Enjoying "Despite Yourself" Despite Myself

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR STAR TREK: DISCOVERY'S

"DESPITE YOURSELF" 

Star Trek: Discovery returned this week by paying off two of the worst-kept secrets about the show: Ash Tyler's reveal as a Klingon Manchurian Candidate, and the appearance of the infamous Mirror Universe. One of these developments was handled with great panache; the other presents viewers with some troublesome subtext. 

First, the good. Following the events of "Into the Forest We Go," the Discovery finds herself lost in space, jumping not to Starbase 46 as intended, but into a field of starship debris. Captain Lorca orders Ash Tyler to retrieve a data core from one of the stricken ships, and the intelligence in the core reveals that they've jumped to a parallel universe, specifically one longtime viewers are familiar with: the dreaded Mirror Universe, home to the fascistic Terran Empire. Realizing their peril, Lorca and company react with commendable logic, reskinning the ship and manufacturing uniforms to make themselves indistinguishable from the I.S.S. Discovery they have inadvertently displaced (into the prime Star Trek universe, they theorize; who knows what mischief that crew will perpetrate in "our" universe?) 

My highest commendation goes to the costuming department this time around - the Mirror Universe uniforms are amazing, with a corruptive allure that it's difficult (but necessary) to resist. It's also fun to see Sylvia Tilly being forced to act against her nature by playing the Discovery's captain, as she apparently is in this universe, having backstabbed her way up the chain of command. The dreaded agony booths of the original "Mirror, Mirror" also appear in this episode, and they are genuinely terrifying. 

I was surprised and delighted most, though, by the reference to the U.S.S. Defiant, which as Star Trek: Enterprise viewers will remember, was captured by the evil versions of Jonathan Archer and Hoshi Sato in that series' fourth (and best) season. Naturally the ship's appearance confuses Lorca, Burnham, and company, since from their perspective the Defiant is currently still on normal duty back in their home universe. They don't know what the audience knows, namely that the Defiant was thrown back in time and into the Mirror Universe some dozen years in the future (from their perspective). These are the kind of wacky hijinks that are only possible in science fiction, and only then in long-form storytelling like this. At this point, Star Trek has become a period piece, in a sense, a setting with a reasonably consistent history, look, and feel. Continuity callbacks are important because they acknowledge the established reality of the setting, and respecting continuity gives writers the obstacles and complications that are often necessary to create good material. Yes, it's also shameless fan service, but it works for me here. 

As for Ash Tyler's story, I'm somewhat disappointed because the reveal does, in my mind, undercut the PTSD storyline that was so essential to his character. Now, given that we still don't know the exact nature of Tyler/Voq's...existence...perhaps this reveal can still remain thematically satisfying. It really depends on how the writers develop the character from this point forward. It appears as though Tyler/Voq's body is Klingon, surgically altered to appear human, with Ash Tyler's memory engrams/personality/soul overlaid on top of the original Voq personality. Depending on your spiritual point of view, you could argue that this person is really the Klingon Voq, with a ghost imprinted on his brain; or, you could argue that Tyler is, in a sense, still alive, only living in Voq's altered body. 

If Voq is written as the real person, then Tyler's story becomes even more tragic, since we never really met him. On the other hand, if Tyler's engrams/personality/soul/whatever are presented as "real," then Tyler's story...becomes even more tragic, since he suffered all that torture and was also ripped from his physical body and stuck in a Klingon. 

I imagine the two personalities will fight over who gets to keep the physical meatspace, but philosophically this is a hugely complicated mess, to put it mildly. But again, this is the sort of story that science fiction was designed to handle. 

Sadly, when Dr. Culber realizes something is up, Tyler promptly snaps his neck - a surprising shock moment, to be sure, but one that brings to an abrupt end the notion of whether or not his relationship with Stamets can be sensitively handled in a satisfying way. 

