S01 E03 - Wesley Crushers Teenage Crush

In this episode Dylan is joined by David Kitchen to look at the Expanded universe of Star Trek. First up its the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel 'Imzadi' by Peter David. Then they look at 'Blood and Fire' a script written TNG, but ultimately  produced by fan film series Star Trek: New Voyages. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Welcome back to Too Hot for TV. We are the podcast that looks at all things extended universe for your favourite films, TV shows, and whatever else we can dig out. Today I'm jumping into the world of Star Trek, and I'm joined by David Kitchen from the Doctor Who Show. David, welcome.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

Thanks, Dillo. It is a pleasure to be here. Very excited to be talking about Star Trek, something I very rarely get to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Amazing. Well, let's jump straight into it. Presumably, you're a Star Trek fan. When did you become a Star Trek fan? Are you a big Star Trek fan?

SPEAKER_03 1:17

It's not the biggest TV series that I'm a fan of. You know, Doctor Who is bigger, Blake Seven is bigger, but it would be competing for sort of, you know, somewhere at the bottom of that top five slot, particularly when you talk about 90s Trek, which was really my era. So I discovered Trek on a visit to the UK in 1991, where my parents were busy doing something and they put the TV on, and there was an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. And as an 11-year-old, I've gone, this seems pretty cool. There's spaceships and lasers and sci-fi crap happening, you know, and said to dad, like, what's this? And my dad being a sci-fi fan explained what Star Trek was. And then when we got back to Australia, I started to dig into it. Now I had a look, Dylan, and I was actually quite surprised to find that Encounter at Far Point, even though it went out in the US in 1987, didn't hit the UK until September of 1990. Yeah and didn't make Australia until the 2nd of November 1991. So that was a big part of me discovering Star Trek. But I discovered the next generation, particularly in a very haphazard sort of manner, because the video releases at the local video library were actually running ahead of the TV broadcasts because they were being brought out on a US schedule, not an Australian schedule. And then I had friends at the Doctor Who Club who were importing from Mates uh multi-generation NTSC to Pel conversion bootleg copies of later next gen. So I might watch a season one episode on the TV, then a season two episode from the video store, and then somebody's lend me a season four or season five episode to watch. And even at the age of 11, I remember watching stuff like Unification and comparing it to what I was seeing on the TV and going, this is almost a different show. Like I get that this gets a lot better. Um, so from there, you know, I borrowed some uh classic episodes on tape, and then the local department store started just randomly selling one episode of the original series per tape in a cardboard cover for seven dollars. So that's about three pounds your money. And so I just started buying like these classics that they were releasing, and so I saw maybe a dozen original series, and then I worked my way through the next generation in a sort of haphazard order, and then Deep Space Nine came along, and I that was the one I was able to reasonably watch in in a proper order over seven years, and so yeah, I became a fan, and as part of that, I definitely got into the books, which is something we're going to discuss. But but yeah, I have I have seen all of the original series at least once, I've seen all of Next Generation at least twice, my favorite episodes dozens and dozens of times. I've worked my way through Deep Space Line a couple of times, again, my favorite episodes dozens and dozens of times. I've cherry-picked episodes of Voyager to watch, I've seen all of Enterprise once, and I've seen bits and bobs of the modern stuff.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

Right. Okay, cool. Yeah, I my Star Trek fandom such as this. I think if you asked a normal person, even if you asked my partner or any of my friends, they would say Dylan's a Star Trek fan. If you asked a Star Trek fan whether I was a Star Trek fan, they would call me a filthy casual. Because I have seen bits of Star Trek. I own all the movies on Blu-ray. I own the original series on Blu-ray, and I think I've probably seen all of the original series, just not in order. Again, I was of that age where in the UK TNG was on like a Tuesday night or something in the UK, and I would tune in and I would tape episodes, and I certainly didn't watch the full run, but there was a few years where I tuned in every week. Same with DS9, same with Voyager. I don't think I've ever seen Enterprise. Of the newer stuff, I've not seen Discovery. And as we record this, the third season of Strange New Worlds is probably six months old, and I've seen half of that. So I'm committed enough to try and catch up with that. And every now and then I'll put on an old episode or jump into a random episode of DS9, Voyager, TNG, anything like that. But I I couldn't claim to know it inside out.

SPEAKER_03 5:24

Can I ask, when you were watching those first broadcasts of TNG and DS9, was that like a prime time, relatively big thing in the UK or was it very niche?

