There’s a great article in this week’s New York Times Magazine about the brilliant Paul Feig.  Check it out here.

Mr. Feig is the creator of the phenomenal (and phenomenally mistreated) show Freaks and Geeks.  (As only 12 of 18 episodes were ever actually aired by NBC — and out of order, at that — when the complete series was released on DVD it was a cause for much rejoicing in my household.)  Mr. Feig has also directed episodes of Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Mad Men, and he is one of the key creative forces behind the American version of The Office.  

If you like comedy and you don’t know his name, you should read this piece!  And if you DO know his name, then you DEFINITELY should read this piece!

There’s a new, longer trailer out for Frank Miller’s The Spirit, the movie-version of comics pioneer Will Eisner’s comic book.  And, well, I have no friggin’ idea what to make of this.  Looks like it’ll either be brilliant of completely unwatchable.  Guess we’ll all find out together on December 25th.

Interested in some more fun trailers? 

Here’s a new one for Bryan Singer’s film, Valkyrie.  Mr. Singer has taken a lot of hits recently, as rumors are swirling that Warners’ next Superman film won’t be a follow-up to his Superman Returns but rather another reinvention of the franchise.  (I am VERY disappointed by that idea, as I’m one of the people who loved Superman Returns and I’m intrigued to know where Singer would have taken his story.)  His latest film, Valkyrie, has been bouncing around the release schedule for the past year, which many saw as a lack of confidence in its quality by the studio.  It was initially scheduled for release in October, then pushed back to February 2009, then back to Decmber 26th.  Will it be as good as this trailer?

Here’s one for Oliver Stone’s W.  Josh Brolin is George W. Bush, Elizabeth Banks is Laura Bush, Richard Dreyfuss is Dick Cheney, James Cromwell is George Herbert Walker Bush, Scott Glenn is Donald Rumsfeld, and Jeffrey Wright is Colin Powell.  At the very least, I am intrigued.

For a look at another sure-to-be controversial film, take a gander at this trailer for Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous.  This could be the film that I am most looking forward to this fall.

Have you seen this peak at Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman in Batman Begins & The Dark Knight) as John Connor?  That’s great casting, although I have every confidence that I will ultimately be bitterly disappointed by this movie…

Finally, here’s something to get your blood pumping for the next Bond film, the oddly-named Quantum of Solace.  It gives a way a good chunk of the film’s plot, so beware of that.  But damn does it look good!  Can’t wait.

I love sci-fi.  Movies, TV shows, novels, comics, whatever.  If its sci-fi, I’m interested.

I’m also a big fan of J.J. Abrams.  Not of everything he’s done, mind you.  (I certainly was never interested in Felicity, and despite sampling episodes during each of the five seasons of its run I just could never get into Alias.)  But I adore Lost, and I also really enjoyed Mission Impossible III (which Abrams directed) and Cloverfield (which he produced).

And so it was that I tuned in to the first two hours of J.J. Abrams’ new series, Fringe.  

Its been getting a lot of hype, so most of you probably know what its about, but just in case: the series features an FBI agent named Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) who, during the circumstances of the pilot, finds herself paired up with sort-of-sketchy Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) and his kooky-but-brilliant father, Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble, who played Denethor in The Return of The King).  Together, they investigate all sorts of strange and paranormal events, which have been nicknamed “the pattern.”

Abrams, along with writers & executive producers Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman (who together wrote Transformers and the script for the upcoming Star Trek re-launch, which is being directed by Abrams), have stated that, in creating this show, they were inspired by Robin Cook’s Coma, Twin Peaks, Real Genius, and Croenberg’s The Fly among other things…but if you think the description (a male and a female investigate paranormal phenomenal) sounds a lot like The X-Files, you’re not alone.  Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The X-Files was great, so more television like that would be OK in my book.  But for Fringe to be enjoyable it would need to re-create some of what made the X-Files so enjoyable, while at the same time being new and different enough that viewers won’t feel “been there, done that.”

So does Fringe succeed in that?

While I really wanted to like it, I must say that, so far (I’ve seen the first two episodes that have aired), it doesn’t.  The lead actors are all likeable, and there’s an interesting dynamic between them.  But so far they don’t have a lot of life — they’re more vehicles for the weird, paranormal stories than they are interesting, three-dimensional characters in their own right.  Which is fine — but I can’t help but think back to our first glimpses of Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in the pilot of The X-Files (it helps that I’ve recently re-watched the first season of the show, as I wrote about here a few weeks back).  They both seemed so REAL, such interesting and distinct characters — really unlike anyone else I’d seen on TV before.  (Now, of course, The X-Files was itself inspired by a lot of its predecessors — most notable Kolchak, the Night Stalker — but The X-Files succeeded in taking its inspirations, mixing them all up and coming up with something entirely new and wonderful.)  So far Fringe hasn’t done that, at least not for me.  And the paranormal cases themselves haven’t been compelling enough to carry the show in the absence of engaging characters.  The case in the pilot was interesting, I will admit — something mysterious gets released on a plane which basically turns all of the inhabitants into goo — but again, very derivative.  When the stuff infects FBI agent John Scott, we get to watch his body slowly become all translucent and goey, in an effect extremely reminiscent of that seen in the first X-Files movie, Fight the Future.  

I am also concerned by the reliance on deus ex machina in both of the first two episodes.  In each one, nutty Dr. Bishop invents some wacky sci-fi device to solve the case.  In the pilot he figures out a way to link Agent Dunham’s brain with that of the injured Agent Scott, so that she can see the face of his assailant.  And in episode two, Bishop invents a way to see the final images recorded in the retinas of one of the dead victims, so they can figure out where she was killed and find her attacker.  Now, I can suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy a show that’s all about wacky paranormal events.  But if each week the writers are going to have the characters just invent other wacky paranormal techy things to solve the case, that’s going to get real boring real fast.  Its too easy — a narrative short-cut.  I’d prefer to watch our heroes actually THINK, and WORK to puzzle out the solution to the mysteries each week, rather than a silly hey-presto-here’s-the-answer rabbit out of a hat every time.  

