The Voyage Continues
Saturday, June 12, 2010 12:43:54
After finishing Star Trek: The Original Series a few weeks ago, I looked into the continuation of the 5-year mission, starting with The Animated Series, and moving on to Star Trek: Phase II, also known as "New Voyages".
Star Trek: The Animated Series
Thankfully, there were only 22 half-hour episodes to this horrible series. There's debate over whether this series is part of the official Star Trek canon, but I think it's safe to say that regardless of its official standing, the series is complete crap. Its purpose was noble - bringing the original cast back after the original show was cancelled, to produce a continuation of the story and provide a series with things that could not be explored in live-action due to budget restrictions. So in theory, they could do more imaginitive visuals for less money. Instead, what we got was animation nowhere near the quality of Yogi Bear - at least in Hannah Barbara stuff, people showed some facial expressions and occasionally moved. In TAS, you get very boring animation, ridiculous animal people, and awful humor. There were also the same stupid purple dragon things in about 8 different episodes, always with the same animation and horrible sound effects. This was also true of many of the shots - the bridge and transporter room reused the same frames over and over and over again, even with different people were there. One example was when Scotty was beaming someone up, they switched to a close-up of the transporter controls, where you could see Kyle's moustache while he was operating the controls, then a wide shot again with Scotty, then back to the close-up with Kyle's moustache. It's like they didn't bother even watching the final product before releasing it.
For the first few episodes, it hurt my brain to listen to their science-fiction dialogue. In TOS, and to a lesser extent the newer series, the techno-babble can be either unscientific or nonsensical, but in this one, it was truly ridiculous. They didn't even try to get anything right. After I realized that it wasn't getting any better, I shut that part of my brain off to finish watching the rest of the episodes.
Many of these episodes were continuations of original series episdoes (More Tribbles, More Trouble, Mudd's Passion, Once Upon A Planet (Continuation of Shore Leave)). But the second episode, Yesteryear, bothered me because it directly spat in the face of one of the all-time great original series episodes, The City on the Edge of Forever. In Yesteryear, they return to this planet and use the guardian to study the past (with predictable results - someone screws something up). But the original episode's entire point was to show how dangerous and painful it can be to screw with the past. And while some other unrelated episodes may involve time travel and ignore this idea, this episode obviously was thinking of the original one, and it's completely out of character for Kirk to want to go back again.
There are plenty more examples of why this was terrible, but it would take all day to list them.
Phase II
Star Trek: Phase II started out as Star Trek: New Voyages, and continues on the 5-year mission where the original series left off (possibly ignoring the animated series altogether). It's technically fan-fiction, but it seems to be more accepted and popular than most fanfic franchises out there. To date, there have been six episodes, including the unofficial pilot and the 2-part "Blood and Fire" separately. They have several more episodes in progress, and seem to be releasing about one episode per year.
With a very limited budget, volunteer cast and crew, and no opportunity to make a profit (as per CBS rules), you can't expect much out of the series. The actors playing the main characters are all awful, and some have been re-cast more than once (Spock is on his third actor). Andy Bray as Chekov is probably the best of the bunch, but Chekov's character has never really been deep, so once you have the accent down, you're 75% there. James Cawley as Kirk is probably the worst - he seems to have no clue how to play the role, but his job as producer apparently gives him the ability to cast whoever he wants, and who wouldn't want to be Captain Kirk?
The series has been visited by a few real Trek actors, with Walter Koenig and George Takei playing older versions of their characters (Chekov when he had a rapid-aging disease and Sulu after a temporal problem left him stranded on a planet for 30 years) in back-to-back episodes. Denise Crosby had a role as an ancestor (probably great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother) of Tasha Yar from TNG.
The special effects were as bad as expected in the first few episodes, but dramatically improved by the 4th episode - still not as good as the TNG era, but significantly better than the original effects from TOS.
The stories are generally pretty bad, but much better than the animated series. However, they made the exact same mistake as TAS, once again going back to the City on the Edge of Forever planet. There was also one episode where something completely unexplainable happens to a main character (I'll skip the spoilers), something that is a blatant violation of the timeline, and is completely ignored in later episodes. Since there isn't much publicity for this series, it's hard to find official word on why they did it, but from what I've read, the show creators really didn't seem to have a problem with it, even though everyone else does.
Next
Next up for me is Enterprise. I watched about 30-35 episodes when it originally aired, and didn't care much for it. However, as a Star Trek fan, I can't just not watch a series just because I don't like it. With nearly all of my shows on break for the summer, I should have plenty of time to get through the series over the next few months.
Tags: review tv
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