Flight Simulator: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Mac, PC)

Quite simply, a watershed moment for me. 

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is the reason the video game section of this project exists. It is, as far as I'm concerned, *the* Star Trek video game because it was *my* Star Trek video game, or at least my first. In true 25th Anniversary fashion, it missed the actual date itself by a good year and a half, possibly even longer depending on which platform you played it on. But with time unbound such things are as trivialities and we can make moments last as long as they need to. 

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was released between 1992 and 1993 on a number of platforms: It came out on DOS first, and was eventually ported to the Amiga and Macintosh. Much, much later it was re-released a few times on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I played the original release. There was a different game also called Star Trek: 25th Anniversary made for the NES and Game Boy in 1991 but (and this is an extreme rarity in my history with video games), it's the version that came out on home computers that I remember, not the console one. In particular, it's the Macintosh release: My first computer was one of the original Macintosh Classics...I can't remember the actual model, but it must have been able to support some form of colour graphics considering it could run this game. I loved that machine dearly and a huge portion of my formative gaming memories were kindled on it: This game, the planetarium programme Voyager II, Cyan Worlds' beguiling Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo (which anticipates their much more famous Myst), the Carmen Sandiego games...They were all there among the first slate of video games I actually got to own for myself.

Some years later, I'm going to guess around 1995, I came home one night to find my computer had been replaced by one of the first generation of the new Power Macs, the ones where they started using those PowerPC chip architectures. That machine was as big and bulky and 90s as my old one had been sleek and compact and 80s and I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that...I appreciated having a more powerful computer to play around with, but I still deeply missed that plucky little machine I had loved so much. This new one seemed to tower over me while my old one had felt just the right size. Although I'll certainly give the Power Mac points for longevity-I still have it, and dug it out in anticipation for this essay. After locating some irritatingly misplaced power cords, I fired it up and was playing Star Trek: 25th Anniversary within minutes. Everything still works as well as they day I first got it.

Apart from my personal sentimentality, my having the Macintosh version of this game is actually relevant in two important respects: One, because I actually still have the original game running on more or less original hardware, this sadly means I couldn't get any screenshots of my personal copy to share with you. There's probably a way to get media like that from old computer hardware, but I don't know how to do it without emulators and regardless I certainly wouldn't have had the time or resources to set it up. Thankfully, it seems this game is surprisingly popular and well-known enough there's a bunch of screenshots and gameplay videos of it floating around the Internet you could find if you were interested. Secondly, and I just found this out comparatively recently, it seems later versions included the actual voices of the Original Series cast members reprising their roles, meaning this game and its sequel are technically their final ensemble performance. Either this was specific to the PC version or a feature of one of the later CD-ROM re-releases (I have the version that came on 3.5” floppy disks), but either way that was something that was never part of my experiences with the game.

Speaking of the Original Series, It's here where you could say my Star Trek “fandom” as it were truly began to crystallize: This game was very possibly the first bit of Star Trek ephemera I got that wasn't directly linked to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as a result this was my first introduction to the Original Series crew and the work that defined my early impressions of who they were and what I thought they were like. Perhaps appropriately then, the spectre of the recent Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country looms very large over this game, and it is in fact far more of a piece with that tone and feel of film then it is with the actual Original Series.


The bridge is what stands out to me the most: While the crew still wear their technicolor prep school-esque uniforms from the show, the bridge seems to be quite clearly based on the one from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which means it's darkly lit and set really low, surrounded by walls with constantly blinking and flashing monitors. There are still a few design notes that nod to the Original Series, like Kirk's captain's chair and that red handrail that goes around the perimeter of the room, though I wouldn't have known that back then. I really like this look for Kirk's Enterprise: It gives the ship a pared-down, utilitarian feel while still keeping a sense of 1980s technofuturism to the aesthetic. Actually, I think I prefer the way the Enterprise looks here then to any other depiction of this story-For the longest time I always pictured it looking the way it does in this game rather then in any of the Original Series or Original Series-inspired TV episodes or movies. I was really disappointed to see the real sets when I finally got to see the show in the late 90s and early 2000s on the Sci-Fi channel because by that point they looked so fake and uninspiring to me. The material realities of television production simply could not live up to my own imagination.

As you may have gathered, the fact that I played this game before I'd ever seen any of the Original Series episodes or movies is kind of significant (well...I may have watched “The Trouble with Tribbles” before playing this come to think of it, as I seem to recall renting it and “By Any Other Name” from the local video store along with possibly some season 1 Star Trek: The Next Generation stuff 'round about the time the latter show was first coming to VHS. That would have been 1991, and this game came out the year later, but I can't recall for certain). It's this version of the Original Series (even down to the 16-bit remix of the theme song) that I remember most fondly. And yet even so...While at once I was interested to get a first-hand look at what this “Other” Star Trek thing my relatives kept talking about was, at the same time the fact that this wasn't Star Trek: The Next Generation, wasn't the thing I *really* watched and liked, was a niggling bit of reality that would always gnaw at me in subtle ways.

Even back then while I fully understood and recognised that this was the thing turning 25, that this was its birthday and that's what we ought to be celebrating, I just couldn't help myself from thinking it would have been nice had something called Star Trek: 25th Anniversary acknowledged *all* of Star Trek. Especially as until very recently “Star Trek” and Star Trek: The Next Generation had been synonymous in my mind. During lulls between missions I would furtively start hunting around for little Easter eggs developer Interplay might have slipped into the game. On the bridge you could click on various crewmembers to activate different ship's functions, and Spock had access to the ship's computer. You could type something into a little search bar that popped up (say, “Klingons”), and the game would give you a mini in-universe encyclopedia entry on whatever you searched for. Sometimes I'd type in things like “Captain Picard” or “USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D” knowing full well I'd get no results just on the off-chance something might come up.

The game itself is a fun hybrid between point-and-click adventure game and sci-fi space flight and combat simulator. It's divided into various “episodes”, with each one being a mission using one or both styles. Perhaps the one and only concession to fanwank and revisionist fan history in all of the 25th Anniversary is the conceit that this game and its sequel comprise those infamous last two years of the five-year mission. Even to this day Original Series fans stubbornly insist on ignoring the fact D.C. Fontana has already told this story, though you can enjoy the games themselves perfectly well while disregarding that little bit of pandering. Hell, I'll go one further and retcon the entire Original Series: As far as I'm concerned this game, it's sequel, the Animated Series and select aspects of the film series are the only “canon” accounts of the story of Captain Kirk and his crew.

OK, I'll allow “The Trouble with Tribbles” too, because I'm generous.

The mission (or “episode”, if you will) I remember most vividly is the first one, “Demon World”, because I could never get past it back in the day and since I kept replaying it over and over again it's permanently burned onto my mind. It starts out with the Enterprise participating in a war games simulation with the USS Republic, which is a damn sight harder than I remembered and than it has any right to be. This serves as the introduction to the space combat part of the game, and you have to raise shields, activate weapons and chase the Republic around a sector of space using a radar screen between the helm and navigation consoles. When you get hit, and you will, you'll have to open up the damage repair menu (the D key in my game, though it took me awhile to remember the controls: It was like straining my mind forcing it to remember some arcane bit of magickal knowledge) and tell Scotty which part of the ship you want him to focus on repairing. Of course, by the time you do that you'll have likely taken several more hits from the Republic and gone down in flames before you can even react.

But when that thing appears on screen and you unload a volley of phaser and photon torpedo fire right into its face and are rewarded by seeing that telltale red and orange explosion effect, it's incredibly satisfying. Probably way more than it should be.

This was one of the games I used to play with my cousin a lot whenever he would come over to visit, and the only one that was mine. He was my introduction to a lot of things in the outside world, especially when it came to pop culture, so I always looked forward to those visits and treasured them very deeply. And just for the record, he was five years older and way more experienced with video games, and even *he* got his ass kicked with alarming regularity by the Republic. Even so, it was always a ton of fun to just keep replaying that section over and over regardless: If I'm honest, this was probably our favourite part of the whole game. But could you blame us? The music was exciting, the graphics were busy and evocative and it was tense playing cat-and-mouse like that.

