to great effect with the Typhon Pact, but I envision something other than a coalition of the Federation’s imperial rivals; perhaps an alliance of minor worlds who were deemed ineligible for Federation membership for some key, illiberal aspects of their social structures that they refused to change, and who now attempt to recruit new worlds to their reactionary counter-Federation.

Or, given how much recent Star Trek series have muddied the Federation’s reputation, perhaps we could have an anti-villain; someone who, at least initially, appears to occupy the moral high ground—say, by interfering in the affairs of pre-warp civilizations to effect goals that seem noble. Or perhaps someone who turns the Federation’s own tactics against them; an insidious foil, capable of waiting patiently to achieve what they want. This was what I had hoped would become of Jurati’s collective: a version of the Borg who are prepared to take no for an answer because they know that time is on their side and, sooner or later, the answer will be yes.

I could go on; I’m sure that you could think of any number of options and I encourage you to lay them out in the comments. But one thing is for sure: a villain who is simply Evil—“the evil that predates doing evil”—isn’t an interesting foil. Because when the villain is Evil itself, all that it tells us is that the heroes are on the side of Good; and, as history and current affairs show us, once you believe yourself to be automatically on the side of Good, you can excuse doing anything, no matter how evil. A villain in whom you can see yourself is a moral corrective for this tendency.[end-mark]

1. My parents will fault me if I don’t also mention that they tried to calm me down by putting on an old Tom Baker Doctor Who serial that happened to be airing on a local PBS affiliate. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of assuming that a three-year-old child would find it just as silly and campy as they did, rather than, for example, existentially terrifying. ︎
2. Insert mandatory grousing about the third season of Picard ignoring the benign version of the Borg that the second season had spent ten episodes setting up. ︎
3. Literally, in the Klingons’ case, in that they ram their heads into each other. ︎
4. Specifically women, on the grounds that “women are more easily and more deeply terrified.” Did I mention that this episode was bad? ︎

The post Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

“You didn’t have a plan, did you?” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Third Season Overview

Looking back at the good, the bad, and the Gorn of season three…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on September 25, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

The last five years have really been bizarre for screen entertainment. You start with the apocalypse of 2020, which messed everything up. Then, just as everyone was starting to come out of it and approach the possibility of normal, first the writers, then the actors went on strike.

For Strange New Worlds, the strikes happened right as the second season ended, and they delayed the third season, with the conclusion of “Hegemony” not showing up on Paramount+ until almost two years after the first part ended season two on a cliffhanger.

There has been a lot of expressed disappointment with this third season of SNW, and the quality certainly has been variable. I don’t think it’s been as bad as some of the haters have said, but it’s also definitely a step down from the first and second seasons. The show-runners themselves have admitted that coming back from the strike was difficult, and it happened only a couple of years after a global pandemic warped the entire damn world. It’s not always easy to do your best work under those conditions.

I don’t present these as excuses, simply as reasons why this season has been a disappointment.

Part of the problem is that there’s a line between genuinely setting up the show for which you’re a prequel and engaging in self-indulgent nonsense that goes for the nostalgia hit over story sense and/or continuity maintenance. And season three of SNW dances back and forth over that line, um, a lot.

The thing is, when it’s on the pure setting-up side, we get some absolutely great stuff. “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” does a magnificent job of showing the embryonic forms of the relationships that Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and Scotty will have with Jim Kirk and each other on the TV show that aired six decades ago (and its followup movies). For all that the episode is generally horrible, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” does do fine work in deepening the specific friendship between Kirk and Scotty, as does “New Life and New Civilizations” for Kirk and Spock. And several episodes this season lay the groundwork for the Chapel-Roger Korby romance that was the backstory of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”

On the other hand, there’s some self-indulgent nonsense, bits that are done as fannish references that hinder the storyline, some of which works better than others. There’s the use of the Metrons in “Terrarium,” which is an attempt to reconcile the Gorn’s appearance in “Arena” with the use of the Gorn in this show, at which it fails 100%, just like every other Gorn appearance on this show.

“Wedding Bell Blues” is a particularly tired offender, though there at least the script leaves things open enough that you can dance around it. Rhys Darby’s character isn’t explicitly referred to as Trelane, even though he acts very much like the character William Campbell played in “The Squire of Gothos,” and the parent who chides him isn’t explicitly referred to as Q, even though John deLancie voices him. I’m a bit more forgiving of the episode precisely because it’s not explicit, so you can just assume that we’re dealing with a different set of powerful beings (goodness knows the Trek universe is littered with them…). Because honestly—with all due respect to the late great Peter David, who built an entire novel, Q-Squared, around the notion—Trelane being a Q never made any sense. On top of that, having Spock and Uhura meet Trelane before “Squire” makes even less sense. (Another reason I’m willing to cut this episode some slack is that it is, in many ways, a tribute to Peter, and I have a soft spot for that.)

But so much of this feels like it’s being written by people who are basing their stories on half-remembered recollections about the original series that are demonstrably false. You saw this in a lot of tie-in fiction back in the day, when the only way to see the episodes was when they happened to be rerun, and even once they started showing up on various versions of home video (either recorded on blank VHS tapes or purchased on tape), people had seen the 79 episodes so many times that they wouldn’t bother to verify their faulty recollections.

So if all you remember is Kirk and the Gorn battling around Vasquez Rocks and you forget the part about how nobody on the ship had fucking even heard of the Gorn, you get SNW’s treatment of the Gorn. So if all you remember is Trelane being vaguely Q-like, you do “Wedding Bell Blues.” And if all you remember is that Vulcans are arrogant snots, and you have trouble telling the difference between biology and cultural mores (or just believe in species essentialism, and seriously read the linked article by Lily Osler, it’s superb), you get idiocy like “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” an episode I have no intention of ever forgiving the producers for inflicting on us.

Right on the line is “A Space Adventure Hour.” There are many who viewed it as an insult to the original series, others (including me) who viewed it as a loving tribute. I mean, look, the original series was absolutely magnificent, but it’s not holy writ, it’s not sacred, and it’s full of some of the most ridiculous nonsense. Making fun of the show’s excesses (Paul Wesley’s letter-perfect impersonation of the worst of William Shatner’s third-season performances) and limitations (trying to work around a minimal TV budget) is totally fair game. And the episode addressed the fact that we’re likely to have holodeck technology a lot sooner than the twenty-fourth century, acknowledged how insanely dangerous the holodeck has proven to be in many of its uses in the various twenty-fourth-century spinoffs, and makes fun of it while also explaining why we don’t see holodecks in mass use until the twenty-fourth century.

And even if you’re one of the people who didn’t like “…Adventure Hour,” there’s other good stuff here. While the description of the Vezda as beings of pure evil were a little too histrionic and absurd (and goes back to that tiresome species essentialism), the actual portrayal of them in “Through the Lens of Time” and “New Life and New Civilizations” was pretty damned effective, mostly due to an excellent combination of Chris Myers’ strong performance (one that is a hundred and eighty degrees from how he played Gamble) and a very effective makeup/CGI choice in portraying the Vezda-possessed folks with their eyes gouged out.

Meantime, “Shuttle to Kenfori” was a very effective action/horror piece that also picked up nicely from “Under the Cloak of War,” “What is Starfleet?” uses the documentary format to excellent effect, and until the doofy-ass bit with the Metrons, “Terrarium” is a strong episode, Trek’s latest of many attempts to riff on Hell on the Pacific.

Still, there’s nothing here that hits the heights of “Ad Astra per Aspera” or “Children of the Comet” or “Strange New Worlds” or “Those Old Scientists.” And I find myself frustrated by what we didn’t see. “Wedding Bell Blues” ends with a scene that goes out of its way to show how delightful Kelzing, the three-armed bartender played by Kira Guloien, is, to the point where Pike and Number One ask her to join the Enterprise staff—and then we never see her again. La’an’s actions at the end of “Terrarium” are problematic to say the least, and also drive an obvious wedge between her and Ortegas, neither of which are actually dealt with or followed up on. We’re still waiting for the sequel to “The Serene Squall” that the final scene of that episode promised us. And Batel’s fate as a guardian of order is sledgehammered into the plot of “New Life and New Civilizations” with woefully insufficient setup, to the point where it feels like a writer’s trick to get Melanie Scrofano off the show because we have to break Pike and Batel up in order to make the plot of “The Menagerie” work.

Let’s hope that season four was able to, as the show-runners promised, proceed more smoothly without distractions and interference from real-world events. And when it does air, I’ll be back to talk with y’all about it…[end-mark]

The post “You didn’t have a plan, did you?” — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i> Third Season Overview appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek

“Resistance is futile.” Why Star Trek: TNG’s Borg Collective Is the Perfect Monster for Our Time

35 years on, what can we learn from the Borg and “The Best of Both Worlds”?

By Surekha Davies

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Published on September 24, 2025

Credit: CBS

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Credit: CBS

What makes a perfect monster? We need look no further than the Borg in Star Trek: TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds” double episode, which first aired on June 18 and September 24, 1990. With their deathly pallor, prosthetics, and hive mind, the cyborgs of the Borg Collective are the perfect screen monster. But for all their uncanny appearance and juggernaut-like technology, the ultimate terror they pose is that they monstrify those whom they assimilate.

On the surface, “The Best of Both Worlds” charts a battle with the Federation’s greatest foe to date. But the story’s timeless power lies in how it plays with the Star Trek universe, echoes monster archetypes, and makes us think about what it means to be human today.

A new foe

“The Best of Both Worlds” opens with the Enterprise called to investigate after a distress signal is received from New Providence, a colony at the edge of Federation space. Upon arrival, the crew find that all that remains of the colony is a giant crater. Trace evidence suggests that the culprits were the Borg, a species they had encountered briefly in the distant reaches of the galaxy. Soon a distress signal from a ship near another Federation outpost confirms that the Borg are in Federation space. The Enterprise races to intercept, and engages the Borg.

The Borg ship’s design suggests to viewers that they will be stranger and more menacing than your garden-variety Federation foe or rival. Unlike regular antagonists’ curved, graceful ships—the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, for example, or the slightly more alarming, coiled-snake-like Romulan ships glowing a warm blue-green—Borg vessels are charcoal-colored cubes resembling post-apocalyptic junkyard scrap, their yellowish-green glow magnifying their bleakness.

The Borg open communications by demanding that Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart; now Sir Patrick Stewart), whom they identify by name, prepare to be transported to their ship. In the ensuing space battle and chase, Borg drones eventually beam onto the Enterprise and abduct him. They set a course straight for Earth.

The Borg Collective—known simply as the Borg—is a bipedal, composite species whose ships troll the galaxy. When they encounter a species with distinctive knowledge and technology, they assimilate it. They inject captured individuals with nanoprobes (microscopic robotic devices) and attach cybernetic implants: a prosthetic arm extension; an ocular device over one eye. These enhancements give drones extraordinary strength, built-in tools, and a way to communicate instantly across the collective.

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” In the wake of a Borg visitation a species is assimilated into the collective. This is not just a worst-case-scenario for a first-contact situation; it’s also an unsettling allegory for what societies might become once “efficiency,” defined too narrowly, runs amok.

Battling such an epic foe requires expert leadership skills and tactical acumen. Partway through Part I of “The Best of Both Worlds,” command of the Enterprise falls to Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes). But seeds of doubt have already been sown: viewers have learned that Riker was offered the captain’s chair on several ships but turned them down, a choice that has begun to raise eyebrows. He butted heads with the ambitious, risk-taking Lt. Commander Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy), Starfleet’s expert on the Borg, who had joined the ship for this mission. Shelby had gotten wind of Riker’s latest job offer and was angling to become his successor as first officer on the Enterprise.

Shelby is a compelling foil to Riker, mirroring his younger, risk-taking self. Her victory over him in a hand of poker—a Riker specialty—is symbolic. A disagreement on anti-Borg strategy prompts a claustrophobic scene in a turbo-lift in which Shelby questions his judgement. And is there a better line to encapsulate an up-and-coming, Type A personality than Shelby’s frank, blunt “You’re in my way”?

On the eve of the Enterprise’s confrontation with the Borg, Riker wonders: has he become too comfortable? Did he turn down offers to command his own ship because he was scared of the big chair? Could he make the tough decisions and take risks where necessary?

Once the captain is kidnapped, a failed rescue attempt reveals that Picard has been assimilated. The Borg cube annihilates a fleet sent to intercept them en route to Earth, and Riker is granted a battlefield promotion to captain. Questions about how good a leader Riker might be are no longer hypothetical, as he faces a trial by fire.

Monster archetypes

The Borg still resonate today, partly because of their effectiveness as a mashup of enduring monster archetypes. Their physique triggers fears about the boundary between human and machine. Weighted down with implants, their movements are jerky and robotic. They sleep standing up, plugged into alcoves in their ships. For today’s viewers they are the twenty-fourth-century version of Frankenstein’s creature, that uncanny child of science and dead flesh.

The Borg share their ash-grey skin with a creepy constellation of undead monsters from folklore, literature, and cinema. While their physical strength recalls Frankenstein’s creature, their mindless groupthink is zombie-like. In a process mirroring vampire replication, the Borg assimilation process begins when a drone inserts the injection tubules attached to their fingers into a victim’s neck. Nanoprobes flow in, enveloping blood cells and re-configuring DNA. When Picard is injected with nanoprobes his skin turns grey. Immobilized for the procedure, his face betrays the horror of the moment through the presence of a single tear.

Like Frankenstein’s creature and zombies, the Borg are uncanny. Neither identical to us nor completely different, they are just similar enough to profoundly weird us out. At the turn of the twentieth century, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jensch proposed that things could be both ordinary and creepy (unheimlich, literally unhomely); for example, a lifelike mechanical doll. Uncanny monsters introduce a sense of unease, making us wonder where they end and “normal” humans begin.

In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori plotted people’s feelings of comfort (affinity) against human likeness for various humanoid things like robots, stuffed animals, and puppets. People’s feelings of affinity went up when they encountered things that resembled a healthy human, but dropped sharply for things that were most similar or near-human, but not actually representing or part of a healthy human (he wrote about corpses and realistic prosthetic limbs when discussing this aspect of his work). Mori also determined that when humanoid objects were in motion, the affinity dip for things that most resembled us—and the rise in the weirded-out feeling—was much greater. Uncanny objects become creepier when moving, their apparent vitality shrinking the distance between “scary inanimate things out there” and “living people like me.” This dip in the graph—the “valley of uneasiness” in Japanese, often translated as the “uncanny valley” —is exactly the space in which Frankenstein’s monster, zombies, and the Borg lurk.

Despite their technological prowess, the Borg’s mechanical gait and robotic movements also brings to mind a pre-industrial monster. Like the Borg, the figure of the zombie plays upon our fear of being controlled, of becoming so disconnected from or disempowered by powerful individuals or systems that we are but puppets whose strings we can’t see.

The connection goes deeper than appearances. During the age of transatlantic slavery, white plantation owners observing West African religious and medical practices in the Caribbean misunderstood and misconstrued the spiritual practice known as Vodún, reductively caricaturing it as a diabolical ritual in which shamans created zombies, individuals who were halfway undead. White settlers, hugely outnumbered, feared what they understood as otherworldly, potentially diabolical powers among enslaved Africans. White colonists’ dread of rebellions fuelled stereotypes and fearmongering involving dark magic and zombies.

The ultimate threat of the uncanny is that there is no defensible line between the self and a frightening other. When the uncanny monster is the Borg, this threat is made real.

Mirror, mirror

The cinematic power of the Borg is channeled through a story arc framed by a fascinating and disturbing question: what does it take to defeat a monstrous foe who is also, somehow, yourself?

The Borg want Picard to “facilitate our introduction into your societies.” He will be the “human voice [that] will speak for us in all communications.” By assimilating him, they internalize his knowledge of the Federation’s defensive capabilities and the Enterprise crew’s tactical preparations. Halfway through the story the crew realize that everything that Picard was and everything he knew is known to the Borg. Defeating him will also require defeating all that was Jean-Luc Picard.

On the Enterprise’s next encounter with the Borg, the assimilated Picard in a deathly charcoal body suit and prosthetic eyepiece greets them on the view-screen: “I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile.”

“Locutus” is Latin for “one who speaks/has spoken.” (For viewers who know that Stewart was once a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in England and played a villain in I, Claudius, a critically acclaimed BBC TV series set in ancient Rome, both his delivery and the lines are as thrilling as they are creepy.)

As Picard’s speech unfolds, the Borg’s terms and conditions become clear: “Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward you will service us.” As the episode moves to its cliff-hanger, Picard’s transformation sinks in when Locutus addresses Riker by Picard’s nickname for him: “Your resistance is hopeless, Number One.”

As Part II of “The Best of Both Worlds” opens, it’s clear that there will need to be a drastic re-thinking of tactics. The crew abandon hope (for now) of rescuing the captain. A successful defense would have to be sufficiently unorthodox that the Borg could not anticipate it from Picard’s time and experiences on the Enterprise. As the ship’s bartender Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) puts it, Riker must “let go of Picard” and tear up the book on how to run this ship.

The multi-pronged solution will eventually involve rescuing Locutus/Picard and disconnecting him from the hive mind after using that very connection to neutralize the Borg cube. But can a monstrified person become fully human again? Perhaps not. As Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) declared after the mission that revealed that the captain has been assimilated, “He is a Borg!” The concluding episode takes the reader through Picard’s first steps on a journey back to humanity. As he puts it once the cube is defeated, he feels “almost human.”

The story ends with a mostly physically recovered Picard back in command of the Enterprise, albeit with a Borg implant-shaped bandage shadowing his face for the moment. The rest of the season is mostly business as usual. But faced with a new threat—monstrification via assimilation—the question of whether the boundary between human and Borg, once breached, can ever truly be completely sealed, remains. Its timelessness makes it a generative dilemma, reverberating through multiple future Star Trek franchises.

