A to Z 2015 - Reflections

As some of you may have caught, I nearly didn't participate in A to Z this year because my mother died at the end of March.  In fact, the original material I did pursue at the start of the month was abandoned because I'm still trying to deal with her death, and sometimes it's a lot harder than other times.  Everyone dies.  But the awareness of death is a personal matter you can absolutely not estimate ahead of time.  She started dying, technically, in the fall of 2010, when she was first diagnosed with cancer, and there have been many rough patches along the way, including last April, which was the start of the traumatic end process...

I ended up switching topics to Star Trek, and that was hugely appropriate.  Even though she didn't become one of those die hard fans who typify interest in the franchise, my mother was one of its original viewers, and every time I popped in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, she'd cry when Spock dies.  (Except the last time.  But at that point, most of her was changing.  I clung and still do to the lasting remnants of who and what she had been throughout her life.)  In a very real sense, I owe my interest in Star Trek to her.

This being May the Fourth, however, I'm not going to continue talking about Star Trek, but rather switch topics once again.  Hey, why not?  Star Wars was a dominant feature of my childhood.  I grew up with four siblings, and Star Wars was one of the few things that united all of us.  We watched the original trilogy all the time.  It got to the point where my mother would literally fall asleep every single time we watched it, and we joked that she did see the whole thing, but only cumulatively speaking.  In hindsight it's probably clear that she was never quite as enthusiastic about Star Wars as we were.

But in her last year, my dad and I still got her to watch most of the movies all over again, and she was perfectly fine with that.  Star Wars had become a constant for her.

I've posted this video before, from How I Met Your Mother, how when Ted tries to understand how Stella has never seen Star Wars before, he and Marshall absolutely cannot understand it.  (For me, it's still baffling, and I absolutely mean it, that there was such a tremendous backlash to the prequels.  But people like what's spontaneous, a discovery.)  Here's the video again:

(It also baffles me that people hated How I Met Your Mother's ending.  But that's a topic for another day.)

Different people have different experiences.  This is sometimes extremely hard to appreciate, and very people are willing to admit this.  When we're forced to confront our differences, we also discover how different we really are.  But sometimes the differences are not as great as we think they are.

Taking part in A to Z for another year, no matter the circumstances and however much my experience was affected by those circumstances, or how little other people know Star Trek compared to me...this was actually the best experience I've had with it to date.  In past years I didn't really understand how it was supposed to work.  I don't mean in relation to others, but for me.  The moment I let go of my own expectations, I started to have fun.  I couldn't ask for better than that.

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "Zero Hour"

"Zero Hour"
Star Trek: Enterprise

Bam!  Remember Quantum Leap, in which a dude keeps leaping into other people's lives, and at the end of the episode, once he and/or they have learned whatever it is they were supposed to learn, he leaps once again (always trying to get home!)?

(It's just too bad that Quantum Leap is otherwise completely irrelevant to Enterprise.  Except for "Detained," which guest stars the great Dean Stockwell.)

What I'm getting around to here (eventually!) is how "Zero Hour" ends.  It dumps Captain Archer from the frying pan into the fire.  This is the end of the season-long Xindi arc.  He seems to have triumphed spectacularly, bravely, and given his life in the process.  But the episode continues!  He finds himself surrounded by Nazis.  Some of them being alien Nazis!

And really, that would have been a completely awesome model for the series, having season-long arcs, and at the very end, tossing everyone into another big adventure to be explored next season (James Bond will return in Card Sharks on a Plane!).

Except the series ended after one additional season, and that final season had a gazillion mini-arcs, none of which helped elucidate whatever happened to Porthos.  The Alien Nazis turned out to be part of the abrupt end to the Temporal Cold War arc, one of Enterprise's many controversial elements (Did Hoshi just swear in Klingon???).  I've struggled with "Storm Front" for years.  I think it's both extremely clever and somewhat grossly disappointing.  But sometimes I err on the side of extremely clever, for reasons that if I went into them now you would butcher me like electronic cattle.

(It's a thing.)

And yes, Tim got married to Zola, and Joe officiated at the wedding, which was held at sea, and they were all the time criticizing each other's taste in movies.  You see, Joe has this unfortunate predilection for professional wrestling, and in a meta twist he likes this particular movie fictional wrestler Terry Stevens starred in called The Last Stand (based, as it sounds, on General Custer's ridiculous mustache), and Tim did say he admired Joe's taste, and Zola did groan, and Ted did hold the blue french horn again, and Robin was the mother, but the replacement mother.  And the villagers rejoiced!

(Terry Stevens and The Last Stand "exist" insofar as I did not just make that up for the purposes of reminding everyone about something they were eager to forget about, so much so that they forgot about it before it even began.  And now the groans grow louder...)

