The latest installment in the Star Trek franchise is definitely a departure from the weightier storylines explored in the first two TNG movies. Well, okay, the ultimate prize in this movie (eternal youth) is pretty much the same as in Generations, but they go about it a little bit more plausibly. No insane scientist blowing up stars this time around. No siree, this time they deploy a giant windsock to absorb the Particle of the Week.

Particle Of The Week (trademark pending) – this week: metaphasic radiation! Remember that magical shielding technique that can allow your starship to hide inside a star’s corona? Well, guess what? It can also be made into an age-defying make-up! Wipe away those wrinkles overnight with Anij’s Oil of Olestra!

So anyway, the movie opens on the faraway planet of Sierra Nevada, where the Ba’ku lead an idyllic existence nestled among the very scenic mountains of a ringed planet nestled in a region of space known as the “Briar Patch.” It’s very pretty, that village. Seriously, the scenery that forms the backdrop for this movie is, hands-down, the most beautiful ever seen on Star Trek. Good location scouting, guys.

In a nutshell: our heroes on the Enterprise decide to disobey orders (again?) and save the pacifistic Ba’ku from the evil Son’a. Seems the Son’a need the magical radiation produced by the planet’s rings to heal them from some sort of degenerative disease (old age). Their plan is to get rid of the B’aku and take the radiation, seeing as how the process of collecting that radiation will render the planet uninhabitable (bummer). The Federation has signed on with these “thugs” because the planet is in Federation space and they want a piece of the magical radiation.

What follows goes something like this:

• Opening Sequence full of tense action.
• Gratuitous laughs at Picard’s expense during a diplomatic function (with necessary nods to DS9 and the ongoing Dominion War).
• Tense action sequence.
• Introspective time with Picard.
• Gratuituous laughs.
• Another tense action sequence interspersed with gratuitous laughs.
• More introspective time with Picard and other members of the crew.

Anyone see a pattern developing here?

Jonathan Frakes was calling Insurrection a lighter, more romantic story than the first two movies. The TV trailers (with which Frakes is furious) portray Insurrection as a hard-core action flick. Which is correct? Um, both, and that’s part of the problem.

The aim here was to try and recreate the magic that made Star Trek IV such a big hit. Problem: in that movie, Kirk & Co. were in a fish-out-of-water scenario and many of the laughs came off them trying to fit in on the streets of 1986 San Francisco. In Insurrection, Picard & Co. are pretty much in their element, disobeying orders and trying to do the “right thing.” Many of the laughs, therefore, are a bit forced and work only with people who know the characters.

In regards to the humor, Worf was back where he belonged, playing the straight man among the happy-go-lucky crew of the Enterprise (uhhhh…the radiation makes you start acting younger, too), and some of the laughs played off that. Most of the other laughs could be attributed to effects of the radiation on our heroes. So does that make the humor a bad thing? Not necessarily. I laughed, and so did the other people in the theater.

Cheapest Laugh: There are two candidates in this category. The first is the general treatment of Worf, who begins to experience Klingon puberty all over again. Har-dee-har-har. However, I think the prize goes to Troi, for her immortal line to Crusher, “Have you noticed how our boobs have gotten firmer?” My jaw dropped when I heard that. Never in my life did I think I would hear the word “boob” in Star Trek.

The action: great! Frakes did a heck of a job with the action sequences. The ground combat was tense and well choreographed. Worf even pulled out some heavy weaponry to deal with the bad guys! And the Enterprise got to do some fancy flying and kick a little Son’a butt. Great stuff.

F. Murray Abraham does a good job as Ru’afo, the villain. Pretty one-dimensional, but entertaining to watch. He’s better than Soran was, come to think of it, but you won’t hear Ru’afo’s name mentioned along with Khan or even Chang.

So, I’ve covered the humor and the action sequences…what’s left? Oh, yeah: the introspective touchy-feely stuff. It turned out to be not nearly as nauseating as I had feared. Picard had some very nice scenes with Anij, one of the Ba’ku leaders. Donna Murphy did a nice job with the role and portrayed her as a bit more sultry than one would expect. I’ve read that much of the Picard/Anij footage ended up on the cutting room floor. Too bad, seeing as how the film could’ve used another 5-10 minutes.

Oh, and in another, minor plotline, Data discusses what it’s like to be a child with one of the young Ba’ku. Nothing extraordinary there. In fact, forget most of the character development that Data underwent in the first two movies. And the last three seasons of TNG.