Is there a best of both worlds—a way of learning something, anything, worthwhile from the Borg and integrating it into the Federation? The suggestion in the title “The Best of Both Worlds” would become a recurring question

Despite the spectacular, horrifying visual effect of the Borg and their powers of assimilation, the most uncanny thing about them may be societal. They are the Federation’s doppelgänger or unrelated evil twin, offering what Naomi Klein, referring to forms of doubling in contemporary politics and internet culture in her 2023 book Doppelganger, calls “the mirror world.” For Klein, “all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other….”

But a society and its avowed opposite may not remain light-years apart. Sometimes a society may flip itself in the mirror. The Borg is a doppelgänger for today’s (increasingly beleaguered) liberal Western democracies, too. The Borg’s technofascist colonialism is unsettling because viewers recognize the parallels with historic settler-colonialism. And now, several decades onward, the landscape of digital privacy is beginning to resemble the authoritarian surveillance state of the Borg.

The Federation prides itself on its enlightened, democratic, egalitarian governance that recognizes and celebrates the individuality of species and persons. They are a collective of planets by the free will of their citizens. In “The Best of Both Worlds” and later in episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, declarations like “My culture is based on freedom and self-determination!” are common in those brief moments of dialogue between the Borg and Starfleet before the shooting and assimilating begins.

By contrast, the Borg assimilates by force and homogenizes individuals into cyborg shadows of their former selves. Borg drones have no privacy and no individuality, hearing the thoughts of all other drones. They speak as one, in one booming voice. To the Federation’s benevolent Dr Jekyll, the Borg Collective is Mr Hyde, the fearsome mirror self, the route not taken.

The Borg are the ultimate monster: they turn those they hunt into monsters, metabolizing their distinctiveness in order to hunt and monstrify with even greater “efficiency,” in search of a “perfection” that is, to those around them, a hollow horror-show imitation.

Yet Starfleet’s mission is one of exploration, science—and defense. Its engineers are as adept at using phasers as they are at fixing a ship’s warp drive. While the Federation views itself as benevolent, the dissident movement known as the Maquis will soon tear the veil to reveal the realpolitik practiced by the real, fallible individuals behind the scenes and at the negotiating table.

Moreover, the benchmarks to qualify for Federation membership have a homogenizing effect. For small polities like the Bajoran planetary system around which Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is set, the consequences of becoming part of a larger collective may mean that the choice of whether or not to seek membership isn’t a genuine choice at all.

Timeless monsters offer timely lessons that can be tailored for any age. The Borg aren’t just a doppelgänger of the Federation; they’re also a doppelgänger of the real world, and our current culture. Considering the Borg in 2025, the monster at the heart of the story prefigures what data journalist Professor Meredith Broussard recently termed “technochauvinism”: the myth that the best solution for any problem must be a technological one.

One real-world consequence of technochauvinism has been the trampling of individual human will over the use of their own creative works. In terms eerily similar to that used in discussions of AI, the Borg took, by force, the distinctive, ineffable essence, knowledge, talents, and experience of individuals while claiming that this served a greater good that everybody should want. To adapt and paraphrase a popular line about LLM-based genAI, the Borg offers something nobody asked for and everybody hates.

The world of the Borg, with drones lacking free will and visiting death and destruction on individuals who do, is a potential endgame that awaits humanity if we entirely relinquish our individuality through a diet of fakes: simulacra and falsehoods fashioned from human-created knowledge and art metabolized and excreted by LLM-based systems. We may become drones incapable of thinking outside the box (or cube), our minds and their contents controlled by whoever programs the system.  

Thirty-five years after “The Best of Both Worlds” first aired, it feels like we’re heading into the exact opposite of the utopian vision of Star Trek: TNG. Far from enjoying the end of war and hunger on earth, hundreds of millions live in war zones, financial precarity, and hunger, while billionaires amass more wealth that they could spend in a millennium. Instead of having the time and resources to reach their full potential, most people and their minds, bodies, and intellectual property are, to giant corporations and tech CEOs, little more than extractive resources, their needs viewed as an inconvenience to corporate profits. If humanity is to survive the current moment of monstrification, a good place to start would be to face it head-on, and recognize the danger we’re courting.

The better, brighter side of the mirror is reachable. While the Borg insist that “resistance is futile” and it seems that Silicon Valley would have us believe the same, the future isn’t written in stone—or on microchips. The perfection (ha!) of the Borg as a screen monster lies in how they combine monster archetypes while resting on a foundation of Trek lore; on how they are undeniably awful, but also represent a doppelgänger of the Federation and a warning for us; and on how a story braiding human courage and frailty can come to a satisfying close while still trailing threads to tug loose in the future.[end-mark]

The post “Resistance is futile.” Why Star Trek: TNG’s Borg Collective Is the Perfect Monster for Our Time appeared first on Reactor.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Bumpy Third Season Highlights a Core Problem in Modern TV

Blaming comedy hardly seems fair when there’s a much larger elephant in the room…

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on September 18, 2025

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The general feeling toward Strange New Worlds’ third season has certainly been more tepid than the previous two. And while everyone rushes to give their opinion as to why, there’s a common theme developing that concerns me. Namely, a lot of blame is being placed on the more comedic episodes of this season, to the extent that it’s possible the series showrunners felt need to provide some reassurance. An interview over at Cinemablend has co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers promising the season four will be the show’s “best work,” but also that—

Mr. Myers, say it ain’t so.

In fairness, the majority of the interview reasserts that “genre-hopping” will still occur, and that the showrunners themselves thought any unevenness in the current season could be attributed to the various Hollywood strikes occurring while they were attempting to get season three made. But that interests me far less than how quick viewers were to jump on comedy being the culprit in Strange New Worlds’ series woes.

We’ve come back to this old fight, I see.

It’s no secret that plenty of fans don’t like it when Star Trek gets “goofy.” In many minds, a science fiction series that takes itself seriously has no business engaging in shenanigans (or hijinks, as T’Pring would have it) of any kind. When Trek goes off the rails or jumps that shark, their socialist utopian future is giving up a little of its hard-won pedigree, as it were.

I’m no big fan of pedigree in general, but I would like to point out that this take is flagrantly subjective and equally “goofy.” Many of Trek’s most famous and beloved episodes are among its silliest, and it’s not reasonable to expect a series that used to run 22-plus episode seasons to have morality plays and deep thoughts aplenty every single episode. Pretending that comedy brings Star Trek down is akin to claiming that a key spice is ruining the flavor of a dish; you may not like the amount of said spice, the flavor balance overall, but you cannot make the soup without it.

Volume would seem to be part of the complaint on many-a-viewer’s lips—the Cinemablend piece linked above specifically notes that season three contains three lighter-leaning episodes, making up nearly a third of the season’s ten-episode run. Too many, it would seem. But I’ll cry foul on this one: To start, that was the same number as last season (“Charades,” “Those Old Scientists,” and “Subspace Rhapsody”). So if you enjoyed season two, you’re misplacing your ire.

But when we get into successful Star Trek seasons in general, “more than a quarter, less than a third” is a good rule on lighter episodes. For example, take the Original Series itself, and its highly successful second season. Of a 26-episode run, I count at least seven comedic/lighter stories (sorry, “Catspaw” counts, it’s a flipping Halloween episode). That’s 26.9%, or 27% rounded up. Only a few points shy of Strange New Worlds’ 30%, notably. And, perhaps even more relevant, the third season of the Original Series is counted as dismal fare overall by even the most devoted Trek fans. You know how many comedic episodes that season had? Zero.

Unless we’re counting “Spock’s Brain” as intentionally comedic. Which… we can if we must, I suppose.

The truth of the trouble is, there are several points working against Strange New Worlds in its basic construction, and these problems were always bound to creep up as time wore on. The first and most egregious culprit: It simply doesn’t have enough episodes.

Star Trek: Discovery, the initial salvo in Trek’s resurgence on television, started out with 15-episode seasons. This is a great sweet spot, one that sits between what we had in classic series, and what we’re currently getting. Lower Decks capped out at 13 episodes per season, which isn’t ideal, but still better than Strange New Worlds, and the more typical episode run in our age of streaming TV. Prodigy gave us whopping 20-episode seasons, and managed to do more in its limited run that most of the shows getting a “full” five seasons. (Bring us back to seven seasons, I beg you.)

Star Trek: Picard only had 10-episode seasons, and you could argue that it worked to the show’s detriment, particularly where its new characters were concerned. But even that’s not a fair comparison to what’s happening with Strange New Worlds—why? Because that series was focused on one of the most beloved characters in Star Trek’s history, a man with more narrative attached to his name than nearly any other, the eponymous Jean-Luc Picard. The show also worked under the auspices of arc-based television, meaning that those 10 episodes were intended to tell a complete story; not so with SNW’s episodic plots.

By the time Strange New Worlds ends—don’t forget, the final season is set give audiences just six episodes—it will only truly have two seasons worth of episodes when comparing it to Trek as we knew it. An entire series comprised of 46 stories. There are only three shorter Trek series: Prodigy, unceremoniously cancelled before it could prove its mettle; the Animated Series, made to bank on audience fervor in the wake of TOS’ cancellation, and thought of by many as an extension of the Original Series itself; and Picard, which was never intended to be a full series, and only went on as long as its leading man was interested in going along for the ride. Is it any wonder that we’re feeling cheated already?

Season three of Strange New Worlds isn’t working for many fans because we’re being given mid-series story arcs without the amount of narrative needed to back those arcs up. Spock’s we’re-not-labelling-it romance with La’an? It’s adorable, but it does seem to spring out of nowhere, founded entirely on the actors’ incredible work in their dance sequences. Actors Ethan Peck and Christina Chong are forced to sell the relationship on chemistry alone with absolutely no buildup—audiences can fill in the gaps, but the gaps we got used to be far smaller than these. As a result, it makes Spock appear either confused or kinda fickle, and vaults right over the steps La’an needed to take in order to be ready for a relationship. (The woman who sang “How Would That Feel” literally five episodes previous is not there yet! It’s only been a few months since then!)

How about Pike and Batel’s partnership speedrun and tearful goodbye? Marie was never much of a fan favorite as a character (and some of the reasons here are complicated, but plenty of them are rooted in weird sexist ideas about who is the right match for Captain Papa Hair Wax), but the choice to have her essentially give up her life to be a time guardian against Ultimate Evil is… it’s just bad, y’all. Particularly when she argues that she never fit anywhere since she was saved from being a Gorn incubator, when she literally nabbed her dream job two episodes previous. And the lifetime-in-a-bottle sequence that we’re supposed to mourn over? Sorry, Farscape and The Magicians did it better—and plenty of other series besides, including TNG’s eternally famous “The Inner Light.”

You know what might have helped? Seeing this relationship bloom over three full seasons of television. It’s difficult to focus on the tragedy of Pike and Batel not getting their rote, highly abridged, extremely heteronormative lifetime—their daughter is gonna marry Admiral April’s son? really?? you had no other ideas?—when we’ve barely seen them together as a couple, and any depth to their partnership only got focus in this season.

How about Erica Ortega’s difficulty adjusting back into her job after almost being murdered by a Gorn at the start of the season? Hate to say this, but it’s hard to care much about that arc when we don’t really have a full picture of Erica as a person. Melissa Navia is one of the most charming actors on the show, hands down, but what do we actually know about Erica? That she’s great at her job, likes pranks, and loves to razz people. That’s about it. (Oh, and that she’s a bit, uh, xenophobic when compared to her companions, which is awkward as hell, particularly when the show doesn’t address it much.) There’s plenty we can guess at, but again, when it comes to on-screen development, we’ve been given practically nothing. When we finally get something real juicy—like La’an killing Erica’s new Gorn friend, assuming her to be a threat to Erica’s life in a moment of split-second trauma-backed terror—the complexity of that pain is mentioned, but not truly explored.

Which brings us to another problem that Strange New Worlds is uniquely poised to drown under: It wants to be a show that plucks at that nostalgia harp every chance it gets, while also offering something sexy, bright, and new. The result is a lot of confusion around who should be getting focus in the series: while the show has a better female main character cast balance than nearly all Trek shows on record, it’s clear that there’s some fear around spending too much time with those characters in favor of Pike and Spock (and now Scotty and Kirk).

For the record, I’m not one of the fans who gets annoyed every time dear ol’ Jim shows up—I think he should, much in the same way Doctor McCoy is constantly on the bridge of the Enterprise when he has absolutely no reason to be. I want to watch Kirk and Spock flirt bond at every available opportunity, and have enjoyed most of the choices SNW makes in filling in the edges of well-known and beloved characters. But this confusion means that I’m not getting enough of either the newer characters or the legacy ones. It results in a lot of uncomfortable storytelling choices; ones where characters make decisions too quickly to understand their motivations or changes of heart; ones where female characters get plenty of screentime, but none of the depth that their male counterparts receive; ones where bioessentialism paints entire species with crude brushes without a second thought.

And again, the answer is simple: Give us more.

I know more about Deanna Troi than I may ever know about Una Chin-Riley because despite being far less central to Next Generation’s overall narrative, I’ve spent days, weeks even, with the counselor. That’s how much narrative space she takes up. Television has forgotten that much of our love of the medium was born of time, plain and endless. The glimmer of prestige led streamers to copy television formats with powerful arcs and singular narratives when most of the allure TV used to provide was company.

What Strange New Worlds has accidentally proven is that you can’t have “episodic” TV without a whole lot of episodes. It would be nice if someone holding the cash at Paramount realized it, and finally gave us back what we’ve all been missing.[end-mark]

The post <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’</i> Bumpy Third Season Highlights a Core Problem in Modern TV appeared first on Reactor.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ Co-Showrunner Explains What Went Wrong With Season 3

Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers also said season four will be “more serious.”

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on September 15, 2025

Photo Credit: Marni Grossman/Paramount+

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Photo Credit: Marni Grossman/Paramount+

The finale for season three of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is now out in the world, and that episode, like others before it from this season, is getting mixed reactions from viewers. That noise appears to have reached the ears of co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman. In a recent interview with Cinema Blend, he said that the third season “was a very challenging season for us.”

“We had the strike, and we had the loss of folks, and we didn’t quite get as strong a breath between,” he added. “We’d stop and start, and folks who are really part of an episode then aren’t there, and so it, in some ways, [was] a little more peripatetic than is typical for us. Season four, I think, is our best work. [Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers] doesn’t like it when I say that, but it felt very much in hand. We were always chasing a little bit on [season] three. Four felt, in the best possible way, quite deliberate and fun.”

This promise will likely make Trekkies eager for a new frontier of episodes. What those episodes hold is largely unknown, though we know season four has already been shot, that one of the episodes will involve puppets, and that Rebecca Romijn calls it “my favorite season yet.”  Co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers also shared that things will be “probably a little bit more serious” next season, but also confirmed that the series works “in various genres,” which is similar to what Romijn had said previously.

No news yet on when season four will premiere on Paramount+. The first three seasons are currently streaming there, and we also know we have a fifth and final season headed our way as well. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

“All you have to do is look up at the stars” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “New Life and New Civilizations”

With prequels, certain story beats are inevitable, but can still make an impact…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on September 11, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

Here’s the problem with doing a prequel with established characters: we know what’s going to happen to a whole lot of them, which puts barriers up on certain story notions. It doesn’t completely limit storytelling. For one thing, storytelling generally resists attempts to limit it. And even when you know characters’ futures, there’s still plenty of room for powerful tales. As evidence, I point to, not just this very show, but also two fantastic recent examples, Better Call Saul and Star Wars: Andor.

But there are story angles that are closed off, and also certain conclusions that are foregone. On this show, we know that, at the very least, Pike, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Chapel, Korby, M’Benga, and both Kirks will still be around several years’ hence.

And we know enough details about them (some more than others, obviously) that certain avenues are, if not cut off, at least severely limited.

The third-season finale of SNW addresses one of those avenues, as we have to come to the inevitable end of the Pike-Batel relationship.

I chose the word inevitable there quite specifically. This relationship was doomed from the start, because Pike obviously wasn’t with Batel in “The Menagerie”; indeed, she wasn’t even a factor. If Pike had a significant other, that’s something that would’ve come up, especially given Pike’s final fate, which was to live out his life on Talos IV with Vina, their respective injuries masked by the Talosians’ telepathy.

So at some point over the course of SNW, the Pike-Batel relationship was going to have to end.

I find myself wondering if this was the plan all along, or if they were at first going to do something more mundane to just break them up. The problem is, Anson Mount and Melanie Scrofano have had such superlative chemistry that just having them break up was going to be either unconvincing or would require mangling one of their characters enough to make it convincing, which would be unsatisfying.

Instead, we close out the third season with a payoff to the cure for the Gorn infestation Batel received in “Shuttle to Kenfori” as well as the fight that broke out between Batel and the Vezda-possessed corpse of Nurse Gamble in “Through the Lens of Time.”

Over the course of this episode we learn that the fancy-shmancy rare flower that they retrieved from Kenfori to cure Batel didn’t just hybridize the Gorn DNA with hers, but instead transformed her into the guardian that was keeping the Vezda imprisoned on Vadia IX (or, more accurately, in the interdimensional prison that can be accessed via Vadia IX). The Vezda that possessed Gamble has been hiding in the Enterprise medical computer (as implied by the very last shot of “Through the Lens…”), and managed to reconstruct Gamble’s body from the medical transporter buffer. He has gone to Skygowan, another world from which he can access the prison (and where Korby is right now).

Batel has come to realize her purpose—backed up by a medical scan that shows that she’s now genetically identical to the guardian in the prison—and so has to confront the Vezda and reimprison them.

So we do lose her, but it’s a sacrifice she makes in order to keep the galaxy safe from the Vezda. And just to remind us how awful they are, Gamble deliberately torments M’Benga as much as he can, and also makes a large chunk of the Skygowan population gouge their eyes out to prepare them for being possessed by the Vezda. Fun people, the Vezda are…

Just before the final battle between Batel and the Vezda, she sends her and Pike into—er, something. It might be a dream sequence, it might be an alternate timeline, it might be a Talosian-style illusion. But whatever it is, it, “Inner Light”-style, has Pike and Batel living out their happily ever after. They marry, they have a kid (and a dog). When Pike goes on the cadet cruise on the Class-J ship, they’re both stunned when he doesn’t get hit with delta rays and instead gets out of it unscathed. They live together to old age, and only when she’s on her deathbed does she reveal the truth: that these memories will stay with both of them to remind them each what they are fighting for.