Lest I sound too down on the show, I should mention that the production values are absolutely fantastic.  The show takes place in a lot of different locales, and each episode has featured all kinds of weird fantastic stuff, all of which has been marvelously realized by the makers of the show.  They are very successful at selling the “world” of the show, complete with all the bizarre, unexplained phenomena of “the pattern” that take place there.  

I also really love Lance Reddick (Cedric Daniels from The Wire!!!) and Kirk Acevedo (who I first remember seeing in Band of Brothers).  Its great to see them in supporting roles here, and I’d love to see more of them.

But I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep watching.  (Well, my wife loves the show, so maybe that will cause me to stick with it for a while.)  There is potential here, and I’d like nothing more than for this to become a true successor to The X-Files.  But The Fringe better pick up soon, because otherwise I’ve got Season Two of The X-Files sitting in the “to watch” pile on my DVD shelf…

The various X-Men comic books have been a sales juggernaut for Marvel Comics for almost forty years now, and the success of the three X-Men films has certainly furthered the spread of this franchise.  There have been a heck of a lot of talented writers and artists involved in the X-Men over that long stretch of time, but one man really deserves the lion’s share of the credit: Chris Claremont, who wrote The Uncanny X-Men comic book from 1975-1991. 

Over the course of that incredibly lengthy run, Clarement shaped the characters, the stories, and the world of the X-Men, so much of which is known and loved world-wide today. 

I started reading Uncanny X-Men towards the late-middle of Claremont’s run, in the mid/late 80’s.  I’d been reading comics for a few years (my enjoyment of Marvel’s Transformers comic book series lead me to various super-hero titles such as the Fantastic Four and the Avengers), and people kept telling me “you can’t be a comic fan and not be reading X-Men.” I finally took the plunge, and I was immediately sucked into the series.  Claremont was incredibly skilled at crafting interesting, really three-dimensional and human characters, and his stories were dense and sophisticated.  (Claremont was the master of the “sub-plot,” in which various story-lines would weave in and out of the comic, sometimes for YEARS, before finally dovetailing with the main story being told.)

After Claremont left the X-Men comic in 1991, I continued to follow the series for many years, but it was never able to recapture for me the greatness of the Claremont era.  Various writers and artists would rotate through the book, and some entertaining stories were told… but after a while I finally began to get bored, and I ultimately stopped reading.  Once or twice a year I’d pick up an issue or a mini-series, but nothing ever held my interest enough to warrant my reading the title again on a monthly basis.

Then, in 2001, the British writer-artist team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took over one of the X-Men comics.  (By this point, there were several!)  I purchased their first issue, titled “E for Extinction,” and was blown away.  Suddenly, the characters were interesting again, and the world those characters inhabited seemed dangerous again.  I was hooked, and with no small amount of disbelief I started reading an X-Men comic every month again.

Maybe I’ll return to this topic at a later date to write a lengthier review of Morrison’s run, but ultimately I was disappointed by what had begun so promisingly.  From the beginning, Quitely wasn’t able to keep up a regular schedule, and without his magnificent art the stories suffered.  (It didn’t help that the fill-in artists each had dramatically different styles, which made it really jarring from issue to issue.)  And while at first I was really intrigued and excited by the amazing density of new ideas that Morrison brought to each issue, by the end of his run I started to feel that the characters of the comic had drifted too far from the world that I had grown up with.

Why am I writing about any of this?  I’m getting to that!!  After Morrison left, the X-Men comics seemed directionless again, and I again stopped reading.  But only a few months later, Joss Whedon began writing a new X-Men comic, titled Astonishing X-Men.  Whedon is known to many as the creator and show-runner of the much-loved Buffy and Angel TV shows, and while I had never (and still haven’t) seen either of those series, I had fallen head-over-heels in love with the next TV show he created:  Firefly.  

Whedon was joined by one of the best artists working in comics today, a gentleman named John Cassaday.  They began a 25-issue run on the title that wrapped up this past spring.  When I purchased the final issue, I decided that before reading it I wanted to go back and re-read their entire run, which I finally had a chance to do this past week.

It is magnificent.  Whedon was able to bring to the comic everything that makes his writing for TV so addicting – most particularly his knack for creating characters who you immediately fall in love with.  The way he is able to create dramatic stories that are also filled with fall-out-of-your seat humor, without turning into self-parody, is also quite stunning.  Whedon was able to capture everything that made Claremont’s run on X-Men so amazing, while also not losing sight of the modern continuity of the book (including many of Morrison’s more far-out ideas, such as secondary mutations, Cerebra, and the idea that Cyclops and Emma Frost – once a deadly enemy of the X-Men – would fall into a love affair).  This is a singularly impressive feat. 

Whedon & Cassaday’s run is divided into four main stories, each of which can be found in collected editions.

“Gifted” (issues #1-6) – Probably my favorite story, in which Whedon re-introduces the characters who will serve as the main focus of his run:  Cyclops, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and Beast.  In issue four, Whedon adds a sixth main character, crafting a very emotional resurrection of a classic X-Men character who had been killed off in the 90’s, and I will love him forever for that.  I’ll also love him forever for returning Kitty Pryde (the young Jewish girl who seemed like she was a favored character of Claremont’s back in the day – she certainly was a favorite of mine) to the forefront of the X-Universe.

The main story concerns a scientist who discovers a “cure” for mutants.  Elements of this story-line were used quite liberally in the third X-Men movie,  so its interesting to go back and read the (far superior) source material now.  I think the aspects of this story that made it into the third film were some of the best parts of what was, ultimately, a very disappointing movie.  The question that our characters must confront — is being a mutant something unique and vital to who they each are as people, or is it just a disease that they want to be cured of with a drug or an injection — is powerful stuff, and its one of those ideas that’s so good that one wonders why it took over 30 years for someone to come up with this story-line.

“Dangerous” (issues 7-12) – In which the Danger Room (the X-Men’s training facility which they use to test their mutant abilities) achieves sentience and attempts to carry out what has always been its main programming: to kill the X-Men. 