Or does it? I immediately thought of the "kill your gays" trope when Culber died, but according to actor Wilson Cruz and writer Aaroc Harberts, there's more to Culber's death than meets the eye, and Harberts and Cruz, both gay men themselves, were quick to say that this isn't what's happening, and furthermore, that Cruz will return. They're not going to replace Culber with a Mirror Culber, so maybe he's not dead and his neck is just broken? Hmmm. 

This is the first episode of Discovery to be directed by Jonathan Frakes, AKA Will Riker, who started directing episodes way back during the days of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Frakes has a reputation for adding a dark sort of flair to his episodes, and he was clearly well-suited to "Despite Yourself." The episode manages to be campy fun and loomingly creepy at the same time - no mean feat. 

So, despite my reservations, I feel like this was another surprisingly solid outing for Star Trek: Discovery. If the Empress of the Terran Empire turns out to be a descendant of evil Hoshi Sato, well, I'll be pretty darn impressed. 

What Might Have Been, What Might Yet Be

Entertainment websites are reporting that rumours about Bryan Fuller's vision for the new Star Trek television series were apparently true: Fuller intended to produce an anthology show, with each season representing a different era in Star Trek's timeline. Apparently CBS reined in that ambition a little, so unless things change radically, Star Trek: Discovery will remain fixed in the decade or so before the original series.

Discovery will have to stand on its own merits, but it's fun to speculate what might have been:

• A season set in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era, with that decade's design aesthetic, measured pacing, and big ideas
• A season set during the months leading up to the Eugenics Wars/World War III/the post-atomic horror, with a coda about First Contact and recovery
• A season of Captain Sulu on the Excelsior
• A season set in the far future, post TNG/DS9/VOY, perhaps about the beginnings of intergalactic travel
• A season about ordinary non-Starfleet life on Earth/Vulcan/Andor/Mars (So many possibilities. Since the Federation is post-scarcity, you could focus on people figuring out what to do with their time, which might be a fun vehicle for some hilarity...) 
• A season set during the Star Trek: Enterprise era, set during the Romulan War
• A season about the adventures of Gary Seven in the 60s and 70s
• A season set during the original series, with period costumes, sets, special effects, story conventions and (!) commercials (they could totally do this in the world of streaming binge television!) 
• An anthology season within the anthology series, with each episode about a character (main or guest) from any of the previous shows
• A season with Star Trek characters appearing on our world, and being amazed to discover that to us Star Trek is just a TV show (I know that this is an old trope, exploited most recently by John Scalzi in Redshirts, but I think this could be tons of metafictional fun.) 

It's possible that Star Trek: Discovery will turn out to be a fine show, one we might follow two or three or four or seven seasons in the traditional Trek manner. Or maybe Fuller will come back and realize his original ambitious vision. Wouldn't that be something? 

Is This the Next Star Trek Theme?

It opens nicely enough, and I like the percussion bits, but to me it feels like this is missing the memorable hook that a great television theme tune needs. The composer's Twitter account indicates that this was just an audition of some kind, so this might not be what we'll hear over the opening credits of Star Trek: Discovery later this year. If it's in the running, I hope they refine it a bit. If not, well, at the very least it's far better than "Faith of the Heart:"

To Every Time Travel Episode, A Seasoning

A while back, I created a guide to all the Star Trek episodes (save those of the fifth series, Enterprise) featuring time travel. Before tonight, the list has been available only to whichever lucky (?) souls received it via email. Now, let the world behold...

Time Treks
The Star Trek Time Travel Episode Guide!

Each episode is rated thusly

Time Bomb: The very worst time travel episodes.

Time Out: Pretty bad, but not a bomb.

Time Waster: Fair-to-middling effort.

Time Honoured: A good way to spend an hour.

Timeless: The very best time travel episodes.


Each series will also receive a TTQ, or Time Travel Quotient, to indicate what percentage of the show's episodes involved time travel.

PART ONE: The Original Series


Getting ready to trek back and forth through time.