In fact, the space combat stuff was so much fun we'd oftentimes throw the whole mission and just go looking for trouble. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary employed a form of copy protection where, after you got your mission briefing from Starfleet Command to travel to a specific planet, you'd have to consult a star chart only included in the instruction manual to find out where on the map that planet was located as the in-game stellar cartography map had no names or other identifying information. We never saw it as copy protection back then; to us it was just one more thing you had to do that added to the immersion of the game (once we figured out what we were supposed to do, that is, as the game gave no indication whatsoever you were meant to consult the instruction manual).

Anyway, the idea was that if you picked the wrong star system, you'd go “off-course” and trespass into Klingon, Romulan or Elasi Pirate territory and get blown to oblivion by an enormous fleet of starships. So, we'd *deliberately do that*: Pick a star system at random, go to warp and see how long we could survive the inevitable onslaught. At first, I hasten to add, it came out of a perfectly innocent desire to explore-Travel to uncharted star systems, Explore Strange New Worlds and all that, you know? But after about the third or fourth “Captain Kirk! You have trespassed into Klingon/Romulan/Elasi territory! Prepare to get royally fucked up!” It became kind of like a self-imposed endurance mode: I don't think you could ever win encounters like that (and if you could we managed it so infrequently I can't remember ever having done it), but it was fun to see how long you could last. Of the Romulan Birds-of-Prey, my cousin once memorably remarked something to the effect of “There's like a gazillion of them. We're going down.”

The Elasi Pirates were always my favourite to run into. They were an original culture designed for this game-A fallen planetary civilization made up of a kind of Mad Max-esque warring group of pirates and raiders sailing around in cobbled-together starships that resembled heavily modified Klingon Battle Cruisers. Though again, I couldn't have known that back then-I remember always wondering why I'd never seen them referenced or mentioned anywhere else in Star Trek as they were always such a memorable and iconic part of this game for me. I seem to remember them being the hardest to run into: For whatever reason they always seemed to be rarer encounters than the Klingons or the Romulans, even though to me they were the third Major Rival Faction of the Original Series. Speaking of the Klingons and Romulans, this was also naturally the first time (or one of the first times depending on how badly I've screwed up my personal history and am misremembering it) I'd gotten to see what they looked like prior to their redesigns from Star Trek: The Next Generation: I liked them, especially the starship designs, but granted they were different and still held a personal preference for the ones I had known before.

Once you managed to figure out how the navigation worked (or were finally able to tear yourself away from suicidally hurling yourself at a wall of enemy starships at warp speed) the point-and-click adventure side of the game became more evident. In each episode, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a redshirt beam down to a planet or over to a starship to help solve a particular problem. I think the idea is you're supposed to be controlling Kirk and issuing orders, but I always got the sense you were playing the landing party more broadly. Each character has an inventory with specific set of items you'll need to use in specific situations, and you can position where everyone is standing at any given time and tell them to interact with different objects throughout the world.

The idea of having a literally nameless redshirt is a tipoff to a tied old Star Trek joke, and yes, they can die in a myriad of horrible ways. I can proudly say, however, I have never lost a single person during a serious playthrough of this game: If there was ever a time one of my security officers got killed or hurt, that was it-The game was over and I would just reset. I never found it “funny” that a redshirt might die because I had no prior experience with the Original Series such that I would recognise that as a joke. To me it was a mistake, a tragic one, and I would obviously have to not do what I did the next time because I couldn't stand to see anyone die, even a nameless security officer.

And anyway, I was fine with resetting because it meant I got to fight the Republic again.

In “Demon World”, the landing party has to investigate reports of Demon sightings on Pollux V. Upon beaming down, the landing party learns Pollux V is governed by a monastic order and that they're currently fearing an invasion of apparent “Demons” into their “Heaven”. The landing party discovers an injured monk by the name of Brother Chub, who was attacked by the Demons and has developed an infection that can only be cured by distilling a hypo-dytoxin out of some local berries. They're directed to a series of mines north of the central establishment where the berries grow, but the monks are afraid to visit because that's also where they say the Demons reside. So the first thing you have to do is go to the mines on the top of a mountain, get the berries and bring them back so McCoy can make the dytoxin.

This is actually way more difficult than it sounds, because this is a point-and-click adventure game, and I can't tell you how many frustrated hours I spent when I was younger trying to figure out how to advance this damn quest. Finding the berries is the easy part: You just walk up the mountain a bit, fight some Klingons and pick up a severed hand. The trouble comes when you go back down, because actually making the dytoxin isn't as simple as you think it is. If I recall correctly, you have to have McCoy make it even though Brother Stephen, the guy who sent you, is standing right next to the machine and specifically asks for the berries. So naturally (well, at least for me), you'd want to give him the berries, which, if I'm remembering correctly, he either proceeds to do jack shit with or you can't even give him them in to begin with. So you then proceed to walk around like a dumbass for hours until you give up, reset the game and fight the Republic again.

As is typical for this kind of game, the challenge isn't in solving the puzzle yourself so much as it is in figuring out how the developer *wants* you to solve the puzzle and implementing the solution *they* had designed it around instead of coming up with a solution yourself. Obviously the nature of video games necessitating a pre-programmed set of specific actions limits the possibilities for freeform experimentation here, but I find it especially clumsy, awkward, counter-intuitive and immersion breaking in this genre. In my view, the truly excellent examples of game design work in tandem with the player's own psychology: The trick is designing a puzzle in such an elegant and intuitive way that the most natural and instinctive solution a player will come to is also the one you've programmed to be the correct one. In essence, you're subtly manipulating the player into doing what you want them to do while making them feel like they're figuring things out on their own. Which, in a sense, they are: It's just sort of a performative demonstration of how the process works. Hence, I suppose, the term video game. For me, that goes a long way towards helping me feel like I'm a part of the world the game creates and its artistry instead of just constantly being aware of the reality that I'm frittering away my time with a prettified computer generated logic switch.

(The other annoying thing about this part of the game is that it's a really sensitive and temperamental process to actually select the juice synthesizer itself: You have to click on the *exact right* pixel of a spot, or else it won't work, you assume you've made a mistake somewhere and waste *even more* time.)

If you finally manage to figure all that out, you can poke around the citadel or whatever a bit and learn it's likely Pollux V had other inhabitants. If you go back up the mountain to find a cave with a door out front, you can blast away the rock barrier in front of it and use the severed hand to open the door. Inside, you'll meet a group of peaceful little green men called Nauains, who are the planet's original inhabitants. In prehistoric times they learned of an inevitable series of meteoroid strikes and built an underground sanctuary to preserve their knowledge and people. The “Demons” the people were seeing were part of an automated defense system the Nauians use to keep intruders away, but once they learn of the landing party's peaceful intentions, they agree to share their technology with the other inhabitants of the planet and apply for Federation citizenship.

There are other episodes and missions to check out, including one that explores the culture of the Elasi Pirates, but “Demon World” will always be the part of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary that I'll instantly think of whenever someone mentions the game. And perhaps it's fitting that, as of this writing, it's now available through GOG.com when we're almost as far from it as it was from the original Star Trek. I'm grateful that video games allow me to relive so many of the most precious moments of my life: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary takes me back to when my love for Star Trek was at its most unfettered and profound, and I can re-experience that any time I turn it on. Perhaps you have similar memories of this game or this time of your own, but even if you don't, I would humbly hope that playing this game even today can bring you a fraction of the joy it's brought me for so many years.


Check out Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and its sequels Star Trek: Judgment Rites and Star Trek Starfleet Academy at GOG.com! They are also on Steam.

Myriad Universes: The Outer Light

Ugh.

Right, here's another essay on a story I had a lot of high hopes for and had planned to look at in extreme detail only to have those hopes deflate pathetically as soon as I looked at the story in question. Well, let's just get it over with so we can move on, shall we?