“Torn” (issues 13-18) – In which the Hellfire Club (a great group of villains from Claremont’s run – they figured prominently into the original and famous Dark Phoenix saga) return, and the Cyclops-Emma Frost relationship is explored in a very deep and intriguing way.  Also, Kitty Pryde and Peter Rasputin (Colossus) do it.

(The above, by the way, is one of the most hysterical – and also the most poignant – stories in Whedon’s run, and again, the way he is able to weave humor and pathos together is really amazing to me.  I certainly found myself getting very emotionally involved in the Kitty-Peter relationship, and in the way that plays out in the final arc of Whedon’s run.)

“Unstoppable” – In which the X-Men find themselves brought to an alien world which Colossus is prophesied to destroy.  All of Whedon’s storylines and character arcs converge here, and its terrific.  My only complaint is the ending, which is a bit abrupt and cries out for a continuation.  More Whedon/Cassaday X-Men comics, someday, please!!

I highly highly highly recommend these comics.  While there is a LOT in there that really speaks to a long-time X-Men comics reader like myself, NO prior reading is required to enjoy this story.  If you liked the first two great X-Men movies, and/or if you’ve enjoyed any of Whedon’s TV work (Buffy, Angel, Firefly and the big-screen follow-up Serenity), then I urge you to check these comics out.  Its not exactly “great literature” the way graphic novels like Watchmen or Maus or V for Vendetta or Jinx (I could go on and on here) are, but it is terrifically entertaining escapist fantasy.  Super-hero comics at their finest.  

There’s a great, in-depth interview with Jon Favreau on his plans for Iron Man 2 (and 3!) to be found here.  Some really interesting tid-bits to be had.  I have a lot of faith in Favreau and am really excited to see what he and his team cook up over the next two years.

I love movie posters, and here’s one I think you might enjoy as well:  Kevin Smith has posted the new poster for Zach and Miri Make a Porno, his upcoming movie starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks.  If you follow that link, be sure to also scroll down a bit to see the poster design that the MPAA rejected.  Pretty funny, the both of them!

This is old news, but I’ve mean meaning to mention it:  Don LaFontaine passed away earlier this month.  Don’t recognize his name?  Well I guarantee you’d recognize his voice.  He’s the famed “trailer guy,” whose deep tones graced the narration of so many movie trailers over the years.  A fascinating trip-down-memory-lane sampling of his work can be found here.  

Hope to see everyone back here tomorrow!

Since I decided to write an in-depth dissertation on Season 1 of Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles a couple of weeks ago (back on August 29th), it seems like I also should weigh in on the season premiere that aired this past Monday.

Over-all, it was a lot of fun — although since so much of the episode was SO good, the few parts of the show that were dumb were VERY annoying.

What did I enjoy?  The episode was INTENSE — right from the terrific opening sequence, picking up seconds after the end of season one’s finale, the show never stopped until the final moments.  Cameron, the Terminator protector played by Summer Glau, has had her control chip damaged, and she reverts to her primary programming: kill John Connor.  That was a great twist, turning the dynamic of the show on its ear.  There was some great action — several sequences with various cars and trucks getting mangled really were exciting.  Most of all, I really liked the DESPERATION of Sarah and John in this episode.  They were alone, injured, and on the run from an unstoppable Terminator for almost the entire hour.   I liked how everything they tried, until the end, failed to work.  About half-way through the show they’re able to knock Cameron out with an electrical surge, and John tries to pry open the panel in her head to remove her chip which, as we saw in other first season episodes (and in the extended version of T2), would shut her down.  Watching that, I thought — oh, so that’s how they’ll make Cameron a good guy again, that’s sort of lame — but IT DIDN’T WORK, and Cameron gets right back up and begins chasing John again.  That was a nice surprise.

Props to Summer Glau.  In some respects, as enjoyable as I’ve always found her to be, she has sort of played variations on the same not-quite-human character in Firefly, The 4400, and now in Terminator.  But her protrayal of the now-evil, damaged Terminator in this episode was really impressive.  Watch the way she moves — so different from the stealthy, lithe model she had been portraying in season one.  She really created a different character.  And she was scary.  Very impressive.

I should also add that I was really excited to see a new, somewhat familiar character be introduced in the closing moments of the show.  A GREAT introductory scene.  I really can’t wait to see where that goes.  

So what didn’t I like?  Well, I mentioned above that I enjoyed Sarah and John’s desperation in this episode — alone and on the run.  Part of what contributed to that was their being separated from Derek Reese (the robot-fighter from the future).  But at the end of the episode, when they’re finally all reunited, Derek says, “why didn’t you call me?”  Huh?  You mean Sarah could have called him all along on a cell-phone or something?  Well WHY DIDN’T SHE??  Lame.  

Also bothersome:  Cameron gets knocked out by the spark from a clock-radio in water?  Um, I would have thought it’d take a MUCH larger electrical surge to over-load and incapacitate a Terminator.  Later, Cameron catches up to Sarah and, stepping on her wound to cause her agony, she demands that she call out to John.  But doesn’t even a casual fan of the Terminator movies know that Terminators can mimic anyone’s voice?  (This show has even used that trick in prior episodes.)  So why suddenly can’t Cameron do that here?  Very inconsistent.  Then there’s the scene when a bloodied Sarah and John show up in a church, clearly on the run, and request sanctuary.  Does the priest call the police?  NO!  He says OK, sure, and hustles the OTHER people out of the church.  Huh??  And then, at the end of the episode, it seems that Sarah, Derek, John, etc. are now LIVING in that church.  Double huh??  I was also a little bummed that, by the end of the episode, everything was pretty much back to normal.  I don’t want to see this show become too episodic, with everything getting wrapped up neatly by the end of each episode.  I would’ve really loved to see Cameron stay evil for several episodes.  

The above lapses and inconsistencies are particularly annoying because the rest of the episode is so good that I wish I could recommend it whole-heartedly.  Instead, I still feel pretty much the way I did about Season One.  It’s definitely entertaining enough for me to keep watching, but I wish there could be a bit more attention to detail, and that some of the sillier elements of the show’s narrative can be curbed.