Season One

"The Naked Time"
The very first episode in the Trek canon to involve time travel, and the seventh episode of the show. However, said travel plays only a very minor role at the end of the story. It's really about a disease that drives everyone on the ship whacko. Classic moments include Kevin Riley's stirring rendition of "Kathleen," and a rock-em-sock-em-play-that-funky-fight-music battle between Kirk and Spock. And the "how did this ever make it past the censors?" moment when a sword-wielding Sulu, drunk with mania, grabs Uhura and says, "I'll protect you, fair maiden!"

Her reply: "Sorry, neither!"

Originally, the brief trip back in time - three days - was to have been a much longer jump, into the late 1960s. Originally, this episode was planned as part one of a two-part story (see "Tomorrow is Yesterday," below).

Rating: Time Honoured

"Tomorrow is Yesterday"
...in which the Enterprise is tossed back in time via a "black star." The ship has also been tossed into Earth's atmosphere, and Air Force pilot John Christopher reports the Enterprise as a UFO. Wacky shenanigans ensue, and to put things right again, Kirk must play around with time some more. During the course of the episode, we discover that 23rd century flashlights look exactly like their 20th century counterparts.

RATING: Time Honoured

"The City on the Edge of Forever"

Universally hailed as Star Trek's best episode, this is the one where Kirk must sacrifice the woman he loves for the sake of the future of humanity. "Doubtless you're wondering about my friend's ears. It's really quite easy to explain. You see, he...had an accident with a...mechanical rice picker."

RATING: Timeless

Season Two

"Assignment: Earth"

No time travel in the second season until the very last episode. Still, Kirk and company are already being a bit casual about time travel; in this episode, they journey to the 1960s purely out of curiosity, to see how the primitive humans of the day managed to avoid nuclear destruction. (They can't find this information in the history books, because "records of the period are fragmentary.")

Turns out that a Mr. Gary Seven, a human being raised by benevolent aliens, is doing most of the work to keep human history on track. He's a sort of secret agent, making sure that the Cold War doesn't turn hot, and his mission is to stop an American orbital nuclear weapons platform from becoming operational, since this would tilt the balance of power too far in America's favour and possibly trigger a nuclear war.

This episode was intended as a "backdoor pilot" for a show called Assignment: Earth, in which Gary Seven and his secretary, Roberta Lincoln (Terri Garr) would have more Cold War adventures. It never happened, which is too bad - it's an interesting premise.

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Three

"All Our Yesterdays"

Only one time travel story in season three, and it's the second last episode of the series. An unremarkable episode, falling into the mid-range of the typically disappointing third-season stories. You get to see Spock eat meat, though, because somehow, being thrown into the past makes him go nuts, theoretically because he's now closer to his savage ancestors. You're not a real scientist, are you? Still, the concept of temporal refugees, escaping a nova by traveling to the past of their own world, is pretty cool.

RATING: Time Waster

Star Trek: The Animated Series

"Yesteryear"

Yay! Cartoons! This tale returns us to the Guardian of Forever, seen in the timeless "City On the Edge of Forever." Mr. Spock visits his own childhood on Vulcan, and becomes a kind of mentor to his younger self. "Yesteryear" would have made a fine live-action episode, with its focus on growing up and making difficult choices.

RATING: Timeless

"The Counter-Clock Incident"

The Enterprise gets pulled into a universe where time runs backward, so visiting Commodore Robert April, the ship's elderly first captain, is the only one who can save the crew when everyone starts to get younger and younger...too young to run things. Restored to vigorous young adulthood, April saves the day. Cool.