I guess in hindsight I shouldn't have been too surprised. Sequels inevitably always ruin anything, and doing a sequel to “The Inner Light” of all stories seems like a recipe custom-tailored for disaster. This seemed like it had potential though-In one of his many chats on AOL, Ron Moore had this to say reflecting on “The Inner Light”:

“I've always felt that the experience in 'Inner Light' would've been the most profound experience in Picard's life and changed him irrevocably. However, that wasn't our intention when we were creating the episode. We were after a good hour of TV, and the larger implications of how this would really screw somebody up didn't hit home with us until later (that's sometimes a danger in TV – you're so focused on just getting the show produced every week that sometimes you suffer from the 'can't see the forest for the trees' syndrome). We never intended the show to completely upend his character and force a radical change in the series, so we contented ourselves with a single follow-up in 'Lessons.'”

Thing is, “Lessons” more or less sucks, as we'll see next season. And this is interesting, as it's claimed Rick Berman and Michael Piller had a fairly strict “no sequels” policy on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and this was used as justification for turning away a pitch for a follow-up to “The Inner Light” penned by the story's original writer, Morgan Grendel. So if the producers were opposed to sequels sight unseen, why did “Lessons” (and a fuckton other things, like everything having to do with Worf or the Borg) get greenlit? Or if they were actually open to sequels to things like “The Inner Light”, why did they turn away the one the original writer himself came up with?

The answer comes when we take a look at “The Outer Light”, a fanfiction comic Grendel produced in 2013 in collaboration with Andre Duza and TrekMovie. And it seems that answer is simply that “The Outer Light” isn't very good.

Responding to a distress call on...some planet, the Enterprise finds a crashed starship that looks suspiciously like the Kataan probe that engaged Captain Picard in the ancestor simulation exercise that leaves him wanting more than anything else to become Kamin again. Beaming down against Commander Riker's protestations, the Captain discovers the crashed ship contains Kataanian scientists who have been preserved in suspended animation for centuries, one of whom miracuolsly happens to be Kamin's wife Eline! Unfortunately for the Captain, Eline has also brought her husband with her, some dude who's not named Kamin and is so forgettable despite being the primary antagonist I've since forgotten his name and don't care enough to go back and check.

By this point I'm already confused, because I'm not entirely sure who this specific Eline is supposed to be and why she's here and this is never really explained. The Eline in “The Inner Light” wasn't the scientist-her daughter Meribor was. Eline was just Kamin's loving and loyal wife. “The Outer Light” seems to suggest that it was really Eline who programmed the ancestor simulation, and that it wasn't *really* an accurate representation of what her life was like, but rather an amalgamation of the kind of life she would have *liked* to live set at some point in a heavily embellished and idealized version of Kataan's history. It's really unclear though, and just manages to raise as much confusion as it does unfortunate implications. Anyway it turns out Eline, whoever she is, is in a bad way because their stasis technology is based around the ancestor simulation and is apparently a narcotic and also keeps them from aging somehow. If she and her fellow scientists were to be cut off from it for a prolonged period of time they would rapidly age and die.

So while that's happening, not-Kamin is doing some shady business with a group of renegade Romulans because of some reasons. The Romulans want to use the mineral resources of this mining planet to build some new weapons, but abandon that plan when the Enterprise shows up because Starfleet has better weapons than they could ever build (which is odd considering I thought the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire were supposed to be on a fairly equal level technologically speaking) and fuck the Enterprise anyway. Also, there's a Romulan suicide bomber done up like that henchman with the cell phone in his chest in The Dark Knight who's somehow also connected to a bomb in the main mine shaft that will somehow blow up the whole planet and the Romulans will detonate it if Captain Picard doesn't surrender the Enterprise and I don't care because my eyes glossed over and I've long since stopped paying attention. So Captain Picard tricks the Romulans with the simulation tech, Eline, not-Kamin and all the other Kataanians rapidly succumb to “To Serve All My Days” syndrome and we all learn a valuable lesson about letting go of the past. Or something like that. Hooray.

Alarm bells should start to go off for you once you hear about the actual writer's pedigree of “The Inner Light”. Grendel came up with the initial treatment, yes, but the original pitch had been one Michael Piller had been chewing on for a long time. And pretty much every member of the writing staff pitched in at one point or another because they all believed in it and wanted it to succeed. In fact, it was Piller himself who polished off the final draft. So I mean no disrespect to Mr. Grendel who I'm sure is an incredibly talented writer, but the fact is a lot of what made “The Inner Light” such a masterpiece was just as much thanks to people who weren't him. And none of them were involved in this sequel. As for the people who were...Well, I can't speak for them personally, but all I know is that “The Outer Light” features a whole bunch of Frank Miller-esque broody, ansgst-ridden third person omniscient narration in textboxes that dictate like 75% of the story to us. Don Ellis Aguillo's art straddles a very fine line between intriguing stylization that provides a compelling reconceptualization of the look-and-feel of Star Trek: The Next Generation and slapdash stylization just done to cover up a lack of actual artistry.

When I read the first part of this story a few years ago, I was under the impression Eline wasn't the real Eline and that she and the other scientists weren't actually Kataanian. I thought they were just going to be a group of scientists who had also encountered the Kataanian probe, had experienced their own version of the ancestor simulation and had asked Captain Picard to join an archaeology summit on it because of his own experiences. This was the primary reason I wanted to cover this story, actually: I figured it would be about this group of people who *kind of* knew each other, but not really, having to work together and what the dynamics that would emerge from that would look like. Presumably, for example, the Kamin character in other people's simulations wouldn't have become a scientist-I always assumed that was largely due to the fact Captain Picard was playing the role, and that he had brought a lot of scientific curiosity to the part. So in essence, each person's experience with the ancestor simulation would have been different, and each person would have gotten a different account of the final decades of Katann's life: A bit like Rashōmon in the sense everyone would have remembered it differently, thus accentuating the differences in their respective positionalities.

If there was ever going to be a sequel to “The Inner Light”, that's what I think it should have looked like. It's the only thing I can think of that adequately follows up on the themes it introduced in an appropriately Star Trek: The Next Generation manner without cheapening them with hackneyed drama tropes. But maybe that's just my own memory betraying me.


 If this essay has for some reason convinced you to read "The Outer Light" for yourself, it's posted online for free at Morgan Grendel's website here.

Myriad Universes: The Broken Moon

So I wasn't originally going to do the 1992 annual. It's good, but it doesn't quite hold up to the likes of “Thin Ice” and “The Gift”, or even some of the most recent serials in the monthly series. But it turned out, quite frankly, that I needed an extra essay here and this was an easy pick.

But I'm going to do more than just kill time and fill space with this one, as there's still a fair amount of interesting things to say about “The Broken Moon”. The first thing to note is that, like the two previous annuals, this story is predominantly about one specific character. This isn't too surprising, as since “The Gift” was about Captain Picard (and Q) and “Thin Ice” was about Commander Riker (and Captain Lyrinda Halk), it's to be expected “The Broken Moon” would follow suit and predominantly feature another main character. What's interesting is who that character ended up being: Given his crippling overexposure in the TV series, we would naturally assume the next character to get a prominent spotlight in an extra-length Annual issue would be Data. But no, Data is actually barely in this story. In fact, it's actually Geordi La Forge! Which is good, because there's a good deal more for us to say about Geordi La Forge.

My reading of Geordi should be fairly obvious and clear by now. Because of LeVar Burton's presence on both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Reading Rainbow, and the comparative similarities of his performances on both shows (not to mention the fact D.C. Fontana essentially conceived of Geordi as being “LeVar Burton as himself” anyway), I see Geordi as filling the narrative role of a children's educator or children's television personality on a series that can be succinctly described as “children's television for adults”. This is why he's the chief engineer; the heart and soul of a starship. The problem is that, for whatever reason, very few writers who have jobbed for Star Trek: The Next Generation seem to have picked up that this is straightforwardly and self-evidently the correct way to conceptualize who Geordi is, what he does on the Enterprise and what his relationship with the rest of the crew is (especially Data, who is plainly a child analog).

