Stardate 5013.1: The Exeter is en route to check up on a Federation Starbase on Corinth IV that has fallen out of contact. When the ship arrives, the planet is in ruins – a once-vibrant ecosystem reduced to a volcanic, earthquake-ridden world – and the Starbase is gone. Another Constitution-class ship sent to investigate, the U.S.S. Kongo, is found crashed on the planet – or at least its saucer section is. Captain Garrovick orders a search for the rest of the Kongo, and it’s found adrift in space at the center of a series of gravitational disturbances. The crew, including Garrovick’s former captain, is found dead – and so is a boarding party of reptilian Tressaurians, a species with whom Garrovick has had a very dark history. An alien device is discovered below decks, the source of the disturbance, and when Tressaurian ships arrive to retrieve it, Garrovick has it beamed to the Exeter and detonates the Kongo’s engines by remote. Science Officer Jo Harris, however, doesn’t believe that the device is of Tressaurian origin – and when another attack wave of Tressaurian ships is destroyed by a group of Tholian ships, it seems likely that the device’s inventors have come to collect it.
telelplay by Dennis Russell Bailey
story by Jimm & Josh Johnson and Dennis Russell Bailey and Maurice Molyneaux
directed by Scott CumminsCast: James Culhane (Captain Garrovick), Joshua Caleb (Lt. B’Fuselek), Michael Buford (Cutty), Holly Guess (Jo Harris), Patrick Scullin (D’Agosta), Elizabeth Wheat (Vandi Richards), Garry Peters (Kosnett)
Review: Hot damn. Now this is a Trek fan film. I’ll admit that I was originally skeptical of the first episode of Starship Exeter (see that review here), but as much as I admired their original intent to stick with lo-fi special effects, and as fun as that was to watch in places, here they managed to step up to the plate with some impressive CGI, and still didn’t betray the signature “look” of the original series. And this time they’ve got a story behind all this stuff which makes it even more impressive, and it’s directed well, and the acting has taken leaps and bounds. This is practically a real episode of Star Trek right here…but there’s just one problem. (more…)
Stardate 6283.4: A distress call takes the Enterprise into the Neutral Zone, where they see a helpless cargo ship destroyed by Romulan Birds of Prey using a new weapon not seen before by the Federation. After it destroys that ship, however, the weapon backfires, enveloping everything nearby in an energy field, including the Enterprise. Sulu and exo-tech expert Lt. Chandris take a shuttlecraft to the wreckage of the lead Romulan ship to learn more about the weapon, but waves of instability wreak havoc with the ship’s structure, tearing it apart and leaving only seconds before the warp core breaches. Sulu and Chandris run back to find their shuttle has been lost, and when Sulu calls the Enterprise for an emergency transport, he’s literally a different man when he returns: he has aged over 30 years, and Chandris doesn’t rematerialize at all. Sulu explains that a rift led them to safety on a habitable world in another dimension, and they spent that time settling down and starting a family. Sulu introduces his crewmates to his daughter, Alana, whose transporter pattern Scotty can barely lock onto. The only way to keep her molecules from scattering is to create a field that stabilizes her pattern. Every time Kirk orders the Enterprise to try to break away from the distortion generated by the Romulans’ weapon, Alana starts to fade out of existence. With mere hours before the distortion destabilizes the space within it enough to destroy the Enterprise, Sulu must try to recover his memory of how to navigate a ship through the distortion – with the full knowledge that escape may condemn his daughter to death.