SPEAKER_02 5:32

It was a tea time slot on BBC Two, which is a sort of, which is the secondary, slightly more, well, at the time, the secondary, more slightly niche channel for the BBC. So I still think there would have been three or four million people tuning in to watching it, but we are in the days where you know big drama's got 12, 13, 14, 15 million viewers. So I'd say relatively niche. But there was this thing in the UK where cable and sky television didn't roll out sort of to everybody for maybe another six or seven years, it felt like after that. It was available, but the rich kids had it. So we were stuck with the sort of four or five terrestrial channels, and they tended to like only show things once. But BBC Two, six o'clock in the week, a couple of days a week, was the cult TV slot. So there'd be something new, which would inevitably be an episode of Star Trek, but then it would be reruns of the Avengers, reruns of uh Randall and Hot Kirk deceased, things like that. So, like that that is before UK Gold, which was the channel that used to run all these things again and again and again, that was where you went to if you were, I don't know, 12 years old, 10 years old in the 90s and loved science fiction. Six o'clock on on a weekday is a couple of times a week, and Star Trek would inevitably be involved in that.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

It's really interesting because it wasn't the case here. Uh the next gen and and all the treks went out on a commercial network. So they weren't on the ABC. And Channel 9 did start broadcasting them in prime time, and then they very quickly realized that whether you put them on at dinner time or you put them on at 11 p.m., the same number of people tuned in because Star Trek fans would watch Star Trek whatever the time of day was, and there was no casual audience. So it very quickly got shunted to sort of 10:30, 11 pm on an evening. And infamously for us Star Trek fans at the time, it often came on after uh on Thursday night after the footy show. And the footy show was the highest-rated TV show in Melbourne at the time, and it went out live because that there would be, you know, it was part it was part footy chat, part variety show, and it would go out live, and it was the highest rating thing in the city. So if they were like on a roll and just hadn't done all their bits yet, they would just let that keep going for sometimes an hour over its allocated sloth. So if you wanted to set the video timer for Star Trek, you have to basically have to set a three-hour window and hope you caught it.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

Right. It was an interesting way to consume things because and again, if you weren't a big fan, then you would miss episodes. And I mean, fortunately, a lot of TV like TNG was designed that, you know, it was 45 minutes, and even if there was a sort of returning character or ongoing arc in some way, you could just dip in for 45-50 minutes and and that would do. And I I regular did like I've got very fond memories of of watching those things, and I did own a handful of videos. I had there was a Q-box set which I was at my dad's over Christmas, and I found it in a box. During lockdown, I digitised all my old tapes of stuff I've recorded off the TV, and there must have been 20 episodes of TNG, and probably the same for Voyager and DS9. And they were obviously things that I did go back to and revisit again and again. So there's a few episodes that I know incredibly well of every iteration of Star Trek, and many that I've never seen.

SPEAKER_03 8:59

Yeah, whereas I was by that stage starting to get the TV companions and the episode guides, the behind-the-scenes books, and that sort of thing. So I I knew what episodes were coming up, and I did try and make sure I did take them if I didn't see them.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Yeah. Um, and so what about your relationship with the extended universe of Star Trek? So books, comics, anything like that?

SPEAKER_03 9:22

The books were a very, very big part of my Star Trek fandom, particularly back in the 90s. I had come to the show first and foremost as a Doctor Who fan. And in 1991, Doctor Who had started doing the Virgin New Adventures, and then later the Virgin Missing Adventures, which were a very big part of my growing up as a teenager, and suddenly discovering that this thing you liked on TV could have original stories that also came out in book form was really, really cool. And suddenly in the corner of the shop, there was this display cabinet as well as those cardboard sort of one-meter high display cabinets, cabinets, too strong a word, um, of Star Trek books. And it's like, hang on, there are original Star Trek books as well. And I started to buy a couple of those, uh, only having pocket money, of course. I couldn't afford most of them. So they were ones that I would go down to the local library and go and borrow what they had on the shelf. And then in the back where it said, the next book is this story about this. You go, oh, that sounds pretty cool. I'll I'll order that in from another library so that I can read it and suddenly discover that I had I was reading probably as many Star Trek books as Doctor Who books for a period there. And certainly when DreamWatch magazine became a thing in what, I reckon the mid-90s, uh, one of the reasons I was buying that was because it was covering uh the tail end of D uh TNG, but all of Deep Space Nine, all of Voyager, it was my sort of window into that. And um although I was never a formal member of the Star Trek Club in Melbourne, Enterprise, that was started by two people who are on the Doctor Who Club committee that I was a member of. So we all like it it's it's Australia, you know, it's a small city a long way from anywhere. So if you're a fan of sci-fi, you're kind of all hanging out together anyway. So Star Trek and Babylon 5 and Doctor Who and um Red Dwarf, you know, all those fandoms coalesced and crossed and interbred in Melbourne in the 90s.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