I am reminded most of all of Ira Steven Behr's assessment of Geordi while talking about his episode “Qpid” and the infamous mandolin scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365:

“Geordi was a very sweet character who was kind of underused. He didn't have much of a dark side about him. He's the kind of human that Klingons would have devoured. And Worf-you know, from a Klingon perspective-I was sure that Worf would lie in bed at night thinking, 'Can't they at least let me kill Geordi?' So taking the mandolin and smashing it was the Klingon view of the Federation and the 'perfect society' the show portrayed.”

So just take as read for now my usual raft of complaints about Behr inasmuch as I think he is almost, but not quite, completely wrong about absolutely everything in spite of how much I respect and admire his talents as a writer and focus in on what he thinks about Geordi. Because I think Behr's complaints about him are common amongst the fandom-To but it bluntly, fans think Geordi is a wuss. That he's a shy, inoffensive nerd who doesn't offer anything to the show and the crew dynamic apart from mechanophile jokes. I would argue they're plainly wrong, obviously, but the fact remains Geordi is arguably the toughest character to write for out of a cast that's fairly universally tough to write for.

Even Michael Jan Friedman is not immune to tripping up over the Enterprise's chief engineer. Way back in the early days of the second volume of the comic series he gave Geordi a two-part story called “Seraphin's Survivors” and “Shadows in the Garden” that depicts him as being so fixated on being reunited with his old flame that he doesn't realise her people are trying to kill the crew and eat their life force, and he gets uncharacteristically belligerent and confrontational about it. Thankfully, Friedman drops this bit of characterization after that little outing and goes on to more or less nail a believable personality for him. He was fantastic in Separation Anxiety, and here Friedman gives him a whole Annual to play with. In fact, “The Broken Moon” plays out like nothing so much as a decisive, definitive refutation of the criticisms people such as Behr and fandom-at-large might be inclined to level at Geordi.

The Enterprise is meeting with a delegation from the Onglaatu empire. They're allies of the Federation, though wary ones, and typically prefer to meet in unorthodox ways. This time is no exception, with representative Kalonis bypassing all formal diplomatic channels and requesting to speak to Geordi La Forge, and Geordi La Forge alone, in private. It turns out that Geordi is the entire reason the Onglaatu are allied with the Federation in the first place, as on a previous assignment he twice heroically intervened on the part of a high-ranking Onlgaatu official named Kastren, once saving her life and once keeping her from escalating a negotiation that had gone south and turned into a brawl. The Onglaatu are a warrior society that values strength, courage and heroic acts, but also a fiercely matriarchal one where men are seen as second-class citizens. Geordi's actions proved his valour in the eyes of Kastren, who bestowed upon him a great honour: By giving him half of her sacred moon pendant, Kastren symbolically made Geordi her blood-sibling; rare for anyone not a woman and unheard of for an off-worlder. But Kastren's voice held sway, so their union helped pave the way for for more diffusion between humans and Onglaatu and a new era of cosmopolitanism for Onlgaatu society.

It turns out that Kalonis is actually Geordi's “nephew”, that is, Kastren's son, and he's come to the Enterprise to request his help once again (and it's neat to think of Geordi playing an uncle role, which is very much in keeping with the extroverted travelling educator LeVar Burton is so good at portraying). It seems Kastren, and a number of other high-ranking Onglaatu matriarchs, have recently started behaving extremely strangely, making uncharacteristically radical and sweeping administrative changes that seem to be a prelude to civil war. Kalonis wants Geordi to come back to their home planet of Glaa to find out what's troubling Kastren, and hopefully talk her out of whatever is bothering her. Understanding the mission's deep personal importance to Geordi (and its potential, if successful, to further strengthen diplomatic ties with the Onglaatu), but also realising this would more or less constitute a violation of the Prime Directive, Captain Picard gives Geordi the go-ahead to investigate...But he'll have to do it as an independent private citizen without help from the Enterprise or the rest of Starfleet. So Geordi takes a leave of absence to travel to Glaa and see for himself what's going on.

The biggest problem, if you could call it that, with “The Broken Moon” is that about 75% of it is backstory delivered through flashbacks or characters somewhat clumsily forcing exposition from one another. Get ready for a whole bunch of “As you know...”s and rather clunky dialog that painfully obviously only exists because the book has to invent a brand new alien civilization, culture and pre-existing history for Geordi sheer out of wholecloth...And then tell a brand new story about them all at the same time. This very likely could have been an entire season-long story arc or even a plot thread that reoccurs across multiple stories over *several* seasons, and it all has to be crammed into this one book. This is not a particular high point for naturalistic dialog, to be sure.

This is pretty much what the rest of the Enterprise crew is doing when Geordi is off romping around on Glaa, but that's not *all* they're doing. One clever thing about this story is how it handles their characterization: Just about everyone is deeply worried about Geordi and doesn't think he'll be able handle a gig with a people as tough as the Onglaatu all by himself. Chief O'Brien is nervous about how tough the Onglaatu seem, Captain Picard is constantly fretting about Geordi's safety, and Commander Riker has to reassure Worf that Geordi is a “big boy” who can “take care of himself”, even if he admits to us that even he's not so sure. Here we're getting another diegetic performance where the crew insert themselves into the roles of interlocutors the metatext requires, even if they wouldn't normally say these kinds of things. Here, they're speaking (albeit benevolently) for the fan concern that Geordi is a weak, wussy, useless character, and it's up to the story to prove to them, and thus us, that he's not.

(Tellingly, the only people who aren't worried sick about Geordi are Data and Ro Laren. Yes, this is mostly because they barely have two lines between them in this story, but I prefer to read it as an indication of their intimate familiarity with him. Because Laren and Data are the two characters closest to Geordi of anyone in the crew, they have the most faith and confidence in his strength and abilities and don't need to remind us of that.)

The actual plot is pretty thin on the ground, though not unengaging: There's a requisite capture-and-escape sequence that all stock genre fiction serials are required to have by law where Kastren throws Geordi and Kalonis in a dungeon basically for talking back (after suspiciously not seeming to recognise Geordi or the significance of him being her Moon-Brother), and then we find out that the reason for all this weird behaviour is that those parasites (you know, the ones from “Conspiracy” way back in the first season? Don't worry, Laren doesn't remember them either, so she gets Data to explain for us) have invaded Glaa, and of course Kastren is one of the hosts. There's a phaser battle, the parasites are all safely removed from their hosts and a generous Kastren overjoyed to see her Moon-Brother again petitions Glaa to join the Federation on their behalf.

But it's this very action sequence, the same kind of action that attracted Kastren's admiration in the first place, that should prove to any remaining doubters that Geordi La Forge is in truth a strong person. And it's a very Geordi sort of action sequence too, being as it is ultimately about helping a person rediscover their true self. It's Geordi's empathy, combined with his strength of will, that has earned him the love and respect of a culture of proud warrior women, and I think that's sort of a lovely moral. I also kind of love how the book doesn't seem to have any problem whatsoever with a society where women rule and are warriors and men are second-class citizens (critically all men, that is, except for men like Geordi). Not only is it a nice inversion of Klingon society (Worf even points this out) and an acceptable recompense for “Angel One”, it's just fun.

I also want to take a little time to briefly touch on Geordi and Kastren's relationship here. Although we don't get to see the “real” Kastren and her interactions with Geordi very much (a definite flaw of the story, especially considering neither she nor the Onglaatu ever reappear), what little of it we do see is really sweet. They definitely seem to have a kind of playfully belligerent brother-sister relationship where affection is conveyed primarily through roughhousing and gentle insults. It's cute and really enjoyable to see, and I'll admit my earlier readings of this story almost had me shipping them. But no, they really are siblings with all that entails, a fact that's subtly reinforced by Laren's presence here too. (Laren, tellingly, also being a warrior woman who presumably respects Geordi a whole lot, but in a different way). I only wish Laren had a bit more dialog (really, any) that drove this point home: She offers a specific nuance and contrast in that regard this story could have used.

In spite of its (really comparatively minor) structural clunkiness though, “The Broken Moon” is a cute and fun little story that's worth a look. It's definitely the best “solo Geordi” story that we've seen to date, possibly a contender for the best in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It more than makes up for stuff like “Galaxy's Child” and “Interface” and gives him a level of depth and respect that is seemingly somewhat hard to come by. And it's worth noting once again that *this* is what can be considered mediocre for the comic book line: Sci-fi serial action that's stock, though inoffensively so, but still also manages to be cute and endearing.