So, overall, did Star Trek: Insurrection meet my main criteria: was it entertaining? Yes, it was. Not nearly up to the level of Star Trek IV in terms of raw comedy value, and not on the level of First Contact with action and suspense, but the elements were balanced to the point where I wasn’t looking at my watch. Heck, I might go see it again for something to do.

Other points, minor and major:

• Enterprise has a new helmsman: an attractive Trill who survived the movie! Hope she’s back next movie.
• Mr. Daniels from First Contact evidently survived the hand-to-hand combat with the Borg; he’s back at Tactical. Nice to see a bit of crew continuity.
• For the first time in the history of ships named Enterprise, the warp core ejection system worked.
• Disgusting End of Starfleet Admiral: Nasty is the only word to describe it. Yuck. And on that note, was he really necessary?
• Eye-Popping Scene: All you fanboys out there who have fantasized about Troi in a bubble bath, beware. And all you fangirls who have fantasized about Riker in a similar situation, watch out.
• Oh, and for the record: the Federation is getting really desperate. It’s alluded to by both Picard and Ru’afo.

So do I recommend it? Sure. Go see it with your family. Good fun.

A solid three communicators out of five.

And to quote the great Starfleet Captain Jean-Luc Picard…
“Computer: music…No, not that kind of music.”
“Please specify.”
“Something Latin…mambo!”

‘Nuff said.

Author’s Note: This reviewer did not get to ride in a limousine with any Executive Producer’s family at the world premiere. He went to see it opening night at the barely-tolerable Berkely 4 cinema in Goldsboro, North Carolina. With no one else. In his 1980 Chevy Citation.

I’m sure some of you have noticed the amendments I’ve made to the site’s graphics, virtually telegraphing the fact that the LogBook is almost ten years old. And I’m sure it hasn’t escaped some of you that the web site at this address hasn’t even been here one year. This begs the question: “Ten years?”

It all started about halfway through my senior year of high school. I was very active on the local BBS scene. (If you don’t remember what a BBS is, that marvelous, pre-internet dinosaur of the online world whose unique local flavor is sorely missed, you make me feel so old…) Thanks to my frequent posts on both the local message bases and the OGGnet echomail network, it was no secret that I was a Trek fan. Back then, OGGnet hit maybe six or seven cities, including Philly, where Joe Siegler’s BBS was located. (Oh, and have I mentioned that these systems, not to mention my computer at the time, were all Apple IIs, back when Apple’s 65C02-based machines were competing for an even share of the PC market with IBM, Compaq, and the other 8088-based vendors?)

So, somewhere before the first airing of Yesterday’s Enterprise, I started keeping track of the actors, writers, directors, and composers on each episode. Then, I had an idea, an idea which immediately brought the word “logbook” to mind.

I was going to copy down, word for word, every log entry made by a character on the show.

That was actually the original concept. That’s why it’s called “LogBook.” And boy, was I screwed when I hit a first season episode whose one and only log entry didn’t tell me a thing about the plot.

Oops!

So I trashed a couple of weeks’ worth of viewing and transcribing, and set about writing my own synopses. And considering that numerous web sites and even books have since fallen to the legal might of Paramount for copying even smaller portions of scripts than that, I consider this a good thing. It became something I could consider My Own Work. I chased it down with another homemade guide to my favorite BBC series, Blake’s 7.

In 1991, the Classic Trek LogBook was written in a three-week marathon viewing session (obviously, classes were over for the winter), and then the Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 LogBooks in 1993. By this time, my home base had become a Fidonet BBS, and the LogBook was in demand all over the place. For those of you who love the Internet for its free downloads, consider this – some readers were calling from Australia, Canada, South America, and other parts of the world. They were calling a BBS in Fort Smith, Arkansas to pick up the LogBook. And they were passing it on to a BBS in their area. And I was getting mail from all over the place. (By this time, I was on a mighty 286 with a 2400 baud modem, which, true to form for my computing endeavours, was already badly obsolete.)

Other episode guides have been added, and other writers have taken over for me when I decided to devote more time to other activities, and the LogBook officially hit the web in 1995. Since then it migrated from the University of Arkansas to Mark Holtz’s Speedlink site, before finally settling at the present address.

