Science Fiction

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Cause and Effect

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  • Title: Star Trek: The Next Generation – Cause and Effect
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Star Trek: The Next Generation - Cause and Effect television review

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the final frontier where no one has gone before. Time loops are a common plot device used in science fiction. One of the most famous uses on television came in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Fifth Season episode entitled “Cause and Effect.” Opening with the destruction of the Enterprise, the episode takes us through the same couple of days over and over again, always ending with the Enterprise encountering a distortion in the spacetime continuum and colliding with another starship. Each time, the resulting explosion destroys both ships and returns the crew back in time to the beginning of the loop only vaguely aware of a sense of deja vu.

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Star Trek: Picard – The End Is the Beginning

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  • Title: Star Trek: Picard – The End Is the Beginning
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Star Trek: Picard - The End Is the Beginning television review

After being denied assistance by Starfleet Command, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) turns his attention to an old friend with plenty of resentment towards Romulands and Picard (whose exit from Starfleet led to the swift end of her career as well). Three episodes in, the show is still dragging its feet and struggling to get Picard into space. It will be another episode before the crew is complete, and two more before the story presented in the first episode actually begins to come together. (So it’s not really the end of the beginning just yet.) As a conspiracy nut who has seen better days, Raffi (Michelle Hurd) shows how far Picard has to go in order to find assistance outside of Starfleet. Hurd is fine here, although the show will continue to struggle with well Raffi holds it together and the level of her skill-set over nearly every episode in which she appears. Flashbacks between the pair help further explain Picard’s exit from Starfleet in a rather uncharacteristically moment of naivete.

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Star Trek: Discovery – Context Is for Kings

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  • Title: Star Trek: Discovery – Context Is for Kings
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Star Trek: Discovery - Context Is for Kings television review

Set six-months after the Battle of the Binary Stars, “Context Is for Kings” offers a secondary pilot for the show as the court-martialed Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) finds herself aboard the U.S.S. Discovery when her prison shuttle encounters trouble during transport. Rightly skeptical of the situation that puts her back on a Starship, nevertheless Burnham goes to work helping the ships crew on a top-secret mission. Pulling in a couple of recognizable faces from the show’s first episode, the rest of the core cast is introduced here including Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), Mary Wiseman as Burnhams bunkmate, and Anthony Rapp as astromycologist Paul Stamets.

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Star Trek: Picard – Remembrance

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  • Title: Star Trek: Picard – Remembrance
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Star Trek: Picard - Remembrance television review

It’s hard not to think of Logan while watching the first episode of Star Trek: Picard. Set more than a decade after Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) left Starfleet, Picard is awoken from his slumber by a dream, an interview, and a visitor. Brent Spiner guest-stars in a couple of dream sequences as Picard does a fairly good job using make-up to hide the actor’s age since the last time Data was seen on-camera. The shiny optimistic view of Star Trek: The Next Generation has been toned-down quite a bit. Playing more than a little to current events, the once wide-reaching Starfleet has turned inward. The interview, which takes place on a historic event of some consequences for our Captain, helps flesh out a bit of Picard’s past and the reasons for his break with Starfleet over its policies towards ending assistance to Romulan refugees after the destruction of their homeworld and the termination of Starfleet’s synthetic life program following an android uprising on Mars.

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