I hate to keep beating the proverbial dead horse with a negativity stick, but there it is.

Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 6: Restoration

Most Star Trek: The Next Generation stories would have ended by now. Packed things in after the Sztazzan and the Enterprise crew had achieved a peaceful diplomatic resolution to the crisis, maybe given us a nice little pat wrapping-up scene with Captain Picard and Commander Riker looking forward to a more peaceful future.

This series does not tell stories typical of what most Star Trek: The Next Generation looks like.

“Restoration” is every bit as low-stakes and low-key as “The Lesson”, and every bit as memorable to me. First of all it's an absolute lyrical masterpiece: From Captain Picard's opening rumination on Plato's theory that humans and human longing were created when a singular flawless being was split into man and woman at some point in prehistory (and his belief the metaphor need not be gendered to be effective) to Doctor Crusher's counsel to a shaken Terry Oliver distraught over her actions with the injured Sztazzan crewmember, this issue is crafted out of the sort of wordplay and turns of phrases so haunting they linger with me long, long after the story is done. And also like “The Lesson”, this is more or less an interlocking series of vignettes centred around a specific theme. This time, it's, very fittingly, reunification and moving forward.

As the Enterprise slowly recovers and rebuilds after its pan-galactic adventures with the Sztazzan, Miles, Keiko and Molly O'Brien watch as their friends, a couple literally separated by the dividing ship sections, happily reunite with each other. Captain Picard checks in on a busy Doctor Crusher in sickbay, her team stretched taking care of the massive casualties sustained during the stardrive section's numerous battles. Nevertheless, she expresses confidence that sickbay will be “empty again soon”, and they both look forward to a future with the Sztazzan that is “at the very least non-violent”. Geordi tells Data he's glad to see the engine room again, and the two have a brief discussion about the nature of objective correlatives before Data accidentally tips Geordi off that he has some “unfinished business” to attend to.

Said unfinished business is not the billiards tournament with Miles O'Brien, however. If you will recall, Geordi was called away from the game at a crucial moment when the artificial moon relay station was first discovered, and Miles had subbed in Deanna Troi at the last second. Geordi and Miles decided it would have been unfair to ask for her help and then turn her away when it became convenient, so Miles kept Deanna on as his partner, despite her warning that “Betazoids do not play pool”, as a point of honour. Deanna then proceeds to shock everyone at the table by winning the game singlehandedly. It seems that while Betazoids do not play billiards, humans do, and she is, after all half-human. Her father, as it turns out, was a billiards champion and “taught his daughter everything he knew”.

Worf insists on taking Alexander to Mott's barber shop to make him apologise to the Bolian for his earlier insensitive remark. He is surprised to learn, however, that the apology is not necessary as it was Mott's tactical plan that saved the saucer section and help pave the way for peace with the Sztazzan, and Alexander was the one who brought it to Commander Riker's attention. In fact if anything, Mott argues, it's Worf who owes Alexander an apology for doubting his son's capacity for empathy and remorse. In the ready room, Commander Riker privately reveals to Captain Picard that while Mott did indeed come up with the plan, he and Alexander only managed to inform Will of it “after [he] had already begun to implement it”. However, the two agree it would be best for all involved for Mott and Alexander to go on thinking that they helped save the ship. After all, it's always good to have others to turn to for help in a time of need.

Terry Oliver is wracked with guilt over her rescue of the Sztazzan officer she saved. Even though she was instrumental in saving all three crews, she confesses to Doctor Crusher that she feels she let her former shipmates down by forsaking her one chance to get revenge on the Sztazzan for the murders and war crimes they committed. But Beverly helps her interpret her emotions a different way: By her measure, the deaths of Terry's former shipmates were incredibly meaningful, despite what Terry might now think. Because, as she tells her

“They made you sick of death. So sick of it, in fact, you couldn't countenance any more of it.”

Beverly seems to think this, a capacity for mercy and forgiveness no matter who is suffering, is what makes the Federation special...But then she would tell somebody that in order to justify to herself, as much as to her interlocutor, the existence of the monolithic institution she's found herself working for. We all know these aren't really Federation values-They're Enterprise ones. This ship and crew lives and breaths the ideals the Federation can only pretend are theirs as part of their state-sponsored propaganda rhetoric.

And yet even so we still have one small bit of unfinished business to attend to. There's one person noticeably missing from this issue's celebratory loose-end-tying. In fact, she's been egregiously absent in any major plot capacity since the second part of this miniseries. And so, perhaps fittingly, we end where we began. Not with Commander Riker or the Sztazzan or with Worf or Alexander or even with Terry Oliver, but with Ro Laren.

It's Moga Nivan, a deeply significant and meaningful Bajoran holiday meant to be spent with one's closest friends and family. And Laren is all alone, looking out into space from a deserted ten forward. Until, that is, she's suddenly and unexpectedly joined by Geordi, who's brought Data, Worf and Guinan with him. Apparently, during their conversation in engineering about objective correlatives, Data had let it slip to Geordi that a holiday can make one feel sad if one has nobody to spend it with, and that Laren had told him she was feeling this way before they encountered the artificial moon. Geordi put everything else on hold to look up all he could find on Moga Nivan so that he could give Laren the best celebration he could put together for her, and roped in Data, Worf and Guinan to help. Geordi tells a stunned Laren that, on the Enterprise, you've got to expect the unexpected. But of course the real meaning in his words is that he considers Laren to be part of his family, the Enterprise family, and hope she feels the same. As Laren leads them in the ceremonial poem, they are joined by Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Deana Troi and Doctor Crusher. The Enterprise warps away as Laren wishes a brave Moga Nivan to us all.

This is one of my favourite moments in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, printed *or* televised for so incredibly many reasons.Yes, there's the fact this makes me ship Geordi/Laren every bit as hard as anything in “The Next Phase”. But thematically, it's perfect that Separation Anxiety end here, with Laren's reminder of who her real family is when it was the most important driving home the miniseries' larger concepts of reunification, rekindling and moving forward to new beginnings. And it's even more fitting that this be Laren specifically, as she's someone the narrative has done some incredibly deft and clever sleight-of-hand with over the course of the miniseries. It was Laren's subplot about feeling lonely at Moga Nivan that opened this whole story and Laren herself was set up as the positive Enterprise counterpart to Terry Oliver in the second issue, but that thread was promptly dropped immediately afterward. From that point in the arc, this section of the story became about exclusively about Terry Oliver overcoming her own personal demons. It almost seemed like Michael Jan Friedman had forgotten about Laren.

But he hadn't.

Remember, Laren didn't drop off the face of the book after “Bone of Contention”: Instead she became a crucial component of the battle bridge crew, and in particular she became Captain Picard's partner. They were breathing in perfect sync for the whole middle section of the story arc, and Jean-Luc wouldn't have been able to pull of anywhere near what he was able to during those time-stalling shootouts with the Sztazzan if she hadn't been there. So Laren's feelings about being lonely and ignored actually become extradiegetic, meant to call our attention to the fact her subplot is doing something unorthodox and interesting. And why wouldn't it, and why wouldn't she work so well with Captain Picard? They are, after all, the two characters in this series who have the best mastery of improvisational theatre, inserting themselves into holes in the narrative canvas by playing whatever roles need filling during a crisis so the show can go on. So of course the narrative turns back to Laren at the end of an issue all about “tying off loose ends”.

The book didn't forget her. And neither do her friends.

(In fact, to add to the cleverness, who's the other main character on the battle bridge? Deanna Troi. And her story hinges on Miles' billiards rivals, and thus us, forgetting she had been pegged as his teammate and the tricky wordplay of the phrase “Betazoids do not play pool”. Thus, she too slips into the background of the narrative counting on us to underestimate her and forget she has a stake in the action. And who is Marina Sirtis' Deanna Troi if not the ur example par excellance of someone gamely playing a role that isn't theirs but that needs to be filled in order to save the show?)