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "Year of Hell"

"Year of Hell, Parts 1 and 2"
Star Trek: Voyager

Hey, you remember Battlestar Galactica, right?  Not the original version, which was more or less a blatant knockoff of Star Wars (this time with more Lorne Greene!), but the reboot, which was more or less a blatant knockoff of..."Year of Hell" (this time with more Edward James Olmos!).

Ha!  Just kidding.  But seriously, the early episodes of Battlestar Galactica (as opposed to the later episodes, which were much more about revealing secret Cylons [no one suspects the Cylon invasion!]) were all about humanity's desperate bid to survive against incredible odds, real grim and gritty presented with grim and grit (and sexy, sexy Cylons).  And genre fans loved it.  Battlestar Galactica was, in short, the latest in a long series of genre programming that was, basically, Not Star Trek.

By 1994, just when everyone thought Star Trek was going to finally become cool, Star Trek's own fans began turning on it.  In effect, Star Trek, which was already massively uncool to the general population, became uncool to its own fans.  These deserters started seeing how genre programming was being done by other people, and began to consider Star Trek outdated.  Does it matter that after Next Generation left the air, this left Deep Space Nine, which did make a conscious effort to switch things up?  Not at all, silly person asking questions to someone typing without the ability to hear you and thus must conjure your existence into being!  You see, Deep Space Nine was seen as a ripoff of Babylon 5.  Mostly because, y'know...they both...had...space stations.  And stuff.

Emphasis on "and stuff."

So when Voyager rolled around and pretended to change things up even further but really rebooted back to what Next Generation and the original series had been doing all along, the fans rolled their eyes further into their head, causing a massive migraine that did not dissipate until Star Trek Into Darkness.

Ha ha!

Basically, Voyager pulled an evil trick.  It pretended it was going to be all grim and gritty, but then, quite evilly, made Captain Janeway able to make peace with a bunch of Federation dissenters and make one big happy crew...stranded decades from home, a lifetime away at first estimate.  What to do, what to do???

"Year of Hell" was the two-part episode that had a look at what it would have been like for a true worst-case scenario to occur (unlike the episode "Worst Case Scenario," which merely had a look at what would have happened if those pesky Federation dissenters, the Maquis, had decided they hated Janeway's hairdo as much as everyone else).  Gradually, everything went wrong.  The ship fell to pieces.  The crew splintered.  Janeway ran out of coffee.  Tuvok went blind and thus could no longer...(never mind about that!).

Basically, substituting Seven for Number Six (imagine that!), "Year of Hell" is exactly what Battlestar Galactica would be (for a handful of episodes, as well as the perpetual grumpiness of Adama) years later.

We're right back at the start!  Yay!

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "The Xindi"

"The Xindi"
Star Trek: Enterprise

In the third season premiere of Enterprise, the Xindi arc officially kicks off.  Technically it began with the second season finale, "The Expanse," in which the horrific terrorist attack on Earth occurs and Archer is asked to undertake the dangerous mission to thwart, if possible, any follow-up.

At the time, I read a bad review of this episode because it seemed like Star Trek, instead of seizing the opportunity to do something bold and new (relatively speaking, for a season billed as one complete arc; although Deep Space Nine more or less featured the Dominion War throughout its final two seasons, there were many episodes therein that did not feature material related to the conflict) the show felt like it was going in a ho-hum direction as Archer and Trip negotiate with an alien who doesn't feel significant enough for such an important occasion.

(Yeah; by this point it was painfully clear that everyone was ready to give Star Trek a good, long rest, if there was going to be a grand revival at all.  Fortunately there turned out to be one.)

But here we are all the same, and by the time we get our first look at the Xindi, in the episode called "The Xindi," we do in fact dive directly in, meeting the ruling Council, all the key players including the scientist Degra, later to be heavily featured (especially in one of the season's best, "Stratagem").  And by the way, we see these guys first and last thing this episode, and at this point they're nowhere near interacting with Archer directly.  Which does happen to be a bold departure for Star Trek.

These are the five Xindi species: the Reptilians (lead villains), Insectoids (back-up villains), Arboreals (first of the sympathetic ones), Primates (Degra is one of these), and Aquatics (along with the Insectoids, one of two completely CGI species within the bunch).  There had been six species, but the Avians became extinct in the cataclysmic events that led to the attack on Earth...

The episode also features the debut of the MACOs (Military Assault Command Operation), who are a detachment of soldiers meant to support Archer's mission (presumably limiting the possibility of redshirt syndrome, although some MACO do in fact die during the season).  Among the actors playing these guys are Daniel Dae Kim (later to be featured on Lost) and Steven Culp (who at the time was making a career of being the MVP of recurring character actors, being featured in such capacity on The West Wing and, most significantly, JAG).