I love movies, and I love watching movies on DVD in the comfort of my own home.  Here are some of the great DVDs I’ve watched recently:

Heist and State and Main — I’m in the midst of a sort of David Mamet retrospective, tearing through a number of his earlier works, many of which I haven’t seen in years!  I’ll be writing a more detailed piece about my journey into Mamet-world in a few weeks, so keep your eyes open for that.  Next up, I’ll be watching Spartan (which I’ve only seen once and am eager to revisit) and The Spanish Prisoner (possibly my favorite Mamet film after the incomparable Glengarry Glenn Ross.  ”Will you go to lunch?!!”)

Wonder Boys — What a masterpiece.  Having just completed the summer of Robert Downey Jr. (in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder), it was a lot of fun to re-watch his magnificent turn in this film.  Tobey Maquire is also great, as a talented but rather messed-up youngster.  (Its sort of bizarre to watch Maguire and Downey Jr. in this film, having seen them together in one of the fake trailers that preceded Tropic Thunder.  If you’ve seen it, you know exactly which one I mean!)  The always terrific Frances McDormand is quietly touching as the university chancellor torn between two men.  But this film belongs to Michael Douglas.  He plays college professor Grady Tripp, a man who once wrote an extraordinarily successful first novel and has seen his life slowly crumble as he has struggled, over many many years, to write a follow-up.  Wonder Boys is a coming-of-age story — for Maguire’s character, and also for Douglas’ Grady.  Its a rare movie that can balance deep laughs and powerful poignancy, and Wonder Boys just nails it.  I give director Curtis Hanson a lot of credit for that, as well as Steve Kloves for the sharp screenplay.  This movie sits next to Igby Goes Down on my DVD shelf.  The two films have a lot of similarities, both in terms of tone as well as the themes explored.  If you’ve seen and enjoyed Wonder Boys but have never seen Igby, I encourage you to check it out.

City Slickers — Boy, I haven’t seen this movie in YEARS!  I remember going to see the sequel, The Legend of Curly’s Gold, in theatres when it came out and being so disappointed that I don’t think I ever watched the original again.  The film is a bit dated — its not quite as timeless as When Harry Met Sally — but it was a lot of fun to return to Billy Crystal’s little ode to suburban men looking to find themselves.  Some of the jokes are a bit groan-inducing, and some of the characters are a little flat (I think Helen Slater is adorable, but she really doesn’t have much to do here other than be cute).  But there are still some moments of great comedy, and also some moments of surprising sweetness (even though some scenes are a bit heavy with the schmaltz.)  The late great Bruno Kirby’s monologue about the best and worst day of his life is really powerful.  Just terrific.  And what can I say about Curly himself, played by Jack Palance?  Still gold.

Spaced — A twelve episode British TV series that launched the career of Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), its about two twenty-something friends (Tim, played by Pegg, and Daisy, played by Jessica Hynes nee Stevenson) who wind up sharing an apartment.  I’ve been reading about this show for positively YEARS, so when it finally was released on DVD in the states last month I snatched it up.  I’m only a few episodes in, but already I’m really enjoying the balance of silly comedy, obscure pop-culture references, and over-all bizarre goings-on. 

The X-Files: Season One — In between watching episodes of Spaced, as well as our regular dose of The Daily Show (which has been PHENOMENAL these past few weeks, covering the Democratic and Republican conventions and all of the fall-out that’s happened since then), my wife and I have been making our way through the first season of The X-Files.  (Very slowly, since we started LAST September!  But we’ve been picking up steam recently, watching much of the latter half of the season in the past 3 weeks.)  My father introduced me to the X-Files mid-way through the first season, and I quickly became a die-hard fan of the show, following it all the way through to the final episode.  During the peak seasons of the show, I watched and re-watched the re-runs endlessly, trying to sort out all the different storylines and hunt for hidden clues and meanings, and to enjoy each scary, creepy episode.  But by the end of the show’s run, I was pretty down on it.  Since then, with the exception of one or two viewings of the first X-Files movie, I don’t think I’ve watched a single episode.  So it is with great delight that I’ve been re-watching the first season.  There’s a lot of greatness to be found, starting right with the terrific pilot. There’s also the haunting episode “Beyond the Sea” about the death of Scully’s father… the creepy “Squeeze” and “Tooms” episodes about the liver-eating mutant… the intense “Ice,” in which Mulder and Scully are trapped in the arctic while the members of their team slowly are driven mad by parasitic worms… “E.B.E.” in which the show’s famous mythology about a conspiracy to conceal the existence of extra-terrestrials begins to take light… and of course the stunning season finale “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” in which a surprising number of important characters and concepts that the show would later explore in great depth are introduced, most notably the shape-shifting Bounty Hunter.  Interestingly enough, all of those above episodes were shows that I had on tape, and had seen tons of times.  It was great fun to see them again after a number of years away.  But there were also a LOT of stand-alone episodes throughout the season that I don’t think I’ve seen for well over ten years… and THOSE were a LOT of fun to watch as well.  The quality varied as the writers, directors, and actors all worked to figure out the style and tone of the show, and what sorts of stories they wanted to tell.  But getting to watch so many episodes that I really didn’t remember… it was the next best thing to actually having a brand new series of the show to enjoy!  Let me close by mentioning one final item that really pleased me.  For all of the (I think very valid) criticism that the writers never really had an over-arching plan for the show’s “mythology” — that they were making it up as they went along, leading to the show’s finally collapsing under the weight of all the stories and lose ends that ultimately went nowhere or were never explained — it was fun to see a lot of notions introduced very early in the first season that wouldn’t be fully explored until much later in the show.  I’ve already mentioned the appearance of the alien Bounty Hunter in the season finale.  But my favorite example is a scene at the end of the very second episode.  Mulder, desperate for some sort of validation of his work and his beliefs, asks his mysterious informant (nicknamed Deep Throat), “They’re here, aren’t they?”  To which Deep Throat replies “Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a long, long time.”  That statement wouldn’t make any sense until years later, when the first X-Files movie (released between the fifth and sixth seasons of the show) revealed that extra-terrestrials had first visited earth during pre-historic times, and much of the alien weirdness that Mulder and Scully had been chasing was related to that first contact, 10,000 years before they were born.  I was surprised and impressed to see those ideas layered into the show at such an early stage.  Now I’m excited to get to Season Two, which has always stood as my favorite season.