RATING: Time Honoured

The Star Trek Original Series Movies


Paramount invites audiences to take a time trek of their own - to the 23rd century.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Or, "Star Trek IV: Save the Whales." Goofy fun in 1980s San Francisco, featuring "A double dumb-ass on you," "Where are the nuclear wessels?" "How do ye know he dinna invent the thing?" and many other fun bits. Despite the film's good humour and worthy conservation theme, this film hasn't aged as well as its original popularity might suggest. It's too much of a hodgepodge of elements, for one thing - a time travel story tossed into the middle of a string of serious events for the lives of our heroes, namely the death and rebirth of Spock, the death of Kirk's son, and the theft and destruction of the Enterprise. Given the gravity of the events in the previous films, the sudden turn to mirth seems a bit off-kilter. Still a fun film, though, if you're in the right mood for it.

RATING: Time Honoured

Time Travel Quotient:

Out of 107 episodes (including the animated series and the movies), only eight involve time travel, for a Time Travel Quotient of 7.47%.

RATINGS BREAKDOWN

Time Bomb: 0 episodes
Time Out: 0 episodes
Time Waster: 1 episode
Time Honoured: 5 episodes
Timeless: 2 episodes

The original Star Trek, then, has a reasonably successful time travel track record.

PART TWO: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Season One
“We’ll Always Have Paris”

A forgettable episode with a minimal time travel element.

RATING: Time Out

Season Two

“Time Squared”

Mysterious space whirlpool opens and threatens to suck the Enterprise into oblivion. Can a ranting Picard from the future avert catastrophe? Who cares? Originally intended to lead into “Q Who,” the episode that introduced the Borg.

RATING: Time Bomb

Season Three

“Yesterday’s Enterprise”

For many, this episode marks a turning point in Star Trek: The Next Generation: it’s the point where the show actually became worth watching. This is the one with the Enterprise-C and the big space battle. More importantly, it also presents Picard and his pals with a wrenching moral dilemma.

RATING: Timeless

“Captain’s Holiday”

Captain Picard goes spelunking, but aliens from the 27th century come back in time to look for a thingy that can make suns explode. An amusing romp.

RATING: Time Waster

Season Four

An amazing ZERO time travel episodes!

Season Five

“A Matter of Time”
Con man Matt Frewer uses his stolen time travel machine to steal technology. Ho hum.

RATING: Time Out

“Cause and Effect”

The Enterprise is caught in a time loop, and not one of those nice time loops when you’re having sex with a pair of twins over and over for eternity! Nope, it’s one of those time loops where your ship is lost with all hands over and over and over. How can you beat a show where, without warning, the ship explodes in the opening ten seconds of the episode?

RATING: Timeless

“Time’s Arrow”

Archeologists find Data’s head in a cave in San Francisco, only it’s five hundred years old, and besides, Data is alive and well on the Enterprise. Oh oh, sounds like some kind of paradox. An intriguing setup, with special guest stars Samuel Clemens and Jack London. Part one of two.

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Six

“Time’s Arrow, Part Two”

Meh. Disappointing resolution. Time traveling vampire snakes?

RATING: Time Waster

“Timescape”

Time is freezing, speeding up, or slowing down thanks to “temporal pockets” in space. Yikes! Picard needs to get his nails trimmed after his hand passes through a pocket and ages a few months. Ouch! Features a laugh-out-loud moment when a delirious Picard draws a happy face in the frozen cloud of vapour that signals a warp-core breach.

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Seven

“Firstborn”

Worf’s son, all grown up now, travels to the present from the future to warn his dad about something. I forget what.

RATING: Time Waster

“All Good Things…”

Okay, maybe this is just all a Q fantasy, but it’s hard to be sure. I include it as a time-travel episode anyway, since the plot relies so heavily on the interconnection of the three eras of Picard’s life on display here. A pretty good series finale, but just a couple of steps away from outstanding.

RATING: Time Honoured

Star Trek: The Next Generation Movies

“Star Trek: Generations”

Killing Kirk off in the lamest of all possible ways makes this an automatic bomb. Bah!

RATING: Time Bomb

“Star Trek: First Contact”

Action-packed race to the past to save our future! Scary Borg! Stoic Vulcans! Drunk Deanna! Grinning Riker! What more can you ask for?

