Author: Alex

Alex writes BoldlyTrek from Scotland, usually while pulling apart why Star Trek works, why it sometimes doesn't, and why it so often argues with itself. Expect reviews, Spotlights, ships, books, comics, production history, and far too much thought about the ideas hiding underneath it all.

  • Star Trek: Red Shirts — A Graphic Novel That Diagnoses Its Own Problem

    ByAlex

    There’s a moment early in Star Trek: Red Shirts where the security team is loaded into torpedo casings and fired at a planet. The team inside stare out in terror, crammed into modified casings with little more than life support and a prayer, while the U.S.S. Warren follows up with two live torpedoes to knock the target antenna offline. It’s a brisk, vicious image, and it tells you exactly what kind of book you’re holding before the first casualty lands. These people are already equipment. The comic knows it, and it wants you to know it too.

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    The Ferengi Were Never the Joke: Greed Is Eternal

    ByAlex

    The joke of the Ferengi was never that they were aliens. The joke was that they weren’t. Strip away the oversized ears and the obsession with latinum and what you’re left with is a society built around competition, acquisition, branding, exploitation, and the belief that success excuses almost anything. The Ferengi were funny because they exaggerated attitudes that already existed in the real world. The uncomfortable part is how much less exaggerated they feel now than they did in 1987.

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    Star Trek: Gold Key Archives Volume 1

    ByAlex

    There’s a version of Star Trek that exists slightly to the left of the one you know.

    The phasers are called lasers. The shirt colours are wrong. Spock occasionally behaves in ways that would make the television Spock raise an eyebrow. Kirk is a straightforward space hero rather than the complicated, contradictory, occasionally reckless man William Shatner was building on screen. Yet despite all that, the stories are recognisably Trek-shaped. Strange worlds. Impossible problems. Civilisations in crisis. The Enterprise arriving somewhere unusual and trying to think its way through a situation that shouldn’t have a solution.

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    Why I Can’t Make Myself Care About Star Trek Novels

    ByAlex

    There is a Wikipedia page that attempts to define Star Trek canon. It is, in the way of most Wikipedia pages on contested topics, thorough, carefully footnoted, and ultimately incapable of settling the argument it was written to resolve. The page lists what counts, what doesn’t count, what Gene Roddenberry said, what he later contradicted, and the various positions Paramount has taken over the decades. It will not tell you whether the DS9 relaunch novels matter. It will not tell you whether Destiny counts. These are questions canon cannot answer, because they are not really canon questions.

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    Star Trek: TOS – The Enemy Within (S01E05)

    ByAlex

    There’s a moment roughly halfway through “The Enemy Within” where good Kirk, gentle, compassionate, and increasingly useless, tries to give an order and physically can’t hold the sentence together. He knows what he wants to say. The words just won’t come with any weight behind them. It’s a small moment, easy to lose in an episode full of bigger ones, but it’s the most honest thing the episode does. The argument isn’t really about good and evil. It’s about what actually holds a command together, and whether the things we’d rather not own about ourselves are, inconveniently, structural.

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    Star Trek: TOS – Where No Man Has Gone Before (S01E03)

    ByAlex

    I came to TOS backwards, the way most people my age did. TNG was the Trek I grew up with, the one that was actually on when I was old enough to care. TOS arrived later, in the way things did before streaming made chronology optional, in chunks, on whatever channel was running it that week, in an order that made no particular sense. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was probably not the first TOS episode I watched, but it might as well have been. It’s the one that made me understand what the show actually was, as distinct from the show I already knew. The two things are related but they are not the same thing, and this episode is where you feel the difference most clearly.

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    Star Trek: TOS — Charlie X (S01E02)

    ByAlex

    The premise of “Charlie X” sounds like something you’d find stapled to a bus stop in 1966. Lonely teenager. Godlike powers. Spaceship full of people he makes uncomfortable. On paper it’s disposable, the kind of high-concept Twilight Zone material that could collapse under its own gimmick in twenty minutes. What Dorothy C. Fontana does instead, in her first Trek teleplay credit, working from a story by Gene Roddenberry, is turn it into something quietly unsettling.

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    Star Trek: TOS — The Man Trap (S01E01)

    ByAlex

    There is a specific kind of irony in the fact that Star Trek, a franchise built on the idea that humanity could sort itself out and reach for something better, began its broadcast life by killing the last member of a species and then moving on to the next episode. That’s not a criticism. Or rather, it isn’t only a criticism. It’s the most interesting thing about The Man Trap, an episode that is simultaneously the wrong introduction to Star Trek and, in its final thirty seconds, one of the most honest expressions of what Star Trek was trying to be.

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    Star Trek: TOS — The Cage The Show That Almost Wasn’t (Pilot)

    ByAlex

    “Too cerebral” was the phrase NBC used when they sent it back. As criticisms go, it has aged badly for them.

    Desilu delivered a science fiction pilot in 1965 that was slower, stranger, and more introspective than the network knew what to do with. They wanted something else. What came back was Star Trek as most people know it: Kirk, action, adventure, and the formula that would carry the franchise for decades. The original pilot went into a vault. Most people never saw it.