OK, this is my last posting having to do with Star Trek for a while — I promise!

But yesterday — believe it or not — marked the 42nd anniversary of the airing of the first episode of the original Star Trek series.  On September 8th, 1966, NBC aired “The Man Trap.”

Its a shame there’s no new Star Trek on TV these days to mark the anniversary.  But last week I spent a while talking about all the great Star Trek fiction that’s out there to be enjoyed.  Today I must add a post-script that novels haven’t been the only source of great new Star Trek recently.  The past few years have seen an explosion of Star Trek fan films across the web.  Now, a great many of these are very, very amateurish.  But there’s one that rises above the rest, and its called Star Trek: Phase II.  (The series began life as Star Trek: New Voyages).

This series is an attempt at creating a fourth season of the original Star Trek.  (The original series famously only lasted for three seasons — 79 episodes — before being cancelled.)  This is a very serious effort to produce complete, one hour (really approx. 45 minute) episodes that try to capture as close as possible the feel of 1960’s Star Trek.  (So far they have produced four episodes.)  And I must say, they get very close!  There is an extraordinary attention to detail in these productions — in the sets, the costumes, the make-up, and the visual effects.  You can tell that this is a true labor of love for everyone involved in its creation. 

What also sets this fan-film series apart from other efforts is that it has attracted the participation of a lot of industry professionals, as well as people who have been involved with official Star Trek work in the past.  Most notably, Walter Koenig (Checkov) and George Takei (Sulu) have each appeared in the series!  And not just in little wink-wink cameo roles — both have had major starring roles.  Mr. Koenig appeared in the series’ second episode, “To Serve All My Days,” an episode scripted with D.C. Fontana (who was one of the key writers for the original series).  That appearance was followed by Mr. Takei’s role in the third episode, “World Enough and Time.”  

Is the series something that looks like it could air on television?  Well, not quite.  But there is so much love on display here that its impossible to fault the series for an occasional shot or moment that seems off.  The writing is terrific and the visual effects are a LOT of fun.  (I particularly enjoyed the cat-and-mouse with the Klingons in “To Serve All My Days,” and the shots of the U.S.S. Excelsior in the future segments of “World Enough and Time.”)  And the acting — well, there are some weak spots, but not enough to dilute my enjoyment of this series.

The opening moments of the next episode, “Blood and Fire,” are available to watch here.  It’s a pretty cool combat sequence between the Big E and a Klingon warship!

The show has also leaked some images of upcoming episodes that are intriguing.  The show-runners have begun discussing their intention to begin transitioning the look of the series from that of the 60’s TV show to that of the movies — beginning to introduce new costumes, revised sets, etc.  To indicate this new direction, they actually changed the name of the series earlier this year from Star Trek: New Voyages to Star Trek: Phase II.  (Phase II was the proposed name of the new Star Trek TV series that Gene Roddenberry was working on in the 1970’s.  That series-that-never-happened eventually became the genesis for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979.)  Now it seems that the fine folks behind this fan series are taking things one step further.  Apparently, damage sustained by the Enterprise in “Blood and Fire” will result in the ship undergoing a refit in the following episode.  Here’s what the new Enterprise will look like.  This is an intriguing combination of the classic Enterprise from the original series and the refitted Enterprise from the movies.  This is the show’s biggest leap outside the bounds of established Trek continuity — but I’m intrigued.  Can’t wait to see the complete “Blood and Fire,” as well as the other new episodes that are coming.

In addition to the great series of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novels that I discussed yesterday, Pocket Books has really stepped up their game across the board.  They have released a number of marvelous novels in the past few years dealing with ALL the different series in the Star Trek franchise.  With few exceptions, they all have the same great things going for them that the DS9 books do — tight continuity from novel to novel, strong character arcs, and terrific attention to detail in terms of picking up old plotlines from long-ago episodes of the different Trek shows, or in taking minor characters from old episodes and bringing them back in unexpected and fun ways.  I have never seen the Trek UNIVERSE treated so much like a cohesive universe before — where things that happen in one novel, or that happened in older episodes of the series, aren’t just forgotten about.  Rather, the consequences and repercussions of those actions are explored… and characters that might have been one-dimensional in the past are fleshed-out and deepened.

For example, Ensign Ro was a well-loved character introduced in season five of the Next Generation.  And yet, after her initial introduction we never learned a whole heck of a lot about her, other than that she was tough and didn’t much like authority figures.  But she has been magnificently fleshed out in the DS9 books, where she has had to struggle to figure out where she belongs as Bajor begins the process of becoming a member world of the Federation.  Will she return to Starfleet, an organization in which she has failed twice?  Will she remain on Bajor, a planet and cultural heritage she rejected and fled from in her youth?  There’s a lot of interesting drama to be had there.  Here’s another interesting example: In the second season of Deep Space Nine, there was an episode in which it looked like Bajor was going to renounce its partnership with the Federation, and a team of Bajoran officers attempted to capture the station.  The leader of those officers was a Bajoran general named Krim.  He only appeared in that one episode, but I always thought the actor made a great impression — he was a memorable character, one who was tough and extraordinarily loyal to his home planet of Bajor, but also calm, rational, and open-minded.  Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought he was a great character, because the Trek novel writers have brought back Krim in the role of Bajor’s first representative to the Federation Council.  The character has played a major role in the “Bajor” novella from the Worlds of Deep Space Nine series, by J. Noah Kym, as well as in Keith R.A. DeCandido’s novel Articles of the Federation, which I’ll discuss more in a moment.  Its great fun to see this that this character hasn’t been forgotten, but that he’s now been made an important part of the continuing story!

