Star Trek Continues Brings New TOS and It’s Like Nerd Heaven Up in Here

Last weekend I was at Colossalcon, and while scoping out the panel schedule, I noticed that Vic Mignogna (dub voice of Ed Elric, Obito Uchiha, Tamaki Suoh, and a ton of other cool kids) would be leading a panel called “Star Trek Continues with Vic Mignogna”. Now, I knew that Vic was a huge fuckin’ nerd and that he loved Star Trek from previous panels of his that I’ve attended, but I apparently didn’t know how far his obsession extended. My friends and I went to the panel without a real idea of what was going to happen there.

Turns out Vic had put together a you-had-to-see-it-to-believe-it cast that ranged from fellow anime voice actor Todd Haberkorn (Death the Kid, Ling Yao, Natsu Dragneel) as Spock, to James Doohan’s son Chris Doohan as Scotty, to Mythbuster Grant Imahara as Sulu, and had built sets that were exact replicas of the TOS stages*. They filmed an episode that was a sort-of sequel to TOS’s “Who Mourns for Adonais?” starring the original actor who played Apollo.

Star Trek Continues is, so far, only one the episode, but it really captures the feel of TOS in a way that Abrams’s film adaptations have proved themselves incapable of. Vic, as such a huge fan of the original series, understands that the real draw of Star Trek is the human drama and philosophical dilemmas rather than flash-bang action and lens flares, and the episode shows it.

My only real complaint about the first episode is that Vic has such a high voice, and I know there’s nothing he can do about that and that his voice is sort of his trademark…. But he looks and acts so much like Shatner’s original Kirk that it’s a bit jarring to hear Edward Elric’s voice come out of him.

The first episode was entirely funded by the actors as proof that they could do what they were setting out to do, but according to Vic they’ll be kicking off some sort of crowdfunding effort through Kickstarter or some such in the near future. As this isn’t actually licensed by CBS, this is basically filmed fanfiction that they can’t legally make money from, but they can cover the costs of creation. With the varied fanbases of the actors involved, I don’t doubt that they’ll easily reach their funding goal, but that won’t stop me from encouraging folks to donate when the time comes!

Watch the first episode here at StarTrekContinues.com!

*Edited to clarify: sets were created by Farrugut Films and used by the STC crew.

After Earth

So now that both Lady Geek Girl and I have reviewed the trailer for this movie (here and here), I figured I’d subject myself to it, because why the hell not? As it turns out, “why the hell not” seems to be the driving motivation behind just about every scene in the movie, so yeah, why the hell not? I can’t say that I had that many high expectations for this film, and so I wasn’t disappointed in the least. Sometimes, I was remarkably surprised at hints of, dare I say, good writing. Other times, I was torn between laughing and cursing at myself for paying to go see this thing.

Obviously, there are going to be spoilers in this post. But before we begin, M. Night Shyamalan likes to work with twist endings. Some of you may be asking yourself what the twist is for this movie. Lady Geek Girl speculates that it’s that the movie takes place in a utopia where The Last Airbender movie didn’t suck.

If only.

The twist is that there is no twist. There’s some fear monster that Jaden Smith is terrified of, but at the climatic ending, he learns how to not be afraid of it. At just that right moment. He and Jamie from Rise of the Guardians seem to have a lot in common in that regard, except that Jamie wasn’t an annoying caricature.

The Late, Not-So-Great Star Trek Into Darkness Review

Yeah, so, this movie came out two weeks ago. I… don’t have an excuse—I guess I was just so underwhelmed by it that I didn’t feel like writing about it. I mean, why bother when io9′s “Star Trek Into Darkness Spoiler FAQ” is a thing that exists?

But it’s poor form to avoid writing about a movie so ripe for feminist critique. Let’s do this thing. Spoilers after the jump.

Trailer Tuesdays: After Earth

Yes, I know this movie just came out recently, but I haven’t seen it yet, and it only came out a couple days so I think I’m still within my blogger rights to review the trailer.

It’s summer time and Will Smith is in an action movie. That seemed to be the norm for a long time, but now that I think about it, I haven’t seen Will Smith in many movies lately, or at least many action ones. But this time it seems like the burden of providing most of the action actually is on Will Smith’s son, Jaden Smith. In After Earth, Will and Jaden play a father and son team that crash lands on… Earth? So apparently one thousand years ago humanity left Earth for… reasons, but now Will Smith and his son have crash landed there, and they need to retrieve some sort of beacon in order to get home. But there’s a twist: everything on Earth has evolved to kill humans now. Again because of reasons… reasons that I assume will be connected with some surprise twist ending about why humans left the planet in the first place. Maybe the plants killed people? No, wait, it’s all actually Jaden Smith’s dream, or it’s faeries, or normal people dressing in yellow robes to scare everyone and hide the fact they live in modern times. Or maybe the twist is that it’s set in a world where Avatar: The Last Airbender didn’t suck.

As you may have guessed from my thinly veiled sarcasm, this movie is directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Which leaves me in something of a conundrum when it comes to whether or not I should see this movie. You see, almost all Will Smith movies are good. That is just fact. Even if it’s not good in the sense that it has a good plot, it’s always at least entertaining and enjoyable to watch. But M. Night Shyamalan has, in recent years, been a terrible director, but his early movies were so good I think I just want to always given him a chance to redeem himself. The movie looks exciting. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the movie stars two characters of color, which is something movies don’t often do, especially sci-fi movies. That alone might be the reason I see this movie, even if the plot seems to set itself up with one too many twist endings.

We’ll have to wait and see if this will be an exciting movie or another M. Night Shyamalan failure at making a comeback.

Doctor Who Series 7.2: Who Cares?