You make a good point about Dreamwatch. Magazines like Dreamwatch and SFX were very much like even when I stopped watching these iterations of Star Trek and other shows, I felt like I was up to date with what was going on because those magazines were constantly they had a spoiler zone, so if you were particularly interested, like in watching them, you could catch up with what was going on, and then maybe you'd jump in. Uh again, I was a member of a Doctor Who group that then became a general sci-fi group, and we'd all huddle around a VHS player in the back of a pub, and they'd have second generation copies of things recorded off the TV in America that hadn't been shown in the UK. So inevitably, like I think that's the first time I saw the TNG finale was I don't know, maybe six months before it was broadcast in the UK because someone had got a a tape sent over from a friend in the States. And like again, so you're you're watching it out of order, in you know, you've seen you've got a handful that you bought on video, you've got a handful that you've recorded off the TV, you've seen a most of them live and never seen them again. Um, and and then sort of sort of jumped in there. So that it was kind of how we consumed our media before there was box sets and before there was streaming.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Yeah, absolutely. I I did buy a few TNG videos. They were$20 for two episodes in Australia, and and that was very much picking and choosing, you know, and and and that's sort of doing that equation of okay, well, that's two classics back to back on one tape, I'll buy that one. Well, that's one classic, but one absolutely shit episode. So is that as good as two decent episodes, you know, and sort of making that that 13, 14-year-old uh equation. Uh Deep Space Nine, I basically tried to buy as many as I could. Uh, but even then I was going, okay, there's two not great episodes and two non-arc related episodes on this tape, so I can skip that one. So my DS9 collection had maybe 70% of sort of seasons three to seven, uh, whereas TNG was like made maybe 20 tapes across the seven seasons.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

Um, in terms of my relationship with that sort of extended media, uh, I didn't have a huge amount of stuff. I was I collected a lot of the action figures. I was at my dad's at Christmas again, and I was rummaging through my old stuff, and I found a bunch of Star Trek books, but they all looked very much pristine condition, never, never read. And that they must have been something that I picked up in a sale or something like that, because you know, you got limited pocket money, and I would have been spending it on Doctor Who things largely. But there was a put a box with about six or seven Star Trek books in that, you know, maybe I'll maybe I'll dip into at some point in my adult life. I couldn't say whether they're any good, whether they were classics or whether they were things that uh perhaps were not looked upon fondly. But certainly within my dad's kept all my old stuff from when I was a kid, there is there is a good like couple of boxes full of Star Trek bits of merch and stuff like that from the the the sort of mid-90s.

SPEAKER_03 14:18

Yeah, one of the great things about being an adult with uh a disposable income and the internet is that I have been able to go back over the last few years and all all those Star Trek books that I borrowed from the library, because I couldn't afford them to have my own copies at the time, the ones that I've really got fond memories of, I've gone, I I can own this now. So you go into eBay, you find a reasonably priced copy, and I've started to just collect and reread some of those ones because it's it's just I think it's really important to emphasize that the time that I was 11, 12, 13, 14, all of these ranges were coming out. The Verger books in Doctor Who, the pocket books for Star Trek, uh in about '93, Star Wars starts for the first time in 10 years doing original fiction with the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn. So suddenly it's like, oh, that's another franchise I can start reading books from. And so that that sort of love of sci-fi in book form and that peak uh sci-fi nerd teenager era sort of all coalesced with all these series just doing all these books. And it was just a kind of a wonderful, amazing time that I don't think has ever quite been replicated.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

Yeah, absolutely. As you say now, everything's there, it's a click of a button. And if you've if you're you only need to be time-rich if you know your way around the internet to find sort of bootleg copies of things, and you can have everything that that you possibly wanted from a TV show or film or what have you, which is what this podcast is all about, exploring those parts of it. But certainly, from my point of view, being a big Doctor Who fan, as much as I wanted to get into Star Trek, I am 10, 11, 12, and I have a very small amount of pocket money and uh only one birthday and one Christmas a year to try and cram in all the stuff that I really want. So a lot of this stuff I'm very familiar with the covers because I stood staring longingly at them in magazines or in shops, but uh never never having consumed them in any way. So it's it's really nice to jump into this stuff.

