Back around June 4th I wrote a post about how Paramount had pushed all its first season episodes onto YouTube, and because they were free to view in June that I would binge watch them and then write my own summaries about each episode because I didn’t like reading any other Star Trek summary (I’m looking at you Wikipedia). I did watch all the episodes, but when I went back to re-view them again and to write up the summaries, a funny thing happened. I found that when I watched them again, slower this time, they did not “age” well at all. I didn’t like them nearly as much on the second viewing as I thought I did on the first.

Star Trek got its start on NBC back on September 1966 (back when I was in sixth grade). After three seasons it was canceled, and move out into reruns on the nascent UHF channels of the day. Soon after it was picked up as a cartoon series, then the first movie was released. Then more movies, more television series, etc. When I look back I see 56 years of some kind of Star Trek exposure in all types of media. Granted there were gaps between various releases, but there were all the yearly conventions where loyal fans could gather and celebrate all things Trek. Let me note that I did not see all the movies or shows, nor did I go to any of the conventions. But I read the reports, stories and reviews, so I vicariously kept up. What I’m feeling (and have for some time) is fatigue for all things Star Trek. I should have realized I was tired of Star Trek when my favorite Star Trek movie turned out to be Galaxy Quest.

I might move back to finishing these summaries. Right now I have the first season episode about a third of the way finished in draft form, which I’ll probably keep around a while. The Star Trek thrill is gone, and has been for some time.

I know I wrote a while back how I wasn’t interested in any more Star Trek content. I’m turned off by “Discovery” and “Picard.” And yet, having binged watched the first season of “Strange New Worlds,” I have to admit liking at least a few of the episodes. While there are plenty of references to other shows (in particular, “Discovery”), it can never-the-less stand on its own.

For whatever reason Paramount has decided to put the entire first season of “Strange New Worlds” (ten episodes) on YouTube to watch for free. This will last all of June. So while they’re out there I intend to write detailed and correct synopses of all ten episodes.

Why? Because of a personal peeve. I’m tired of coming across synopses of shows that are wrong in so many little ways (yeah, I know, someone is wrong on the Internet). Rather than waste my time arguing I thought it would be better put to use by just doing it myself. So here we go, for at least ten more entries.

For the record, I actually enjoyed this series. I thought the story telling was a bit uneven across the ten episodic arc, but there’s no denying the high production quality and excellent overall character development. I don’t know if I’ll want to sign up to Paramount+ to watch season 2, but I am getting ready to drop two streaming services I currently pay for, so I suppose I could replace those with Paramount+ and maybe even Hulu. Who knows?

When the third season started I eagerly tuned into the first episode, Spock’s Brain. That episode turned out so bad it turned me off of The Original Series. I have never watched a single complete episode of season 3, not even in reruns. Why was Spock’s Brain so bad? Mid-episode, Bones beamed down to the surface of a planet with a brainless Spock in tow. Bones had attached a device (prop) to Spock’s head, and had a control box (another prop) in his hand to help control brainless Spock. When he pressed a button on the hand-held prop to “control” the brainless Spock, a mechanical clockwork-like clicking sound could be heard coming out of the T.V. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a technologically advanced culture portrayed as using a mechanical clicking sound to convey the brainless character Spock moving and walking. I suddenly realized I could have written everything up to this point better than what I was watching, at which point I turned off the show, and the T.V. itself.

At that moment in my young life a basic rule was born. If a science fiction movie or a television show looked like something I would write, then it wasn’t worth finishing. Because believe me when I say I couldn’t write a lick of decent science fiction you’d want to read if my very life depended on it. But I do have enough good taste to recognize good science fiction when I read or see it.

Television shows are easy to boot to the curb as they are part of your basic streaming/cable service. Movies, especially first run shows in theaters, are tougher to walk out on because of the expense of seeing them (but I have for a few). That’s why I don’t go to very many any more, and haven’t since at least 2017. The pandemic just reinforced my abandonment of theater movies.

I attended the first Star Trek movie and managed to sit through the entire production, but I’ve never since watched it again. The second movie, The Wrath Of Khan, is the only movie I truly enjoyed and the only movie I have watched more than once. I watched The Search for Spock, leaving less than satisfied. I left in the middle of The Voyage Home and never went back to watch another one of the original cast films.

As for The Next Generation I pretty much gave up on it after watching a few of the first season episodes, with one notable exception. Guest star John de Lancie added considerably to every episode he appeared in as the character ‘Q’. I tried to watch those episodes he appeared in. He is a treat to watch. It’s a shame he was never made a starship captain.

I essentially skipped Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I managed to watch a bit of Enterprise, stopping during the Xindi story arc and never going back. As for the modern show Discovery, I absolutely can’t stand it. I assume it’s due to the fact it most certainly isn’t aimed at my age demographic, but still. Discovery (or DISCO to its admiring fans, which says a lot there) started its existence racing off the proverbial cliff with a fungus-powerd starship warpdrive. Fake dilithium crystals were bad enough, but a fungus? Really?