Amazingly, this adds further texture to the framing sequence of “The Menagerie.” Throughout Part 1 of that two-parter, Pike is constantly telling Spock “no” when Spock kidnaps him to take him to Talos IV. Pike’s foreknowledge of his confinement to a convalescent chair back in Discovery’s “Through the Valley of Shadows” and his subsequent acceptance of that (despite some hiccups, notably in “A Quality of Mercy”) explains why he was so reluctant to go along with Spock’s crazy-ass plan.

Now we have another reason: he already has detailed memories of a happy life with Batel. He knows that he’ll be trapped in a body that will be ravaged by radiation so much that he will be in constant pain, but he also will refuse Spock’s help, because he has these memories.

I also have to give props to the script, credited to two of the show’s executive producers, Dana Horgan & Davy Perez, and especially to the direction by the superlative Maja Vrvilo (one of the best of the regular slate of directors Trek has been using the last eight years) for the dream sequence/illusion/alternate reality/what-the-hell-ever. The cuts to show the passage of time are simple and subtle, and I especially love the use of knocking on the door as a motif.

I have heard arguments that Batel is fridged here, and I can see the argument, but I’m not quite there to accept it for the very reasons I outlined above. The relationship was always doomed thanks to Batel’s absence from “The Menagerie.” She needed to be written out, and this way she goes out in a blaze of glory, giving Pike a lovely mental gift and also saving a shit-ton of lives.

Besides, this doesn’t really fit the criteria. A fridging is a gratuitous death of a female character whose death’s sole plot purpose is to motivate the hero. That doesn’t apply here. Pike is a bystander to her sacrifice—and also an aid to it. It’s the death of a hero, not the death of a girlfriend. (Having said that, I can see the argument. Feel free to discuss this further in the comments…)

One of the side-plots involves our heroes needing to open up the portal on Skygowan that leads to the interdimensional prison. Scotty and Pelia hit on the notion of ship’s phasers, but a single ship only has about fifty percent of the power. So they do it with two ships, since the Farragut is also nearby, and Captain V’Rel apparently is indebted enough to the Enterprise crew for saving her life in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” that she’s willing to go along with this.

Because apparently Horgan and Perez don’t understand how computers work, we are told that a mind-meld between two pilots is the only way to coordinate the two ships’ joint firing solution. (It would make much more sense for an independent computer system to control both ships simultaneously, but I guess that violates Trek’s long-standing inconsistent animus against automation.) Spock and Kirk are the ones who must mind-meld. First off, let me give major credit to the script for queer-coding the shit out of the scene in which Spock and Ortegas approach Kirk, which I’m sure made legions of slash fanfic writers giddy with glee. (I certainly chortled mightily.) And second of all, for all that it was dumb, it was lovely watching Paul Wesley and Ethan Peck talk in stereo as they did the thing.

The episode does not end with a cliffhanger, thank goodness, nor even with a surprise ending or any other kind of tease. It simply concludes with the Enterprise going off on their next mission. Which is as it should be.

Next week, I’ll do an overview of this very uneven third season.[end-mark]

The post “All you have to do is look up at the stars” — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “New Life and New Civilizations” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Master and Commander

Why Master and Commander Is a Great Star Trek Movie in Disguise

Guided by naval structure and a captain who adores his best friend (the ship’s doctor), the two series have more than a few items in common.

By Don Kaye

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Published on September 10, 2025

Credit: 20th Century Fox

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Credit: 20th Century Fox

Some 22 years after its release, the reputation of director Peter Weir’s 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World continues to grow. Based loosely on elements of three novels by British author Patrick O’Brian from his “Aubrey-Maturin” series, the film is set in 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, and follows English captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and his warship, the HMS Surprise, as he plays a game of cat-and-mouse with a superior French privateer vessel, the Acheron.

Even as he matches wits, strategy, and firepower with the unseen commander of the Acheron, Aubrey also tussles intellectually and philosophically with his close friend, ship surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany), while also managing the lives, superstitions, morale, and abilities of his loyal crew, whose complement ranges from grizzled veterans of the sea to boys not even of high school age.

Although it was nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture, Master and Commander wasn’t a box office success. Yet as is often the case with great films that happen to come out at the wrong time—and Master and Commander is a superb movie—the film has found an audience through cable, streaming, and home video over the years. Critics have reaffirmed its overall excellence and accuracy as both a thrilling high-seas epic and a study of human beings behaving at the edge of endurance with dignity and honor, while also reappraising it as a “beacon of positive masculinity.”

There’s another way to look at Master and Commander as well, and that’s through the lens of science fiction: if you replace the HMS Surprise with the USS Enterprise, and swap out Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin for Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy, Master and Commander could be reconfigured as an outstanding episode or film from Star Trek: The Original Series. Parallels abound between the two, and while I don’t think Patrick O’Brian was influenced by Star Trek in any way (I have no way of knowing if he even saw the show), he began writing the books in 1969, just as Star Trek was finishing its network run on NBC.

O’Brian reportedly based the character of Jack Aubrey on one or two real-life Royal Navy captains: Lord Thomas Cochrane and Captain William Wolseley, both of whom employed tactics mirrored in O’Brian’s books and the movie. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, meanwhile, was famously inspired by C.S. Forester’s books about the fictional Captain Horatio Hornblower, a similar set of Royal Navy adventures set largely during the Napoleonic Wars and penned between 1937 and 1967. Roddenberry melded this with his “Wagon Train to the stars” concept, seasoned with a helping of Forbidden Planet and A.E. Van Vogt’s Space Beagle stories.

Whatever their disparate influences, however, Roddenberry and O’Brian came up with concepts that are eerily analogous to each other in terms of certain storylines, character traits, and the exploration of social and command hierarchies within a naval military structure. Even allowing for sails instead of warp engines, and cannons rather than photon torpedoes, there’s a shared pedigree. Some examples:

Jack Aubrey, Meet James T. Kirk

As played by Russell Crowe, Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey is a singular shipmaster. He knows every nook and cranny of his ship, the HMS Surprise, and he seems to know what she’s capable of even when his crew isn’t sure. He commands complete respect from his officers and crew, and seems to find the right balance of compassion and steely authority—although he sometimes finds it difficult to communicate one and one with individual members of the crew, especially as he feels tremendous responsibility for their well-being and safety.

Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) shares many of the same attributes (although the slight detachment from the crew may be a little more present in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Jean-Luc Picard). Like Aubrey, Kirk knows the Enterprise from bridge to shuttlecraft bay doors, has earned the respect and admiration of the crew, and can be both an authoritative field commander as well as a humanist.

Kirk often waxes about the loneliness of command on a deep space vessel, and his personal history is littered with several serious relationships that went south as well as a long trail of brief liaisons (which, more often than not, simply served the plot of a particular episode). We don’t learn much about Aubrey’s personal background in the film Master and Commander (in the books, he’s married with children, a fact only acknowledged in passing in the film), but there is a moment when the Surprise stops at a port in Brazil to pick up supplies, and Aubrey shares eye contact with a beautiful native woman on a boat, offering her a wistful smile. It’s a moment that says a lot about the life he’s chosen to lead, and the sacrifices he has perhaps had to make.

Lucky Jack vs. the Kobayashi Maru

Shortly after having his backside handed to him for the second time by the captain of the Acheron—who nearly cripples the Surprise with one sneak attack and almost succeeds at springing another, costing the lives of several seamen—Captain Aubrey is sitting in his cabin with Dr. Maturin when the latter notes that the captain is “not accustomed to defeat,” adding that his obsessive pursuit of the Acheron is “beginning to smack of pride” and that the Surprise should have turned back weeks earlier—an observation that Aubrey doesn’t much enjoy.

James Kirk famously doesn’t “like to lose” either and—as detailed in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—even reprograms the Kobayashi Maru simulation in his Academy days so that he can defeat a no-win battle scenario. “You have never faced death,” his son David Marcus says to Kirk later, after Spock has sacrificed himself to save the Enterprise. “No,” Kirk replies. “Not like this… I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity.” Aubrey doesn’t “cheat” his way out of any situation in Master and Commander, but the two captains are both almost too proud to acknowledge when they’ve been bested, a source of both their strength and their potential undoing.

Yet both captains are also all too willing to stop their mission or reverse course if a crew member needs urgent, immediate care. In Master and Commander, Aubrey calls off his pursuit of the Acheron and heads for the Galapagos Islands after Maturin is accidentally shot, requiring the doctor to perform surgery on himself that can only be done on dry land. In the Star Trek episode “Amok Time,” Kirk disobeys a direct order from Starfleet to attend a diplomatic event when he learns that Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) must be taken to Vulcan or he’ll die. Both men are willing to put the well-being of another person first—at great personal or professional cost.

You Can Tell Your Doctor

The relationships between the ship’s captain and the ship’s doctor in Master and Commander and Star Trek have different contexts but are essentially the same. In the former, Aubrey and Maturin are old friends (a relationship explored in great detail across O’Brian’s novels) and the surgeon often advises Aubrey in the most personal terms, acting as his therapist, his conscience, and his sounding board. Their conversations in the captain’s cabin sometimes set them at odds, as when Maturin questions Aubrey’s motives in pursuing the Acheron and pushing his crew to extremes, or when Maturin insists on allowing time for a scientific expedition. “We do not have time for your damned hobbies, sir!” the captain shouts at him angrily.

Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) has almost the exact same relationship with Captain Kirk. While he and Kirk don’t play music together, they do enjoy a drink in the Captain’s cabin, where Kirk expresses his own doubts, fears, and concerns to his old friend and Academy colleague. Like Maturin, McCoy is perhaps the only person on the ship who can speak to Kirk candidly—sometimes to the point of insubordination. “I have no time for you, your theories, your quaint philosophies!” sputters an angry Kirk at McCoy during a tense moment in the episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” Both the Aubrey-Maturin and Kirk-McCoy relationships, however, always come back to a place of mutual respect and—while they may not express it—love.

I’m a Doctor… and a Naturalist

While Dr. Maturin has many parallels with Dr. McCoy, as portrayed in the film Master and Commander, he’s actually sort of a synthesis of both McCoy and Mr. Spock. All three men abhor war, and while Maturin operates on a much more emotional level than Spock, he shares the latter’s insatiable scientific curiosity. As the Surprise chases the Acheron into southern waters, the ship arrives at the Galapagos Islands, where Maturin plans an expedition by foot in search of new species of animals, birds, and marine life. But when Aubrey discovers that the Acheron is only a day away, he cancels Maturin’s expedition much to the latter’s chagrin. Maturin places the possibility of scientific discovery far above the pursuit of the enemy, to Aubrey’s annoyance.

Likewise, Mr. Spock has occasionally risked safety and security in pursuit of scientific knowledge. In the classic Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark,” he advises a team of security personnel to try and capture the creature known as the Horta—in almost explicit defiance of Kirk’s order to kill it on sight. While Kirk eventually comes around to Spock’s thinking, he admonishes the science officer for contradicting his command—a rare instance of Spock getting genuinely embarrassed.

Both Spock and Maturin, however, do share an unswerving sense of duty. Spock, for example, is just as willing to kill the Horta when Kirk’s life is in jeopardy, while Maturin, after finally getting his chance to explore a little of the Galapagos, voluntarily cuts his own expedition short and leaves his specimens behind when he spies the Acheron hiding on the other side of the island.

“In a Different Reality, I Could Have Called You Friend”

The plot of Master and Commander echoes that of an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series that’s considered among its very best: “Balance of Terror.” In that segment, a hostile vessel from the Romulan Empire crosses into Federation space and attacks several outposts, forcing Kirk to pursue the vessel in a tense game of chess between him and the Romulan commander that could lead to interstellar war. The two captains try to out-think each other, with Kirk and the Romulan commander earning each other’s grudging respect. Meanwhile, various subplots play out throughout the narrative, with an officer accusing Spock of possibly being a Romulan spy and a young couple on board the Enterprise trying to get married.

Master and Commander finds Aubrey trying to outwit the French privateer captain as well, although we never actually meet the latter (or do we? It’s left open-ended for a sequel that sadly never came). As in “Balance of Terror,” there are other stories happening below decks on the Surprise, including the haunting clash between a midshipman and several seamen that ends with the former taking his own life.

Many of the strategies deployed by Aubrey are similar to those used by Kirk in “Balance of Terror” and other episodes, most notably when Aubrey disguises the Surprise as a whaling ship to lure the Acheron into a trap. In a similar move, Kirk pretends that the Enterprise has been crippled, gambling that the Romulan will draw close enough for a full-on attack. Whether on the open ocean or in deep space, the tactics are the same and the outcomes often comparable as well. And when there is loss of life among their crews as a result of their decisions, both Aubrey and Kirk must confront it—and live with it.

Of course, Master and Commander doesn’t line up exactly with Star Trek in a few substantial ways: for one thing, the crew of the Surprise (and almost the entire cast of the movie) is completely male and largely white. There are no women at all on board and only a few faces of color toiling below decks, which is simply a matter of historical accuracy. Set in the distant future, Star Trek aimed for diversity from the start, putting a Black woman, a man of Japanese descent, and an extra-terrestrial on the ship’s command bridge (truly groundbreaking for 1966) and continued to strive—not always successfully but generally in good faith—for a multiplicity of races, genders, and species among its regular and guest characters.

In addition, the British Empire, colonizers and aggressors in their own right, are not the 19^th century equivalent to the far more peace-oriented Federation. The Royal Navy at the time is on much more of a war footing than Starfleet, which has a primary mission of exploration and outreach, only deploying military force as a defensive measure.But on the whole, with its themes of duty, honor, compassion, and sacrifice, its conflict between military action and scientific exploration, and its compelling look at life among a ship’s crew voyaging to the furthest reaches of human understanding, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World shares much more in common with Star Trek than not—whether the ship and its crew are on the far side of the world or the far side of the galaxy.[end-mark]

The post Why <i>Master and Commander</i> Is a Great Star Trek Movie in Disguise appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Trek: Scouts

Star Trek: Scouts Is Set to Boldly Entertain Preschoolers

Today, Star Trek announced a YouTube series aimed at the toddlers in your life.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on September 8, 2025

Screenshot: CBS/Nick Jr.

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Screenshot: CBS/Nick Jr.

Star Trek is expanding into adorable territory. Today, we found out that the franchise, in partnership with Nick Jr., is releasing a number of YouTube shorts aimed at the preschoolers in your life who you want to indoctrinate into the world of Trek before they’re potty trained.

The animated series is called Star Trek: Scouts and focuses on three kids (with three cute sidekicks, a space turtle, a space dog, and a space pig) who are training to become Federation explorers. It is, in some ways, a younger version of Star Trek: Prodigy, where non-adults are trying to train in the ways of the Federation.

Here’s the official synopsis, which gives us a bit more information:

Having watched the first installment, which involves a Romulan rubber ducky and a soap-shaped asteroid, I can say it’s adorable and something that young fans of Gabby’s Dollhouse and SuperKitties will enjoy. Let’s start them young, folks!

Check out the trailer for Star Trek: Scouts and the first four-minute short below. The first two episodes are available on the Blaze and the Monster Machines YouTube channel, and the remainder of the twenty-episode season will continue to roll out through the beginning of next year.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Khan

“Love never built an empire” — Star Trek: Khan Debuts With “Paradise”

Remember Khan? He’s back, in podcast form!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on September 9, 2025

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The character of Khan Noonien Singh debuted on the original Star Trek’s “Space Seed” in 1967, played with immense charisma by the late great Ricardo Montalban. The character created enough of an impression that Nicholas Meyer brought him back when he was hired to direct the second Trek feature film fifteen years later. The Wrath of Khan is still, forty-three years later, one of the most popular and beloved of the fourteen Trek movies.

The character has endured in several ways throughout the franchise. His mendacity was the reason given for why the Federation banned genetic engineering, as established in Deep Space Nine’s “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” We saw some Augments who didn’t join Khan in space-bound exile in Enterprise’s “Borderland”/“Cold Station 12”/“The Augments” three-parter, and Khan was further referenced in Picard’s “Farewell” via some paperwork we saw in the possession of Adam Soong in the early twenty-first century. We saw the Bad Robot timeline version of Khan in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), and we saw him as a child in Strange New Worlds’ “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” (played by Desmond Sivan). Plus, of course, SNW’s La’an Noonien Singh is a descendant of Khan’s…

One of the many projects that was announced as being developed following the debut of Discovery in 2017 was a Khan-focused miniseries that Meyer (a consulting producer on Discovery’s first season) would be heavily involved in. Over the years since, that project has finally come to fruition in a much different form, to wit, an audio drama being released as a podcast. While the story is Meyer’s, the script is by Kirsten Beyer (the co-creator of Picard and a co-executive producer on both Discovery and SNW, in addition to being a veteran Trek novelist) and David Mack (also a veteran Trek novelist, indeed one of the franchise’s most prolific prose stylists, who also was a consultant on the first seasons of both Lower Decks and Prodigy), with Fred Greenhalgh serving as director.

(Full disclosure: Mack and Beyer are both good friends of your humble reviewer.)

The first episode, “Paradise,” dropped on the 8th of September, also known as “Star Trek Day,” as it’s on this day in 1966 that Trek debuted on television with the airing on NBC of “The Man Trap.” The episodes are free (albeit with commercials), and are available on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and most anywhere else one might download a podcast.

The main plot focuses on the time between “Space Seed” and The Wrath of Khan. At the end of the former episode, Captain Kirk exiled Khan and his Augments (as well as ship’s historian Marla McGivers, who had fallen for Khan and also betrayed the crew, and chose exile over a court-martial) to the verdant paradise of Ceti Alpha V. A decade-and-a-half later, the U.S.S. Reliant is exploring what they think is Ceti Alpha VI, but it turns out to be the fifth planet, CA6 having exploded and turned CA5 into a brutal desert wasteland.