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "Wolf in the Fold"

"Wolf in the Fold"
Star Trek (the original series)

Much like "The Savage Curtain" was very nearly a Lincoln episode, "Wolf in the Fold" is pretty much a Jack the Ripper episode.

It's also a Scotty episode.  By the second season, the original series began making a more concerted effort to focus on the supporting characters who would become well-known as part of the core group of the series (early in the first season, Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand were arguably more important than any of them, but then receded as the series progressed, and their significance in the films reflects that).  This was of course Chekov's debut season, and he quickly stood out, even though he was an extremely odd choice for the reason his character was introduced at all.

(I mean, think about it: this mop-topped younger character was clearly meant to capitalize on the Beatles/Monkees...and yet Chekov wasn't British, he was Russian.  You may, ah, remember, remember something called the Cold War?  Which was still going on at the time?  I think Chekov was really a passive-aggressive compromise in a show where Kirk was supposed to be the heartthrob.  The producers want to introduce another one, but how to reconcile this competition with the series lead?  Give him the wildly popular hairstyle.  But yeah, make him Russian.  Huge bonus points for looking past the present, as with the inclusion of Uhura, surely a mark in the show's ethnic profile, but still...Another reason, I think, that Star Trek had such a hard time finding respect.  And you probably never even thought about that until now!)

Early in the second season they tried pushing Scotty as the would-be rescuer of damsels in distress, so he'd have something to do other than being a miracle-worker (isn't that enough???), so to then create an entire episode that casts him in the role of the quintessential threat against said damsels (hey, go back and read that parenthetical digression, on the off chance that you tend to ignore such things; although, catch-22, if you didn't read that one you won't be reading this one, now will you?) just goes to prove how little the producers tried to make sense of such efforts.

Which makes the fact that fans came to embrace Scotty, Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura to the levels they did, that there has been constant debate on how much of a jerk William Shatner is, strikes me as really quite startling.  Because other than their regular appearances, these guys were clearly never near as important as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

Feel free to debate this.  (You will be wrong.)

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "Virtuoso"

"Virtuoso"
Star Trek: Voyager

Admittedly, The Doctor could get a little full of himself.  Most amusingly, this was demonstrated in "Author, Author" when the crew rewrote his holonovel Photons Be Free! to paint him in the worst light after the original version had everyone else look bad (the rest of the episode takes things more seriously, rest assured, but this is one of those instances where the old joke, "It hurts when I do this"/"Then stop doing it!" is once again hilarious).

"Virtuoso" is another such experience.  The nature of this medical emergency is an alien civilization that has never heard singing before.  The Doctor sings for them, they fall in love, he thinks it's a brilliant idea to leave Voyager behind and pursue this exciting new career, and of course he ends up proved absolutely wrong.

Not one of the best Doctor episodes, but certainly captures the character in a nutshell.

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "Unexpected"

"Unexpected"
Star Trek: Enterprise

A dude becomes pregnant.  Honestly, I think doing an episode like this so early in the series made it hard for some people to like Enterprise above and beyond any other reason you may have heard or had.

But the thing is, it's not just some random dude, it's "Trip" Tucker, and it's exactly this kind of experience that helped define him, ultimately, as one of the best characters in the whole Star Trek franchise.  Because of his accent, Trip was sometimes pegged as the McCoy stand-in, a country outsider looking in as the wonders of the universe came pouring in.  And yet, Trip was always more of a Kirk.  With a crucial difference.  Whereas Kirk routinely let experiences roll off his back (with a few exceptions, and probably an era that ended with Spock's death) and led the way with a smirk, Trip tended to stumble his way forward, undaunted but routinely inconvenienced.  He couldn't help but let things get to him.

The biggest impact on his life was when Trip's sister died at the start of the Xindi arc.  It ended up defining him for at least a season, trying to get over it.  Remember in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country when Kirk admits that Klingons weren't just his enemy by default anymore, but personally so after the murder of his son David?  Trip existed in this mode from the start.  He was Enterprise's emotional anchor.

So yeah, when the final episode ("These Are the Voyages...") comes around and spends most of its time exploring his impact, I tend to overlook things like how much time Riker and Troi got, because it's not a Riker and Troi episode, it's a Trip episode.  The final episode of the series, dedicated to Trip, not Captain Archer.  I think that says something right there.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Through the Looking Glass"

"Through the Looking Glass"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Remember "Mirror, Mirror," the episode from the original series where Kirk had a transporter accident and ended up in an alternate reality where Spock, however improbably, proves to be even more awesome with the simple addition of a goatee?