As good as it is for Laren and the miniseries on the whole, this is also a moment that speaks very much to Geordi's character and hearkens all the way back to “The Icarus Factor”: That episode has a similar conceit, where Worf was upset that a major Klingon holiday was coming up and he had no Klingon family to spend it with. The crew banded together to give him a proper celebration too, but in that episode it was played all tonally off and wonky. Doctor Pulaski was uncharacteristically squeamish, Geordi had to be badgered into participating and Wesley did everything. This scene portrays characters who are far more recognisable as the ones I love and admire, and is far more effective and arresting. So the fact that Geordi, Worf and Data are here has weight because of that, and the fact that they're doing it for Laren holds an incredible amount of personal significance and emotional resonance for me.

This is, in fact, probably my second favourite Laren story after “The Next Phase” and actually the one I find myself reminded of the most when thinking about who she is as a character. This is who I remember Laren as: Not a brash, hotheaded insubordinate snark queen, but a moody, melancholy and quiet person whose traumatic past weighs heavily on her conscience. She's a loner by nature and necessity, if not by choice. Someone who needs to be shown a little kindness, attention, warmth and love, and while she won't always know how to react to it, it will mean more to her than you could ever imagine. That's why I think it's so special that Geordi be the one to do this for her (and it very explicitly is him and his idea: He specifically tells Data he's “heard enough” when he starts to go on about holidays and objective correlatives and while Guinan does a lot of the talking, Geordi is very clearly the one who spearheaded it all), because listening and bringing people together through stories is his job: Who better than the host of Reading Rainbow to reach out to someone by learning from their oral myths and traditions?

It's the perfect scene to cap off a perfect story. “Restoration” is right up there with “The Lesson”, “The Wounded”, “The Next Phase” and “Encounter at Farpoint” among my very favourite and most treasured stories. This is everything Star Trek: The Next Generation is about to me.

Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 5: Strange Bedfellows

Out of options, Commander Riker turns to the last one he has: Ask the pursuing Sztazzan ship if they would extend their shields, and thus their warp bubble, around the saucer section to get them both to the second relay station, which will hopefully bring them back to where they started from. The Sztazzan are predictably boisterous and recalcitrant, but Will reminds them that its his people who have the coordinates to the station, and he's likely to erase them should the Sztazzan try to invade the saucer.

Alexander is depressed and wants nothing except to be reunited with his father. Similarly Worf thinks only about getting his son back, to the point he puts it above his mission and the rest of his crewmates. It seems at first a perhaps shallow form of characterization, but it builds upon the turmoil both characters have been through over the past few stories. Alexander has already lost one parent and now faces the prospect of being completely orphaned, while Worf lost not only K'Heleyr as well, but almost lost his closest friend in Commander Riker in The Return of Okona. Mott comes to visit Alexander in his quarters and offers a suggestion. He's come up with a tactical plan he thinks might help the crew, and asks if Alexander would like to come with him to tell Commander Riker about it, so long as he thinks it's a good plan (Alexander of course being a superior tactician). Mott's idea is to...Ask the pursuing Sztazzan ship if they would extend their shields, and thus their warp bubble, around the saucer section to get them both to the second relay station, which will hopefully bring them back to where they started from.

We cut to a scene on the Sztazzan ship, where we at last get to see a little more of their own cultures and beliefs. As Miles O'Brien guessed last month, the Sztazzan see humans as dangerous and untrustworthy with no set of morals or code of honour (a perhaps not unjustified assumption given what we've seen of how humans organise themselves in the 24th century at large). The Sztazzan are all ready to say no to the saucer crew, but one officer pleads the case that perhaps not all humans are as bad as all that, as he had personally witnessed the heroism of one human who went out of her way to rescue an injured Sztazzan when the two away teams had clashed on the planet's surface earlier. Swayed by the story of Terry Oliver's act of selflessness, the Sztazzan agree to Commander Riker's plan, just before Alexander and Mott come to the bridge to tell him about it.

And it couldn't have come at a better time too, as things aren't looking so good for Captain Picard, Ro Laren and Deanna Troi back on the battle bridge. Outmanned and outgunned by the Sztazzan fleet and with multiple hull breaches to contend with, they're about to be forced to abandon the saucer section to its fate and retreat with Geordi, Worf and Data. But just in the nick of time, the saucer and the Sztazzan flagship reappear, and the Sztazzan fleet captain orders his crew to cease fire. Informing the battle bridge crew of how the two ships worked together to find their way home, he singles out Terry Oliver for particular praise, as it was her actions that helped convince him of the necessity of cooperation towards a common goal.

It's here where the thematic focus of Separation Anxiety truly comes into view. As I mentioned before, this is a story about being kept apart from others by distance, but it's also a story, fittingly, about reunification. The endgame here has always been to get the Enterprise back in one piece, because it's really meant to work together as one holistic unit. And that's even true granting the existence of those interesting subgroups and subset cultures (such as the dynamic duo of Captain Picard and Ro Laren and their battle bridge team): One thing I've really enjoyed about this series is all the little cuts like we talked about in part 3 that show all these different micro-teams are working on the same problem from slightly different angles pretty much simultaneously in real time. And in this issue we add to that not just the Sztazzan, but Mott and Alexander as well! So there's the obvious teamwork and cooperation theme we get from the Sztazzan cease fire (laying the groundwork to build a new bridge, if you will), but the Enterprise itself serves as fitting visual metaphor for not just the message of the story, but one of Star Trek: The Next Generation's most fundamental core values.

It's beautifully elegant and perfectly crafted science fiction from the person I am increasingly convinced is the only author working on this property who has a decent handle on what that means. I really have to sit back and take in the craftsmanship on display here: Not only is it a deft execution of genre fiction where the world itself embodies the story's ideas and concepts such that it organically grows out of them, but there's that novellesque richness and sense of scale here too. This book has a sprawling cast of characters by Star Trek: The Next Generation standards, and each one has their own unique, individual, hand-crafted story arc that ties into to the larger plot. Nobody feels left out, left behind, ignored or given up on, which is quite frankly something of a miracle at this point.

Well, nobody except one, some might say...? But this miniseries isn't done yet...

This has got to be one of my favourite cliffhangers to date, because the story is more or less done. The action is over, the big plot has wrapped up and we've had our nice speeches about diversity and tolerance and working together. There's no stinger with somebody in mortal danger, or some heretofore unknown plot element flying in at the eleventh hour. There's nothing really left except a denouement, should you want one. But we haven't seen the saucer reconnection. We still have unfinished business.

Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 4: Second Chances!

“Second Chances” is perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation.

...Oh no, not the goofy episode from next season where the transporter retroactively cloned Commander Riker on his previous post that fucks up Will's relationship with Deanna Troi and Mae Jemison is the best part of it. That's ridiculous. I'm talking about this comic book that's the fourth part of Separation Anxiety.

You know it's going to be a good story, or at least noteworthy, when it opens with a “chief medical officer's log”. And this one doesn't disappoint, with a lengthy portion of its runtime dedicated to just letting us watch Beverly Crusher be awesome leading an away team mission. Any Beverly Crusher, Science Officer fan will be spoiled by scene after scene in this book of her being unflappably competent, whip-smart and quippy. And continuing a thread introduced in The Return of Okona, Bev is also portrayed as having a manifestly different style of leadership than Commander Riker, though still compelling in its own right: She's far more involved in the nitty-gritty of the technical research, not issuing orders to her team but managing, delegating and actively working with them to help gather as much information as they can. Seeing how effortlessly and perfectly she slides into this role here only makes you wish all the harder that this had been her role on the TV show much, much more often than it really was.

But we barely have time to appreciate that before we're treated to a scene so defining it could have come from “The Wounded”. Which, incidentally, is what it's positioned as a sequel to. Miles O'Brien and Terry Oliver are investigating a computer room the away team discovered on the planet they beamed down to last issue. Doctor Crusher has learned there aren't any sentient life-forms still around who could help, but figures the computer banks are probably still intact and could yield some clues. Terry expresses concern that time is of the essence as the Sztazzan no doubt know of their whereabouts and will probably send a team of their own down. What follows is an exchange between her and Chief O'Brien so priceless and air-pumping I had to repeat it in its entirety here.