This audio drama is not the first time this period has been explored. Greg Cox did it in prose in his 2005 novel To Reign in Hell (the followup to his The Eugenics Wars duology, which chronicled Khan’s life leading up to “Space Seed”). In addition, Scott & David Tipton and Fabio Mantovani did a four-issue comic book miniseries for IDW in 2010, Khan: Ruling in Hell that provided another interpretation of those events.

And now we have a third. Montalban, who died in 2009, is obviously not available to reprise the role of Khan, and one suspects that Cumberbatch would be too expensive, or perhaps the producers didn’t want to cross the streams with the Bad Robot timeline. (Cumberbatch has plenty of audio voiceover credits, most notably his excellent work on the comedy series Cabin Pressure.) Instead, Naveen Andrews, probably best known for his excellent work as Sayid Jarrah on Lost, takes on the title role. Perhaps to give the production a bit more Trek cred, there’s a framing sequence that takes place in the early twenty-fourth century, after Kirk was lost in the Nexus in the prelude to Star Trek Generations, involving Captain Sulu and his command, the U.S.S. Excelsior (established in The Undiscovered Country), along with one of Sulu’s crew, Ensign Tuvok of Vulcan (as established in Voyager’s “Flashback”). George Takei and Tim Russ, respectively, reprise those roles.

However, the main character of that framing sequence is Dr. Rosalind Lear (Sonya Cassidy), who has gotten her hands on some accounts of Khan’s life on CA5 that were recorded by McGivers, and she is petitioning Starfleet to allow her to go to CA5 to see if the rest of them are there. Lear, like McGivers, is a historian, and she wants to know more about Khan beyond the legend, and the heavily redacted log entries from the Enterprise. She even mentions the possibility of Kirk having known ahead of time about CA6’s imminent destruction, which gets Sulu’s back up. However, Sulu also wants to get at the truth, and so agrees to ferry Lear to CA5.

Sure enough, she and Tuvok find a treasure trove of tapes, and the main part of the audio drama is her listening to them.

First of all, the casting in this is superb. Andrews absolutely nails Khan’s bearing as we saw him in “Space Seed”: regal, arrogant, confident, in control of everything around him. And if he’s in danger of losing control, he is expert at regaining it. Cassidy does excellent work as the passionate Lear, and Takei and Russ are their usual fine selves in roles they’ve both inhabited a whole heckuva lot over the years. (Takei’s vocal tremors betray his age, but it’s not a deal-breaker for his performance.) All the various Augments living on CA5 with Khan are well played, particularly the two women who have been attempting to reverse the enforced sterilization of the Augment women, done in order to keep them from breeding without control. (The men were not sterilized, which is just typical.)

But the standout here is Wrenn Schmidt as McGivers, both in her performance and particularly in how she’s written. McGivers was very much not well-served by Carey Wilbur and Gene L. Coon in 1967, as she at no point behaves in any way like a professional historian or a professional officer. Neither Wilbur nor Coon really understood the importance, or even the actual job, of a ship’s historian, either.

Meyer, Beyer, and Mack (which really does sound like the name of a law firm in a farce…) rectify this oversight in spades. Schmidt’s McGivers is much more forceful a personality than the timid one played by Madeline Rhue, insisting she bunk down in the cargo pod rather than in Khan’s cabin, which surprises everyone—especially Khan himself, though he respects her decision. In addition, she makes it clear that at least part of the reason why she joined Khan on CA5 is for the unprecedented opportunity to witness a great moment in history as it happens. (She claims it’s the only reason, but not wanting to face a court-martial and probably imprisonment for her mutinous acts kinda had to be a motivating factor, too, even though one can’t blame her for not admitting it.)

The best part comes toward the end of the episode. McGivers learns about the enforced sterilization of the Augment women, and she concludes that Khan brought her along to his exile because he needed breeding stock in case they prove unable to reverse the sterilization. This, by the way, also addresses another minor flaw in “Space Seed,” to wit, what Khan saw in McGivers, in two different directions: the fact that she has a functioning uterus makes her valuable to Khan, and also this version of McGivers is someone you can see an enhanced human actually being attracted to.

I particularly love their exchange about Hernán Cortés. Khan tells the legendary story about how Cortés burned his ships to motivate his troops to fight and not desert during a long battle. McGivers throws it back in his face, saying that in truth Cortés left one ship intact so he could escape if necessary. The punchline, of course, is that they’re both wrong, but that plays perfectly into the theme throughout the episode—and presumably throughout the series—about the different ways in which history can be interpreted, depending on who’s writing the accounts and what their biases are.

The other bit of retconning that every chronicle of this period has to address is to provide an explanation of why Khan tried to take over the Enterprise with an ethnically diverse group of contemporaries in the 1967 TV episode, but his followers in the 1982 movie were all blond-haired blue-eyed young people. “Paradise” at least sets this up by establishing that there were also children on the Botany Bay, whom Khan rescued as his last act before heading off into space on the latter ship. He didn’t revive them in “Space Seed” because he needed adults to take over the Enterprise. One assumes these children will be the ones who Khan brings aboard the Reliant in the 1982 movie…

Star Trek: Khan will be nine episodes, each one released on a Monday. After the final episode airs on the 3rd of November, I’ll be back with a review of the whole schmear.[end-mark]

The post “Love never built an empire” — <i>Star Trek: Khan</i> Debuts With “Paradise” appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Trek: Discovery

Wilson Cruz Is (Jokingly) Upset That Star Trek: Discovery Didn’t Get a Musical Episode

“I love them, but I was so enraged by that…” (Remember, he’s joking people.)

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on September 5, 2025

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ “Subspace Rhapsody” broke ground as the first musical episode in Star Trek history. Strange New Worlds, however, was far from the first Star Trek series to try it.

We know that showrunner Michael Chabon tried to make one happen for Picard, and even called up Lin-Manuel Miranda to try to make that happen. (It didn’t, thank the stars.) Ronald D. Moore also reportedly pitched one for Deep Space Nine and failed. And at this year’s STLV: Trek to Vegas convention, Star Trek: Discovery star Wilson Cruz confirmed that his show had considered a musical installment as well.

During a panel with Cruz and his co-star (and former Rent performer) Anthony Rapp, Cruz (via TrekMovie) shared the following about his musical episode dreams being dashed:

It’s a shame Star Trek: Discovery didn’t get its chance to sing during its five-season run. We at least have these Carpool Karaoke clips of Rapp, Soniqua Martin-Green, Mary Wiseman, and Doug Jones singing, which lets us imagine what could have been. [end-mark]

The post Wilson Cruz Is (Jokingly) Upset That <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> Didn’t Get a Musical Episode appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Is Biology Destiny?

Vulcans are logic machines, Gorn are monsters… or so Strange New Worlds might have us believe.

By Lily Osler

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Published on September 9, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the latest Strange New Worlds episodes, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” and “Terrarium.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is, as its reputation suggests, a cold movie, one where emotion and character give way to tedious docking sequences and 2001 rip-offs. And the movie has those, sure, but it’s not about those things. It’s about love.

More specifically, it’s about Spock—half-Vulcan science officer of the Enterprise, fixated on observable facts and sound logical thought, beneath the surface consumed by angst about his residual emotions—considering destroying his emotional self through a Vulcan ritual, the kohlinar, that’s said to cleanse one’s mind of anything but logic. And then, before he can go through with it, the Enterprise gets called to deal with a galactic threat: a strange cloud of matter that eliminates anything in its path. At the cloud’s core is V’Ger, a sentient space probe in turmoil from its inability to approach the world through anything but logic. Spock goes out to V’Ger across the void of space to mind-meld with it, gets knocked unconscious, and is dragged back to the Enterprise by Kirk. 

And there, in a white bed surrounded by his friends, Spock realizes the futility of his attempt to achieve kohlinar. He grasps Kirk’s hand, looks him square in the eyes, and says that, quote, “this simple feeling is beyond V’ger’s comprehension.” He doesn’t need to say what feeling he’s referring to; we can see it on Kirk’s face as he smiles back tears, seeing that the man he loves (in whatever sense of the word you find appropriate) is alive and, more, that he has elected not to kill the part of himself that feels.

It’s a gorgeous moment, one of my favorites in all of Trek. I love it for how sincere it is, how gentle, how radically uncringing. But I also love it because, like many moments in Star Trek: The Original Series, it lets a Vulcan be a person rather than an automaton. 

Vulcans in TOS are beings of logic by culture and choice, not by biology. Spock struggles with what he often terms his “human half,” absolutely, but the show makes clear that, more than a biological struggle, this is an anxiety about his upbringing, about the way he’s internalized other Vulcans’ bigotry toward him. In season two’s “Journey to Babel,” we meet Spock’s parents, the stern Vulcan ambassador Sarek and his gentle human wife Amanda Grayson. When Spock and his father quarrel about whether Spock ought to give his own blood to save Sarek’s life, the entire scene rests on you, the viewer, knowing that these two bickering Vulcans are using the idea of logic as a shield for what they actually want. Even some of TOS’s cringier properties are fundamentally about the fickleness and contingency of Vulcan logic: see, for instance, Spock’s secret half-brother Sybok in Star Trek V, someone who has more Vulcan ancestry than Spock and yet who by choice speaks and acts like a fully emotional human.

And it’s not as if this theme—the primacy of culture and individual volition over innate biology—is limited to the series’ consideration of Vulcans. Think, for instance, about “Arena,” the famous and famously goofy episode of TOS where Kirk fights a Gorn in a poorly-articulated rubber lizard suit. Kirk’s grudge against the Gorn is not small: it appears to have annihilated a Federation outpost. Moreover, when Kirk finally sees the Gorn, he regards it as monstrous, cold, inhuman, a beast. And yet, after hours of tussling atop Vasquez Rocks, Kirk finally manages to speak to the Gorn, who says they were just defending their own territory to stave off what they feared would be a Federation invasion. When Kirk finally has the upper hand, he decides not to kill the Gorn. He’s still horrified by their actions, but he realizes that they were likely telling the truth about their motivations. It’s an act of mercy, but also one of recognition: this creature Kirk took from its appearance to be monstrous is in fact an individual agent capable of free will, just like Kirk himself.

All of which makes it rather odd, when you think about it, what Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has done with Vulcans and Gorn. 

The show, Paramount+’s flagship program and the only remaining Trek series on the air, is a quasi-prequel to TOS, set seven years before with a crew composed of both original and legacy characters. It’s both largely (not entirely!) faithful to established show canon and reverent in its attitude toward many of its parent program’s most famous episodes, going so far as to remake an entire TOS episode to prove that Kirk’s actions in that original episode were correct. Yet its vision of nonhuman species is just about entirely at odds with that we see in TOS. 

In SNW, Vulcans are most often the butt of jokes, and that joke is, just about universally, look at how logical these Vulcans are! In season two’s “Charades,” Spock (already half-human) is turned fully human by a noncorporeal intelligence. This immediately makes him smelly, horny, hungry, and catastrophically emotional, things he apparently was unable to be when he was biologically part Vulcan. Later, in season three’s “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” four human crew members are turned into Vulcans, which makes them into science-loving assholes obsessed with facts and logic, save for one who, because she got turned into a Romulan, turns scheming and mutineering and altogether evil. There is little nuance in the show’s portrayal of Spock and his emotions, and even less in how it regards anyone with two Vulcan parents. Vulcans in SNW, to oversimplify (but not by much), are cruel, petty beings obsessed with logic and science simply because they are Vulcans. 

Things are even further from TOS’ vision with the Gorn, who have become the series’ primary antagonists. In SNW, the Gorn are both a known galactic power and a race of shadowy, monstrous lizard-men. Gorn episodes of SNW are routinely the show’s most audacious attempts at gristly horror. In these episodes, Gorn eat humans and use them as fuel on their starships. They implant their young, xenomorph-like, into humans who will act as incubators. Their young are ravenous beasts who long to rip you—yes, you—limb from limb. In season three’s “Hegemony, Pt. II,” the Enterprise crew find out that the Gorn have what is in essence a good/evil switch regulated by solar flares, and by imitating one of those flares they manage to turn the whole Gorn fleet, and possibly the entire Gorn species, docile again. 

Until this week’s “Terrarium,” more than halfway through what we now know will be the show’s entire run, no Gorn had spoken a line of dialogue on SNW. And while “Terrarium” complicates the way the Gorn have been portrayed on the show (more on that below), it’s one episode against a solid handful throughout the entirety of the show’s run that have portrayed the Gorn as, essentially, mindless beasts, forces of nature rather than thinking minds with goals and motives and friends and dreams and loves.

Strange New Worlds has often been hailed as a progressive breath of fresh air in a repressive political climate. And yet its commitment to one of the fundamental tenets of not just progressivism but any left-wing ideology—that people from groups unlike your own are still complex individual people, not marionettes strung up on stereotypes—seems less than that of a show that premiered before the Moon landing. What’s going on? 

In a word: bioessentialism.

Bioessentialism, or biological essentialism if you want to be fussy about it, is a term that gained popularity in late twentieth century feminist discourses. It means pretty much what it says on the tin: that one’s inborn biological traits determine one’s personality, preferences, and actions in life. I would argue that it’s the defining ideology of being alive in America right now.

In its native academia, bioessentialism is often used to describe conservative worldviews around gender and sex. In this usage, it’s a very useful term to cut through right-wing bluster and get at the core of these arguments: that boys are born to become traditionally masculine heterosexual men and girls are born to become traditionally feminine—and, vitally, childbearing—heterosexual women. In a bioessentialist view of sex and gender, gay men, women who work outside the home, and trans people of any stripe are all deviants, trying in vain to fight against their rightful, biologically determined life path. (If you find yourself wondering why these roles would need to be enforced if they are also natural and innate, great question!)

It would maybe be an overstatement to suggest that a bioessentialist worldview about sex and gender is currently running America, but there are signs. See: the encroaching aesthetics of fascist ultrafemininity as embodied by administration goons like Kristi Noem , the growing number of cis men convinced that they must take massive doses of exogenous testosterone to feel sufficiently masculine, the news attention the same couple of right wing childbirth enthusiasts get every time they open their mouths. These cultural signifiers, blasted constantly toward us in mass media, in turn lend credence to the administration’s material attempts to enforce bioessentialist views of womanhood. A trans person unable to leave the country because they cannot get an accurate passport and a brain-dead cis woman kept alive as an incubator for a fetus are in the same category of person to the Trump administration: those who need to be violently returned to their biological essence.

This in itself would be bad enough, but bioessentialism doesn’t only refer to issues of sex and gender. Bioessentialist views of race and ethnicity have never been far from the American conservative imagination, but they’ve taken on even more import since January. The vice president’s favorite thinker is an open “race scientist”; the shadow president regularly retweets white supremacists; the administration regularly massively overstates the proportion of undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, creating an indelible impression in many people’s minds that undocumented immigrants are criminal in their very essence. I am no longer on what is now called X, The Everything App, as I value the ability to use my brain, but in what leaks over to my sphere of knowledge from there, it’s clear that a number of Silicon Valley elites have become utterly besotted with phrenology. 

Bioessentialism, in brief, is the ultimate anti-liberty philosophy: a bioessentialist universe is a clockwork universe, one where every choice a person makes can be traced back to a fundamental and irrevocable feature of their DNA. A bioessentialist wants nothing from you but your cooperation in the role they’ve decided you must play in their world; God help you if you say no. It’s an ideology so self-evidently evil that it’s at the center of just about any young adult dystopian novel my fellow Millennials may have read in middle school. If you believe in human self-determination in any way, it’s a concept you must not only refuse but actively resist.

Which, of course, makes it all the stranger that it’s so present in a television show that’s been celebrated since its debut for its progressive politics.

The skeleton key to all of this, in my opinion, lies in what, precisely, it means when we call Strange New Worlds “progressive.” It’s a term that’s been bandied about for the show online for years for reasons that seem initially quite obvious: it has a main cast that’s more than half female! It had a nonbinary character in its first season and never once got their pronouns wrong! It’s, as best I can tell, the first ever Trek show to explicitly refer to the franchise’s future as “socialist”! In its very first episode, it showed footage of the January 6th coup attempt in a slideshow meant to demonstrate Earth’s history of needless violence! All those things are true, and I sincerely think the show is better for all of them.

Unfortunately, they are also all surface-level espousals of progressive beliefs rather than deeply-thought-out thematic statements. The themes the show does incorporate are, paradoxically, often pretty conservative. I’ve laid this out at length in an essay in Emily St. James’ newsletter Episodes, but the summary is that that the show has two main modes, one in which its episodes point toward broad and sort of mealy-mouthed progressive morals (see: “Ad Astra per Aspera,” “Lost in Translation”), and one in which its episodes hide a profound xenophobia beneath their slick production (“A Quality of Mercy,” “Under the Cloak of War”).

Nineties Trek shows, generally speaking, had a far different attitude toward progressive thought, especially in regards to bioessentialism. While they routinely churned out horrifically anti-progressive episodes like Deep Space Nine’s stunningly transphobic “Profit and Lace,” they simultaneously took pains to avoid bioessentialism in their worldbuilding. Consider, for instance, the way Klingons transition from enemies to allies by The Next Generation, the many conflicting ideologies of the Cardassians we meet in Deep Space Nine, and the literal individuation of a former Borg unit in Voyager. I’m not suggesting this approach was perfect, of course. I’m glad Trek no longer routinely makes plainly offensive episodes. But it suggests a level of baseline consideration toward avoiding bioessentialist thought on the meta level that SNW hasn’t nearly matched.

I’ve spent some time thinking about SNW since writing the essay I linked above, and I’ve come to the idea that the conservatism I clocked in those latter episodes is probably negligent rather than malicious. Trying to square the circle of the show’s left-wing cultural signifiers and regressive bioessentialist ideas in any way that suggests intent eventually leads to the conclusion that it must be some sort of sinister operation, and no matter my thoughts on Paramount’s new ownership, Occam’s razor rules out a grand conspiracy to smuggle right-wing ideas to the public through a show mostly watched by lefty nerds. No: I think Strange New Worlds’ bioessentialist politics are a product of the show chasing after TOS’ afterimage without spending enough time considering why TOS made the choices it did. 