SPEAKER_03 16:10

Yep, and then then suddenly, you know, school studies actually become time consuming and there's only so many books you can read.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I I mean I I look around, I'm sat in my little office at home now, and it is definitely full of stuff that I wanted as a kid. That's I'm now able to own, as you say, you get older and you get a bit more disposable income, and you're like, I could get that book that I wanted when I was a kid, which is great fun. And my dad, who's in his 70s, does a similar thing with stuff from when he was a kid as well. So, you know.

SPEAKER_03 16:39

Well, that's lovely.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

So let's jump into our first choice, which is Mzadi, a Star Trek The Next Generation book by Peter David, which came from Pocket Books on August 1st, 1992. Now, I wanted to get an idea of what was going on in the Star Trek world at the time. Principal photography on Star Trek Deep Space Nine had begun with the first live-action scenes on Emissary filmed on Paramount. Series 5 of The Next Generation had finished in June, and series six would start in September. That was being broadcast in America. Uh, and Undiscovered Country was rolled out over Europe with its cinema release, because we're in the days where there was no sort of simultaneous or a couple of days apart release across the world. They'd be rolling out a film over the entire world for what could be a year, 18 months, but it was a much more protracted.

SPEAKER_03 17:35

Oh, very, very aware because Australia was usually at the very tail end of that.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah, I I've got no idea where the UK came in that.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

73-year-old Admiral William Riker, embittered by decades of regret over Diana Troy's death, is summoned to BetaZ as Luxana Troy lies dying. Sorting through her belongings reawakens memories of Riker and Deanna's first meeting years earlier, when a brief posting to BetaZ led to a slowburn romance marked by emotional growth, mutual change, and deepening love. The bond was solidified during a traumatic Cinderine raid in which Diana was kidnapped and rescued, culminating in their acknowledgement as a Mzadi. Yet interference from Luxana and a moment of weakness shattered their relationship, and they went their separate ways until fate reunited them aboard the Enterprise D. In the present, Commodore data reveals that Diana's death was a temporal focal point, prompting Riker to uncover evidence that she was murdered by a future poison. Realizing history was altered, Riker travels back through the Guardian of Forever to the time of the Cidereen Peace Conference and saves Diana. Only to discover that a future Cidderine agent sought her death to prevent her exposing their deception. After a confrontation involving a rogue future data, Diana reveals the Cidderine's true intentions and the timeline is restored. As the Guardian declares balance returned, Riker comes home to find an uncertain future, comforted by the voice of his Imzadi alive once more.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Why did you pick this book?

SPEAKER_03 19:16

So when you were asking me to pitch some stuff to talk about, I went back and thought, what is it that really meant something special to me in terms of spin-off media? And for the reasons we've already discussed, the Star Trek pocketbooks were very, very much a big part of my nerd childhood, my nerd teenage years, because it just was a way of consuming more of something that I loved. And often in a way that was just, I want to say too broad and too deep, but that's not the series we're doing. It's just just a way that is, you know, be outside of budgets, outside of constraints. And so I have very, very fond memories of reading these pocketbooks. Before we talk about Inzardi particularly, it's probably just worth noting here that um Pocketbooks was a division of uh the publisher Simon Schuster, who I hadn't realised until yesterday are owned by Paramount slash CBS. So obviously this was their officially licensed Thai in media because they had the rights to track from 1979. They were doing into Spurs sort of original track novels from 81, which I didn't realise, but started doing TNG books in July of 1988, which is only after the end of series one. And I do remember reading some of those very early TNG pocket books, and it was very clear that they were based solely on season one, and no one really had quite an idea of, you know, how this show was meant to work and how these characters all worked, although they're better than the Deep Space Nine ones, where they clearly started writing the books at the same time they started making the TV series. So those first few books had clearly been written without the authors seeing any actual Deep Space Nine. They just got scripts and you know stills to go off. So these would come out on a regular basis. They were they were very well available in shops down here. Uh, but in between sort of doing these books on a monthly basis, you know, one month would be a TOS one, next month would be a TNG one, etc. They'll do these big hard canvas sort of once every year or year, maybe one or two a year. They'll do these big hardbacks, which were sort of really, really fan-inspired type stuff. So the first one of those that I read was called Reunion, and that was where the crew from Stargazer, Captain Picard's old ship, you know, his crew all can come along for a reunion for sci-fi reasons, and they all tell stories about their time on the Stargazer and what happened to Wesley Crush's dad and all that sort of thing. So very, very fan, deep lore type stuff. And the next one I read, which I didn't have a copy of at the time, but I did borrow from the library, was Imzardi, which had a really evocative cover with The Guardian of Forever at the top, Dana Troy, and then A Young Riker and an Old Riker. And I read that as a probably 13 year old and just thought this was the most amazing, magical piece of Star Trek fiction that I'd ever read. It Just, you know, it will it was exactly right for a nerdy 13-year-old. I have very, very fond memories of it. I didn't own it at the time because it was one I couldn't afford, but it was one that I have eBay's since and now have a very bashed up second-hand copy because that's about all I could afford on eBay. So yeah, just a really, really fond memories of this.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