Then there’s Picard. I came by that show through Apple TV+, and I came by Apple TV+ because I purchased my iPhone 11 back in late 2019 before I retired. Apple was handing out free twelve month subscriptions with the purchase of new expensive Apple gear. When I finally redeemed my free subscription in December 2019 it lasted pretty much through 2020. Along with Apple TV+ came a free 30-day subscription to Paramount’s streaming service, so I used that to watch the first season of Picard. By the time I was done I’d done something I hadn’t done since The Original Series; I’d watched most of an entire season of Star Trek. I wasn’t impressed and did not watch Picard season 2, nor will I watch season 3. It’s just not worth my time.

And what about the latest Paramount property, Strange New Worlds? I’m not going to bother. What little I’ve read on other news spots indicates it’s a retread of The Original Series’ first pilot, The Cage. New actors obviously, but Strange New Worlds has its real roots (and a number of its characters) from Discovery, and that’s enough to kill any interest.

If I dislike Star Trek so much, why even talk about it? Good question, and the answer is because I’m tired of seeing it constantly mentioned and written just about everywhere else on the web. Because I’d decided I’d finally had enough. Star Trek in the 1960s was something fun and a way for my friends and I to get excited by the future. Now Star Trek is just another way for Paramount to create a recurring revenue stream called Paramount+. Long gone are the days when I’d channel surf at 2am through the UHF stations until I found one playing an old TOS episode. Those easy days came to an end when it got pulled into Netflix along with everything else Netflix streamed. Now everything Star Trek has been gathered up into Paramount+, and you gotta pay them to watch. No thanks.

This is my first and last rant about Star Trek. It’s finally out of my system. Sorry to have bothered you.

Apple TV+

I got a year’s free subscription to Apple TV+ when I purchased my iPhone 11 Pro Max in September 2019. It was January 2020 before I even bothered to set up the application, let alone start to watch anything on it. The only show I remember watching was “For All Mankind,” and I stopped watching it because I’m no fan of alternate history, especially when it involves the space race of the 1960s between the US and the Soviet Union. The whole series is based on what if the Russians moon rocket booster, the N1, had actually worked? I’ve studied the N1 and it was a manufacturing disaster. The N1, on paper, was the most powerful heavy lift first stage every built. That first stage used 30 NK-15 engines, which were considered the most powerful rocket engines in that class of their day. The problem is that the N1 first stage was not static fire tested, the entire N1 program being under-funded and rushed to completion. As a consequence, all four N1 test launches self-destructed when launched. An awful lot of what went wrong in our time line would have had to have been done correctly in an alternate history. An awful log stretching back decades. You can’t just blithely wish it so. Rocketry is stupidly hard, such that the only rocket that even comes close to the N1 is today’s Falcon Heavy, with three Falcon 9 cores, each core with nine engines, for a total of 27 when the Heavy is under full thrust.

I got tired of all the glib passing over of the technical issues so that “For All Mankind’s” writers could write a convoluted soap opera. I skipped around a few episodes in the first season, and gave up.

After several months of light watching I stopped watching Apple TV+ completely. I only remembered I had it when I received an email from Apple that my free subscription was expiring in November 2020. That’s when I unsubscribed.

CBS All Access

That service was offered through Apple TV+ with a free 30 day all-you-could-watch trial, so I signed up. I managed to watch “Star Trek: Picard” as well as “Star Trek: Discovery.” Both shows were fan-service shows. If you’re a die-hard Trekkie then those shows are certainly for you. I’m not in that category. I’m the 8th grader who turned off the original Star Trek, season three, first episode, “Spock’s Brain,” because it was so bad. That episode has absolutely no redeeming qualities; by the time I’d gotten to the mid-point of the episode I’d had enough. I never watched another episode of season 3, and when NBC finally killed it I barely noticed.

Both of those new shows reminded me a bit of that crap. I quickly went through all the episodes, skipping parts that were of no interest to me. On “Picard,” the last episode where Data dies was particularly bilious. “Discovery” on the other hand was just off the scale when it came to overall acceptance of any of the stories or plot lines. “Discovery” is just bad fantasy wrapped in Star Trek technobabble and flashing lights. Once I finished with “Discovery” I killed my subscription.

Netflix

I was an old subscriber to Netflix. I opened a subscription with Netflix back when you ordered DVDs to be shipped to your home, back in the early 2000s. It was cheap, a lot cheaper than going to the movies, and it helped entertain the family, including the girls who were in high school at the time. I stuck with Netflix when they switched over to streaming; I first streamed Netflix with an app I installed on the family Nintendo Wii. When I upgraded the family DVD to Blueray, it came with Netflix streaming pre-installed. Same with my first digital TV, a Samsung 55 incher. Netflix was ubiquitous, and full of video content from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was cheap and plentiful.