SNW is a distinctive show in Trek’s history in that (and I do not mean this in a derogatory way!) it seems to exist almost entirely to sate fan nostalgia. After Discovery veered, in many fans’ eyes, too far away from Trek’s in-universe tentpoles, it was hard to find a review of SNW that didn’t focus on how the show harkened back to Trek’s roots, both in its in-universe content (the 23rd century! Exploration! No fate-of-the-galaxy battles!) and its out-of-universe format (episodic television with character arc serialization, a format Nineties Trek perfected but which TOS arguably innovated). Its unique place in Trek’s timeline means that it can show on screen many things that TOS merely alluded to (Spock and Kirk meeting for the first time, for instance) and that it can have a second story—the origins of TOS’ crew—running in parallel to its main plot. As a critic, I’m ambivalent in particular about that last point, as I think a TV show should have higher aims than “turn into a show that already exists,” but if IMDb ratings are any indication, SNW episodes like “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” that focus most directly on TOS characters developing into their Sixties-accurate selves are among the show’s most popular entries. Bluntly: fans love this stuff.

And so is it a surprise that SNW wants to give those same fans more of what they want? That it is going out of its way to stack what is ostensibly a standalone program rather than a prequel with signifier after signifier of how much the writers’ room loves TOS? Spock is (sorry, Kirk!) Trek’s most iconic character, and his inner turmoil about his Vulcan heritage forms TOS’ emotional core; if you’ve got Spock on your new show and want to keep TOS fans engaged, why not make the differences between Vulcans and humans the center of a few episodes? “Arena” is one of TOS’ most famous episodes; considering SNW’s affect toward TOS, I’d be shocked if the Gorn didn’t show up. These species of aliens are present on the show to do the same thing, say, Scotty is present to do: to say the line and get the fans to cheer. 

Here, I think, lies the problem. Scotty, in SNW, has been reduced down to teleological caricature, someone whose character growth is inextricably tied to him paraphrasing TOS lines and learning how to be the miracle worker we see in his later incarnation. I wouldn’t argue that that’s good, narratively, but it’s largely inoffensive. The exact same sanding-down of Vulcans and Gorn to their absolute minimum rewriting-from-memory TOS stereotypes, though, is what gets us the bioessentialist ick. SNW abandons the lessons these species’ episodes are meant to teach us as viewers in favor of aping those species’ bare images to sell fans back the same thing they’ve always loved, and in the process they’ve (to borrow a phrase) reversed the polarity of Trek’s moral universe. It is a bigotry arrived at, I believe, through pandering rather than hatred, but its laziness does not make it any less despicable.

In fact, I think that laziness makes it more damning, for all of us. The more I think about SNW’s biologically determined view of the world, the more I fear that it is not an isolated case of terminal Franchise Brain but a damning example of the way that being an American of relative privilege is a massive risk factor for being a negligent bioessentialist. 

The thing about growing up in America is that bioessentialism is the water you’re slowly boiled in. When my parents were born, Jim Crow laws were still in place across most of the American South, and the American North was, via white flight and redlining, in the process of hardening its own segregation boundaries. They grew up at a time when legal, social, and moral systems across the country were blaring the message that Black people were inherently and essentially less deserving of wealth, safety, or respect than white people. By the time I was able to walk and talk, such messages often used softer language, but much of the time they conveyed the same content. I got my first bank account less than forty years after the Equal Credit Act, before which women were often assumed intrinsically incapable of managing credit without a husband or father’s guidance. The American discourse around trans rights has regressed toward a bioessentialist framework so quickly it makes me queasy to consider; only eight years separate the NBA pulling out of North Carolina to protest HB2 and the present moment in which major national Democrats have adopted right-wing talking points about trans women as “common sense.”

No one, no matter how smart a writer they may imagine themself, lives outside the context and political norms of their era. This is especially true for writers of horror and comedy, two seemingly distinct genres that are nonetheless two sides of the same coin, exploiting surprise, anxiety, and the grotesque to elicit a specific lizard-brain emotional reaction. It’s unsurprising that both these genres have a tendency toward explicit and implicit right-wing messaging that’s difficult but absolutely necessary to guard against. (Trust me; I write both.) And it’s therefore sadly predictable that it’s from episodes in these two genres—broad Vulcan comedy and derivative Gorn horror—that Strange New Worlds’ most grossly bioessentialist moments have come.

More cynically, too, I don’t think the adjectives in that last sentence, the broadness of SNW’s Vulcan episodes and the derivativeness of its Gorn episodes, are incidental. Bioessentialist storytelling is morally queasy at best, but it’s also just so goddamn boring. The heart of TOS’ best Spock episodes is always the painful depth of Leonard Nimoy’s performance, the pathos when we see Spock holding back tears, working so hard to live in a way he’s been told since he was a child ought to be easy. That’s why The Motion Picture’s emotional climax is so powerful: Spock finally, without angst, accepts his individuality and thus his emotionality. How do you find that kind of catharsis in a show where Vulcans are flat caricatures without agency or complexity? How, for that matter, do you make the comments “Arena” makes about the American tendency toward xenophobia and warmongering in a show whose Gorn are so often portrayed as thoughtless beasts, cheap bodies to be phasered while too-loud dissonant strings crescendo? If everything you need to know about a character can be summed up by their ancestry, why bother writing a character at all? I imagine there will be readers of this essay who envision me yelling like a madwoman at my TV screen when SNW goes bioessentialist, but in truth I’m usually bored stiff, pausing the episode every thirty seconds to see just how many more flat jokes or muddy action sequences I’ll have to watch before I can go do something else.

I know Strange New Worlds can do better. I think it’s already trying to. Above, I mentioned that “Terrarium,” this week’s episode of Strange New Worlds, broke with how the show has depicted the Gorn so far. In it, hotshot pilot Erica Ortegas gets stranded on a moon with a Gorn, whom she tries to fight before realizing their only option for survival is mutual cooperation. It’s far from a perfect episode: I could call the episode’s entire plot literally from the summary in Paramount+, Ortegas’ constant talking to herself gets old quickly, and the episode’s conclusion reveals it to be a groanworthy “Arena” redux, down to the entire plot being the result of Metrons meddling in human/Gorn relations. 

But, crucially, “Terrarium” is also the first episode to portray an individual Gorn as a person with agency and culture and desires. Ortegas rigs up a crude device to talk to the Gorn via yes-or-know questions, challenges her (the Gorn) to a chess match, tends to her wounds even when she wants to give up hope entirely. We find out that, although Ortegas doesn’t understand the Gorn’s language, the Gorn has been learning English to better understand her enemies. The episode’s filmic language is just as changed: the shots of the Gorn’s teeth and claws and reptilian eyes are now clearly from Ortegas’ point of view and get replaced with a more humane framing as the episode goes on. 

The whole thing certainly makes me wonder whether the show will continue the work it starts in this episode to reconcile the monstrous Gorn we saw earlier with the individuated Gorn we see here. It’s hard to be sure, particularly since “Terrarium” tiptoes around or straight-up ignores the most offensively bioessentialist bits of SNW’s Gorn worldbuilding: there’s nothing here about Gorn breeding planets or Gorn eating human flesh or the special sort of solar flare that turns the Gorn less evil. But, well, it’s a start. And it’s already yielding dividends in terms of quality: “Terrarium” is one of SNW season three’s best episodes. It’s certainly the first Gorn-centric episode of Strange New Worlds I legitimately enjoyed, and, crucially, it’s the first of those episodes to have a theme beyond flat xenophobia.

I won’t pretend I have no investment in Strange New Worlds being a progressive show. The United States is in a genuinely frightening political era, and in an era where progressive political candidates are citing Andor when describing why they’re running, left-wingers need all the help from fiction we can get. But as much as I want SNW to be a politically astute show, I just as much want it to be a good show. I have many issues with Discovery’s large and often reactionary hater-dom, but I broadly agree with them that I prefer Trek when it’s episodic and moderate-stakes like SNW. More importantly, as the only Trek left on the air, SNW holds the fate of the franchise on its shoulders. By stumbling into bioessentialist storytelling in an attempt to become a show that already exists, though, it will only ever come across as a cheap imitation of the genuine article, something that might delight a handful of fans in the moment but which will leave both the show and this era of Trek with a mushy, bland legacy.

These past two weeks have shown us the two radically divergent paths SNW’s attitude toward bioessentialism can take from here: blundering further into that mushy blandness with the fanservice nothing of “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” or sticking with the messy, worthwhile searching of “Terrarium.” I know which one I’m pulling for.[end-mark]

The post In <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>, Is Biology Destiny? appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Hell on the Gas Giant — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Terrarium”

Ortegas must find a way to survive on a hostile moon — alongside the enemy.

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on September 4, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

Ever since Hell on the Pacific was released in 1968, tons of stories have been told that riff on the Lee Marvin-Toshiro Mifune classic where they play, respectively, an American soldier and a Japanese soldier stuck alone on an island in the middle of World War II. The two have to overcome a language barrier, as well as a cultural one, and work together to survive.

The most famous science fictional riff on this concept is probably Barry B. Longyear’s multiple-award-winning 1979 novella Enemy Mine, which was adapted into a mediocre movie featuring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. in 1985. Star Trek has dipped into this well a lot, including twice on TNG (“The Enemy,” “Darmok”) and once on Enterprise (“Dawn”), plus variations on it on both DS9 (“The Ascent”) and Voyager (“Gravity”).

And now we add SNW to the list with an episode that only annoyed me a little bit, “Terrarium.”

Let’s get the annoying part out of the way. The episode’s climax has an appearance by a Metron (played by Dariush Zadeh) in yet another failed attempt to reconcile SNW with what was established in the original series’ “Arena.” I gotta say, I do not get the SNW producers’ obsession with the Gorn, especially since most of their episodes have been terrible. And this episode tries to make it look like what happened in “Arena” was the latest in a series of experiments by the Metrons involving the humans and Gorn, which almost makes sense, but still doesn’t reconcile the complete ignorance of the Gorn evinced by the Enterprise crew in the 1967 episode with the deep history with the Gorn the Federation has in the 2020s.

Having said that, it’s that history that makes this episode work. Ortegas has been suffering some serious PTSD since the trauma of escaping from the Gorn ship in “Hegemony, Part II,” seen most overtly in her insubordinate behavior in “Shuttle to Kenfori.” Here, she’s assigned to pilot a shuttlecraft to drop a subspace buoy in a technobabble phenomenon. However, a wormhole appears out of nowhere and the Archimedes falls through it. On the other side, the shuttle crashes on a moon orbiting a gas giant.

These types of shuttle-crash stories have many of the same beats, and it’s to the credit of “Terrarium’s” script, credited to co-executive producer Alan B. McElroy, that the familiar tropes remain compelling viewing. A big part of that is Melissa Navia’s charm. Ortegas is often fun to watch, and her snark-leavened desperation is particularly compelling viewing. So is her excitement—at one point, she cobbles together a water condenser, and her joy at it working is palpable.

However, while the condenser gives her water, and the shuttle itself provides shelter, she has no food (the emergency rations were trashed in the crash). So she explores, and comes across another crashed ship, which belongs to a single Gorn.

Thus starts the true part of the Hell on the Pacific/Enemy Mine riff. Ortegas has to get past her distrust of the Gorn, especially since the latter’s shuttle has a working force field that will hold off the predators on the planet. Ortegas even cobbles together a translator, which can only handle “agree” and “disagree” (an amusing riff on the yes/no wheelchair we saw Pike using in “The Menagerie,” the episode that introduced Pike to the viewership in 1966). It makes for some fun conversations between the two of them. (The Gorn can understand Ortegas, because she has learned the language of the enemy, but Ortegas needs the translator.) Between them, they’re able to eat and survive.

Eventually, Ortegas comes up with a crazy-ass plan to get the Enterprise’s attention, to wit, setting the moon’s atmosphere on fire.

Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise, Spock and Uhura are trying to come up with a way to determine if Ortegas is alive and if she can be rescued.

I’m really enjoying seeing Spock and Uhura’s friendship develop here. While the Bad Robot movies’ interpretation of the Spock-Uhura friendship as seen on the original series was to propose a romantic relationship between them—which is a perfectly valid interpretation, mind you—it isn’t the only interpretation possible. (The joys of 1960s TV and its lack of interest in developing characters.) Either way, though, it’s obvious from their interactions—in particular in “Charlie X,” “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” and “Who Mourns for Adonais?”—that there’s a deep abiding respect between the two, one that easily can speak for a friendship that dates back to before Kirk became captain of the Enterprise. Indeed, this episode—with Uhura’s out-of-the-box thinking in coming up with a solution, one that Spock then has to engineer—is a nice bit of prequility (a word I made up and continue to use) to “…Adonais?” in which Spock expresses what is obviously a long-held confidence in Uhura’s technical and scientific expertise. It’s said in the original series episode in relation to her fixing the communications console, and you can easily see that he’s basing it at least in part of things like her work in “Terrarium.”

That solution is to use the Enterprise itself to jam open the wormhole and use its sensors to find Ortegas. The probes they send in are too small and fragile to do the job.

Because there must be a ticking clock, the Enterprise has limited time to try to find and/or rescue Ortegas because they need to rendezvous with the Constellation to deliver a vaccine. At one point, Number One has to forcefully remind Uhura that there are thousands of people who will die without the vaccine and saving them is more important than saving one person. I appreciated this very much, as far too often in fiction, people who are in the opening credits are deemed more important than other people, and it’s morally bankrupt. (We’ve actually seen it twice in Trek, on the original series’ “The Galileo Seven” and DS9’s “Waltz.”) So Number One’s repeated reminders that they have a deadline is appreciated.

So is the continuity hit: the Constellation was established as another ship of the same class as the Enterprise in the original series’ “The Doomsday Machine,” and Pike even references Captain Decker. (He was a commodore in the original series episode, but that takes place six years in the future, so his promotion obviously happened in that timeframe…)

In the end, the Enterprise plugs open the wormhole, they see the moon on fire, and go and rescue their pilot.

I do have one other complaint about the episode, albeit a minor one, and one that may still be addressed (though there’s only one episode left this season, so I’m not confident), and that’s the rescue. La’an and two other security guards beam to the moon, and as soon as La’an sees the Gorn with Ortegas she fires on her and kills her.

While this is briefly touched on in the final scene in Ortegas’ quarters in her conversation with Uhura—with Ortegas saying that the Gorn was her friend and La’an is her friend, and she doesn’t know what to do with that—I’m incredibly disappointed that that wasn’t addressed in this here episode. La’an’s response is understandable, but also shows a spectacular inability to evaluate a situation, as there was no cause, none, for her to be firing on the Gorn until she knew more about what was going on. The Gorn wasn’t armed and wasn’t doing anything threatening. La’an’s own history makes her reaction understandable, but it wasn’t appropriate, and the episode’s unwillingness to address that is a minor flaw. Of course, there’s still a chance of it being addressed—if not next episode, then next season—but it’s a bit of a lack here.

Still, this is one of Trek’s better reworkings of Hell on the Pacific, and bravo to them for that. Even if it is yet another damn Gorn episode…[end-mark]

The post Hell on the Gas Giant — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “Terrarium” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek

Naveen Andrews Talks About Voicing Khan in New Audio Drama

Reactor interviewed Andrews about voicing the iconic character in Star Trek: Khan.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on September 8, 2025

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Khan! He’s returning to us in the upcoming audio drama, Star Trek: Khan, which chronicles his time on Ceti Alpha V after Kirk exiled him and his people there in The Original Series episode, “Space Seed,” and before we see him again in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

In the audio drama, Naveen Andrews (Lost, Sense8) voices Khan, taking on the character made iconic by Ricardo Montalban’s portrayal in TOS and the movie. “He created the whole template for that character,” Andrews said about Montalban in my interview with him about Star Trek: Khan. “I greatly respect him, and I thought what he did with it allowed me a way in.”

I talked with Andrews about voicing such a well-known character, how working in audio differs (and doesn’t differ) from other types of acting, and whether he had any thoughts about returning to the Star Trek universe in the future, perhaps as a character on camera.

Read on for our full discussion.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

I would love to hear how this project got on your radar and what drew you to it.

I was born in 1969, so I grew up in England in the ‘70s watching Star Trek, among other things. And what I remember from that time, at least, was that what was ostensibly a science fiction show seemed to have this core of moral responsibility to it. It’s almost quite odd, and even as a kid, you think, “Wow, this is interesting!” And I think that’s what drew me to want to do it.

Khan, obviously, is a pretty well-known character in Star Trek. What did you do to prepare for the role? 

Ricardo Montalban, for me, created the whole template for that character. So it was entirely down to him, I have to say. I know he’s no longer with us, but I greatly respect him, and I thought what he did with it allowed me a way in. But particularly the episode in the Star Trek show [The Original Series episode, “Space Seed”], that’s what I drew from.

Can you talk about the process of recording the audio series. Were you in a room alone? Were there other actors with you? 

Technically, it wasn’t possible to be in a room with other actors, which is obviously a shame, because I draw from who I’m working with in order to hopefully create something. So you have to do the best you can within those limitations. But that can also be an asset in some things, because there’s a certain kind of intimacy, I think, between you and [Wrath of Khan writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who created the story for the audio drama], and in this case [co-writer Kirsten Beyer, who penned the script with David Mack], where it’s really down to the three of you to find this kind of note, if that makes any sense.

That should happen very early on when you start recording: Does it feel right, in very basic terms? And the other thing is the pace, the flow. And if you achieve that early on, then the rest seems to fall together seamlessly. So having said that, I was brought up listening to radio in England. We listened to Radio 4 as kids, and then as a teenager, in my early 20s, Radio 4 in particular. And I always thought that there was a certain kind of magic to radio, so I wanted to try and recreate some of that. 

