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So, its Trek's fortieth year and to be honest the
celebrations have been somewhat muted. Enterprise is
dead in the water and only the prospect of the new film keeps
Trekkers hope alive. Paramount, in an effort to squeeze every
last drop of money from the show, have released a number of
new box sets. To be honest this is not such a bad idea as
it first sounds. To have collected all of the shows would
have cost well over a grand, which is no small amount. Hell,
I remember paying over seventy quid for the first VHS copy
of Encounter at Farpoint, when it first came out. So
if like me you're not willing to pawn your first born to get
you favourite show these themed boxes are a nice idea.
This
box set covers some, but not all, of the stories which involved
time travel. The shows cover the Original Series, The
Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager,
strangely enough there is no show representing Enterprise,
which is a shame.
The
discs, themselves, have an impressive number of audio and
subtitle options. The show can be watched in either the original
English or ten other major European languages. This generosity
extends to the subtitles as well; you could, if you so wished,
watch the episodes in a German dub with Swedish subtitles.
A
couple of the shows come with a text commentary from Michael
and Denise Okuda who, as designers, had a great hand in producing
the look of Star Trek from The Next Generation
onwards - always informative and well worth a look. The text
commentary appears on three of the episodes; Tomorrow is
Yesterday, Yesterdays Enterprise and Little
Green Men.
There
is little point in going into large synopsis of each of the
shows as the target audience would have seen them endlessly,
so we'll have a quick zip through of the goodies on offer.
First
up, from the original show, is Tomorrow is Yesterday,
in which the Enterprise is thrown back to the nineteen-sixties
and is mistaken for a UFO. To compound their troubles they
take on board a number of unwilling passengers. The print
of the show is not great, it looks like the transfer was from
original film stock, meaning the print has a lot of artefacts
in places, especially when the show is utilising stock footage
or showing some of the special effects shots. That said, the
shots of the stage interiors are a lot better. The show itself
is a little gem providing a good arena for D.C. Fontana's
strong sense of character. There are some really great moments
of wry humour between McCoy and Spock and, as a story, can
still hold its head high.
The
second original series story is the contentious The City
on the Edge of Forever. The print is okay, but I suspect
not the enhanced version that is currently available. The
original treatment was written by Harlen Ellison. However
the elements of drug addiction was expunged and the whole
thing toned down, much to Ellison's public annoyance. The
story details the Enterprise's discovery of an ancient
time portal through which a manic McCoy enters the past and
eradicates history as Kirk knows it. This results in Kirk
and Spock travelling back in time to stop McCoy with tragic
consequences.
We move into The Next Generation with Yesterday's
Enterprise, which not only turned out to be a good story
but was also to be one of the pivotal moments in The Next
Generation, which would have far flung consequences for
the show's storyline. The Enterprise encounters a time
rift from which emerges the Enterprise-C a ship from
the past. Its emergence, however, has dramatically changed
history and now the Federation is at war with the Klingons
- a war it is loosing. The show has a text commentary and
a pretty good print. Like all of the shows in the box set
it is shown in its original aspect ratio with a 5.1 audio
track.
Last
episode on disc one is another Next Gen story, Cause
and Effect in which the ship and crew are stuck in a time
loop which destroys the ship and wipes their memories before
the loop begins again. This is a very clever show, given that
each time through the loop could become very repetitive if
not dealt with well. It's a testament to the writing that
this does not happen.
Disc
two and the emphasis is still with Next Gen. Instead
of four episodes we're reduced to three. Times Arrow
(parts one and two) sees our intrepid heroes thrown back in
time to meet with Mark Twain in an effort to stop extraterrestrials
from stealing biological energy from Earth's past. It's not
a bad story as such but does feel a little stretched as a
two-parter. It may be a bit disingenuous to say that the disc
only contains three episodes as the last one on the disc is
All Good Things, the final episode of the next Gen
and a feature length episode. This show was a fit finale for
the show and contains travel into the past, the very beginning
of Next Gen and the far flung future, as Picard tries
to unravel a phenomenon which is moving backward in time destroying
the whole of history. It's also the show which best showed
Q's omnipotence making him seem a bit more than his usual
portrayal as a flimflam man.
Disc three and we move onto Deep Space Nine with Little
Green Men. Although the show is generally considered to
be the darkest Trek show this episode showed DS9
at its comedic best. This episode also comes with a text commentary.
Quark, ever the wheeler dealer has another scam in mind; unfortunately
his plan goes horribly wrong, as things always do with Quark,
stranding Rom, Nog and himself back in a contemporary Area
51. Well what's a Ferengi to do except search out possibilities
for profit, even if it does mean destroying the odd timeline.
Next up is every fan boys/girls dream, Trials and Tribble-ations
where the full force of modern CGI technology was used
to place the characters from DS9 into the original
episode Trouble with Tribbles, even providing some
nice new CGI shots of the original Enterprise. Let's face
it the narrative reasons for the travel back in time is inconsequential
compared to the joy of seeing the two crews together. For
the last two episodes we move away from DS9 and into
the world of Voyager and a bit of an oddity. There
were indeed time travel stories in Voyager, however
I'm pretty sure that it's stretching a point to say that Year
of Hell (parts 1 and 2) is a time travel story as such.
Whilst
continuing its journey back to the Alpha Quadrant, Voyager
runs into the Krenim who are systematically trying to wipe
out their opponents by eradicating them from history. Of course,
Janeway gets into the thick of it at a great cost to her ship
and crew. The show is good drama with an unexpected twist
at the end. Although Voyager came in for a lot of critical
kicking, shows like this showed just how good it could be
once it got away from the first season.
So
we're onto the last disc of the box set and with no Enterprise
in sight, the set ends on just one story, the last in Voyager's
run, Endgame. A future Janeway, having been scarred
by the sacrifices that the crew made in order to get home,
decides to travel back in time to show the crew a quicker
was to get home, but will her contemporary self believe her
or hinder her. As is right on a show that had some of the
best Borg stories Voyager goes out on a humdinger of
a Borg tale, with Alice
Krige reprising her role as the Borg queen and
Dwight Schultz returning as Barclay - one of the few characters
which survived the cancellation of Next Gen.
If, like me, you didn't re-mortgage your house to buy the
full season box sets, these smaller sets are a god send. The
quality of the prints is generally good, only the Original
Series seems to suffer. If you've never seen a Trek
show, and I'd find that hard to believe, then these would
be an excellent way of introducing yourself or another to
the ever expanding worlds of Star Trek.
Charles
Packer
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