RATING: Timeless

Time Travel Quotient

Out of 179 episodes (including the movies), only 13 featured time travel in any significant way. That’s a TTQ of 7.26%, only a fraction lower than the original series.

RATINGS BREAKDOWN

Time Bomb: 2 episodes
Time Out: 2 episodes
Time Waster: 3 episodes
Time Honoured: 3 episodes
Timeless: 3 episodes

In terms of quality, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s time travel record covers the entire scale fairly evenly, though slightly tilted towards quality.

PART THREE: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Season One

“Emissary”

Time travel plays an important role in the mythology of Deep Space Nine, since it revolves around a space station that’s situated next to a wormhole inhabited by a species of aliens who live outside linear time. We find all this out in the very first episode, an excellent beginning to an excellent series.

RATING: Timeless

Season Two

An amazing ZERO time travel episodes!

Season Three

“Past Tense, Part I”

Sisko, Bashir, and Dax are thrown into Earth’s past by a transporter accident. That’s bad enough, but it’s the early 21st century, and they’ve wound up in a sealed-off compound for the homeless during the historical Bell Riots. Fantastic commentary on real-world social problems and the widening gap between rich and poor.

RATING: Timeless

“Past Tense, Part II”

Second verse, just as good as the first.

RATING: Timeless

“Visionary”

Poor Chief O’Brien. Nothing good ever happens to this guy, and now he’s being jerked back and forth between the present and the near future. Not only that, but he discovers that the space station is about to be destroyed! Can he alter the course of the future?

RATING: Timeless

Season Four

“The Visitor”

A heart-wrenching episode: Jake Sisko is tortured by his father’s death, and spends his entire life trying to undo the past. One of only a handful of episodes to move me to tears.

RATING: Timeless

“Little Green Men”

The Three Stooges – er, make that the three Ferengi, Quark, Rom, and Nog – have a time travel accident and wind up in Roswell, New Mexico, 1947. They are, of course, responsible for the persistent rumors that aliens crash-landed there…This episode also gives a fun nod to “Past Tense” with a clever in-joke.

Rating: Timeless

Season Five

“Trials and Tribble-ations”

A villain from the past steals the Bajoran Orb of Time in an attempt to reverse a past defeat…and only Captain Sisko can save the legendary Captain Kirk from dying a decidedly untimely death. A classic.

Rating: Timeless

“Children of Time”

Another standout episode. Sisko and company must trade their own lives for 10,000 of their descendants…but the Odo of the future has other ideas.

RATING: Timeless

Season Six

“Far Beyond the Stars”

A black science fiction writer has trouble getting his stories published in the 1950s…and no wonder, considering he writes about an outlandish space station with a black man as its captain. Another high concept, winning episode.

RATING: Timeless

“Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”

Great title, not-so-great episode. Major Kira borrows the Orb of Time to see if her mom was really a collaborating whore or not. She was.

RATING: Time Out

“Time’s Orphan”

Little Molly O’Brien wanders into a time portal and spends over a decade there, emerging as a young woman. Her parents don’t know what to do. Meh. Disappointing.

RATING: Time Out

“The Sound of Her Voice”

Time travel as plot twist. Good enough to pass the, er, time.

RATING: Time Waster

Season Seven

No time travel!

Time Travel Quotient

Out of 174 episodes, time travel plays a part in twelve episodes, for a TTQ of 6.89%, lowest of the four series.

RATINGS BREAKDOWN

Time Bomb: 0 episodes
Time Out: 2 episodes
Time Waster: 0 episodes
Time Honoured: 0 episodes
Timeless: 10 episodes

An amazing result – ten out of twelve DS9 time travel episodes are timeless classics, with only two disappointments.

PART FOUR: Star Trek: Voyager

Season One

“Parallax”

Voyager responds to a distress signal from…itself, as it turns out, trapped in a quantum singularity in the ship’s near-future. Good thing technobabble can save them!