Can you talk a bit more about how you work to create that magic?

A lot of it exists, as radio should do, in the in the imagination of the audience. It’s like the audience does 80 percent of the work in a strange way. I mean, I’m sure you’re aware of when Orson Welles read The War of the Worlds on radio, and the effect that it had. There’s a certain kind of power that can be accessed with that simple medium that you can’t do in the theater or on film. And I think that’s what we’re aiming for. 

I think it works in terms of the power of a voice reading a story, say to a child, like I did with both my sons. I mean, they’re grown up now, but when they were little, I read to them. And there’s something almost sacred about that. It still has a certain kind of power that cannot be replicated. The idea of a human voice being able to speak and be heard, I think, is is quite unique, and that’s what I’ve always loved about radio. 

Is there anything that jumped out to you when you read the scripts?

I thought it was extremely well written. And what jumped out to me was the amount of literary references, the idea that he was a man of letters, or a Renaissance Man, for want of a better term. So he’s not just an intellectual, given that he is a super being, but he has a genuine interest in literature and poetry.

This is your first foray into the Star Trek universe. Has it piqued any interest in you to potentially return to it, maybe on camera down the road?

I certainly wouldn’t be averse to it. I suppose that’s the medium that I’ve, for better or for worse, I’ve been forced to work in since I was 21. 

Any specific character or type of character you think would be fun to play?

Anything that has the depth and complexity and scope of Khan would be very welcome.

The audio drama Star Trek: Khan premieres on September 8, 2025, in honor of Star Trek Day. New episodes will be available weekly on Mondays through November 3, wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out the trailer for the audio drama below.[end-mark]

The post Naveen Andrews Talks About Voicing Khan in New Audio Drama appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

“Am I slightly forgiven now?” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans”

There’s a new contender for “worst episode ever”…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

|

Published on August 28, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

Before I say anything else about this awful episode of SNW, let me say this: don’t stop it when the credits start, as there is a post-credits scene that beautifully shows off the comic talents of Patton Oswalt and Ethan Peck. It’s kinda dumb, but it’s fun, and worth a look.

And it might wash the taste of this dreadful episode out of your brain. But probably not.

Move over, “Hegemony”! Take a seat, “All Those Who Wander”! Step aside, “Charades”! SNW has a new nadir, and it’s this week’s episode, which should take its place proudly alongside “And the Children Shall Lead” and “Shades of Gray” and “Profit and Lace” and “Threshold” and “A Night in Sickbay” as a Trek episode that is actively painful to watch and which need never be viewed ever again if one can possibly avoid it.

Paramount+ released a clip from this episode prior to season three’s commencement, and it raised several red flags for me, but I was hoping that there was some missing context to salvage it. Technically, there is, it’s just not enough.

The concept of this episode is that there’s a pre-warp society that was contacted by the Vulcans a while back when the planet was in danger. First of all, let me say how happy it made me to once again see the current crop of Trek shows repudiating the hidebound, overly rigid, morally bankrupt version of the Prime Directive that too many of the first batch of spinoffs adopted (cf. “Homeward,” “Dear Doctor,” etc.). Yes, there’s a Prime Directive, but it takes a back seat to saving lives.

However, the Vulcans limited contact, just doing enough to save the planet. Unfortunately, the equipment that maintains the world is breaking down, and there are no Vulcan ships close enough. In order to maintain the Prime Directive, the repair team must present as Vulcans. But these aliens have very effective scanning equipment, so a cosmetic disguise won’t cut it.

Enter the cure Chapel created for Spock when he was made fully human back in “Charades.” They can use that to make Pike, La’an, Uhura, Pelia, and Chapel into actual Vulcans. Unfortunately, Pelia’s Lanthean physiology rejects the serum, so she stays as she is. The rest all become genetically Vulcan.

At first, what you expect to happen happens: they all become incredibly overwhelmed by the powerful emotions. As established in a number of places on the original series—“The Naked Time,” “Amok Time,” “This Side of Paradise,” “Balance of Terror,” “All Our Yesterdays,” etc.—Vulcans aren’t emotionless, they actually have emotions that are way fiercer and more turbulent than those of humans. They chose to control those emotions through logic.

And then, the new Vulcan versions of Pike, La’an, Uhura, and Chapel start acting like contemporary Vulcans. The hand-wave for this is that the serum is based on Spock’s brain chemistry, so it incorporates his notions of what being a Vulcan is like, but I call bullshit. Even by the often pliable standards of Trek science, that’s nonsense. Vulcan arrogance, Vulcan logic, Vulcan suppression of emotions, all of that is cultural, not genetic, not biological. There is simply no way that a serum that alters their DNA would also alter their cultural norms. That’s not how this works.

My disbelief having been choked to death before the credits even roll, I’m watching the rest of this episode with annoyance and frustration.

I hasten to add that the fact that the foursome all start acting like assholes is not why I dislike the episode. Indeed, in three of the four cases, it was actually kind of interesting. Uhura approached her nascent relationship with Beto analytically, Chapel saw that she could be an even more efficient workaholic, and furthermore that her personal relationships were all illogical, and La’an starts getting all Machiavellian. (In a nice touch, both La’an and Pike recognize that the former is acting kinda Romulan, as the two of them both know—thanks to time-travel shenanigans, La’an in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” Pike in “A Quality of Mercy”—that Romulans are Vulcan offshoots. But those events were classified, so neither of them talks about it past a quick mention and then go back to avoiding talking about it.)

The weak link, sadly, is Pike. Anson Mount chooses shouting as his mode of being Vulcan, and it honestly feels like he was told he was playing a Conehead rather than a Vulcan.

Anyhow, Vulcans being assholes isn’t exactly new. If you watch the original series closely (or even casually, honestly), you’ll see that Spock is a spectacular asshole on many occasions, and the other Vulcans we met on the original series—Sarek, Stonn, T’Pring, T’Pau—were even more spectacular assholes. One of the more moronic complaints about Enterprise in 2001 by many in fandom was that it portrayed the Vulcans as assholes, when that just proved they were paying attention. (Personally, I blame the mountains of tie-in fiction and fanfiction in the 1970s and 1980s that wrote Spock and the Vulcans as noble space elves rather than a bunch of arrogant snots.) Enterprise did plenty wrong, mind you, the Vulcans just weren’t one of them.

The problem is that the transformed quartet shouldn’t be snots because, again, that’s cultural and not biological. They should’ve all been acting like La’an, or acting like Spock did in “All Our Yesterdays.”

At least the damage is minimal, as the Enterprise is on shore leave, so they’re not actually on missions or anything, y’know, dangerous. Which is good, as—after they solve the problem on the pre-warp planet—they decide to stay as Vulcans, as it’s much more logical for them to be Vulcan than human.

One of the few good things about this episode is that it shows the growing friendship between Jim Kirk and Montgomery Scott. Kirk comes on board because the Farragut is still under repair from the events of “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” and he wants to visit his brother. Sam, however, has already gone on shore leave. (Maybe call first, Jim?) So Kirk decides to hang with Scotty, as Kirk is grateful to the young engineer for saving his ass in the prior episode. They wind up getting sucked into La’an’s plan to turn the Enterprise into a warship, and also to manipulate the Klingons, Tholians, and Gorn into fighting each other, a war that will result in the Federation dominating the galaxy. That part of the story is generally fun, with a nice little continuity hit thrown in for good measure. (Scotty calling Kirk by his first name in “Mirror, Mirror” was always a jarring moment—on purpose, mind you—and this episode has Kirk first asking Scotty to call him that.)

Other parts of the story, not so much. We have Pike being a dick, including nearly scuttling Batel’s attempt to get Pasalk (Graeme Somerville, back from “Ad Astra per Aspera”) to let her get back to work for the JAG office. (That turns out for the best, as Batel’s frustrated outburst at both Pike and Pasalk leads to the latter offering her his job after his imminent retirement.) We have Uhura using a mind-meld to brainwash Beto into being more Vulcan-like. And we have Chapel breaking up with Korby and ending all her friendships so she can devote all her time to research.

The solution is even more cringe-y, as we’re introduced to Number One’s ex, Doug the Vulcan (Oswalt). Doug’s family has always been fascinated by humans, going so far as to give their children human names. However, Doug and Number One have a rather significant effect on each other, and both of them act completely dippy and loopy when they’re together. It’s a side of Number One we’ve never seen before, and which frankly, I never wanted to see. It’s yet another doofy sitcom bit in an episode choked with them. I might have been willing to put up with it in a better episode, but at this point it was just piling on the stupidity.

Doug is also an expert in katras (the essence of self in Vulcan beliefs, as seen initially in The Search for Spock), and Spock believes—and Doug confirms—that if they can get at the foursome’s respective katras and show them who they really are, they’ll agree to be turned back into humans.

And then that part happens off-camera! In an episode filled with missteps, this is by far the biggest one. Instead of showing Pike, Uhura, and Chapel confront their true selves, it all happens between scenes, fobbed off into a first officer’s log voiceover. The only one we actually see is La’an, because she refuses to change back even after seeing her true self. Spock theorizes that her Vulcan DNA mingled with her Augment DNA to cause her to become the megalomaniac she was turning into, and it takes a telepathic confrontation between Spock and La’an to get her to finally come back to herself. And credit where it’s due, that confrontation is beautifully staged, modulating from hand-to-hand combat into the dancing that Spock and La’an have been doing together since “Wedding Bell Blues,” and hats off to the show’s choreographers.

One of the few genuine laughs in the episode came when Pelia decided she wanted a high-five from Pike, and Pike flinches when Pelia raises her hand to him, thinking she’s going to hit him before he figures it out. This, in turn, set up another laugh, at the end, when Spock is discussing bits of human behavior with Doug, including a deadpan Vulcan riff on up-top-down-low-too-slow.

Or maybe by then I was just punchy…

I’m off to Dragon Con 2025, so forgive me if I don’t respond much in the comments on this one. But if you’re in Atlanta this weekend for the con, come see me![end-mark]

The post “Am I slightly forgiven now?” — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Unfound Footage — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “What is Starfleet?

This week’s episode tackles a confusing bit of Star Trek lore: how exactly does Starfleet function?

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on August 21, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

One of the dumbest lines of dialogue ever uttered on a Star Trek TV show—and in a lot of ways, one of the most damaging to the franchise—was put in the mouth of Jean-Luc Picard in the second-season TNG episode “Peak Performance.” He said, “Starfleet is not a military organization, its purpose is exploration.”

Those words are utter fucking nonsense, and are borne of Gene Roddenberry’s tendency late in life to believe his own bullshit—and also, apparently, forgetting that “military” and “militaristic” are two different words that mean different things.

First of all, the dichotomy Picard implies in that line of dialogue doesn’t exist: being a military and having your purpose be exploration aren’t mutually exclusive. Secondly, of course Starfleet is a military organization. It has a rank structure. It has rules and regulations that must be obeyed. Those rules are enforced via courts-martial that are independent of the civilian legal system. Roddenberry served in the military (he was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II), so you’d think he’d have remembered that.

This philosophy in general and that line in particular has been the source of a great number of arguments and a great deal of confusion about what Starfleet is supposed to be. It’s also led to silly things like Archer’s crew on Enterprise saying they need a military presence on board when going into the Expanse, even though they are a military.

The latest episode of SNW tackles this head-on with the aptly titled “What is Starfleet?” It’s done in the form of the documentary that Beto Ortegas was given permission to film in “Wedding Bell Blues,” and which we’ve seen him recording in “Through the Lens of Time.”

And it is absolutely fantastic, a brilliant episode of Star Trek.

The entire episode is Beto’s documentary, with interviews with the crew intercut with footage both from Beto’s free-floating cameras and security footage from the Enterprise computer, with captions explaining that they’ve been declassified for this documentary.

It opens with the titular question, and pointing out one other issue with the whole military thing: Starfleet ships have enough armament on board to lay waste to a planet, plus they’re incredibly heavily stocked with hand weapons. The capability for violence is huge on a starship, and Beto starts off questioning that. What’s the difference between a starship and a warship?

The mission that’s at the heart of the documentary involves the Enterprise assisting the Lutani, who are in the midst of a conflict, and Starfleet is to provide aid. Part of that aid is to escort a life-form called a Jikaru that is listed as “livestock” to the Lutani homeplanet. Over the course of the mission it becomes clear that the Jikaru isn’t livestock, it’s sentient, and has been enslaved.

Watching this conflict play out is a joy, and having it be through the documentary just makes it more fascinating. It’s a trope that Trek has revisited plenty of times, indeed is one of the franchise’s signature moves: an alien being that they think is one thing turns out to be something else, and they have to adjust their assumptions and their actions.

And yes, Starfleet is a military organization (sorry, Jean-Luc), and that means they have to commit violent acts in the name of keeping the peace. It also means they sometimes have to kill—and sometimes be killed. And, as is mentioned plenty of times on this mission that grows ever-more distasteful as it goes on, it means they have to follow the orders of their superiors.

But it doesn’t mean they can’t be compassionate and understanding. As the episode goes on, Spock and Uhura find ways to communicate with the Jikaru, and they eventually realize, not only that she has been enslaved, but that she is sentient and wants to commit suicide. (Her initial attacks on Enterprise were in the hopes that the Starfleet vessel would kill her in retaliation.) The focus shifts from escorting the Jikaru to a war zone to helping her die with dignity and stopping the Lutani from exploiting the other Jikaru.

Along the way we get some lovely character insights, mostly through the interviews. Spock discusses the prejudice he encountered as a halfbreed on Vulcan (as also seen in the animated series’ “Yesteryear,” the 2009 Star Trek, and Discovery’s “Brother” and “Light and Shadow”), and says that Starfleet allows him to explore his human half in a way he would not be permitted to on Vulcan. Uhura discusses the loss of her immediate family (as first revealed in “Children of the Comet”), and also is told that one of her Academy friends died on the Cayuga back in “Hegemony.” La’an talks about how important it is for her to protect people. M’Benga makes it clear that he very much wants to bury his past (as established primarily in “Under the Cloak of War”) and has no interest in discussing it.

Pike and Number One are much more mature in their interviews, with Pike solemnly telling the story of having to put down an injured horse as a boy, and Number One very calmly discusses the realities of having to follow orders.

The biggest character revelation, though, is about the documentarian. Talking to Beto, Uhura realizes that a big reason for this documentary is Beto working out his anger at Starfleet for what was done to his sister in the “Hegemony” two-parter. Erica Ortegas nearly died, and Beto is furious at Starfleet for letting that happen to her, and furious at his sister for staying in Starfleet after it happened.

Tellingly, the interviews with Ortegas are the only ones that aren’t structured and settled. Everyone else is interviewed while sitting calmly and talking into the camera. Ortegas, though, is in her quarters tinkering, constantly moving around, and also constantly giving her brother shit. She’s unwilling to sit still for an interview—or for Beto’s issues.

That’s one of many excellent touches by director Sharon Lewis, who did a superlative job here. The documentary feel is expertly captured, but she also makes use of that feel to do some excellent visual work. In particular I love the use of closeups (the security footage from the different consoles, which give extreme looks at the faces of the crew), but also of distance. One of the most effective shots is of Pike and Number One speaking with Starfleet Command. The camera is very far away, so the captain and first officer are extremely small, reflecting how small they feel in the face of this mission, which keeps getting more insane. We also can’t hear what Starfleet Command is saying, a nice touch that shows the Enterprise’s isolation.

This is a brilliant episode of Star Trek, a fantastic hour of television, and one that reinforces the Trek ethos of compassion over violence, of understanding over blindly following orders. And it reminds us that a military organization doesn’t have to be brutal or unthinking or cruel.[end-mark]

The post Unfound Footage — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “What is Starfleet? appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

These Will Be the Voyages — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”

Paul Wesley gets his moment to shine playing a version of Kirk we may be less familiar with…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

|

Published on August 14, 2025

Photo Credit: Marni Grossman / Paramount+

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Photo Credit: Marni Grossman / Paramount+

At San Diego Comic-Con this year, it was announced that one of the projects that is apparently under development at Secret Hideout to possibly be a new Trek series is called Year One, meant to be a sequel to SNW and a prequel to the original series, setting up Jim Kirk’s first year in command of the Enterprise.

I’m not sure that’s such a hot idea—but then, I wouldn’t have thought a Pike show was such a hot idea until Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn showed up in Discovery season two, at which point my whole world (and that of large chunks of the audience) became all about a Pike show.

Paul Wesley has not matched Mount, Peck, and Romijn in creating as good an impression as the young Jim Kirk in several episodes of SNW. (Or as Celia Rose Gooding, Jess Bush, Babs Olusanmokun, and Martin Quinn have as their “legacy characters” on SNW.) How-some-ever, I think he’s doing a fine job generally by portraying the quieter, more thoughtful Kirk we got in the early first season of the original series before William Shatner’s excesses became, er, excessive.

Wesley’s Kirk is one of the focal points of “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” which is one of the best episodes of SNW for a variety of reasons. The story involves the Farragut arriving at a planet which is subsequently destroyed by a giant ship, badly damaging the Farragut. The Enterprise answers their distress call, and takes the vessel’s wounded on board, including Captain V’Rel (Zoe Doyle), a Vulcan woman with whom Kirk had been—well, not arguing, but at least disagreeing prior to the disaster. Kirk felt they should send a landing party rather than just scan from orbit. After all, a probe could scan the planet—the whole point of sending a staffed ship there is to put boots on the ground.

Of course, if V’Rel had listened to him, the landing party would’ve been vaporized, which Kirk is painfully aware of.

An Enterprise team beams over, led by Spock and also including La’an, Uhura, Chapel, and Scotty. La’an beams back with sensor data on the ship that attacked, and shortly thereafter the ship returns and eats the Enterprise, then buggers off.