Well, Deep Space Nine returned to that alternate reality, repeatedly.  First it was with "Crossover," in which Bashir and Kira discover how badly things turned out for humans after Mirror Spock took Kirk's advice and tried to course-correct the Terran Empire.  Mirror Sisko, apparently, was something of a scoundrel.  And then he died.

"Through the Looking Glass" is the second in this series of episodes (to be followed by "Shattered Mirror," "Resurrection," and "The Emperor's New Cloak"), but as it turns out, it's a great deal more than that.

You see, whereas Mirror Sisko is now unavailable, there's another Sisko over there.  In the first episode of the series, we quickly learned Sisko's backstory, which involves the famous Battle of Wolf 359 (the Borg crisis as depicted in Next Generation's "The Best of Both Worlds") and how he loses his wife Jennifer, taking away from him his wife and from his son Jake, a mother.  Except now, Sisko is brought to the Mirror Universe (that's what it's commonly called) and meets Mirror Jennifer.

It's a startling moment.  Remember Next Generation's "Yesterday's Enterprise," in which we discover an alternate reality where Tasha Yar (a series regular from the first season) is very much still alive, which later leads to Sela, the Romulan daughter of Yar, and they're all played by the same actress (Denise Crosby)?  It's the kind of continuity that seems completely impossible, but is one of the neater things Star Trek has managed to accomplish over the years (the best example will always be Leonard Nimoy popping up in two J.J. Abrams movies).  Felecia M. Bell has far less pedigree than Denise Crosby or Leonard Nimoy, but she played Jennifer in the Deep Space Nine  pilot ("Emissary") and then returns for an expanded performance in "Looking Glass" (and then encore in "Shattered Glass").

The result is amazing.  Not so much for anything Bell herself does.  For Sisko, it's a part of the whole rebuilding process he'd been experiencing (this is one of the many examples of everything the third season did right by Sisko).

It's a defining moment for the series and arguably an unheralded one for the whole franchise.

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "The Savage Curtain"

"The Savage Curtain"
Star Trek (the original series)

If things had gone differently, "Savage Curtain" would be known for featuring Abraham Lincoln, and pretty much only that.  There's a lot of mileage to be had from Lincoln, and the original series had a habit of using every possible story template as a springboard for Kirk's adventures.

But things went as they did, and Lincoln was overshadowed by a couple of dudes named Surak and Kahless.

Who are those dudes, you ask (you Star Trek neophyte, you!)?  They were both founders of the way famous Star Trek alien civilizations tend to behave: Surak instituted Vulcan logic, Kahless laid the foundations of Klingon honor.  Kahless made an appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation ("Rightful Heir"), or at least his clone did, and his chosen weapon, the first bat'leth, was fought over in Deep Space Nine ("The Sword of Kahless").  Surak's teachings were reawakened in Enterprise ("The Forge"/"Awakening"/"Kir'Shara").

So "Savage Curtain" is known for introducing these fine dudes.

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "Rascals"

"Rascals"
Star Trek: The Next Generation

I swear I didn't select episodes based on how bad they made Next Generation look, but "Rascals" is easily one of the most ridiculous episodes of the whole franchise.  I mean, it makes "Spock's Brain" looks like "City on the Edge of Forever."

The basic premise has Picard, Guinan, Keiko O'Brien, and Ensign Ro de-aged to childhood because of a transporter accident.  Seriously.

This doesn't even account for the wildly disparate adult ages they represent, certainly Picard and Guinan.  (Maybe this doesn't matter given the premise.  But still.)  There's some mild amusement to the proceedings, including Riker pretending Kid Picard is his son when the inevitable additional crisis occurs (it only figures that the Ferengi are involved, I guess), but, I mean, seriously?

And, actually, this is also the final Next Generation episode I'll be writing about this month.  Early in the month I also included "The Dauphin," which was a decent Wesley Crusher episode from the second season.  Not as good as, say "The Game," but then, it had far less Ashley Judd in it.  I also featured "Genesis," which featured the far more awesome physical alteration of the crew being devolved into various ancestral states.  Fish Troi cannot be topped.  Except by Lemur Picard...

(Okay, okay.  Cake Troi obviously tops Fish Troi.  Bonus points if you can tell me about the episode in which Cake Troi appears.  And what kind of frosting she sports!)

A to Z 2015: Star Trek Episodes "The Quality of Life"

"The Quality of Life"
Star Trek: The Next Generation

In which the robot apocalypse begins with tools that become sentient.  Tools, folks, tools!  This is why comparing Data to a toaster in "The Measure of a Man" was actually chilling.  Chilling!  Do you know where your toaster is???  You've seen the meme involving cows and the surprising number of deaths they cause.  I'm just saying, know where your toaster is...

