Various and Sundry

Star Trek Fandom: Generations

Readers know I have an abiding interest in Star Trek (as evidenced in part by my previous series of posts, Crisis of Infinite Star Treks). So it should come as no surprise I happily devoured the data and geekery on display in Keith Wilson’s Medium entry last month all about Star Trek fandom likes and dislikes. From over 3,500 responses, he breaks down Trek fans’ likes and dislikes of the various series and by different…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

Once more unto the Trek breach…

I’m going to do one last post looking forward to this Thursday’s launch of Star Trek: Picard. The first link is to an excellent article by David Itzkoff in the New York Times about the future of Star Trek. It covers similar ground as my last Crisis of Infinite Star Treks post, but, you know, it’s a journalistic feature article with first-person interviews vs. my Internet-based observations, so I think many of you will find…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: All Good Things…

This is the 32nd and final entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. It was… fun. Way back in November 2015, I started musing about the state of Star Trek… and I kept on blogging about Trek so much that in 2016, that I retconned those early posts into what has become Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. There have been long posts…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry Writing

Spock, Chabon, and This Mortal Coil

If you’ve checked out any of the anthology series “Short Treks,” you’ll know the arguable standout thus far is the first season’s “Calypso” co-written by Michael Chabon. Chabon, probably better known to many as an award-winning novelist, also wrote this season’s “Q&A” and is the showrunner for the forthcoming Star Trek: Picard. When I saw a behind-the-scenes photo of Chabon and the Vasquez Rocks (a popular Hollywood “exotic” filming location and one very storied for…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

Space is big. Really, really big.

I saw Ad Astra this past weekend, which is doing its part to make sci-fi hard like vibranium not squishy like flubber Scientist James O’Donoghue decided to make an animation to demonstrate how “warp speeds” worked in Star Trek, its various incarnations known for loving science… while certainly not being beholden to rigidly adhering to known norms because writers. In any case, even though vast distances can be crossed in three days or three weeks…

Continue reading

Various and Sundry

The Music of DOOM! er, the Doomsday Machine

One of my favorite episodes of the original Star Trek and, I would argue, one of their best overall episodes, was the action-packed season two entry, “The Doomsday Machine.” A significant factor on why I believe it should be ranked so highly is because of the episode-specific music composed by Sol Kaplan. Viewers may recall the original series re-used a lot of music cues as a cost-cutting technique. The fact that they don’t do so…

Continue reading