There are LOTS more examples like that — but I’ve gotten off track and I’m back talking about DS9, when what I wanted to do today was to highlight some other great Trek novels that have come out over the past few years.

Let’s start with the afore-mentioned Articles of the Federation, by Keith R.A. DeCandido.  This novel is, in essence Star Trek meets The West Wing, and it is genius.  The novel takes place over the course of one year in the life of the Federation (specifically, the year immediately following the events of the last Trek movie, Star Trek: Nemesis).  Whereas all of the Star Trek TV series have focused on the military — people in Starfleet, working on starships and space-stations, this novel focuses on the civilian arm of government: The United Federation of Planets.  Specifically, the President and her many advisors.  This is an entirely unexplored aspect of the world of Star Trek, and DeCandido does a phenomenal job of imagining for us what life in the President’s circle must be like.  This novel also contains an extraordinary number of little nods and references to all sorts of Star Trek episodes, characters, alien races, etc.  That really enriches the novel, and enhances what I described before: that sense that the different Trek series and novels are really all part of one shared fictional universe, which I think is really fun.

Titan: Taking Wing, by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels — One of the only interesting notions put forth by the really-so-bad-its-painful Star Trek Nemesis was the idea that Will Riker had finally, FINALLY, gotten command of a starship of his own.  Well, this book launched what is now a five-book (and sure to be more soon) series of Will’s adventures in command of the Starship Titan.  As the book that launched that series, this one remains my favorite.  A lot of interesting new characters are introduced (and some familiar ones are there as well) as part of Riker’s command crew.  I also really enjoyed the Romulan-centered storyline.  The events of Nemesis left the Romulan society rather a mess, and there were a whole host of questions left unanswered by that movie — such as what the heck happened to the militaristic Romulan society after its senate had been annihilated?? — that this novel addresses.

Star Trek: The Buried Age, by Christopher L. Bennett — Mr. Bennett has written a number of interesting Trek books over the past few years, but this one is my favorite.  It steps back from the “current” Trek storyline (taking place post-Nemesis), and examines the years of Captain Picard’s life after the destruction of the Stargazer, and before he took command of the U.S.S. Enterprise in “Encounter at Farpoint” (the Next Gen premiere episode).  This is a time period that wasn’t much discussed by the Next Generation series, and yet Bennett constructs a truly engrossing story that presents these years as a pivotal time in the life of Jean Luc Picard, in which he went from a man almost-broken after the loss of the Stargazer to the confident Captain who we met in the opening moments of “Encounter at Farpoint.”  Along the way, Bennett also fleshes out a variety of interesting aspects of the back-story of the Trek universe, piecing together a number of disparate hints and references from numerous Trek episodes into a coherent and surprising picture.  I love that sort of thing!  Once again (am I repeating myself unnecessarily??) different stories are made to fit together into a unified fictional Trek universe.

Crucible: McCoy, by David R. George III — Having sung the praises of the way all the modern Trek novels fit together, let me now praise one that really stands on its own.  David R. George III wrote a three-book celebration of the 40th anniversary of the original Star Trek, with one novel focusing on each one of the central trio of Trek, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.  It is the McCoy novel, though, (one of the longest Trek novels I’ve ever read) that is the most extraordinary.  George III takes possibly the most pivotal episode of classic Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and uses it as a jumping-off point to tell two parallel tales.  One follows McCoy after the traumatic effects of that episode, in which Edith Keeler is allowed to perish back in 1930 in order to restore the proper timeline of history.  In what is a marvelous act of attention to detail and narrative creativity, this story takes place in and around many of the familiar Trek episodes that followed “The City on the Edge of Forever” in the run of the series and beyond, casting those adventures in an entirely new light.  The other, parallel storyline follows McCoy back in the past.  What if Kirk and Spock never travelled back in time after him, and McCoy was able to save Edith and wound up living the rest of his life in the past?  For much of the novel, these two stories proceed side by side, and it is only towards the end that we begin to understand the connections between them.  Each tale is haunting and powerful, and it succeeds in doing the near impossible — taking the well-known character of McCoy and forever changing my perception of that character.  This is a novel I look forward to revisiting many times in the future.

Before Dishonor, by Peter David — Over the last two years, Pocket Books has attempted to do for post-Nemesis TNG what it so successfully did for DS9: launch a highly connected series of novels to take those characters forward from their last filmed adventure.  But the Next Gen relaunch has been a bit shakier than the DS9 series was.  The first three novels were each written by a great Trek writer, and each one tackled what looked to be a great topic.  Death in Winter by Michael Jan Friedman addressed the Picard-Dr. Crusher relationship.  Resistance, by J.M. Dillard, brought about the return of the Borg.  And Q & A, by Keith R. A. DeCandido, featured (of course) a return visit from Q, and a story-line that linked together ALL the previous Q tales.  And yet, while each of those novels was good, none of them proved to be a stand-out.  All three novels were, surprisingly, rather short, and all seemed to me as if they could have been much lengthier, more complex stories.  And while the DS9 novels had phenomenal continuity, particularly in terms of the characterizations of the new characters from novel-to-novel, the Next Gen novels seemed to have have rather disparate depicitions of the new characters from book-to-book.

Which brings us to Peter David’s Before Dishonor.  Visit some on-line Trek sites and you’ll see that this was the most controversial of the Next Gen relaunch books.  Many were very critical of David for his depictions of the new characters, as much of their characterizations as built up in the prior novels seemed to have been ignored.  There were also a lot of objections to a shocking turn of events early in the book.  (If you don’t want to be spoiled, STOP READING NOW!)  As the novel opens, it seems that the new Borg threat introduced in Resistance has only grown stronger.  A massive Borg cube invades the Alpha Quadrant, and the Borg’s first step is to take care of an individual who has consistently defeated them:  Kathryn Janeway.  And in the shocking introduction to the novel, the Borg finally succeed in assimilating Janeway.  And she is NOT rescued by the end of the novel!!  Many Voyager fans were shocked, but I for one found this a wonderfully surprising twist — and a deliciously ironic one at that, as I had always found the Janeway character to be shockingly arrogant in terms of her attitude towards the Borg.