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Past Tense"

"Past Tense, Parts 1 and 2"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Hey, so remember "The City on the Edge of Forever," the episode routinely listed as the best of the original and any other series in Star Trek lore?  Well, "Past Tense" is better.

Yeah.  I just said that.  "City on the Edge of Forever" is one of those experiences, and there are many, many such experiences in and out of Star Trek and throughout history, that maybe has been greatly exaggerated over time.  When you boil it down, the story is basically this: Kirk stumbles upon a gateway that can be used for time travel; McCoy, who has just accidentally overdosed on his own medication, uses this gateway to randomly screw up history; Kirk and Spock conveniently are sent by the gateway to the exact time and location they need to prevent McCoy from actually going through with it; the victim in all this is some woman who actually proves the lie in the Star Trek assumption that a perfect future, or idealism in general, is generally a good thing.  Kind of screwy, and I won't go much further into that.

So now that I have enraged all geeks everywhere, let me make my feeble defense of "Past Tense."

This is another time travel episode that deals with social issues, leaving members of the crew stranded in a situation where they end up living like bums (except for Dax, because she's pretty).  Except these particular bums are also about to make history, as long as one of them manages to live long enough.  Except he doesn't.  So Sisko has to make the difficult decision to replace the guy.  Which is a pretty risky move.

But it's perhaps Star Trek in a nutshell better and more nuanced than "City on the Edge of Forever."  There's very little artifice involved.  There's a crazy bum involved, too, and he's a lot of fun to watch, and he doesn't care too much about offending people.  (Call me crazy, but people who aren't afraid of offending people are so much easier to understand.  At least they're being honest.)

Plus it's just one of the many third season stories from Deep Space Nine that helped prove how awesome Sisko is.  Seriously, it's like the writers suddenly woke up and realized they had an infinite amount of ways to demonstrate how awesome he is, and they spent the whole season doing exactly that.  It's my favorite-ever season of Star Trek.  Late in it, he gets promoted to captain (finally!), but not before spending some quality father-son time solar sailing, which is another all-time favorite episode ("Explorers") of this or any other series.

"Past Tense" is one of those Star Trek stories that clearly evokes an earlier one, and is perhaps the better for it.  But I've angered enough geeks already.  I'll stop here.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Oasis"

"Oasis"
Star Trek: Enterprise

Enterprise had a remarkable wealth of appearances from past series, not just from the usual pool of guest stars that had already made multiple appearances (I'm looking at you, Vaughn Armstrong and Jeffrey Combs), but a number of actors who had been series regulars.

"Oasis" features one such appearance.  The story itself was considered fairly derivative of past episodes, one of which featured the very actor who makes a return engagement for the occasion: Rene Auberjonois.

You may remember the name from the man behind the rubber mask of Odo from Deep Space Nine.  The holographic community his character has created for himself in "Oasis" is similar to an experience Odo had in Deep Space Nine's "Shadowplay."

Other past regulars who showed up in roles other than the ones they had previous played included Ethan Philips (who was Neelix in Voyager, now a Ferengi in "Acquisition") and Brent Spiner (who was Data in Next Generation, now an ancestor of the android's creator in a trilogy of episodes beginning with "Borderland").

***

And because I a big fan of a band named Oasis:

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Night Terrors"

"Night Terrors"
Star Trek: The Next Generation

Those who read me prattling on about Star Trek online might sometimes get the impression that I basically, unconditionally, like all of it.  This is not true.  There are episodes I find interminable.  "Night Terrors" is one of them.

"Where arrrrrre youuuuuuu?"

That's the extent of Troi's piercing investigation as she attempts to find out what happened to another Betazoid that's left him in a coma.  It's a repeated dream sequence that's utterly baffling as to how anyone at all thought they had good writing, good footage, and even in the case of the mostly blameless Marina Sirtis, good acting involved in any of it.

Hey, fans of Marina Sirtis, sometimes you nail bad material (it's possible) and sometimes you don't.  This one episode seems absolutely determined to bring the series back to the point in the first season where Riker is shouting over an immense precipice: "Aaaaanybodddddy???"

"Night Terrors," mind you, comes from the fourth season of Next Generation.  Fans generally agree that the series found its stride in a hurry at the commencement of its third season (the one that ended with "The Best of Both Worlds," or in other words when we all found out how awesome the Borg were), so to find an episode so poorly executed a season later just goes to prove, even when there's a good thing going there's always the chance that something will go horribly wrong.

It's a rare story featuring Troi in all her Betazoid significance.  It was far more common to leave all the Betazoid-ness to her mother, Lwaxana, who even in the seventh season and well into Deep Space Nine had plenty of interesting ways of displaying how horrifying (in a good way) Betazoids can be.