Kirk is now in charge of a ship that’s been beaten all to hell with a skeleton crew that includes the Enterprise landing party, as well as the one uninjured bridge officer, Alvarez (Paloma Nuñez). While it’s not Kirk’s first time in command—he’s first officer, he would’ve been in charge of the ship plenty of times—it is, according to Alvarez, his first time in command during a crisis. (Nuñez did an impressive job of showing an experienced Starfleet veteran who’s seen it all and who does multiple jobs quietly and without fuss, and I honestly wish the script had done more with her.)

On the one hand, this is very clearly manufactured to show Kirk working with people we know are going to be part of his crew in the future. And, once again, SNW does an excellent job of showing us these characters we know and love as younger, less experienced people. The Jim Kirk from the original series would not have any kind of crisis of confidence like the one Kirk has in this episode. But this isn’t that Kirk—this is the younger Kirk who’s only recently been made first officer of the Farragut. We see him at the top of the episode doing the things that a first officer does: providing options for the captain. But now he has to make the decisions, and it’s incredibly difficult.

One of my favorite touches in the episode is on the bridge, and everyone is tossing options around, something we’ve seen a lot on SNW, because Pike encourages that. But Kirk shuts it down, saying that all the chattering means he can’t think. And then he goes off into the conference room. It’s a clever way of showing differing command styles. We never did really see Kirk ask for options among the bridge crew—partly because 1960s television didn’t do that sort of thing, the square-jawed hero in the center seat did all the cool shit—and I like making that difference into a story point here.

The discussion among the crew about what to do with Kirk’s indecision is beautifully done, going so far as to discuss how removing him from command would work. But then Uhura gives an impassioned plea to give Kirk a chance, telling everyone about how Kirk helped her back in “Lost in Translation.” Spock winds up being the one to give him a pep talk, and we get a lovely conversation between two guys who we know will become bosom buddies, and they continue the bonding process begun over annoyance over Sam Kirk back in “Lost in Translation.” Kirk tells the story his mother told him about the dog who catches the car, and Spock counters with a similar Vulcan aphorism, the titular sehlat who eats its tail.

The antagonist ship is a scavenger that La’an, Number One, and Scotty have all heard legends about, destroying planets and taking ships. Even as Kirk and the gang on the Farragut are trying to figure out a way to stop the thing with their beat-up ship—because it’s en route to an inhabited planet that won’t stand a chance against them, and no other help will arrive in time—Pike and the gang on the Enterprise are trying to free themselves, which is complicated by the fact that main power is down.

Pike, La’an, and another security guard have to detach an umbilical from the Enterprise. The latter is killed by two of the scavengers who have boarded, and I will give them credit for actually remembering that that was a person, not just an extra, as Pike is genuinely affected by her death—mostly pissed that the lack of power on the ship is why they couldn’t save her.

Meantime, they have to navigate out. The problem is, all they’ve got is thrusters, and they can only be fired manually. But without communications, there’s no way for Ortegas to coordinate firing them. Pelia comes up with a solution from her massive collection of junk: wired telephones from the twentieth century! They string CAT-4 cable and connect folks to each other with a good old-fashioned analog signal! So, once Pike and La’an are able to sever the umbilical, Ortegas gives instructions to M’Benga and Number One over the phone on which thrusters to fire and how hard. (Pike and La’an’s banter as they set the explosives is delightful. “I’d take a step back.” “If it explodes, it will take out the entire engineering hull.” “Big step back, then?”) Number One also has the clever solution of opening an airlock to serve as a makeshit thruster when one of the regular thrusters fails.

They can only escape because the Farragut has temporarily disabled the scavenger ship. (“How temporary?” “No idea.”) As it always should be on Star Trek, the solution is found through smart people figuring out smart solutions. And they’re able to destroy the scavenger ship by firing down the opening the Enterprise escaped through, because while its hull is impermeable by Starfleet weapons, its insides are not.

At one point, when Pike, La’an, and the security guard are fighting the two scavengers who boarded, the faceplate of Pike’s EVA suit cracks, and his face is visible. The scavenger hesitates upon seeing that. Later on, we learn why, when Pike takes the helmet off the corpse of one of the scavengers: they’re human.

Uhura eventually learns that they’re an early group of space travelers, from before first contact with the Vulcans, which had disappeared. They apparently became this awful legendary group of destructive scavengers.

The ending is a bitter one. Our heroes had no real choice in how they behaved. The scavenger ship was en route to destroy an inhabited planet, and they were responsible for a ton of wanton death and destruction. But learning that they were humans from Earth changes the calculus a bit, at least in terms of how they feel about what happened.

The episode ends with a superlative conversation between Kirk and Pike, with Pike talking to Kirk about his time as April’s first officer, and the difference between being XO and CO.

This episode just works. As a straight-up Trek episode, it’s excellent, a tense thriller of a storyline, with pathos, tough decisions, and high stakes. As an ensemble show, it’s perfect, as everyone in the cast contributes to the action—not just the folks in the opening credits, but also Rong Fu’s Mitchell, the aforementioned Alvarez, and most especially Carol Kane’s Pelia. As a prequel, it’s magnificent, nicely sowing the seeds of what we saw on television from 1966-1969 and 1973-1974 and on movie screens from 1979-1994.

By the way, I don’t normally do this, but of all the episodes of SNW, this one calls for a bibliography, as there are tons of works of tie-in fiction that also explore Kirk’s time prior to taking over the Enterprise, as well as his first mission as the Big E’s captain. I list some of them here in absolutely no order whatsoever:

• Inception by S.D. Perry & Britta Dennison (chronicling Kirk’s relationship with Carol Marcus and Spock’s with Leila Kalomi)

• The Captain’s Oath by Christopher L. Bennett (Kirk’s first command prior to taking the Big E’s center seat)

• The Autobiography of James T. Kirk by David Goodman

• Enterprise: The First Adventure by Vonda N. McIntyre (one take on Kirk’s first mission as captain of the Big E)

• Star Trek Annual #1 by Mike W. Barr, David Ross, & Bob Smith (another take on Kirk’s first mission as Enterprise captain)

• The My Brother’s Keeper trilogy: Republic, Constitution, and Enterprise, all by Michael Jan Friedman (chronicling the friendship between Kirk and Gary Mitchell)

[end-mark]

The post These Will Be the Voyages — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch

What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Forbidden Books, Magicians, and Alien Alternatives

All the inescapable font deep dives and underrated sci-fi series you need while you wait for the Hugo Awards.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on August 14, 2025

Screenshot: Lionsgate

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Screenshot: Lionsgate

If you are not among the multitudes descending on Seattle this weekend for WorldCon, you may find yourself in need of some sort of distraction while you wait for the Hugo winners to be announced, right? Here are a few suggestions for the weekend of August 15th!

Space Adventure Hour(s): Killjoys

I was thinking about the phrase “Space Adventure Hour,” which was the name of the fourth episode of Strange New Worlds’ third season, and I realized: I haven’t yelled at anyone about Killjoys for a hot minute.

That, my friends, is a space adventure hour (give or take a number of minutes). Killjoys stars the MCU’s Ghost, Hannah John-Kamen, as Dutch, a space bounty hunter with a very complicated past. (For one thing, in later seasons John-Kamen also plays another character who—for complicated reasons—looks exactly like Dutch.) Dutch has a very cool spaceship in which she flies around with two brothers, Johnny and D’avin Jaqobis, one of whom is played by Aaron Ashmore (the Ashmore twin who didn’t play Iceman in X2) and the other by Luke Macfarlane. Johnny is kind of in love with their ship. D’avin is kind of in love with Dutch. Except when he’s not. 

There is a truly excellent bartender, a rich girl working as a doctor in the bad part of town, other much more terrible rich people who sometimes accidentally grow consciences, more Canadian SFF character actors than you can shake a stick at, and plots that inch right up to going wildly off the rails but never quite do. The found-family space series I never knew I needed, Killjoys ran for five perfect, over-the-top, playful, affecting, underrated seasons, and that was not enough. Someone really needs to give creator Michelle Lovretta another show. 

Because the universe is a cruel and uncaring place, Killjoys does not appear to be streaming anywhere. But you can treat yourself to an episode or two on Apple TV+ or Prime and see if you get hooked.

Is It Time to Reread the Books We All Read Too Early?

On Bluesky, author John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) offered a fun prompt: “Quote this with a book you read way too young that explains why you are the way you are.” Answers range from the nigh-inevitable V.C. Andrews to a whooooole lot of Stephen King, Clan of the Cave Bear, and well beyond. I still haven’t seen anyone admit to reading the books Anne Rice wrote as “A.N. Roquelaure,” but I did. Way too young. Waaaaaaay too young.

I mention this because the replies are so sprawling and wonderful—and may give you some reading flashbacks—and because it is never a bad time to reread the books that made you who you are (for better or worse!). There are enough Clan of the Cave Bear kids to start a book club. 

Gorton: The Inescapable Font You Might Never Have Heard Of

Remember when there was a whole movie about Helvetica? This isn’t that. Marcin Wichary’s February piece, “The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan,” surfaced multiple times in my social feeds this week, and I’m so glad it did.

Way back in the 2000s, Wichary noticed an odd font in Manhattan. And then noticed it again. And again. And didn’t know what it was. Ten years later, he found out: The font is called Gorton, and its history is deeply fascinating. 

Not a font nerd? It’s still a deep dive into how things used to be made. Don’t care about New York? Gorton is everywhere. I learned about how keyboard keys were and are made! I learned about engraving machines! This story has everything. This font went to space! The history is not what Wichary initially thought it was! And Gorton really is everywhere. This is worth it for the photos alone. And the fact that you’ll never look at an apartment buzzer panel or an engraved bossy street-side sign the same way again.

Now You See Me, Now We’re All Family?

Before Superman, there was a trailer for Now You See Me Now You Don’t, which might win this year’s award for “movie that by all rights should have a different name.” (Seriously, Now You 3 Me is right there.) Having never seen one of these magical heist flicks, I found myself with a burning question: Is this series essentially the Fast and the Furious franchise but with magic? 

No, hear me out! The sprawling cast. The over-the-top villain. The reluctant team-ups. The far-flung locations. The sheer amount of money on display (though in diamonds, here, instead of ridiculous vehicles). Have these movies always been like this, or is this a conscious shift on the part of the hands behind the franchise? Have I been missing out all this time? Do I need to investigate? Do you need to investigate? Exciting August movie and TV releases are a bit thin on the ground (though those who are less baby than I will definitely be watching Alien: Earth this week). Might as well try something different?

Or, on a related note, you could just have a Fast and Furious marathon—sort of. On Saturday, Netflix is adding seven of the Fast and/or Furious films. For unknown reasons, they’re skipping Fast & Furious, aka Fast 4, and going straight from Tokyo Drift to The Rock Takes Brazil—I mean, Fast 5. My personal favorite remains Fast 6, for an assortment of reasons that includes Han (Sung Kang) and his snacks; the presence of Black Sails’ Anne Bonny (Clara Paget); and the 18.37-mile-long runway in the climactic sequence. Yes, it has to be that long. The BBC did the math.

A Different Sort of Space Adventure Hour(s): Bethany Jacobs’ Kindom Trilogy

If you are the sort of person who is reluctant to pick up a book series until it’s complete, now is the time to start Bethany Jacobs’ Kindom Trilogy. The third book, This Brutal Moon, is out in December, so you’ve got time for a leisurely read of the first two books, These Burning Stars and On Vicious Worlds.

These books are so tightly wound that they’re difficult to describe; a blurb from Kate Elliott on the first one says, “Like every good revenge story, it is baroque, intense, inventive, vivid, violent, and visceral.” These things are all true! It’s also kind of a good time, amid all the cat-and-mouse games, near-death scenarios, and, in book one, an incredible twist. If you crossed the obsession-worthy characters of The Raven Scholar with the huge-scale plotting of The Expanse, you might end up with something like this. But Jacobs does entirely her own thing. [end-mark]

The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Forbidden Books, Magicians, and <i>Alien</i> Alternatives appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Trek

Proposed Star Trek Series Could Bring Back Captain Archer in an Andor-Style Story

The Paramount/Skydance merger may have opened the door for Scott Bakula to return in a different kind of Star Trek series.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on August 8, 2025

Courtesy of CBS

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Courtesy of CBS

The merger between Paramount and Skydance is complete, and Star Trek: Enterprise and Voyager writer and producer Michael Sussman thinks that could mean we’ll see more Star Trek projects moving forward.

“The hope is that Paramount is planning to invest more in Star Trek on television, and they’ve been very clear about how they want to make Paramount+ a real player in the streaming space,” Sussman told TrekMovie.

It turns out that Sussman already has an idea in mind, one that he had inadvertently laid the groundwork for twenty years ago, when Enterprise’s “In a Mirror Darkly, Part II” aired in April 2005. In that episode, we see a dossier on the future of Captain John Archer (played by Scott Bakula).

“It occurred to me that someone on the writing staff, not the art department, needed to write this graphic,” Sussman said. “Somebody needed to think about this, right? This was going to be a graphic that spelled out Archer’s life and career after the series ended.”

That graphic included the note that Archer becomes President of the United Federation of Planets. From that note, Sussman came up with the idea for a show called Star Trek: United, which followed Archer in this presidential role. Sussman described it to TrekMovie as “a political thriller and a family drama set in those chaotic, formative years of the Federation,” and likened it to shows like The West Wing and The Diplomat. He also said that he thought the series “could do for Star Trek, what Andor did for Star Wars. It’s a show where you can tell adult stories about adults and tell them in a very grounded, realistic way.”

Sussman had previously pitched the idea (Bakula has also expressed interest), and while he said the idea was well-received, the project was initially passed on. With the merger, however, Sussman hopes the new leadership might take interest. He’s not the only one: Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman is reportedly eager to pitch his Star Trek: Year One concept, following Kirk from the day after he takes the captain’s chair on the USS Enterprise to the first episode of The Original Series.

Where all these Star Trek projects end up is still up in the air, though we can currently watch new episodes of Strange New Worlds weekly on Paramount+, and the next show, Starfleet Academy, will come out in 2026. [end-mark]  

The post Proposed <i>Star Trek</i> Series Could Bring Back Captain Archer in an <i>Andor</i>-Style Story appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Back to Basics — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Through the Lens of Time”

It’s an episode of Strange New Worlds where they visit a strange new world!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on August 7, 2025

Credit: Paramount+

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Credit: Paramount+

Hey look, it’s an episode of Strange New Worlds where they visit a strange new world! What a concept!

Sarcasm aside, it is nice to see an episode that goes back to basics and isn’t a gimmick episode or yet another tiresome Gorn episode (though the ongoing Gorn mishegoss does play a role in this story). In addition, it’s a story that continues laying the groundwork for what we already saw in the original series, specifically the relationship between Christine Chapel and Roger Korby.

The original series episode “What are Little Girls Made Of?” established that Chapel and Korby were affianced, and that Chapel signed onto the Enterprise under Captain James T. Kirk as a nurse in order to find Korby, who’d gone missing. But another original series episode, “The Naked Time,” established that Chapel was in love with Spock, something she admitted while under the influence of the Psi 2000 virus that made everyone act a little binky-bonkers (Tormolen committing suicide, Sulu running around shirtless with a sword, Spock having an emotional breakdown, etc.).

Here’s the thing, and this is why I love what SNW is doing with Chapel, Spock, and Korby: “The Naked Time” came first (and that’s true whether you’re a sensible intelligent person and go with production order like I did in my rewatch or a big honkin’ doofus and use airdate order like the DVDs and streaming services inexplicably do because they’re big honkin’ doofuses). Plus, as I said last week, we’re seeing the evolution of Spock from someone who was willing to smile at the realization that the flowers on Talos IV stopped humming when you touched them to the guy who completely repressed his emotions by the time he served under Kirk.

Notably, in this episode that has Spock, Chapel, and Korby all on the same landing party (an original series term that is used amusingly interchangeably with “away team,” the term coined by TNG and which is much more in the public consciousness at this point), we see that Spock is much more closed off, much more logical, much less emotional. In other words, closer to the Spock Leonard Nimoy played from 1966 to 1969, as opposed to the one he played in 1964. On top of that, we’re actually seeing how much Korby and Chapel love each other, as they make quite the adorable couple, which has the added bonus of making the events of “…Little Girls…” that much more poignant.

And yes, I’m spending a lot of time showing the clever connections that bridge “The Cage” and the original series because I’m really really sick and tired of the complaints by folks online about how SNW (and Discovery) simply must be in an alternate timeline from the shows that aired from 1966-2005. Which conveniently forgets all the folks who insisted from 2001-2005 that Enterprise simply must be in an alternate timeline from the shows that aired from 1966-2001. Not to mention the folks who insisted in 1979 that The Motion Picture had to be in an alternate timeline from the TV show. It’s tiresome.

The story itself is a two-pronged plot that we often see in Trek: some folks are on the planet dealing with a thing and the people back on the ship are dealing with another thing. Sometimes the two things are related, as they very much are here. Korby and Chapel have discovered some artifacts on one world that indicate the possibility of an ancient civilization on another world, which has refused Federation membership. They do allow Enterprise to orbit and send a small party down, led by Chapel and Korby, and with a native guide, N’Jal (Ish Morris).

The placement of the artifacts on a particular item on the world results in a huge building appearing out of nowhere, and our heroes immediately investigate it, with Chapel allowing the door to prick her finger and examine her blood and then allow her ingress, along with everyone else.

The original plan was for a small team that included Chapel, Korby, Uhura, and Gamble. In fact, the episode opens with Gamble’s personal log, as the young nurse is thrilled to be on away team duty for the first time, having been requesting it for ages. With the huge building now to explore, Spock and La’an join the party. Originally Spock was going to stay on the Enterprise to avoid awkwardness, but this is too big a find for the science officer not to be present. Also taking the trip is Beto Ortegas (Mynor Luken, back from “Wedding Bell Blues”), recording stuff on the Enterprise for his documentary on the Federation Centennial.

Of course, things go horribly wrong once they’re inside. For starters, comms don’t work inside the structure. Procedure dictates that they should go back outside and report in, but there is much to see here—and Korby isn’t Starfleet, and he doesn’t want to leave. Spock, to his credit, asks N’Jal what he wants, since this is his world, and they’re his guests. Their decision to stay and investigate further is N’Jal’s.