In all that time, I’ve gone from my senior year of high school, through a few traumatic and unfinished years of college, to full-time work in television, and now the imminent prospect of starting my own family…and it’s kind of hard to imagine that one of the only constants in my past decade has been the LogBook. (Or the fact that I’ve had a cat under my feet the whole time, but sadly, it wasn’t even the same cat that whole time.)

I really don’t have a road map for what will happen with the LogBook next. It has continued to evolve, with the music and video game sections emerging to fit the shape of my own interests, but I don’t seem to have scared anyone away yet. And with any luck, the best is yet to come.

So that’s the ten years story. Thanks for tuning in, everyone.

TV bosses (and employees like myself) are already complaining en masse about the state of the current season of TV bombs. The broadcast execs are also harping about the incursion of cable on their viewing figures. Only a year ago, critics and viewers were reveling in the glory of Seinfeld’s final season, ER’s live episode, the arrival of Seven of Nine on Voyager, and many other wondrous television events. This time last year, Oscar winners like Titanic, Good Will Hunting, and As Good As It Gets were all over the big screens.

What’s changed in a year?

Not much, truth be told. Yet this fall and winter, the media news headlines are littered with this season’s already-high count of prime time bodies. ER and Voyager are still on the air, but now we’re hearing more about such missteps as Desmond Pfeiffer, Encore Encore, Holding The Baby, and so forth. But we’re quick to forget the corpses that were strewn upon the battlefield this time last year – remember Union Square, TimeCop: The Series, or Hitz?

But now the emphasis is changing. The bad shows seem to be getting worse… and, to be brutally truthful, the better shows aren’t faring much better.

Can the tide be turned? Of course it can. But the broadcast networks are going to have to start emulating their cable cousins to some extent, and stop living and dying by the Nielsen numbers. Cable has carved a solid niche – now approaching a majority of the audience share – as a haven for specialty programming. Whatever variety of programming you like, you’re guaranteed to find at least one 24-hour cable outlet for it: news, weather, sports, children’s shows, all kinds of music, adult programming, and yes, science fiction. The broadcast networks are going to have to try to carve out their own niche instead of trying to pull off a schizophrenic juggling act of generalization.

Fox briefly reached that nirvana with urban, African-American-targeted shows, and the WB is getting close to cornering the young adult (especially female) market that Fox once could have had with Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. UPN, if they’d just wake up and realize that their biggest hits currently consist of Star Trek: Voyager and Seven Days, could save themselves by lining up the action/adventure-oriented male audience in their sights.

As someone who makes his living from the Nielsen book’s fateful results, you can probably imagine I have a vested interest in this.

My advice would be for the networks to stop attempting to cater to all audiences. There’s no saying that they can’t cater to several at the same time, but when, for example, NBC’s sitcoms grow whiter and blander with every fall season, one wonders if they are actually catering to anybody at all.

There’s also a tendency which has emerged over the past several years to can shows mere weeks into their lifespan. Last fall, ABC’s television TimeCop was consigned to temporal oblivion after a single post-Monday Night Football airing failed to win big in the overnight ratings. This year, UPN’s Mercy Point, even though I didn’t care for it, was decommissioned after two weeks, and disappeared after three. New shows must be given a chance to catch on. They vanish from the landscape so quickly these days that one doesn’t actually see the show, just the blur of motion as the 1″ master reels are kicked out the network’s back door.

To pour salt into the wound, such cancelled shows as Earth 2 and Alien Nation are later revived on cable, run endlessly, and finally find their audience, or at least appease the fans who mourn their brief on-air life. And others, like Sliders and Babylon 5, are actually brought back to life and given their fair shot. And the broadcast brass wonders why droves of viewers are flocking toward cable?

The hell of it is, those same broadcast bosses know everything I’ve just expounded on. So many people have told them, so many times, that they’ve surely gotten the clue. But generalized, non-specific, risk-free pilots are more likely to get advertising commitments from sponsors who fear associations with anything even remotely controversial…so that’s what the networks stick with.

Something major will have to happen to break that cycle, and wake up the broadcast networks.

Perhaps two or three more years of audience erosion – and, more to the point, migration to cable – will do it.

Star Trek: First Contact‘s Borg Queen will make an appearance on a two-episode Voyager epic premiering on UPN in February. Although UPN’s press release is making this out to be a two-hour movie, it will most likely be two distinct episodes aired on one night, much like last season’s The Killing Game.
Source: UPN