This is not to say "Night Terrors" suffers because of Troi, but that the writers let her down.  Significantly.  She was one of those aliens who were also half-human, like Spock, which was always an odd way to explore a species (or perhaps a reflection of how Americans like to view themselves, culturally blended and maybe not always that adjusted about it).  Because she was half-human, Troi's depiction of what a Betazoid is typically like was compromised.  She could only sense emotions, rather than exhibit full telepathic abilities like the rest of the family on her mother's side.

Granted, there's a better version of this same episode in the final season, "Eye of the Beholder."  But Troi would not truly be awesome until Star Trek: First Contact, in which she makes a hilarious drunk.  Go figure.  I think a writer who knew that in advance would have had a lot more interesting things to do with her.  I mean, it's not as if it was any big secret that she had mommy issues...

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Minefield"

"Minefield"
Star Trek: Enterprise

Being a prequel, Enterprise was expected to explore territory fans would have previously known about.  The era depicted in the series was best known, or perhaps only known, for the Romulan War, a conflict previously referenced in the original series episode "Balance of Terror," where it was established that until that point no human, much less Vulcan, had ever seen a Romulan.  Which would necessarily make any depiction of this period, involving Romulans, somewhat problematic.

Enterprise initially solved this dilemma in "Minefield," which does in fact feature the eponymous threat, a problem that becomes another spotlight of Malcolm Reed's penchant for pessimism when he becomes pinned by a mine to the hull of the ship.  Captain Archer does his best to reassure Reed, but it's a tough sell.

In the first season, there's an even more vivid example of Reed's tendencies as he and Trip are left stranded in space.  "Shuttlepod One" was considered one of Enterprise's early highlights.  It should be noted that Reed wasn't alone in his apprehensions.  Hoshi Sato was similarly skittish.  Everyone's nerves were tested to the extreme in the third season, naturally, as they embarked on a mission to prevent the Xindi from destroying Earth.  Trip tended to take most of these experiences in stride.  He was also one of the few human males to end up pregnant ("Unexpected"), although even he, or his clone, was reluctant to follow Archer's wishes in "Similitude."  ("This is a screwed-up situation," are his exact words.)

In the fourth season, Enterprise revisited the Romulans in a three-part episode ("Babel One," "United," and "The Aenar") that demonstrates both military and infiltration tactics as part of their activities during this period.  There had been speculation that the fifth season, which never happened, would have involved events more closely related to the Romulan War itself, and there was a movie trilogy developed, unrelated to Enterprise, that would have done the same.  The 2009 movie that was released did involve Romulans, but this is likely a coincidence, much as the fact that the last Star Trek movie before it, Nemesis, featured them too.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Little Green Men"

"Little Green Men"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Spacerguy has explained in his participation of the challenge this year how Worf ended up in The Next Generation.  I mention this because originally Gene Roddenberry didn't want Klingons, or any other familiar aliens, in Picard's adventures.  Instead, it would be all-new ones, like the Ferengi.

Now, the Ferengi as originally depicted in Next Generation were...not quite worthy successors to the Klingons.  There was the episode ("The Battle") where Picard's backstory begins turning things around a little, but it wasn't until Deep Space Nine that Ferengi could truly be taken seriously.  Still, "Ferengi episode" is a common term among even this show's fans, and it's not uttered with affection.  In fact, the episode that's generally regarded as the show's worst, "Profit and Lace," is of course a "Ferengi episode."

Perhaps tellingly, every time Deep Space Nine visited the Mirror Universe (the alternate reality first introduced in the original series episode "Mirror, Mirror"), a Ferengi is killed off.

All that considered, especially in Deep Space Nine, I personally loved the Ferengi.  Bartender Quark, ever the scheming pragmatist and therefore thorn in the side of Odo (chief of security, shape-shifter, eventual love interest of Kira Nerys), alone did an excellent job of redeeming them.  Eventually his brother Rom and nephew Nog became worthy companions in this crusade.  "Little Green Men" is the episode where they all undeniably shine together.

It's a time travel episode.  As the title implies, it's one of science fiction's many explanations for Roswell, New Mexico, and its long association with UFO conspiracy lore.  Nog has become the first Ferengi admitted to Starfleet Academy, but of course this doesn't stop Quark from attempting to make a side profit as the family journeys to Earth, which backfires so spectacularly they end up thrown into the past.

Watching as Army officers attempt to understand these strange aliens, before a bobby pin is used to repair Universal Translators hilariously hidden inside the outsize ears of our unusual heroes, it's pure comedy gold.