As for the rest of the novel, I loved it!  It contained a number of fascinating connections to earlier novels by Mr. David (most particularly his previous Borg opus, Vendetta).  It was a relentlessly paced tale, full of the mix of high-stakes drama and great humor to be found in most of David’s novels.  And I particularly loved the way the Borg were really made a scary threat to the Federation again.  (I found it somewhat silly how easily they were defeated in all the Voyager episodes that featured them.)  Although this novel is very different in tone and characterizations than the previous Next Gen relaunch novels, I think this is the one I’ll be re-reading the most in the future.

Well, there have been LOTS of other great Trek novels that I’ve read recently, but I think you get the idea.  I’ll close by mentioning several of the novels that have either been recently published, or are coming out soon, that I can’t wait to read!

Greater Than the Sum, by Christopher L. Bennett — Picks up the pieces left by Before Dishonor.

Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru, by Michael A. Martin and Andy Magels — Yes, even though I found the Enterpise TV series to be pretty weak, I am actually excited about a new Enterprise novel.  Why?  because this one promises to tell us the actual story of the Kobayashi Maru, an event preserved in Starfleet lore as the no-win scenario test given to all Starfleet Cadets, as memorably depicted in the opening scenes of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  (This novel will supposedly be followed next year by another Enterprise novel, this one depicting the Romulan War, a major event first mentioned in early Original Trek episodes!)

Star Trek: Destiny, by David Mack — a three-book crossover that promises to feature characters from almost ALL the different Trek series of TV shows and novels, and to bring the continuing Borg storyline to an explosive climax.  (Pocket Book is keeping the plot of the trilogy very tightly wrapped, but there are hints that this story will also have some connection to the tragic fate of Captain Hernandez, first introduced as the captain of the second NX-class starship in the final season of Enterprise.)

Enough to keep me busy for quite a while!  I can’t wait!  Its enough to almost make me forget that its been a long time now since there have been ANY new filmed Star Trek adventures, on TV or at the movies.  But with novels this good, who needs ‘em?

The other day I mentioned here that there hasn’t been any truly great Star Trek around since Deep Space Nine went off the air back in 1999.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  Believe it or not, in the past few years, Pocket Book has put together a terrific line of Star Trek fiction.  You heard me right!

I have found most novels based on sci-fi TV shows or movies to be, as a rule, disappointing.  Most are saddled with the restrictions of having to adhere to the continuity of the show or movie being written about.  In other words, nothing of great significance can happen to any of the characters, because they need to be in the exact same place at the end of the book as they were in the beginning.  Well, that takes a lot of the fun out of the story!  I’ve been reading Pocket Books’ Star Trek novels since I was a kid.  Even though I got a lot of enjoyment out of the books back in the day, I quickly recognized that most of the books followed the same basic framework: the Enterprise (either Kirk’s or Picard’s) visits a new planet, has an adventure, and then our heroes head on their merry way.  There were several authors who spun some terrific Star Trek tales within that framework (Peter David being one of my favorites), but after a number of years of reading those novels I eventually drifted away.

But over the past few years, with no new Star Trek TV series or movies on the horizon (and the more recent development of J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie looking like its going to be some sort of reboot in its own continuity), Pocket Books’ editors and authors have been free to move the 24th century Star Trek characters forward in exciting and unexpected ways.  Suddenly, characters from the different series can interact… old familiar characters head in dramatically different directions (some are even — gasp! — killed off!)… new characters are introduced and developed… in short, lots of exciting things happen, and the over-all Star Trek story is moved forward.  Even more exciting to me is the CONTINUITY that now exists between the Star Trek novels!  As I have written about before on this site, I LOVE continuity in my entertainment (be it in TV shows, comics, etc.)  This continuity in the Star Trek novels is delightful, as each book now has significance — with one leading into the next — and with plot twists now having weight and repercussions.  Of something happens in one novel, that is reflected in the storyline of the next novel!  And all the novels begin with a “historian’s note” that dates the events being depicted, showing how each book relates to the rest, and moving the Star Trek story forward from the last new piece of filmed Trek, the dreadful Next Gen movie Nemesis.  All of that makes each book feel like one piece of a larger, epic story.  And I’ve found myself waiting for the publication dates of upcoming novels the way I count the days until the opening weekend of an anticipated movie!

The series of books that, for me, embodies all of those good things outlined above — and the series that got me started reading Star Trek novels again a few years ago — is Pocket Book’s relaunch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  DS9 was my favorite Star Trek series, and I was very sad to see it end.  (Particularly when the series that followed it, Voyager, seemed so much simpler and less sophisticated in its storytelling.)  So when I heard that Pocket was coming out with a series of novels, making up something of a “season eight” for the show, I was interested — although it took me a while to finally take the plunge.  When I finally read the first novel, Avatar, I was blown me away and immediately hooked.  Here are a few novels of note from the DS9 re-launch series:

Avatar Books I and II, by S.D. Perry — This duology launched the DS9 “season eight,” and it is a magnificent reintroduction to the series.  The book begins some months after the events of the DS9 series finale, “What You Leave Behind,” and right away I was thrilled to see the story picking up many of the interesting character threads left by the series finale.  Kira is in command of the station… Jake is struggling with the loss of his father…Kassidy Yates is about to give birth to a child… Odo is in the Gamma Quadrant, trying to curb his people’s hatred of all solids… the controversial Lieutenant Ro has taken over as head of station security… Bajor has finally become a member of the Federation… and then DS9 is brutally attacked by a Jem Hadar warship, and Captain Picard (yes, Next Gen characters are in this DS9 book, the first indication of the wonderful increasing interconnectivity of the Pocket Book Star Trek novels) and the crew of the USS Enterprise discover a new Orb of the Prophets…  

Its a marvelous novel, filled with all the things that made Deep Space Nine so great — action, a focus on the ever-changing political landscape between all the great powers in the Alpha Quadrant (the corner of the galaxy in which most Star Trek stories are set), and great, great characters.  Attention is paid to all of the major DS9 characters (at least, all those left alive at the end of the TV series), and a whole host of interesting new characters are introduced.  Its a neat trick to make a bunch of new characters as engaging and worth of the reader’s attention as the familiar ones from the show who viewers got to know over seven seasons. But S.D. Perry accomplishes that here, and one of the really surprising things (to me, at least) about the series of DS9 novels that would follow Avatar is the way these characters developed and changed.

