Dinostar77 wrote:

Ohh missus still has her apple tv trial. Will have a look to see if its on there.

Sorry mate. iTunes. Paid for.

There was a bit of DS9 remastered footage from the recent DS9 documentary in the recent promo reel so now there are rumours abound about the possibility of a full DS9 remaster happening. Would be cool if they did DS9 and Voyager, would be a real shame if they never got remasters.

They did rescan a few negatives for clips in 'What We Left Behind' and they looked damn good. But I expect it would be too expensive to do the whole series. Weird that it happened for Babylon 5 though.

The producers behind the DS9 'What You Left Behind' doc are crowdfunding a similar one for Voyager so it looks as though we might be getting a look at a wee bit of remastered Voyager footage at some point.

Angel One (S01 E14)
Riker gets femdommed but it isn’t even sexy. The Enterprise looks for survivors of an escape pod that landed on the planet of the femdoms. On this planet, the women wear the trousers (and high heels, hair spray and makeup). The men also wear trousers but have to show their nipples. Riker wears a nipple suit and bones the head domme. You can tell the women don’t take any shit because they all stand with either their arms folded or their hands on their hips.

This little boner in the nipple suit seems to act as a personal assistant, butler, sex slave (inferred by me) and executioner of heretics. 

Meanwhile on the ship, there's some virus going round. If you get it you sneeze, then the next scene you’re completely incapacitated with bed sweats. Wesley hits Picard with a holodeck snowball, sneezes, then gets the bed sweats and isn't seen again. 

The main plot is crap. The male survivors have been spreading ideas about equality and now they must die. Riker gives a bad, barely coherent speech about not making them martyrs and not standing in the way of evolution and gets them out of it. It's not as bad as it sounds. 


I would. 

11001001 (S01 E15) 
I had my suspicions in the previous episode but the rapport and smirks between Riker and Yar in the cold open of this can only indicate that they're low-key boning buddies now. Two prime starfleet alphas on the sharp end of hostile encounters. Alone in deep space. No baggage. This is canon afaic. 

The Bynars are weird twin repair people who are integrated with computers. They stage some emergency to get the ship evacuated and then rob it. The only people left behind are Riker and Picard, being kept busy on the holodeck by some dream woman created as a distraction by the Bynars. She is unattractive. Riker and her are getting cosy then in struts Picard and now she's all over him. Cut back later and now it's her and Riker again. With Picard just sitting there looking at them canoodle. It's really weird, very unsettling but also very boring.

The Bynars are actually pretty decent characters. They needed the ships computer because their Sun was going supernova and they needed a backup for their planets database in case things went tits up. The Bynar bits are good but the holodeck parts broke the cringe-o-meter again. I swear they're making it unsexy on purpose for family friendliness. Characters turn up that are supposed to be complete sex bombs and they're pure uggers. 

Picard: Why didn't you just ask for our help?
Bynar 1: You might have...
Bynar 2: ...said no. 

Too Short a Season (S01 E16)
An old, terminally ill Admiral (played by a young person in heavy make up) needs to be taken to do a hostage negotiation. But he's OD'd on an alien anti-ageing drug and he Benjamin Buttons throughout the course of the journey. The drug is unstable leading to lots of clutching his sides and sweats. This is all pretty solid apart from the very dodgy make up and acting by some dick in his 20s. His ‘old person’ acting isn’t far away from a Harry Enfield sketch.

It turns out the Admiral made a deal forty years ago that plunged a planet into unending civil war. He's been drawn there to be revenged upon by one of the original participants. The man wanting revenge turns up and shouts his way through every line of dialogue he has. Picard sorts it.

The episode is completely unremarkable apart from it being fairly solid all around. Apart from the make up. And the terrible acting of two out of the three guest characters. But as a story it's fine. And Picard has a good episode as he unpicks the Admiral's lies and secrets and has to deal with going along with his erratic decisions.

When the Bough Breaks (S01 E17)
A stinker. A mythical utopia planet with advanced technology decloaks after thousands of years but, in a new twist for Star Trek, ALL IS NOT AS IT SEEMS IN THIS ALIEN PARADISE!!! The planet has a population of ‘thousands’ but they’re all dying and infertile so they nab 6 kids from the Enterprise, which they seem to believe will solve their problem. Their leader is Deep Throat from the X-Files wearing an orange boiler suit. 

A lot of rank bad acting from kids in this one. A lot of Picard being awkward with kids. A lot of Wesley. At the end, Deep Throat goes from arrogant, child-snatching villain to Picard's best mate in 5 seconds flat. There’s some underlying Wall-E-esque theme about how they’ve become dependent on their technology so didn’t find solutions to their problems that the Enterprise spots. It’s not properly fleshed out but I think this story was more interesting somewhere along the line than it turned out on screen. Nevertheless, nothing good here.  