To say nothing of a more subtle in-joke that sees Nog digging through Earth history and coming across the profile of Gabriel Bell, who looks suspiciously like Captain Sisko.  This is because Sisko became Bell in the classic two-part "Past Tense" the previous season.  (You could do a lot worse to introduce yourself to the whole series, if you've never seen Deep Space Nine, with a viewing of both "Little Green Men" and "Past Tense."  And then throw in "Trials and Tribble-ations" for good measure.  And then "The Visitor," one of the best episodes of the whole franchise.)

All of which is to say, this is definitely an experience you need to see to truly grasp how awesome it is.  It may even have you liking Ferengi, and then you will have a totally different interpretation when you hear the term, "Ferengi episode," because there are plenty more good ones to discover.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "The Killing Game"

"The Killing Game"
Star Trek: Voyager

This two-part episode features the aliens known as the Hirogen, hunters who hounded Janeway and her crew for a while (in the ship's defense, the Hirogen had a sweet data plan complete with tech specialist Andy Dick).  For one reason or another, the Hirogen choose to stick the crew in a holodeck program where they act out WWII, and everyone pretends this is completely logical, even when the lead Hirogen intones, "This is not a game!" even though, ah, it clearly is.

And incredibly, this is not the only Star Trek two-parter to features aliens masquerading as Nazis!  (There was also Enterprise's "Storm Front.")

Okay, and so while I'm being somewhat flippant today, "Killing Game" is actually a lot of fun (which is always odd to say in relation to Nazis; see also: Inglourious Basterds), and is also indicative of how so much of the franchise after the original series, which was clearly modeled on the Cold War era, was kind of fixated on WWII (Deep Space Nine's Dominion War, certainly).

Also, in the program, Janeway becomes a leader of the French resistance, while Chakotay is an American soldier.  This is ironic, because in some ways the Maquis (as the name implies even in an obvious way) were modeled after the French resistance and Starfleet would be analogous to Americans, meaning for "Killing Game" Janeway and Chakotay swapped backstories.

The Hirogen, no matter if I've spent a little too much time making light of them, were actually some of the best aliens Voyager featured.  One of them even gave the famed Species 8472 (the CGI beings who at one point were kind of set up to be the show's answer to the Borg, until it relented and just mad the Borg the show's Borg) a run for their money.  A lot of fans tended to question when the series featured any one adversary for an extended period of time, but it made a great deal of sense, especially if the enemy in question was nomadic or sprawling in some other way, as the Hirogen were and certainly the Kazon (the guys who looked like even grubbier Klingons and were most famous for involving themselves in the treacherous affairs of Seska, who helped make the early seasons some excellent material to revisit) as well.

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "The Jihad"

"The Jihad"
Star Trek: The Animated Series

A group of bloggers I've followed for a few years now has chosen to watch The Animated Series all the way through.  They're writing about their experiences, which you can find every Wednesday (or Fridays in the case of The Geek Twins as part of their Geek Bits feature; the others are Armchair Squid, Mock!, and Spacerguy).  I actually recently just finished writing about each episode in the series for another of my blogs, Star Trek Fan Companion, where I've been working at reviewing every episode of the franchise for several years now.

But chances are, if you've seen this series at all, you might have been one of the viewers who watched its original run forty years ago, because since that time it's been considered less than officially part of Star Trek canon.  Until a new home video release a few years back, it was just something a lot of fans knew about but had never had a chance to see for themselves.

"The Jihad" is not particularly an episode worth recommending.  The episode everyone who knows anything about the series knows is "Yesteryear," which has been drawn on for years in canon material, most recently in 2009's Star Trek.

So what is "The Jihad"?  Less favorable for its legacy is that by the title alone it's perhaps the most obvious of the many, many Star Trek references that might look a lot less innocuous post-9/11 than it might have previously.  I plan on writing a whole article on Star Trek's famous terrorists.  Understand that none of them exist in material post-9/11 itself (when Enterprise was launched, actually).  "The Jihad," mind you, doesn't have anything to do with terrorists, but today hearing that term seems less acceptable than it would have when the episode's title debuted.  That must be acknowledged.

(It might also be stressed that "jihad" is an Islamic term concerning holy war, and does not specifically refer to terrorism.  But today, it's hard not to associate radical Islam with terrorism.)

So if not terrorists, who?  Basically it's an episode featuring a bunch of alien species, of which prototype, famously, was the original series' "Journey to Babel."  And since this is The Animated Series, which felt free to come up with the most wild alien designs it could imagine (to be outdone later by the five Xindi species from Enterprise in the CGI era), you can expect to find a lot of wild alien designs indeed, all of which are much like all those alien designs the Kirk movies liked to populate in the background, none of which were ever seen again (amazingly, even the species responsible for the Federation president in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Impulse"

"Impulse"
Star Trek: Enterprise

During the Xindi arc that was in fact the entire third season of Enterprise, Star Trek finally got to do zombies.  Let me rephrase that for maximum awesome: Vulcan zombies.