Amazing. So I mentioned to a few people who like Star Trek that uh we were covering this book and people were very interested. So are you aware of any reputation it has within Star Trek fandom?

SPEAKER_03 22:30

It's a reputation that's really hard to pin down. I I think that at the time, to the extent I knew other Star Trek fans, there was this sense of, yeah, this is one of the really good ones. And it certainly sold very well, it was very well known. I can certainly say that it sold well enough that they pushed Peter David to do the sequel, uh Triangle Imzadi 2, which I believe Peter David, when he was asked to write it, said, Look, I'll write a book, I'll call it Triangle, and it could be a sequel, but I don't want it to be advertised as Imzadi 2. And they said, Oh, look, we have to put it in there. He said, Okay, look, call it Triangle, small font Imzadi 2. Um, but if you look up here, it is Imzadi 2 Triangle. So they were very, very keen, the publishers, to get a sequel to that. So obviously it's sold very, very well. And I think it was very well regarded. I think it has probably aged badly, and I think that fans would probably be a lot cagey about saying that they like it now as adults, because some of the content is of its time, if not a little bit outdated of its time, and that's something I'm sure we'll discuss. So I don't know if its reputation is going to be good, bad, or just cautiously mixed.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Oh, interesting. Well, it was a New York Times bestseller, so whether people loved it or loathed it, they clearly bought it in their droves. In that respect, it did really well.

SPEAKER_03 23:49

No, well, well, Imzadi 2 has got a sticker on the front that says the long-awaited sequel to the New York Times bestseller Imzadi. So they obviously thought they could make some money there.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

How does it handle the lore? Because we've got, you know, flashbacks to the TNG pilot. We've got the Guardian of Forever, which is obviously from an original series episode. So it does it feel lore heavy or does it weave a slightly more accessible story?

SPEAKER_03 24:15

It's it's definitely lore heavy. And I think that they've made a calculation that if you're paying money to read a Star Trek book, you have some knowledge, you are at least a viewer of the show and you know who the characters are. But I think that's really interesting, Dylan, because compared to other comparable ranges of the time in the early 90s, you look at the Doctor Who range that's coming out of original stories, and at that point, the Doctor Who TV show has finished. So as long as they pick the story up where the TV show finished, and then after the telemovie comes out, and then they lose the rights, as long as they put the story away in a way that dovetails into the telemovie, that they've got a very clear start and a finish they just have to work within. Red Dwarf was being written by the authors of the TV show and they just did whatever they liked with continuity. Star Wars was being watched like a hawk by Lucasfilms and various productions. So if they did anything with lore, it was very, very much checked out by the franchise. And you can see where stuff like uh characters that Timothy Zahn uses in his Star Wars books turn up in the computer games like TIE Fighter later. Star Trek's in a different position because it's actually being made contemporaneously to the books. So using Ip Mimzadi as a really good example of that, this, as you said, is written and then it's released between seasons five and six. So it's very lore-heavy and very, very accurate up to the end of season five. What then happens is because the TV show is being made, suddenly it becomes out of out of sync with lore and continuity very, very quickly. So just a couple of examples I noted in season six in Second Chances, Riker's middle name is given as Thomas. In the book, it's given as Thelonius, because Peter David obviously thought, hey, I can invent Will Riker's middle name. This is really cool. And the TV show's gone, no, we'll do that. Thank you. You know, all the stuff about the Riker Troy backstory in the episode Second Chances doesn't quite dovetail with what we read in Ibzardi, so it's out of sync with the law there. Um, and obviously the Troy Wharf love story uh that happens in season seven of the TV show doesn't match at all with anything in the book Imzadi. So it's very lore-heavy and very accurate until the TV show overtakes it. But then you get to Imzadi 2, which is all about retconning all of the Diana Wharf stuff. It basically retconned everything that Imzadi got wrong in retrospect.