Then it got not so cheap and not so plentiful. Other streaming services came along (Disney, for example) and starting pulling movies to show on their services. And then Netflix started to “rotate” movies out, so that if you didn’t watch it, and it was rotated out, too bad, so sad. And then Netflix started to make their own movies, none of which appealed to me. I know my taste in movies can get pretty trashy, but not Netflix trashy. So early 2020 I killed that subscription.

So what are we watching these days?

Amazon Prime with Brit Box

It’s Amazon, and it seems to come with everything. I added Brit Box so we could see all the British TV that never was complete on any other streaming service. So all the seasons and all the episodes are complete on Brit Box. I watched Amazon pretty much because of “The Expanse,” but if you read my last post, you pretty much know I’ve walked away from that. I use Amazon Prime for a lot of other services besides movies, so I’m not to concerned with whether I keep it or not; Video is just one of those added perks.

Disney+

I signed up to Disney+ because it’s cheap and because of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision,” as well as the complete catalog of Star Wars, MCU, and Pixar. There’s a lot there to keep me occupied. But not necessarily happy.

I’ve already passed judgement on “The Mandalorian” and found it lacking. Once again, a fan service episode. If there’s any redeeming feature to the show, it was season 1, episode 1, in which Werner Herzog stared as “The Client.” It slowly went down hill from there.

“WandaVision” is a bit more enigmatic. They’re trying to be clever, and they’re almost making it happen. These first few episodes remind me a bit of the first few seasons of “Agents of Shield.” The fact that new episodes are only released weekly every Friday is a bit of a letdown, but then, it takes time to film and produce anything, so I can wait for the finished product to be delivered.

Going back through the MCU catalog has allowed me to build a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together. The problem with movies is the long delay between releases, when you memory of the last movies grow a bit hazy. So when I see something that doesn’t quite make sense in one film, I can go back to a prior film and see how that led to an event in the later film(s). I’ve grown to have a better appreciation of what the MCU accomplished up to this point.

In conclusion

That’s about it. My TV watching is declining over time. I have a recent LG 55 inch TV that is programmed to stream just about everything. Funny thing is I spend as much time watching streamed content on my iPhone and iPads as I do on the LG. My wife is going down the same path. If we want to watch something together I’ll pull up my 12 inch iPad Pro and share it with her. It seems sufficient, and it harkens back to the early days of broadcast TV when my primary TV was a 13″ Sony that my wife and I shared right when we married. Talk about coming around in circles…

As for the other kind of visual entertainment, video games, I hardly play anything anymore. I have exactly one game I play on both iPhone and iPad. My oldest daughter and her husband gave me a Nintendo Switch Lite, on which I play “Animal Crossing” and share it with them and my youngest daughter. I’ve tried to get interested in other Switch games, especially when the local Walmart puts them on sale, but I play them a bit then put the cartridges in my Switch case and don’t think much about them after that.

I have no patience anymore with fantasy and make believe worlds. They take too much time, have too many logic and story holes, and demand too much money over time for too little in return.

As a kid I’d gotten a small reel-to-reel GE tape recorder one Christmas, and I quickly pressed it into use recording the audio from each episode. I eventually had two stacks of tapes, one for season one, and one for season two. I never recorded season three; after spending one evening watching “Spock’s Brain,” I never turned Star Trek back on again because that episode was so bad. I spent the rest of the third season replaying my audio tapes, imagining the visual portion of Star Trek while the audio and music played from my tape player. After the original series was canceled I concentrated on Apollo up through 1972, when I graduated from high school and headed off to college. Those tapes got recycled into other recordings, and eventually into the trash when they were worn out.

Over the years that’ve followed I’ve watched some of the movies (“The Wrath of Kahn”), some episodes from the spin-offs like Next Generation, and even gone back to watch the occasional rerun of the original series. To this day I still can’t watch “Spock’s Brain” or any of the third season episodes.

These past few days were an opportunity to kill some time by binge watching TOS. I’ve had a Netflix account now for years, starting back when you got physical DVDs in the mail. The physical media’s long gone, but I still stream. So I fired up my iPhone 6s+, pulled up the Netflix app, and went slumming through all those old episodes.

The version of TOS that Netflix has are the updated episodes where CBS went back and redid nearly all the old special effects. Planets really look like planets, especially when that planet is Earth (“Tomorrow is Yesterday,” “Assignment: Earth”), the spaceships were cleaned up, as were the movements of ships in space. With all the science fiction that has been produced since TOS first aired, it only made sense to update the effects. And I certainly appreciated those updates.