RATING: Time Bomb

“Time and Again”

After a promising premiere episode, “Voyager” gave us two time-travel episodes in a row. “Time and Again” is the second, a heavy-handed morality play about the importance of following the Prime Directive. Voyager runs across a planet that has recently suffered some kind of technological disaster. Beaming down to investigate, Captain Janeway and Mr. Paris fall through subspace ruptures into the past, to a time just before the accident. Turns out that it was their presence in the past that triggered the disaster all along! Oops. That’ll teach you to seek out strange new worlds and new civilizations.

RATING: Time Bomb

“Eye of the Needle”

Voyager discovers a teeny-weeny wormhole that leads back to the Alpha Quadrant; into Romulan territory, to be specific. The ship can’t fit through, but at least they can send a message back to the friendly Romulan who promises to pass on the news of their survival to the Federation. But oh-oh – they discover that the wormhole is a tunnel not just through space, but also back in time fifty years. One of the few decent Voyager episodes, with a nice touch of pathos.

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Two

“Death Wish”

Well, you knew Q had to show up sometime, and you knew it was going to involve time travel. With a suicidal member of the Q on trial, the Q we know and love calls up witnesses from the past to prove that the suicidal Q’s life has meaning after all. Includes a gratuitous cameo by Commander Riker of the Enterprise.

RATING: Time Waster

Season Three

“Future’s End”

A time-ship from the 29th century Federation appears before Voyager, and its captain isn’t happy. Apparently, Voyager is about to be responsible for a catastrophe that will have far-reaching repercussions. To prevent that, Voyager must be destroyed. There’s a fight, and Voyager winds up getting flung through time and space to Earth of the year 1996…

RATING: Time Waster

“Future’s End, Part II”

In which the intrepid crew (of an Intrepid-class ship, no less) resolve the paradox and wind up right back where they started. Plus, you get to see a shuttlecraft blow up a semi.

RATING: Time Waster

“Before and After”

Kes is exposed to radiation that sends her leaping back and forth through time, right back to her very birth. A high-concept time travel episode that actually – shock – works!

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Four

“Year of Hell”

Kurtwood Smith (Red from “That 70s Show”) plays an obsessed Krenim scientist who wants to restore his fallen empire and recover his lost wife. He has a ship armed with a powerful weapon – a “temporal cannon” that erases the Krenim Empire’s enemies from history. Can Voyager stop countless billions of sentient beings from being erased?

RATING: Timeless

“Year of Hell, Part II”

The conclusion. Not quite as good as part one, if only because in the end, the famous Voyager reset button is pushed and you discover that the events of the story…never happened. Sigh. Still, the coda where Smith’s character is finally reunited with his wife is very moving.

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Five

“Timeless”

An experiment to get Voyager home goes horribly awry, and only Commander Chakotay and Ensign Kim make it back to Earth. But their failure weighs heavily, and the two surviving officers spend years figuring out how to cheat fate, traveling back in time to prevent the accident before it occurs. One of Voyager’s few good episodes, guest-starring LeVar Burton as Captain Geordi LaForge.

RATING: Timeless

“Relativity”

The 29th century Federation is back, and this time they want to know who destroyed Voyager with a time bomb! Originally titled, amusingly, “Time Bomb.” I’m almost sorry the episode is too good to warrant that rating.

RATING: Time Honoured

Season Six

“Fury”

Kes, who left the ship in the fourth season, comes back, and she’s pissed, using her telekinetic abilities to wreck Voyager. Quick! Only time travel can save us!

RATING: Time Bomb

Season Seven

“Shattered”

Holy Cow! A space-time anomaly has shattered Voyager into different eras! The bridge is set in the days before Voyager got tossed back into the Delta Quadrant, engineering is being occupied by Kazon from the second season…it’s chaos, and only Chuckles – er, that is, First Officer Chakotay – can put things right. Now you know we’re in trouble.

