When I was a kid watching the reruns after school in the mid 70s, Scotty was always my favorite. I even worked a reference to him into my dissertation.
I was born in 1968 and grew up with reruns of TOS. I can only remember seeing a handful of episodes for the first time (and those are some of my earliest memories). Some of the episodes are awful, and the third season is overall very weak. You can be a Trek fan without loving…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The episode starts with O’Brien on the floor, as Bashir exposits that he was exposed to plot contrivance particles. On his way to meet a Romulan delegation, Sisko passes rowdy, drunken Klingons whose ship is in for repairs. O’Brien, trying to relax, talks Quark into setting up a dart board. He’s about to…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir thinks he’s bonding with Kira in a runabout as he namedrops and mansplains cheerfully about meditation and music, and asks her to call him “Julian.” Most of this happens in a single two-person take, and it’s delightfully cringeworthy to watch. A problem with the engines and an unusually rough return trip through…
I’m amazed at the level of detail that went into analyzing the prop computers created over 50 years ago for the original Star Trek. Not only has this website collected screen shots of the various props, but some include diagrams indicating which practical buttons on the props activated which lights. (The same website has sections…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Dax is apprehended for the allegedly criminal actions of a previous host. Bashir is unsuccessfully trying to escort Dax to her quarters when he witnesses people attaching her. Instead of calling for backup, he tries to be a hero and gets knocked out. The station manages to catch the baddies’ getaway ship, and…
Rewatching ST:DS9 At the bar, Quark and Odo bicker expositionally about this week’s guest stars, one of whom is killed by another in the very next scene. The victim’s twin brother swears vengeance against the shooter Croden. Odo suspects that Quark arranged for Croden to interrupt a surreptitious business deal and steal the macguffin, but…
Clearly influenced by Kubrick’s 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1975-1977 British TV show Space:1999 features our protagonist riding a gleaming off-white almost empty shuttle to a gleaming off-white space station and then on to a gleaming off-white moonbase. A delightfully consistent design ethic created a seamless connection between the sets where the actors…
Rewatching ST:TNG Troi wakes up, looking like a Romulan. When Subcommander N’Vek tells her she’s impersonating the imperial intelligence officer Major Rakal, and that she’ll be killed if she doesn’t play along, he invites her to use her empathic powers to see whether he’s lying. He’s not. He’s using the assumed authority of “Rakal” to…
I’ve often had dreams about returning to a former home and discovering a hidden room there. When I was a kid, the local TV station trimmed a couple minutes out of every rerun of Star Trek, so as an adult I would occasionally be surprised by a few minutes I had never seen before. …
After returning to Earth in Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin private spacecraft, Shatner is delivering an extemporaneous monologue about viewing Mother Earth and reflecting on death. “I hope I never recover from this,” he says, of the emotions he experienced. Much better than Kirk’s death scene in Star Trek: Generations. Someone (I was listening, not watching……
Although more modern-looking rifles appeared as props in ST:The Next Generation and later iterations, the iconic phaser rifle only appeared in the second pilot, the first to feature William Shatner and the character James Kirk. Reuben Klamer, the inventor of Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life board game and the designer of a Starfleet phaser…
Rewatching ST:TNG Beyond stating that he is on “a personal mission of peace,” the AWOL Ambassador Spock is reluctant to explain his presence on the Romulan homeworld. Referring to events depicted in the movie Star Trek 6 (which had not yet premiered when this episode first aired), Spock says he is reluctant to risk any…
Rewatching ST:TNG Informed that the venerable Ambassador Spock has vanished without a word and has been spotted on Romulus, Picard visits the ailing Sarek, who reports Spock’s optimistic hopes to reunify the Vulcan and Romulan people. This was an important theme in the early 90s, with the recent fall of the Berlin Wall and the…
A great father-son story, written by Adam Nimoy, son of Leonard Nimoy. I was 10 when “Star Trek” debuted in 1966, and I was reading Spider-Man comics and listening to the Beatles at home in LA — a very different experience from having to deliver newspapers in the dead of a Boston winter. Dad’s zeal…
I’ve been a college English faculty member for over 20 years and I just realized I’ve been spelling and pronouncing “detritus” wrong all my life. A short while ago I realized I had typed “detrius” — and that’s how I heard the word in my head — “DEE tree us.” But the word has an…
See Also: Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Rewatch Great post from Fake History Hunter: It is often said that the first interracial kiss on TV was the (involuntary) kiss between Captain James Tiberius Kirk (William Shatner) and translator and communications officer Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in the Star Trek…
In poplar culture, Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek has a reputation of being a womanizer. Chris Pine’s portrayal of Kirk in the rebooted movies certainly plays up that character trait, but in Kirk’s original appearance, the second pilot episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” it’s Kirk’s helmsman Gary Mitchell who follows a…
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. Picard searches for a legal loophole in peaceful planet’s pact with the devil. Memorable scenes include Data playing Scrooge on the holodeck, courtroom hijinks (“The advocate will refrain from making her opponent disappear”), and Picard padding around on the planet in his jammies (“Just have Mister Data fetch me…
I recall just sort of telling the editors that I would be taking this story, thank you very much. I started looking for this clipping when I reviewed The Measure of a Man for my ST:TNG Rewatch. Sadly The University Journal is no more. When I was at U.Va. it was one of two competing…