Home Soil (S01 E18)
Really dreary. A planet is being terraformed. The opening 5 minutes is some very dry exposition from a terraforming science lady about things like siphoning from water tables. Then one of the other terraformers gets lasered to death by some drilling machinery, programmed to kill by persons unknown. Picard gets excited because he thinks this is going to be a cheesy whodunnit episode. But there’s only three suspects and two of them very obviously didn’t dunnit. That leaves the grumpy chief scientist as the obvious candidate and they clear up quickly that it wasn’t him. So that fizzles out to nothing. One of the other suspects is the terraforming science lady who’s grieving over her friend dying. Troi suggests Riker goes in and turns on the charm to squeeze her for info. He does, it works and no one has any qualms about it.

Meanwhile the thing whodunnit was a glowy crystal that can take over computers that is actually the first discovery of inorganic life. It gets beamed into sick bay for study, takes sickbay over, and declares war on the ‘bags of mostly water’ that have been siphoning off it’s precious water table, essential for them to live. Data works out they’re photovoltaic (which seems odd for creatures that live underground), they dim the lights in sick bay to drain it’s power, Picard says sorry for humans murdering loads of them and the lifeforms tell them not to come back for 300 years. 

It’s not a great episode. But it’s probably the first one that doesn’t have something absolutely dreadful in it. 17 episodes in and they’ve done it. They were just so busy doing that that they forgot to put anything good in. Progress though.

Coming of Age (S01 E19)
It’s happened. The first Riker chair hop. Wesley narrowly misses out in the Starfleet entrance exam to Mordok. After a quick dive into Memory Alpha, the Mordok actor apparently turns up in later episodes with a different name, but the same face because they’d already spent all the money on the make up and prosthetics to fit him. He’s quite interesting here anyway.

The subplot has a needlessly antagonistic inspector sent round to question the crew about events from previous episodes for possible lapses in protocol. He winds Riker right up, and after a testy exchange about whether Riker should sit or stand for his interview, he pulls this out. 

Have you ever seen a chair hop so full of contempt. Beautiful. 

Turns out the inspector is actually there to investigate Picard. Some old Admiral friend wants Picard to head up Starfleet Academy because unknown forces are at work and he needs allies back on Earth. He wanted to make sure Picard hadn't been gotten to by the unknown enemy. The first of what I remember as being many plots about an Enterprise crew member being offered a plum position but can’t do it because they love the Enterprise so much. Again, not good but it's maturing and not offending again. Laying some sort of groundwork for future plots.


Everything is still all over the place. It veers between Saturday morning cartoon levels of simplicity and then, in the next scene Picard is picking through the finer points of 40 year old hostage negotiations. There's a lot of Wesley but he's sandwiched in there, almost like they’re fulfilling a contractual requirement. There's a plot going on but now suddenly Wesley has to have his bit where he does something. Then they can get back on with it again. The show is fighting against this poor idea for a character even at this stage. Worf and LaForge have done nothing. Absolutely fuck all. Yar had a strong start in the earlier episodes but she’s faded away. Just one more big push until the beard.

In my head season 1 is all junk, but they reminded me about Ep21 Symbiosis which is actually really good.

Great stuff @monkey more more!

Watched some TNG over the weekend. Man its so good. That episode where Picard is visited by his old archaeology professor and the one where Barclay is afraid of the transporter (both series 6 i think). Excellent stuff.

I've been watching Season 3 and like, yeah, it does have some bangers but I think it's interesting that the thing that makes it feel like 'proper' TNG-VOY Star Trek as opposed to Seasons 1-2 is the consistency of the less interesting episodes - it's reliably entertaining comfort food.

Yep its great comfort/background viewing.

That's a great article.

I had no idea they've been tarting the old episodes up for a while now.

I knew they'd done new space bits. Didn't realise they changed the backgrounds as well.

They could take it even further.



Blake's 7 could do with some CGI. The space effects in that look like the animated bits in Monty Python.

Oh god.

Discovery has a couple of really nice, mysterious moments and the germs of some great ideas. But in general, Discovery is like three seasons of the Game Of Thrones final season. But worse. Much worse. 

Also, something that is bothering me about Picard AND Discovery is the ship design. Ok I like Discovery itself a lot. But the rest....pure shite. I couldnt even tell you what Picard's ship looks like. And the Romulan ships were just garbage.
Where have all the proper sci fi fans gone?