RATING: Time Bomb

“Endgame”

Voyager’s final episode involves the show’s two most overused elements: time travel and the Borg. In the future, we see that psychotic Admiral Janeway, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Voyager’s arrival home (after a 23 year trip), decides that history just didn’t unfold the way it should have, and steals a time travel device from a Klingon scientist. She lost a few crewmembers along the way, you see, including Seven of Nine, and, well, damn it, erasing 33 years of history is justifiable for the sake of those lives. Holy cow! Where are those 29th century time cops when you need them? Voyager gets Batmobile armour, the Borg seem to get destroyed for all time, and future technology falls into the hands of the Federation. Oh, the big homecoming? You get ten seconds worth as the final credits roll. No resolution of character arcs, we don’t find out what happens to all those Maquis crewmembers (who are, as far as we’ve been told, still criminals in the eyes of the Federation)…oy. Possibly Voyager’s worst episode, and that’s really saying something.

RATING: Time Bomb

Time Travel Quotient

Out of 168 episodes, Star Trek: Voyager told time travel stories 14 times. That gives Voyager a TTQ of 8.33%, the highest of all four completed incarnations of Star Trek.

RATINGS BREAKDOWN

Time Bomb: 5 episodes
Time Out: 0 episodes
Time Waster: 3 episodes
Time Honoured: 4 episodes
Timeless: 2 episodes

Not surprisingly, Voyager features the fewest Timeless episodes and the most Time Bombs. Still, there are a surprisingly high number of decent Voyager time travel episodes.

PART FIVE: CONCLUSION

Thus far, there have been 628 episodes of Star Trek, not counting the newest series, Enterprise. Of these 628 episodes, 47 have featured time travel, for a complete Time Travel Quotient of 7.48%, a surprisingly low number. What about quality?

RATINGS BREAKDOWN (TOTAL)

Time Bomb: 7 episodes
Time Out: 4 episodes
Time Waster: 7 episodes
Time Honoured: 12 episodes
Timeless: 17 episodes

Surprisingly, Star Trek has been pretty successful at tackling time travel. They’ve had a few bombs – mostly thanks to Voyager – but their fair share of classics as well.

Has the time travel well, then, been dipped into too often? Only in the fullness of time shall we discover the answer…

Revising a Pseudo-Classic: The New Battlestar Galactica

The original Battlestar Galactica was a show with many faults, including uneven acting, gaping plot holes, and laughable science.

But the show had its merits, too, chiefly its premise, a science-fiction take on the old story of the Jewish Exodus, with a liberal dose of Erich Von Daniken's screwy "Ancient Astronauts" pop-mythology of the seventies. A thriving civilization is betrayed and ambushed by a terrifying enemy, and the devastated survivors are left with no choice but to flee, led by a visionary prophet (Adama) to some far-off promised land (Earth).

Having just re-watched the entire original series on DVD, I am more aware than ever of the grand potential of the show, a potential that never came close to being realized. There certainly were a number of good episodes, notably the original three-part pilot (much better than the whittled-down movie version most of us probably remember), "The Living Legend," in which the Galactica encounters another Battlestar, "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero," "War of the Gods," and the final episode, "The Hand of God."

The friendship between pilots Apollo (Richard Hatch), Starbuck (Dirk Benedict), and Boomer (Herb Jefferson, Jr.) is nicely developed, and I've been forced to reevaluate Dirk Benedict's skills; he clearly has a lot of charisma, great comic timing, and a better emotional range than I once gave him credit for. Herb Jefferson deserves a lot of credit, too; his Boomer is eminently likeable, and believable as a no-nonsense, if somewhat resigned, Viper pilot. Richard Hatch is a little wooden at times, but he certainly portrays Apollo's love for Serena and Boxey convincingly, and the depth of his grief (after the loss of his younger brother, and later Serena) is well-acted.