SPEAKER_02 26:42

I think what you say about if you pick this up, the authors have sort of calculated that you know something about Star Trek is true. But even with I I'd say my sort of lack of knowledge or very holy knowledge of the show, I didn't have any problem picking anything up in this. There was certainly nothing that I went, oh no, I I don't really know what this is. So it's definitely not aimed at a hardcore, hardcore fan. You can be a casual fan like me and pull it off a shelf and read it. And I think I don't know whether it explains properly what the Guardian of Forever is until the end of the book, but it does explain it. But I guess that's just a mystery if you've never seen the original series that the book is going to explain at some point. But certainly, like there was no, what is this moments? It's it's it uses elements of the lore, but without it ever being impenetrable. And you mentioned Doctor Who there, you know, obviously we covered everything on this podcast as first and foremost Doctor Who fans. And there are certain books, quite a few books in the New Adventures range, which were being published at the same time, where if you gave this to somebody who had never seen Doctor Who, or just remember Tom Baker and John Pertwee, they would have no idea what was going on in the books. Whereas this is, from beginning to end, it works as just a sort of standalone Star Trek book, I think.

SPEAKER_03 28:01

Yeah, and and Peter David does have a few paragraphs in there which are clearly meant to sort of ease that friction a little bit. You'll make a reference to Edith Keeler, for example, and you won't then go and explain the whole plot of City at the Edge of Forever to the reader, but there will be a paragraph just explaining very quickly that Edith Keeler was involved with Captain Kirk when he went back through the Guardian of Forever. So there'll there'll be just enough for you to go, okay, I know what's going on, that's fine. And you know, if you don't know who Lloy's son of Troy is, she's described adequately. You can go, well, she's an overbearing aristocratic mother. And you know, if you if you've seen the TV show and you know that Madge Barrett Roddenberry plays her, you can add that performance into your mind's picture. But but there's enough there that anybody could go, I understand exactly what sort of matriarch this character is.

SPEAKER_02 28:48

Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of a story, is it a competent one? Does it work? Like, how do we feel about the story that Peter David weaves?

SPEAKER_03 28:58

I read this for I think the fourth time last week in preparation for this podcast. And I must admit when I picked it up and saw it was 350 pages, I did have a moment of, why didn't I pick one of the little ones? Yeah, why didn't I pick a nice 200-page monthly release?

SPEAKER_02 29:14

You've got to have big pockets for this pocketbook.

SPEAKER_03 29:16

You you you well well, as I say, this this was this this originally was a hardcover. So although I've got the paper back here, you can see the hardcover because I'm showing Dylan over the Zoom is much bigger. However, I read it in about three days. I picked it up and had no problem reading this at all. It just flew through my mind in the most lovely sort of way. It was very, very easy to read. And I think really, really well told. Part of it is because it is very heavy fan wank, and I'm a fan, so I don't mind being wanked occasionally by literature. But also the structure of it is just really, really lovely. It it moves between errors in a really useful way that keeps the story interesting. I'll talk a bit more about that as we dive deeper, but yeah, just a really easy, lovely read for me. How about you?

SPEAKER_02 30:05

Yeah, very, very easy. It's not something, as I said, that I've experienced before, but it certainly captured the tone of TNG, I think, for me perfectly. I think the prose style is one that is very accessible. And as I said, the story itself is accessible, and there are bits of fan wank that make me go, oh, I remember that. And probably stuff that went completely over my head, but as I said before, it doesn't stop me from enjoying the story. I love the tone of it. I love the gruffer older Riker who's seen the love of his life pass away and things like that. And uh, I love all the sort of alternative timelines. I'm a sucker for an alternative universe, alternative timeline, really bits of sci-fi. So, like from the moment it starts and I realize, okay, we're not in the correct timeline. All of a sudden, I'm like, okay, I'm in from the start. So it was very easy to consume.

SPEAKER_03 30:58

Although it's interesting, we talk about how TV Law overtook book law with this book. When I first saw All Good Things, when I I I got a I actually bought a bit videotape of that for the UK so I could see it well before it showed Australia. When we got bitter old and crusty Admiral Riker and no Deanna Troy around, there was a part of me that went, Are they homaging Mzadi here? Like, is this an Imzadi sort of alternate timeline? So I thought that actually was quite cool. And I'll be stunned if that wasn't a deliberate choice given how big the book was at the time.