Enterprise, as you may or may not know, was a "prequel," in that it was set before the events of any other Star Trek.  As such, there were a lot of expectations, and quite gleefully Enterprise more or less subverted all of them.  The biggest subversion concerned Vulcans.  Vulcans in Enterprise hated humans, and they made no bones about it.  Remember Star Trek: First Contact and that feel-good moment at the end when it turns out the title refers to Vulcans?  And Enterprise was more or less a sequel to First Contact, mind you (there was even a whole episode dedicated to what happened to all the Borg remains, "Regeneration").  That whole idea turned out a lot worse in practice than in theory, as it turns out, Vulcans interacting with humans.

And while Vulcans were still more or less completely recognizable, as a culture they exhibited a distinct break from how Spock would later represent them.  The biggest break was in fact how the idea of mind-melds were treated at this time.  "Stigma" famously presented Vulcans who practiced them as more or less analogous to the LGBT community.  Fans were pretty livid about Vulcans in Enterprise.  By the fourth season, Captain Archer helps revive the philosophy of the famous Surak, founder of Vulcan logic, as the fourth season made continuous efforts to appease fans.  But of course, the fourth season was also the last one of the series.  (Too little too late.)

So what do Vulcan zombies have to do with any of this?  In short, T'Pol's arc in the third season, which itself was a manifestation of the inner turmoil she'd experienced all along, the lone Vulcan in a ship crewed almost exclusively by humans (aside from the dear Dr. Phlox, naturally).  Some fans remember T'Pol best for the sexy times she spent in various states of undress (a significant moment of which occurred in the third season), but she was in fact a notably nuanced character whose journey in the series closely matched that of Trip, arguably the best thing about the whole series and with whom she shared most of her screen time.

Zombie Vulcans is what would have happened to T'Pol, too, if she hadn't known what to do that season, even if there were a few stumbling blocks along the way.  The region of space where the five species of Xindi inhabited was bad for Vulcans, so bad that if entered without precautions taken, they became zombie Vulcans.  "Impulse" is full of zombie Vulcans.  That's the whole episode.

And Spock was at the receiving end of human bigotry, it must be remembered.  How do you think that happens, anyway?  Because the road to what has always been described as the perfect future was in fact a bumpy one.  Along the way, zombie Vulcans.  Because there ought to be some fun involved, right?

A to Z 2015 - Star Trek Episodes "Heroes and Demons"

"Heroes and Demons"
Star Trek: Voyager

This was one of several episodes Voyager got to much quicker than fans might have expected (B'Elanna Torres being split into her human and Klingon components in "Faces" was another).  It's a holodeck episode, which was one of the more notorious story types from The Next Generation.  But in Voyager there's a unique reason to have a holodeck episode: The Doctor.

No, I didn't randomly switch topics again.  The Doctor, not as in Doctor Who but rather the Emergency Medical Hologram, who in the early seasons was confined exclusively to sickbay because that was the only area of the ship equipped to project him.  Except, y'know, the holodeck.  So this was the episode where that finally happened.

"Heroes and Demons" might otherwise be known as the Beowulf episode, because that's the holodeck program that ends up being corrupted and needs to be played out.  And the only person aboard the ship qualified to complete it is also the one who seems least qualified: not only an individual who technically did not exist until he was activated in the wake of the ship's catastrophic entrance into the Delta Quadrant, but an apparent balding man who when he isn't being acerbic is actually quite nebbish.

In other words, this is the episode that establishes what The Doctor is truly made of, and I'm not talking about his programming.  (Much like the Moriarty hologram from Next Generation, "Doc" seems to have gained sentience simply from the unique circumstances in which he first appears.  One minute he's uttering, "Please state the nature of the medical emergency," for the first time and the next he's being told that everything he knows about his programming is in fact being thrown out.)

Yes, this is the first time they tease The Doctor getting an actual name and no, it never happens in seven seasons (in the series finale he does settle on one, in an alternate future timeline).

Most of The Doctor's early development comes from his unique relationship with Kes, another apparent innocent with a few tricks up their sleeve.  Of all the original characters from the series, they most embody the fresh start envisioned in the pilot (Tom Paris and certainly Torres are their closest rivals, until Seven comes along and kind of blows everyone out of the water, which in hindsight was probably appropriate, considering she was a bombshell) and undergo the fiercest trials during their time.  Just when Kes seems like she's gotten her peace, she comes back a couple seasons later in the controversial "Fury," an episode that actually encapsulates the true legacy of Voyager quite well (you understand, not in a negative way; I love this series).

Two additional standout Doctor episodes would be "Latent Image" and "Author, Author," both of which completely deconstruct Next Generation's more famous "The Measure of a Man."