And then more things go wrong as a device that Gamble picks up explodes in his face and blows out his eyes. Chapel and La’an take him outside so he can beam back to Enterprise. They continue searching, but then N’Jal sees something that he views as evil—it’s a visceral reaction, one that causes him to run to the door to leave—

—at which point he’s vaporized, and then the door closes and they can’t open it back up. It turns out that Chapel has to be the one to use the doors, and when anyone else uses the door without her, they get zapped.

The planet plot proceeds nicely, as the landing party continues to explore the building, now also trying to find a way out. They move into another chamber only to find themselves separated in pairs: Uhura and Beto in one room, La’an and Chapel in another, Korby and Spock in a third. Except it turns out they’re all in the same room, just slightly displaced in time and space, which they only discover thanks to Beto’s cameras. (Beto also has a freakout at one point, as (a) he’s a civilian, and (b) unlike the other civilian on this mission, Korby, he’s not used to this nonsense. Uhura is able to calm him down, however, drawing on her own fears and difficulties as a newbie cadet back in season one.) Everyone contributes to the quest to get the hell out of the building, including Chapel having to trust a crazy-ass notion of Spock’s that is nonetheless rooted in logic. They also eventually determine that this is an interdimensional prison for creatures, one of whom was what attacked Gamble.

Except, as we eventually learn over the course of the shipboard plot, the creature didn’t just attack Gamble. It takes a while, but it soon becomes clear that there was a creature that invaded his mind and took over his body. It appears to have some telepathic abilities—it gets information about both M’Benga and a security guard that it could only get by reading their minds—and pretends to be Gamble until it grows strong enough.

In fact, M’Benga’s instruments indicate that Gamble is already dead, even though he’s talking to him. But Gamble is M’Benga’s protégé, and he refuses to accept that he isn’t still in there somewhere, even though by the episode’s end he’s killed two crewmembers, gotten into a huge fight with Batel (more on that in a bit), and is threatening Pelia, Scotty, and Sam. M’Benga’s distracting the creature is what allows Pelia to shoot and kill it.

I’m still not at all happy about the use of the Gorn on this show, but I do like that the cure Batel got in “Shuttle to Kenfori” is proving to be complicated. Her Gorn DNA responds instinctively to the presence of the creature that has taken over Gamble and they have a brutal fight in sickbay. There’s a sense here—in Batel’s response to the creature, in how deeply the creatures have been buried, not just in space, but in time, and in Pelia’s reaction to the creature—that this is a very ancient evil that has been hidden away for very good reason. And the final shot implies that it’s still in the Enterprise’s computer.

This episode also touches on another of Trek’s tropes, and manages to do it right and wrong at the same time. Chris Myers has been in each of the three prior episodes to this one, and he and the writers have given us a friendly charming character in Gamble. His death here carries more weight because we’ve gotten to know him and like him. In addition, N’Jal’s death is effective, as both the script and Morris’ understated performance make him feel like a real person, not just a plot device, and his death is mentioned several times over the course of the episode, not forgotten like side character deaths often are.

But then we have the poor science officer whom Gamble kills off-camera (we just see his corpse on the deck when security captures him) and the security guard that Gamble later kills when the creature gets strong enough to walk through the brig’s force field unharmed. While it’s nice to see that La’an’s security team is competent—they capture Gamble and the one guy only dies because of the unforeseen possibility of his not being affected by the force field—neither of those dead-meat characters get a name or a mention of their deaths after it happens. The penultimate scene has an eye-rolling comedy moment, as Pelia makes a stentorian pronouncement, not because she thinks what she’s saying is important, but because she wants to sound cool in Beto’s documentary. This results in a chuckle from Pike, which is so totally inappropriate for the debrief of a mission in which four people died.

At least the last scene gives us M’Benga making the condolence call to Gamble’s family himself, which was a welcome touch. I just wish the other two guys on the ship who died got even a fraction of the consideration.[end-mark]

The post Back to Basics — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “Through the Lens of Time” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

“To go further and bolder than anyone ever before” —  Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “A Space Adventure Hour”

This week’s episode is a brilliant example of what a prequel can do well.

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on July 31, 2025

Credit: Marni Grossman / Paramount+

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Credit: Marni Grossman / Paramount+

This week’s Strange New Worlds is a brilliant example of what a prequel can do well.

One of the more tiresome complaints about both Discovery’s first two seasons and SNW is that the tech doesn’t look like the tech on the original series, which these are supposed to take place prior to. The problem of course is that, if you remove the warp drive and the transporter, the U.S.S. Enterprise that we saw on TV between 1966 and 1969 is less technologically sophisticated than my house.

But this is a problem that has dogged the franchise ever since it was revived as a movie series in 1979. Back then, in fanzines and at conventions, a subset of Trek fandom was making the exact same complaints about the technology in The Motion Picture that a similar subset made in 2017 about Discovery, that it looked way too advanced for being only a couple of years after the five-year mission. For that matter, loud and vociferous were the complaints about the tech in Enterprise in 2001, this time with the Internet as a bullhorn.

And it keeps happening, because the march of technology over the past several decades has outstripped a lot of predictions. (At least part of it is because of the influence Trek itself has had. I mean, c’mon, why do you think most cell phones produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century looked just like communicators from the original series?) In 1987, it looked really futuristic for the cast of The Next Generation to be using padds, but now it looks quaint for them handing iPads to each other.

Also in 1987, the holodeck seemed like far-future technology, but even then it seemed unlikely that it would take four hundred years to perfect that particular tech. And indeed, we seem pretty likely to have the tech for the holodeck a lot sooner than three hundred years from now…

And so SNW addresses this issue, while simultaneously addressing two of the biggest holodeck-related complaints that developed over the course of the three twenty-fourth-century spinoffs from 1987-2001.

The first of those complaints is how incredibly dangerous the holodeck has proven to be. It started with TNG’s first-season episode “The Big Goodbye,” where an intense scan by the Jarada made the holodeck go all binky-bonkers and endanger the people inside. This continued throughout TNG (e.g., “A Fistful of Datas”), DS9 (e.g., “Our Man Bashir”), and Voyager (e.g., “Heroes and Demons”), and it got real tiresome.

“A Space Adventure Hour” addresses this by having the holodeck be new, experimental technology. Scotty has installed it on the Enterprise (Pelia is apparently on shore leave, this week’s excuse for not paying for a Carol Kane guest shot) and La’an is tasked with testing it, encouraged to be aggressive and rigorous as possible to make sure that it’s a piece of technology that should be integrated onto starships. The logic is that in the not-too-distant future, starships will be on missions that last even longer than five years, and they will need more elaborate recreation options on board when being far from home for long periods. Which actually makes sense, and is why the holodeck was such a good idea when it was first introduced in the animated episode “The Practical Joker.” (You thought I was going to say TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint,” didn’t you? But the animated series got there first…)

And so La’an creates a holodeck adventure based on Emilia Moon, a series of Nancy Drew-esque mysteries originally published in the 1960s that she read as a child. (Though when she goes onto the holodeck in character, her outfit looks more like it was inspired by Carmen Sandiego.) She asks for a mystery that will challenge her, a slip of the tongue that astute viewers will recall also tripped up La Forge in another of TNG’s holodeck misadventures, “Elementary, Dear Data.” In that second-season episode, La Forge asked the computer for a foe that would challenge Data, rather than one that would challenge the character of Sherlock Holmes. The holodeck responded by creating a sentient holographic being in the form of Daniel Davis’ Professor Moriarty.

Similarly, the murder mystery that the computer provides is one that challenges La’an Noonien Singh, security chief of the Enterprise, not Emilia Moon, fictional girl detective.

Said murder mystery is the meat of the episode, of course, because the victim is the executive producer of a 1960s science fiction television show, The Last Frontier.

Yes, I’ve buried the lede. What is glorious and wonderful about this episode is this hilarious riff on the original Star Trek. The teaser is, in fact, a bit from an episode of The Last Frontier, with Paul Wesley as actor Maxwell Saint, who plays the captain of the U.S.S. Adventure as an overly exaggerated William Shatner.

One of the dings against Wesley has been that his Kirk doesn’t feel much like Shatner’s, a complaint I have never agreed with, as he’s matching the more subdued, calm version of Kirk that Shatner played in season one, not the overenuciating, overly mannered, endlessly pausing Shatner that he’d devolved into by season three, and which is what everyone remembers of Shatner’s acting. In the teaser, Wesley shows us that he very much could have Shatner’d the shit out of the role, as he absolutely nails Shatner’s excesses, as well as his head tilts and facial expressions. (This is aided by director Jonathan Frakes doing tricks with the lighting very similar to ones they pulled on the original series to emphasize particular gazes. Frakes was absolutely the perfect choice to direct this one, as he absolutely nails it.)

After the delightfully low-budget 1960s-era confrontation between the Adventure and an Agonyan (Kira Guloien, who played the bartender Kelzing in “Wedding Bell Blues”), a goofy-looking alien who wants to steal their brain cells, we cut to the opening credits of The Last Frontier. It starts with Wesley reading a voiceover that feels like someone translated the original series voiceover into French, then into Russian, and then back into English—or just went through and made copious use of thesaurus.com to rewrite it. Points to the show’s magnificent composer Nami Melumad for her delightful riff on the old theme music (complete with soprano voices humming).

The reason why the various spinoffs kept going back to doing holodeck shows is because it’s a chance for the actors to play dress-up and pretend to be other people. (Crusher in a glorious pink dress from the 1940s! Worf in a 19th-century suit and tails! O’Brien in an eyepatch! Kira and Dax in Arthurian finery! Janeway in a white tux! Paris and Kim in jumpsuits and carrying ray-beam guns!) And, since Scotty uses existing transporter patterns for the physical forms of the characters, we get many of our regulars (and one of our recurring guest stars, since Scotty uses Jim Kirk as one of the templates for reasons the script never bothers to explain) in holo-roles.

Part of the fun here is people either putting on or taking off accents. When portraying actor Adelaide Shaw, Jess Bush uses her natural Australian accent while Babs Olusanmokun, portraying Shaw’s boyfriend, puts on a British accent, and Christina Chong puts on an American accent when she’s acting as Moon.

And the murder mystery itself revolves around the cast and crew of The Last Frontier, including Anson Mount as the show’s creator T.K. Bellows; Melissa Navia as another actor, Lee Woods; Rebecca Romijn as a studio head who championed the show (an obvious riff on Lucille Ball’s huge role in putting Star Trek on the air back in the day); and Celia Rose Gooding as the agent who happens to represent all three actors.

For all that the episode makes fun of a lot of the original series’ goofier aspects, it’s an affectionate satire, emphasized in particular by a speech Gooding gives as the agent talking about how important this show could be for children who want to grow up and go to space and hope for a better future, which is exactly what Star Trek did.

In the end, the holodeck winds up drawing too much power away from the ship, plus a coronal mass ejection from the neutron star the Enterprise is studying messes with the holodeck systems, keeping them from communicating with the holodeck or shutting down the program. (The transporter is never mentioned as an option for some reason.) La’an has to finish the mystery and end the program in order for her and Spock to get out—

—except the Spock that’s been helping her in this scenario isn’t actually Spock. It’s another holographic character that looks and talks like Spock, and it is responsible for the subsequent murders that have happened since the scenario started.

In the end, La’an’s recommendation is that they don’t install holodecks on starships because holy crap are they dangerous. Pike agrees wholeheartedly, given that they almost got eaten by a neutron star because of this malfunction. Scotty points out that they could make the holodeck power systems separate from ship’s systems to avoid some of those problems, which Pike says to put in a footnote in small print in the recommendation.

This hits on the second complaint about the holodecks: the ridiculous notion posited in Voyager’s “Caretaker” that holodeck systems are independent of ship’s systems. That was a writer’s trick to enable Voyager to still do holodeck dress-up episodes despite the ship needing to ration power due to being 70,000 light-years from home. And here’s Scotty providing a rationale for it!

Best of all, they address these two long-time complaints head-on, establish why holodecks didn’t become ubiquitous until a century later in story time, and still enable them to do an actual holodeck dress-up episode!

I really admire the chutzpah and the cleverness of pulling this all off. Plus it’s funny as hell, which is what you want in your comedy episode…

There are two other plot points that shouldn’t get lost in the foofuraw of holodecks and Trek parodies and Wesley channeling Shatner, one good, one not so much.

The not-so-much one is the final shot. Spock and La’an are continuing their dance lessons, originally begun in “Wedding Bell Blues” to prepare for the upcoming festivities, but which they have been continuing. There has been a certain sparkage between Ethan Peck’s Spock and Chong’s La’an, and that sparkage explodes into a kiss to close the episode.

Just last week I talked about how much I appreciate that they’re showing us younger versions of the characters we know and love, in particular showing Spock’s evolution from someone who smiled at the musical flowers in “The Cage”/“The Menagerie” to the guy who fully suppressed all emotions by the time the original series rolled around a dozen years of story time later. The trauma of his breakup with Chapel seemed to be setting the stage for that—plus we’re getting very close to the point in the timeline where he would first meet Leila Kalomi from “This Side of Paradise.” So adding a thing with La’an just feels like piling on a bit too much. On the other hand, the complications of feelings for three different women (or four, if you toss in T’Pring) might also lead to explaining why Spock went full Vulcan by the time Kirk took over the Enterprise’s center seat. We shall see.

Much more interesting is Number One’s conversation at the end with Scotty. First of all, I love that finally this season we’re seeing Commander Chin-Riley actually being the first officer of the ship. Unlike Pike and Spock, we have no idea of what Number One’s future is, and that gives them room to play with the character. We keep being told she’s the best first officer in the fleet (most notably in the episode that highlighted her, “Ad Astra per Aspera,” also perhaps not coincidentally SNW’s best episode to date), so it’s nice to see her actually being that. In this case, she reminds Scotty—who has spent the entire episode trying to fix everything all by himself, aside from a clandestine plea for assistance from Uhura—that he’s part of a team. The reason why the Enterprise functions is because they all work together. Scotty’s own recent history as chronicled in “Hegemony” when he was the only survivor of a Gorn attack on a ship that was much smaller than Enterprise comes into play here. He was more autonomous there out of necessity, but that’s not the case here, and Number One has to remind him of that. It’s a fantastic scene, one that shows off Number One’s talents as first officer and Romijn’s talents as an actor, both of which have been criminally underused prior to this season.

One last thing, regarding last week’s episode: I totally missed that the name of the planet (and the title of the episode) was a pun. One of the lead actors in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (one of the great zombie movies) was named Ken Foree, which is where they got the name Kenfori. Bravo, folks.[end-mark]

The post “To go further and bolder than anyone ever before” —  <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “A Space Adventure Hour” appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Starfleet Academy’s Wall of Honor Is a Giant Star Trek Easter Egg Worth Obsessing Over

You either die a hero or live long enough to become an admiral.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on July 29, 2025

Screenshot: Paramount+

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Screenshot: Paramount+

With the release of the trailer for Starfleet Academy came a closer look at the school’s wall of heroes (unofficial name, obviously)—the glowing, epic list of important players in Starfleet history. In an earlier image, Commander Beckett Mariner stood out; the Lower Decks character did good! Her real-life counterpart, actor Tawny Newsome, somehow rose even higher in the ranks: In the 32nd century, she’s listed as an admiral.

The (presumably final) ranking of more than one character (or behind-the-scenes name) is a source of some curiosity—or glee. Admiral Harry Kim (Voyager) made it past ensign! Demora Sulu (Generations) also achieved the rank of captain, but of which ship? When, how, and why did Montgomery Scott (TOS) become a captain? How did Julian Bashir (Deep Space 9) and Tom Paris (Voyager) stay lieutenants forever? Is Commander Zero the Third the same Zero from Prodigy, or perhaps a descendant?

More than a few of these characters are folks who met unfortunate fates before they could move up the ranks, among them Ellen Landry, Discovery’s chief of security, who died at the hands (feet?) of a massive alien tardigrade. Her peers in early demise include Tasha Yar, the Enterprise-D’s chief of security on The Next Generation, and Deep Space 9’s Riley Shepard, the helmsman on the Valiant, killed by a Jem’Hadar ship.

And then there’s very special boy Wesley Crusher (The Next Generation). Crusher technically belongs among those whose careers ended early—though less in death than in mysterious vanishing. Presumably Starfleet included him here because his fate is tragically unknown to them, and not because he fucked off with the Travelers and went on to pop up in unexpected places. (Could even pop up on Starfleet Academy, for that matter.)

Lieutenant Nog also deserves a mention. The Ferengi from Deep Space 9 was promoted to lieutenant junior grade by Benjamin Sisko just before Sisko went to join the Prophets—a fate also referenced in the Starfleet Academy trailer. His non-canonical promotion to captain in the Deep Space 9 documentary What We Left Behind apparently wasn’t official enough to earn him captain’s rank here, but he did also get a spaceship named after him.

A lot of big names are missing from this board, which is absolutely mystifying in terms of who appears on it and in what order. We choose to believe it cycles through names, and there are plenty more presently unseen. Presumably the most famous captains have entire wings of the school named after them. Kirk, as we’ve seen, gets a pavilion, so maybe there’s a Picard dorm? A Janeway annex?

Notably, the only visible character from Discovery—which takes place at the same time as Starfleet Academy—is Commander Hugh Culber. “Commander” was his title when we last saw him in Discovery‘s finale, but his presence on the wall is enough to make you wonder: Is he still alive? Did something terrible happen to him? Or are all of Discovery’s crew on there somewhere, just waiting for their moment to glow? Is this wall only for the dead, and is he on there because he was dead?

Don’t hurt Hugh, show! He’s been through enough.

Starfleet Academy premieres in 2026 on Paramount+.[end-mark]

The post <i>Starfleet Academy</i>’s Wall of Honor Is a Giant <i>Star Trek</i> Easter Egg Worth Obsessing Over appeared first on Reactor.