SPEAKER_02 31:31

Interestingly, considering the bits we've mentioned that are very lore-heavy and the things that sort of contradict the TV show, I noticed the first thing that the uh sort of Star Trek wiki article says is this is non-canon. It's a non-canon story, which in the worlds of Doctor Who you don't really get. So you're sort of left to your own imagination to sort of go, this fits in there, or maybe that's overwritten by that. But I've noticed this in Star Trek and in Star Wars that almost the people in control of the brands are very quick to say what is part of the canon and what isn't.

SPEAKER_03 32:03

Yeah, no, that's that's absolutely true. And I think partly because they nobody could really manage to gel it all together. It's it's almost impossible. Well, without a lot of effort, it's very, very hard to have an ongoing television series and an ongoing book range and have them all uh keep up with each other's lore. And when you start to do time travel and alternate timelines, it just becomes even crazier. So yeah, it it is it is very, very different. But there was nothing there that I thought was offensive. Like there was there was stuff there I've gone, huh, that's gonna be, you know, contradicted by season six in six months' time. Well, that's a shame. But there's nothing there I was going, well, Riker would never do that. You know, data would never do that. You know, it was it was all very respected.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

Yeah. And I suppose when you're dealing with The Guardian of Forever and sort of alternative timelines and stuff, there's all the easy out is actually it's not quite the timeline that we know in the TV series. Well, that's the thing.

SPEAKER_03 33:04

We start off under the assumption that the this is the correct TNG timeline, but in the future, where Dan of Troy is for some reason dead, uh, Data is now a Commodore flying around on the Enterprise F, Riker Riker is an admiral in a sort of a middle of fucking nowhere, way station somewhere, Wesley crushes the captain of a small ship, you know, all of these things that if you're a Star Trek fan in season five, season six, you go, well, this is obviously where they all end up. It all seems very reasonable and very logical. And you just go, yeah, this is a this is this is the future of our timeline. And it's really not until effectively two-thirds or more through the book where suddenly the rug is pulled and Riker realizes, and therefore the audience realizes this is actually an alternate timeline that even further in the it's even further in the book before they make it explicitly clear this is an incorrect timeline.

SPEAKER_02 34:00

Yeah. And so how do we feel about the weaving in of the Guardian of Forever? Is it a a smart thing to do to sort of uh bring in that lore and tell a story in that world?

SPEAKER_03 34:10

Yeah, I thought it was a really good way to do it because one of the problems with alternate timeline stories is you've got to find something that's gonna mess time up. And you can either spend the first quarter third of your story working out the MacGuffin that's going to go and do that. You know, it's it's it's the first quarter of Voyage Home where they've got to work out that the whale songs are from, you know, the the whales are sending the song and they've got to go back. And how are we going to get back through time? I've got to go around the sun, let's go do that. Like you just skip all that by going, well, we have this thing in the Trek Universe. It's called the Guardian of Forever. We've seen it used before, so the baddies can use it, the goodies can use it, the other goodies can use it, and it's just it's just done. So you've got about 15 pages of reintroducing the Guardian of Forever at the start, and then done, ready, boom, we're into the story.

SPEAKER_02 35:02

Yeah, I really, really enjoyed it. And once you've set that up, you kind of go, well, anything's possible within this story, and also it can all get reset, changed at any point, or you kind of know it's going to get tied up by the end of it.

SPEAKER_03 35:16

Yeah, and and it's important to note that about half of the book, it's less than I expected it. Like my memory was that the the flashback to the the origins of the Troy Reich relationship, which we'll we'll get to in a moment, my memory was that was about three chords of the book. It's actually only about half. But it uses the alternate timeline really, really well because it does let you explore these future characters in this alternate universe. So what Riker is like when he's just old, bitter, and sad. And you know, what Data would be like as a Commodore. And and when you get to the point where you've got a moment of genuine tension as as Data is very carefully and meticulously deciding the most humane way to execute Deanna Troy without her knowing it. I'm just going, well, that's that's an amazing concept and really chilling. And you can do it because we're in this alternate timeline back and forth thing.

SPEAKER_02 36:06

Absolutely. Well, let's jump into sort of the meat and bones of the story is obviously Riker and Troy's relationship, which is something that is in the background and sometimes the forefront of the whole run of TNG, you know, right from the pilot episode, the there's a brief moment where they sort of go, well, where the term Mzardi is used in a telepathic conversation between the two of them, and it's established that they've previously had a relationship. So, how does it handle their relationship and how does that compare to what the TV show does later and at the time?