“After all, it won't take long for those Sztazzan filth to find our coordinates and beam down after us!” 

“'Filth', eh?” 

“You'd call them that too, if they'd murdered your friends the way they murdered mine!” 

“I see. Funny...You sound the way I did not so long ago. Except it wasn't the Sztazzan I had a hate for – It was the Cardassians! I'd witnessed the kind of slaughter they're inclined towards – First hand!” 

“Then you know how I feel!” 

“Sure – But that doesn't mean I approve of it! Not so long ago, we had some Cardassians on the Enterprise – Making some wild charges about my old captain. It was all I could do to keep from slugging one o'them! Unfortunately, the wild charges turned out to be true. And I learned a valuable lesson: There are usually two sides to a story.” 

“Not when it comes to the Sztazzan!” 

“Are you sure? What do you know about them except that they fired on your ship? Maybe they had some provocation – At least from their point of view!” 

“Forget it chief...Nothing you say is going to make me love those bloody butchers!” 

“You don't have to love 'em. You just have to co-exist with them.”

There are only so many ways I can say a thing is perfect without sounding like a broken record. But that's what this scene is. The attitude on display here, from beginning to end, is absolutely, spot-on to-the-note perfect for Star Trek: The Next Generation. This encapsulates better than anything I could hope to put to prose myself the utopian conflict resolution and commitment to personal growth I love this series so much for. It solidifies what the purpose of “The Wounded” was and what it meant for Miles O'Brien as a character for anyone left who might be unsure. There's the significance of this coming in the wake of “I, Borg”, because this is a treatment of the “know your enemy” pitch I personally far prefer to what we got in that episode. But there's also the more implicit significance of this coming less then a year out from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: Terry hasn't been with this Enterprise very long, so she's still prone to the kind of militaristic categorical dismissal of “the enemy” that defines the rest of Starfleet (tellingly, Miles is cut off before he can finish his speech by asking “Isn't that what the Federation's all about?”).

But she is now, and this means she has the opportunity to look within herself to become a better person. And though its Miles who is ultimately saved in this moment, this exchange also sets in motion a chain of events that will lead to Terry's salvation too. For she's right, the Sztazzan do beam down and assault the away team in the book's climax, and while they do all get out in time comparatively unscathed, it's not before Terry catches sight of an injured crewmember...Who turns out to be Sztazzan. She hesitates for a moment, but ultimately decides to call Doctor Crusher over. Thanks to her split-second intervention, the crewmember's life is saved. Clearly the ramifications of this will need to be explored more later on, but for now this restores Commander Riker's (and our) faith in Terry, just as Beverly had hoped.

So all the stuff going on with the saucer section is so fascinating we haven't even talked about what's happening with the stardrive section crew yet! Thankfully Data and Geordi have found a way to keep the relay station from exploding, but the Stazzan fleet is growing progressively more irritated and starts to take action. So to buy the team time to get on that, Captain Picard and Ro Laren decide to play along. What follows is a rollicking space battle action sequence the likes of which would make the TV show's VFX department blush and budgeting department quake in their boots. The stardrive section spins around, takes off vertically and flips around behind its pursuers (bringing a whole new meaning to “thinking three dimensionally” in space).

It reminds me a lot of the Dirty Pair TV episode “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys”, and a lot of space-based action sci-fi anime of that type in general. I'm unashamed to admit it's an absolute blast to see something like that in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it's also noteworthy because of how genuinely rare it is, even in the comic line: You would expect this kind of scene would be right up this series' alley, but Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos are surprisingly reserved about giving it to us, preferring to shift the visual spectacle elsewhere. This works to great effect, of course, but it also means the action scenes are all the more breathtaking and memorable when they do happen.

The story on the stardrive section is mostly about Laren and Jean-Luc this month: We get the obligatory progression of Worf, Geordi and Data's subplots on the relay station, but it's those two who get the overwhelming majority of the dialog here. Deanna Troi is surprisingly underserved by this book's standards, though she isn't in the miniseries on the whole and I'm actually OK with that as it gives Friedman a chance to play with a character and character dynamic he really hasn't been able to before. And Laren and Jean-Luc are wonderful under his pen, becoming nothing short of a veritable tag-team partnership during the Sztazzan firefight. There is the obvious healthy, functional portrayal of a relationship that didn't typically get that treatment on TV, but I want to lay off the contrast here as I feel like now I'm just punching down. What struck me more about the way Laren and Jean-Luc behave here is that they seem to embody the best of anyone in this story so far the creation of a unique micro-team dynamic.

Maybe it's the more stripped-down and utilitarian feel of the battle bridge, but Captain Picard's team seems much smaller and much more finely honed then Commander Riker's. They also have a really distinct and attractive dynamic that is utterly their own. I don't mean that as a criticism of Will's people or his leadership style, but it does seem like Will has a bigger ship and more resources to work with. He's got Doctor Crusher (and with her all of sickbay and all her science labs), Chief O'Brien, Terry Oliver and an extra who's familiar and recognisable to us in Jenna D'Sora at tactical (who, and let's be perfectly fair and honest here, Captain Picard's tactical officer Burke kind of isn't). Including the civilians, he's also got Alexander (whose story gets developed a bit further when Mott takes it upon himself to ask Ms. Kyle if the young lad might like a “distraction” to take his mind off his father) and Keiko O'Brien as well, not to mention the fact Will has the normal, full-size saucer section bridge at his disposal.

Captain Picard, by contrast, really just has Laren and Deanna. Sure, he's also got the away team on the relay station, but they're cut off from both ships and have their own set of challenges to work through. But the interesting and curious side-effect of this is that it makes Captain Picard's team seem a bit more tightly-knit and tenacious, and the captain himself is more engaged and more of an active participant in the action than I think he's ever been in recent memory. It reminds me of maybe an older way of doing Star Trek, or at least a different one...More akin, perhaps, to how I imagine life aboard the Stargazer might have been like for Captain Picard. Much as I love the sprawling starship Enterprise in its own way, I've long held a fascination with space-based science fiction aboard comparatively small and cramped starships with a crew manifest not exceeding the single digits-It feels cozy and homey to me for some reason, and I guess marks a nice contrast with the vastness of space. That's part of the reason I like Dirty Pair and Raumpatrouille Orion as much as I do, and that's the vibe I get from the battle bridge action this month.

(Interestingly, as I write this I'm also reminded of how the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation described their friendship with each other on set. They say that while they were all part of the same circle of friends, there were also different subdivisions and subsets, and each pair or subgroup of people had a unique dynamic with each other they didn't have with anyone else. So each time you came on set and each time somebody had a scene with somebody else, the energy was always just a little bit different, and equally compelling, from the last time. It's funny how Friedman seems to have captured that so well here.)

Meanwhile back on the saucer section (and I like how the cliffhanger ends with them this month, as it ended with the battle bridge crew last month), Doctor Crusher and Chief O'Brien have learned the history of the people who built the relay station. Apparently their homeworld was facing natural disaster, and having only found one other planet in the galaxy that could support their kind of life, they pooled all their resources into building a machine that could transport vast quantities of people and material over great distances in a very short period of time. Unfortunately, the planet they settled on wound up being struck by a comet a few centuries after they arrived, so they tragically all went extinct anyway. It seems there is another station on this side of the galaxy that could conceivably be rewired to send the saucer back, but there's a problem: It's a year away at impulse (which is all the saucer can do), and their deuterium tanks would dry up long before that anyway. Whoops.

Streaming Update (and a Brief Treatise on Crap Home Video Standards)

Hey Dirty Pair fans! All three of you! Guess what?

I just found out something really exciting: It turns out Nozomi Entertainment, one of the rights-holders to the English language version of the Classic Anime Series, has been putting up complete, *subtitled* versions of Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia, Original Dirty Pair and Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy on its official YouTube channel all summer! You may recall that these were among the releases Manga Entertainment chose not to include in subtitled form among its own uploads of the Classic Anime Series, so it's a really big deal to finally get these versions in free, legal streaming form.