Hi, all. So you might have noticed that I left off my Doctor Who episode reviews after “The Bells of St. John”. Never fear, though: I’m here to make up for it with a review of all the remaining episodes in one post. Buckle up for mediocre plots, tired tropes, and characters with no character after the jump!

Star Trek and the Distinct Lack of Gay Characters

Star Trek is yet another show that faces a difficult challenge. You might even say that the Powers That Be of Star Trek are up against a potential no-win scenario. This challenge the PTB (particularly the writers) have is that Star Trek has been often up held as this utopian society. In the midst of many dystopian futuristic sci-fi shows, Star Trek, though filled with many alien conflicts, presents us with a universe where the problems of earth have been resolved. In the Star Trek universe there is no more racism, classism, ableism, or sexism.

The reason this can be viewed as a no-win scenario is that it’s hard to create a utopian society when the writer exists in an imperfect world and is influenced by all those -isms that Star Trek claims to have gotten rid of. However, Star Trek has done surprisingly well—yes, there have been some problems, but, for the most part, Star Trek does a pretty good job.

Oh, wait—there is still one problem. There have never been any queer characters in any Star Trek TV show or movie—not one. And no, Kirk and Spock don’t count.

When it comes to marriage and gender, Star Trek has addressed tons of different views on marriage and many different interpretations of gender. Hell, there was even a canon male pregnancy in one episode. There have been polygamous relationships, interracial relationships, and interspecies relationships. There have been tri-gendered species and androgynous races, but gay characters? None at all.

Fanfiction Fridays: Anyone up for some old-school slash?

Okay, to be fair, I haven’t seen Star Trek Into Darkness yet. I’m seeing it tonight. So I don’t know what happens in it or what beautiful relationships blossomed or were furthered or which ships were brutally sunk.

Either way, I felt like starting off this Star Trek day with a little good old-fashioned Kirk/Spock, yanno, the pairing that started it all. Of course, in keeping with the fact that it’s nu!Trek day and not Original!Trek day, this fic is set in the rebooted Star Trek verse (sometimes referred to as XI).

Kyliselle’s “How High the Moon” series is sort of famous in the reboot’s K/S fandom (although probably not as famous as her “Baseball” series). Back in the day when I followed the kirkspock LiveJournal comm, her fics were a perennial favorite, considered a must-read for both newbs to the fandom and old guard slashers alike.

“How High the Moon” is in five parts, and follows Kirk as he tries and fails to forge the fabled connection Spock Prime promised him he should have with his commanding officer—a friendship that would define them both, as it were. However, Spock doesn’t seem the least bit interested in Kirk as a friend or anything else, and his rejection of Kirk may be hurting Jim more than either of them realize.

This fic has great imagery, a really solid basis in both reboot and TOS canon, great tension and characterization, no lady-bashing, and, my favorite in fanfic, buckets of hurt/comfort situations (and my secret weakness, Vulcan endearments). Check out this series here and let me know what you think!

An Unearthly Journey: “Tomb of the Cybermen”

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed any Classic Who here, but seeing as Neil Gaiman’s upcoming episode “Nightmare in Silver” is supposed to feature the return of the Classic show’s Cybermen, now seems like the perfect time to talk about the Second Doctor serial “Tomb of the Cybermen”. (You’ll notice I’ve skipped Hartnell’s third and fourth seasons—I’ll get to them eventually, don’t worry; I never promised these reviews would come in chronological order!)

“Tomb of the Cybermen” is the only Two serial in Troughton’s first two seasons that’s still in one piece; the serials bookending are all lost episodes, and what I have of them is pieced together from audio and grainy stills. There’s a lot I’d do for Doctor Who, but after half an hour of “The Highlanders” I had to call it quits and move to something with existing video footage.

Let me just say that I’m glad I did; this serial alone has put Two on the map as one of my favorite Doctors and features some great storytelling.

Sexualized Saturdays: Star Wars and Interspecies Relations

So quite a while back, I did a post on the Jedi and their sexual relations, but I feel the need to revisit this world. One nice thing about the prequel universe—depending on how you look at it—is that nothing is developed at all. Characters are personality-free vehicles going through the motions George Lucas wanted them to, and the universe itself certainly isn’t portrayed that well either. In some ways, this is a good thing, because it gave the Clone Wars a lot of space to work with. In fact, it gave just about anything dealing with this time period a lot of room to work with. But the Clone Wars is what I’m most familiar with, so we’re going to use it almost exclusively for the purposes of this post.

One thing that I always liked about Stars Wars, especially on the planet of Coruscant, is that there are a bunch of different sentient species all intermingling with each other. However, it doesn’t often appear that they are engaging in interspecies relations. We know that there has been and probably still are sexual relationships between people of different species going on in the universe. Every once in a while, characters will be revealed as being bispecies, and the Twi’leks in particular have a long history of being sold into slavery, with their women usually ending up as sex slaves. (The Wookieepedia article says that they usually were dancers or entertainers for their owners, because of how attractive people found them, but let’s be realistic: they’re used as sex slaves.)

However, the fact that there are interspecies relationships—outside of slavery—makes the Star Wars universe much more interesting.

Let Saika Tell You About Homestuck: Act 6

So you’ve finally read Acts 1–5 of Homestuck. You’ve successfully learned over a dozen main characters names, habits, and personalities, absorbed a new working vocabulary including terms like ‘capchalogue’ and ‘alchemiter’, come to terms with a polyamorous alien romance system, and finally got your brains to stop leaking out your ears after Cascade. What’s next?

Act 6, nooksniffer. Buckle up.

Actually, first, there’s Intermission 2, which is just one flash. Unbuckle. Go watch it. Come back. Buckle back up. Are you ready? Good.