But while the show's creators were working hard to develop a larger mythology for Battlestar Galactica, their efforts were undercut by far too many "planet of the week" episodes, in which either Apollo or Starbuck crashed on some lost colony or other, which usually had a Wild West or medieval theme, almost certainly to make use of existing Universal sets and props. Episodes such as "The Young Lords," "The Magnificent Warriors," "Fire in Space," and "Greetings from Earth" are either ridiculous or mind-numbingly dull, and have done much to diminish this series' reputation. Maren Jensen's overwrought turn as Athena doesn't help, nor does the obnoxious robot dog, Muffit II. And the short-lived but disastrous follow-up series, Galactica 1980, with its flying motorcycles and tired "fish out of water" jokes, seemed certain to completely destroy any hope of redemption for the series.

The new version of Battlestar Galactica, then, comes as a pleasant surprise. While by no means perfect, it is certainly intriguing, and well worth a look for anyone who enjoyed Space: Above and Beyond, whose storytelling ethos it seems to most closely resemble.

In this retelling of the myth, the Cylons were not created by lizard-like aliens, but humans themselves, and some forty years before the events of the series, the Cylons turned on their human creators. (Obviously the Colonials hadn't been exposed to Earth fiction that could have warned them of this possibility, such as Demon Seed, Colossus, or the aforementioned Space: Above and Beyond.) The humans won the war, the Cylons retreated, and an uneasy peace was born. But as the series opens, the Cylons launch a sneak attack, using electronic counter-measures to disable almost all of the Colonial defences and lay waste to the twelve worlds of humanity. Even worse, there's a new model of Cylon, indistinguishable from human beings, and possessing incredible depths of passion and righteous anger. One of these Cylons, played by Edmontonian beauty Tricia Helfer, dupes one of the Colonies' leading scientists, Dr. Gaius Baltar, into handing over access to vital defence facilities. This time, Baltar isn't a diabolical traitor, but a selfish and arrogant fool, one so wrapped up in his own genius that he forgets his obligations to his fellow humans. Whether he'll grow up at some point in the series is an open question.

Of course, there's one ship that survives the initial assault: the Galactica, an old, worn-out hulk that's immune to the ECM weapons because her ancient technology isn't sophisticated enough to be vulnerable to such attacks. While the ship is full of computers, they aren't networked, and information is relayed from deck to deck by old-style telephone headsets and computer printouts. Very retro, and quite cool.

As the colonies burn - an event that is chillingly portrayed, and quite believable - the Galactica retreats to a human weapons depot, having no ammunition because of her imminent decommission. Meanwhile, human survivors are fleeing in whatever ships they can find, some with FTL drive, some without, which leads to a heartbreaking - and shocking - decision by the new Colonial President, formerly the Minister of Education, a woman so far down the line of succession she could never have dreamed of wielding such power.

In the original series, military authority was infallible, and the civilian Council of the Twelve was filled with buffoons. Thankfully, this time around there's a bit more balance; the civilian President and Commander Adama each have very difficult decisions to make, and they make them pragmatically. By the show's end, it's clear that while these two characters may butt heads, they share mutual respect, something quite lacking in the original show.

The new Apollo is pretty dry, but the new Starbuck - this time a woman - is delightful. Boomer, too, is a woman this time around, one with a shocking secret that promises to provide plenty of dramatic tension if the miniseries is turned into an ongoing series.

I also liked the focus on "lower decks" characters, the maintenance crews who make the hotshot antics of the pilots possible.

The special effects are as excellent as one expects these days, and the re-imagined starships are quite ingenious, particularly the living Cylon raiders. The FTL effect is pretty nifty, and the landing bays need to retract before the ship jumps, giving the Viper pilots plenty of incentive to get aboard before the train leaves the station, as it were.


In the final analysis, this new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica has as much or more potential as the original, and thus far much more of that potential has been realized. I hope that the show is picked up - it promises to be more entertaining, at least, than the current Star Trek series, Enterprise.

Much more.