The TV show never received an English dub because it was localized on the cheap and only very recently, so this doesn't apply to the Manga Entertainment releases of those episodes,  but this is, to my knowledge at least, the first time folks who prefer to stream their visual media over the Internet have had to watch these later Classic Series Dirty Pair anime productions with the original Japanese language track and English subtitles. I've updated the video embeds on all my posts about those episodes and movies to these new uploads, and I do very much hope you'll consider taking this opportunity to give them a second look. I mean my work is surely rubbish and will make me cringe with embarrassment over a year later, but Dirty Pair itself still holds up!

If you were turned off checking out the OVA Series and movies because of the unavailability of a proper subtitled version through steaming services, I hope you'll go back and watch them now that there is one. And even if you were kind enough to follow along with my coverage of Original Dirty Pair and the film series, I hope you'll still think about giving them one more go-around now that you have the chance to see the original actors' performances. I'm not sure if this applies to the versions that are available on Hulu as well, so I've left that disclaimer on The Ultimate Dirty Pair Episode Guide Master Post, but I can now conclusively say for certain the YouTube versions are subtitled ones.

So what are you waiting for? The very best English language versions of some of the greatest sci-fi or anime ever made is now just out there waiting to be seen in all its glory! You can find a playlist of the OVA Series here and one for the movies here. And if you're for some reason still interested in hearing me go on about Dirty Pair after all that, you can always catch up with my more recent ruminations on the Lovely Angels at this humble side blog of mine. It's sadly been dormant for the past few months because of stupid life reasons (though I thankfully managed to update in time for the 30th Anniversary of the TV series on July 15), but I'm hoping to get back into it in the near future.

Now for the remaining 99% of my audience, I have something for you too.

The high definition restoration of Star Trek: The Next Generation is *finally* available to stream on Netflix! I'll freely admit I sound like a shill for this project, but I really, truly believe in it at a fundamental level. First a little background for those of you who might not know what this actually is, even though I harp on it all the goddamn time. So back in the day when they were making Star Trek: The Next Generation for TV, Paramount decided that because videocassette was obviously the technology of the future (and also because it was very cheap) the series would be *recorded* traditionally (meaning on 35mm film), but *composited* on tape. This means all of the editing and effects shots for the biggest new TV show of 1987 would be done on the utmost pinnacle of crappy 1980s consumer grade home video. This also meant there was a considerable visual downgrade from what the cameras were seeing in the studio to what audiences were seeing at broadcast, but it didn't matter back then because the average home TV set wouldn't have been able to pick up all that extra detail anyway.

The problem with this approach comes in the form of future proofing, or rather a glaring lack thereof. Because television sets got better, or at least good ones eventually became more affordable, this means that Star Trek: The Next Generation was curiously stuck in time: Even as technology moved on, it still looked like it was intended solely to be seen via broadcast TV in 1987, which, OK, it was, but that media climate is somewhat troublingly fleeting. This has the predictable, if unfortunate, side effect that if you happened to be watching Star Trek: The Next Generation in any medium or climate other than broadcast TV in 1987, it happened to look like utter shit.

This became particularly a problem once home video started to become commonplace. Here's what normally happens with stuff shot on film: As I understand it, film has a limitless (or at least very deep) well of potential visual detail and information it can capture, something other media standards don't necessarily have, particularly the ones used for consumer grade home video (and certainly not VHS which is and always was, let's be clear, rather crap). Luckily, as home video technology gets better, it can convey more detail, and so all someone has to do to put out a new release of an old movie or TV show that was shot on film is to go back to the original print and make a new copy or transfer that takes advantage of the improved tech. And because this happens with goodly regularity, the process is fairly streamlined and effortless.

That didn't happen with Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in fact it *couldn't* happen.

Because there was only one print of the show ever made and because of the unusual way it was produced, instead of being able to turn back to a "definitive" film print, every single home video release of Star Trek: The Next Generation had to draw *exclusively* from that one composite job done on *VHS*. That is, the one that was consciously designed to be crap, but good enough for right now ("right now", of course, meaning broadcast TV in 1987). To make matters worse, those involved with producing said home video releases made the unfortunate decision to just outright *copy* the original VHS print: Anyone who's had the experience of trying to copy video tapes for a friend by daisy-chaining VCRs back in the day will have a keen understanding of what happens to a VHS signal after several generations of copying copies (also Roxette FTW).

Yeah, so now imagine that but with Captain Picard instead of Marie Fredriksson. That's what Star Trek: The Next Generation on home video used to look like, *including* the DVD releases from the early 2000s: All they did there was take the Nth Generation shitty VHS transfer and try their best to make it presentable through "digital remastering", which is marketing speak for doing some bullshit with sliders on a video editing computer programme to fuck with different colour balance levels. It's that DVD version that was used in syndication for the past ten years or so *and* on Netflix until, well, right now.

This means that if you were trying to enjoy the adventures of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D in any form other than as they aired on a huge-ass 1980s CRT TV or debatably on the very first LaserDisc release of the show from the early 1990s (LaserDisc having a comparatively higher visual and audio fidelity for standard definition content than VHS provided you set your player and TV up right), they would have in all likelihood looked like utter shit. But thankfully, they don't have to anymore!

In 2012, Paramount released a new high definition Blu-ray release of Star Trek: The Next Generation to tie into the show's 25th Anniversary. They called this a "high definition remaster", which is unbelievably misleading because this was manifestly not a "digital remaster" like I talked about above (and you can't even "remaster" something that isn't audio anyway: That's actually a physical impossibility and I wish people would stop abusing that word): This was nothing short of a brand new print of the entire series done completely from scratch: Because the show was still shot on film, all that filmic detail was still there, even though it was *composited* on VHS. All that was needed was to go back to the original film and make a new print using modern video production methods. The only issue was that given that compositing is where the effects shots were combined with the raw video footage of the actors, every single effects shot in all seven years and all 176 episodes had to be completely re-done.

It was an absolutely mammoth undertaking, but the end result is a Star Trek: The Next Generation that looks jaw-droppingly, breathtakingly beautiful. It also means that the Blu-ray releases are arguably the only place you can see the show as it was "originally envisioned" by its creators. In fact, because of all the VHS shenanigans I'm actually rather adamant that it's actively disingenuous to criticize the aesthetics and look-and-feel of Star Trek: The Next Generation unless you've seen this new print. Of course, given that, until now, this meant ponying up money for an admittedly pricey set of seven Blu-ray box sets, this is something understandably out of reach for those not swimming in disposable income or not insane to the point of being dangerously irresponsible.

But now you don't have to spend a dime more than your Netflix subscription fee, as its these new prints of those episodes that are now available to steam. The Netflix version has been compressed somewhat for Internet streaming when compared to the Blu-ray print so you'll be accepting a minor visual downgrade, but not enough for reasonable people to really give a damn, and the upside is that it looks like Netflix fans get to enjoy further tweaks, revisions and corrections to admitted mistakes that were spotted after the Blu-rays shipped. So now you *really* have no excuse not to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation the way it always should have been seen.

(And if Amazon Prime is more your thing, not to worry: Their version of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the new print too.)

One last treat for Netflix users: LeVar Burton's "other" show, Reading Rainbow, is also now available to stream. There are only a handful of select episodes to choose from right now (and "The Bionic Bunny Show", which visits the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is *not* one of the ones on offer, though it is on iTunes and I believe Amazon Prime), but I'm sure more will be coming soon. My personal pick of the ones available now is "Tar Beach", which is an episode I've always had very vivid and fond memories of. Reading Rainbow, and LeVar Burton's joint position on both it and Star Trek: The Next Generation, is pivotal to the reading I've been building throughout this section of the blog, so I heartily recommend it to any Vaka Rangi reader.



UPDATE 9/6/15: Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture/Dirty Pair: Project Eden is now up in full and subtitled too and I've updated the post for that movie as well. So that's a thing you can watch. I mean, only if you really want to.