A Stitch in Time, by Andrew Robinson — Mr. Robinson played the enigmatic Cardassian Garak on the show, and this wonderful novel provides an enormous amount of background on the “plain, simple” tailor.  There have been other Star Trek novels written by actors (William Shatner’s series featuring Kirk is a most notable example), and most of those have been, in my opinion, rather mediocre.  Also problematic to me: I found Garak to be an interesting character on DS9 precisely because of his mysterious background, and I didn’t have much interest in finding out all about his true life story.  And so it was that I was very dubious about this novel — and therefore I was stunned to find this to be my favorite of all the DS9 novels.  The narrative is very sophisticated — Robinson interweaves multiple stories set at multiple different points in Garak’s life: his youth spent in a Cardassian military school like something out of Ender’s Game; various experiences during his years as an operative in the Obsidian Order (Cardassia’s secret intelligence unit), including the much-hinted at but never revealed in the show tale of Garak’s involvement in the fate of Gul Dukat’s father; Garak’s struggles on DS9 during the Dominion War; and the sad circumstances of the ruined Cardassia, left devastated after the DS9 finale, “What You Leave Behind.”  Each one of these stories is powerful and affecting — the book as a whole is rather melancholy (not surprising, since the end of DS9 showed us the terrible fate that befell Cardassia)…and yet also uplifting.  A marvelous piece of writing.

Unity, by S.D. Perry — After the four-book series entitled “Mission Gamma,” S.D. Perry returned to the DS( re-launch series to pen what in many ways served as the “finale” of the “Season Eight” series of novels.  In this story, a great number of the myriad storylines built up in the preceding eleven DS9 novels come to a head.  A major character has been assassinated.  The Federation and Bajor face a horrifying attack from an enemy long-forgotten — the parasitic aliens last seen all the way back in the FIRST SEASON of Star Trek: The Next Generation.   A Trill secret threatens to come to light.  And Jake Sisko returns from the Gamma Quadrant, bringing with him a familiar DS9 character thought long-lost… but its not Bejmanin Sisko!

Worlds of Deep Space Nine, by various authors — If the novels from Avatar to Unity represent “season eight” of DS9, then this three book series launched “season nine.”  Each book contains two novellas, focusing on different worlds important to the DS9 saga: Cardassia, Andor, Trill, Bajor, Ferenginar, and The Dominion.  At first I was concerned that, after the engrossing climax of the storylines in Unity, these books would be something off a “digression.”  But there’s not a loser in the bunch.  Each novella is an engrossing tale with an enormous amount of “world-building” — giving the reader a lot of insight into these different, fascinating alien cultures.  But, as noted above, these stories aren’t just interesting asides, there to add some depth to various alien species.  Rather, each one moves all of the characters’ stories forward in dramatic ways.  The Trill secrets revealed in Unity come to a head, causing tremendous upheaval to Trill society, and putting Ezri Dax to a dramatic test.  The Bajoran village of Sidau (seen in the first-season DS9 episode “The Storyteller”) is massacred; a character not seen since season two of DS9 is named the new Bajoran representative to the Federation; Jake Sisko gets engaged; a mole is discovered on the station; and the Jem Hadar Taran’atar stabs Kira Nerys in the heart (not a dream, a hoax, or an illusion!).  The shape-shifter Laas (from the seventh season DS9 episode “Chimera”) rejoins the Great Link, setting in motion a chain of events that causes the Changelings to make a desperate decision.  And, in my favorite story, Paradigm, written by Heather Jarman, two of the new characters created in the DS9 novels — the Andorian Shar and the Starfleet Ensign Prynn Tenmei — must navigate the complex structure of Andorian society as Shar returns home to bury his beloved.  It is a powerful, romantic, sweet and sad story that I have subsequently re-read several times.  Great stuff.

Warpath, by David Mack — The most action-packed of all the DS9 novels, this book takes place over the course of about two days, as the crew of the Defiant races in pursuit Taran’atar; a mysterious Cardassian woman makes her way to a fateful rendez-vous; and we witness the brutal demise of yet another Kira — the Indendant, from the Mirror Universe.  This book ends with a cliffhanger of the most brutal kind, and unfortunately it took Pocket Books TWO YEARS to release the next DS9 novel!!  Sheesh!!!  

Yikes!  I’ve gone on for a while now.  Tomorrow I’ll continue with Part II of this column, writing about several OTHER great works of Star Trek fiction that have been published over the past few years.

Its always fun to be watching an old episode of a favorite TV show and spot a great guest star actor you’d never realized was there before.  This happened twice to me recently.  

I was watching an old episode from the first season of The X-Files called “Shapes.”  Its about cowboys, Indians, and werewolves.  Its a decent first season episode — solid, but nothing spectacular.  But, even though I’d seen this episode a few times before, I was startled to notice that one of the cowboys was played by Donnelly Rhodes, none other than Doc Cottle on Battlestar Galactica!  He looked totally different — in this X-Files episode he was all decked out in cowboy gear, with grey whiskers — but that gravelly voice was unmistakable.

The same thing happened only a day later.  I was watching an old Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode called “Shakaar.”  It’s a third season episode that introduces us to several of Kira’s old chums from the Bajoran resistance movement (including their leader, Shakaar).  In the course of this episode, Kira and her old mates wind up taking up arms again, and find themselves pursued by other Bajorans — lead by a tough general named Lenaris Holem.  Now, I’ve seen this episode many many times before — but not since having devoured all five seasons of The Wire last year.  And so it was with delight that I realized that General Lenaris was played by John Doman — Rawls himself!  (According to imdb, its one of his earliest film credits.)

Who knew?