The only problem is that those cleanups made all the episodes look that much worse for their age. What was entertaining and exciting for a middle-schooler in the 1960s now seems worn, frayed around the edges. The plot holes are too obvious and too numerous to mention, cause and effect too silly. I grew up during the period of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, watching real astronauts fly into space. It was watching real rocketry that made me believe we might have something like Star Trek in the future. When it all got shut down and replaced with the Shuttle, Star Trek became part of the “kid stuff” I left behind. Along with a lot of other silly Hollywood science fiction.

I’m glad I got a chance to skip through all those old episodes. I think I finally got the very last vestiges completely out of my system.

The underlying Borg cube itself was created by a very talented graphic artist who was either a student or working (or both) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (computer graphics, computer art?). He’d been creating a series of Star Trek models, and then setting them up in a series of beautiful visualizations which he’d posted on the Web. That Borg cube is one of his works. Unfortunately, having grabbed this back around 2005, I no longer have any idea who he is or where he’s currently at. I would very much like to know, if for no other reason than to provide proper attribution.

I found the Microsoft logo on the Microsoft site as one of their official logos in SVG format. It was available for download, so I downloaded that. Using Photoshop and layers, I put the Borg cube in the lowest layer, then put the logo on the next layer. I then adjusted the logo in size and location, adding transparency to the logo, so that it appeared to blend into the side. Export to JPEG, and post. Somewhere in all my stuff I think I still have that Photoshop file, but I can’t find it. It has, after all, been a good 10 years, and once I created this conglomeration I quickly moved on to other things.

I also created this at a time when I was filled with considerably more righteous indignation against all concerned parties. It has tapered off considerable over the last decade. Microsoft has long since ceased being the fearsome monolithic force the Gnu-ists would like to continue to think it is. As history now notes, two years later Apple introduced the first iPhone on 29 June 2007, during which we were entertained by Steve Ballmer’s clueless dismissal of the iPhone. Fast forward to today and Microsoft is little more than an historical footnote in mobile and is boxed into the dwindling PC market, everybody has Android or iOS smartphones, and people are now writing about how Microsoft “is the company to watch in 2016.” How far the once mighty have fallen.

Which is to say that the graphic is irrelevant. It no longer has the visceral punch it might have once had due to both Microsoft’s and the Star Trek franchise’s slide into historical irrelevancy. While Microsoft might have a chance of coming back, I don’t ever see that happening with Star Trek. But that’s another story…

The Star Trek original series “Balance of Terror” (S1E14) is considered one of that series’ best episodes (the best is always open to debate). The episode’s many strengths lie in its stars and co-stars, such as Mark Leonard who played the Romulan Commander and Paul Comi, who played Lt. Stiles, as well as the multiple plot threads carefully woven into the story, such as the dangers of prejudice (Stiles) and the horrors and fruitlessness of war. And yet, there is this one issue I have with the story; the use of the Romulan plasma weapon.

While I’ve read descriptions of the story that call the device a plasma torpedo, it appears in fact to be a directed energy weapon, a plasma canon that requires nearly all the Romulan ship’s power to fire. It’s an interesting plot twist because it requires the Romulan ship to go from invisibility to visibility before firing the weapon. Both weapons, one defensive, the other offensive, require too much power to operate together. It’s implied several times in the story that the ship and its new weapons are prototypes, with not quite all the kinks worked out. Unfortunately future writers failed to note this important plot detail and made the cloaked-and-invisible-ship-appears-before-firing shtick a boring part of the Star Trek canon.

The problem I have is what happens after the weapon is fired at the Enterprise (see screen shot above). For static, unmoving defenses the plasma weapon is ideal, and it’s used to full and horrifying effect against every asteroid post it goes up against. It works in a strait line, the one that intersects the ship and the stationary target. However, the Enterprise is not a stationary target unless its captain is willing to make it such. The Enterprise is much more nimble than the Romulan ship in a straight-up ship to ship fight. Thus, when the Romulans opened fire with their plasma weapon, all the Enterprise had to do was move out of the way at a sharp angle out of the direction of fire instead of moving in reverse. They’re all in space, and space is three dimensional. The idea of backing up in reverse, under warp, was nothing more than a crude way to build drama in the show. Enterprise was in no real danger from that ball of plasma except from the decision by Kirk to just back up.

The other problem I have with the episode is the Romulan Commander’s decision to leisurely head home after the final attack on Outpost 4. It’s one thing to slowly sneak in under the invisibility cloak, but once all tactical actions had been performed, the captain should have dropped the invisibility cloak and made all possible speed back to the Neutral Zone and Romulan space. They knew that the cloaking device “consumes much fuel.” Perhaps the Romulan commander had such a deep death wish he really did want to die by Federation starship.

No matter the flaws, in the end it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a TV show, written on a tight schedule and budget, at a time when a lot of this was new. Calling out flaws some forty-plus years later is a bit unfair. This is more along the lines of lessons learned; what might I do different if I had the opportunity to redo this particular story.