SPEAKER_03 36:40

It's interesting because you're right, the Riker Troy relationship in the TV show does sort of fluctuate depending on the episode. So you get some episodes where it's completely non-existent, you get then other episodes where Gana Troy's arranged marriage is meant to happen and you introduce Loxana there. You then get nothing for a while, then you get an episode like Menage Troy, which, you know, they're basically dating again, and then you know, very obviously went down to the planet for more than just holding hands. So it's it's very up and down and uneven in the TV series, and then you get the whole wolf thing, which is just weird and nuts and whatever. So I think the book does that really, really well because it it sets up what Riker's like in the future without Troy. It then has the death of Loxana Troy, which actually was something that I had really vivid memories of reading from when I was about 12 or 13. Like those scenes of the dying Loixana and what she says and does to Riker have sat in my mind's eye for 30 years. So they're really, really powerful scenes. And that leads to Riker sitting down with an Al at Wesley Crusher and Wesley's like, tell me the story. And Riker's like, okay, well, this is how I met Deanna Troy. Including a rather off little moment where Wesley admits that his and his teenage friends used to have some pretty inappropriate thoughts about Deanna Troy. That was a really weird and unnecessary moment. He's like, you know, my friends and I, we all like Riker's like, yeah, yeah, me too. So yeah, that was that was really weird.

SPEAKER_02 38:07

Relatable for some of the audience, though, I imagine, at the time.

SPEAKER_03 38:10

Well, and this let's let's pull back to that because this is a bigger conversation about the book. I think that the way that it sets up and tells the relationship origins of of Ganatra and William Riker is is really well done. It it takes time, it talks about what sort of a man Riker was when he's just about to be promoted to lieutenant commander. He's up, he's on the up and up, and then he gets posted for three months to BetaZ as the Starfleet attachee, and he doesn't want to be there, he doesn't want to be on the planet, he just wants to be up there trying to be Captain Kirk's record, and then he meets this psychology student, Deanna Troy, who's got a very different worldview, whose sort of future is to be the heir of the house of uh the fifth house of Beta Z and all the rest of it. And and the way that the two of them in in classic romance novel type style, the two of their characters are so polar opposite that they teach each other the things they're missing from each other. And it's done with all that. It's done with Loaksana Troy hovering over the whole thing in a way that is, I think, far more credible and more uh given more respect than most of the appearances of the Loxana in the TV show are, frankly. And and, you know, in the middle of it all, you have a bit of a space adventure because the Cinderine raiders are coming to raid some art treasures from Beta Z, and that just allows for enough danger to uh in ensure that Riker gets his hero moments and can impress the girl Western style. I I think it's all there, it's all lovely. I'm not a big romance person, but I I bought it, and certainly at the time was written there, nothing contradicts what you see in the show.

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Yeah. I I think there's a weird thing about Star Trek. I think that it's a very unsexy show. And I'm not saying sci-fi needs to be sexy. There's a lot of relationships, there's a lot of, especially, you know, Captain Kirk spreading his seed around the uh around the galaxy. And it does deal with relationships and things like that, depending on what week it is. But it's not slick and sexy like other sci-fi would be later, and uh, I think television learns to be sort of in the late 90s and it's sort of the television we know now. But I I'm interested to know what this book sort of says about how sex and relationships are treated in the Star Trek universe.

SPEAKER_03 40:24

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Star Trek is not, particularly in the 90s, it is not a sexy TV show, in that again, you have multiple relationships. People are very clearly hooking up with other people, but in incredibly chaste sort of ways. You know, there's there's embracing, there's a peck on the on the lips. Sex is very implied, if it's implied at all. And clearly, when they get to the books, they're not quite bound by the well, we need to be broadcast on US television in prime time, so we can be a little bit more risque with that. And Peter David, particularly in his books, goes a lot further, arguably a little bit too far. Certainly, when you've got the point where he's describing the in a certain amount of detail, the indentations left in the ground by Deanna Troy's Ars post-lovemaking. You realize that he's, you know, that's maybe a level of detail we didn't need. Yeah. Um, and I think they are pushing a little bit too far. And it's not, it's not unique to Mzadi. One of the other books that Peter David wrote that I came out, it was just a pocketbook, came out roughly the same time within a year or so of this, that I did read again as a kid, uh, is called Q in Law. And the main plot of that is about Like Zana Troy setting her sights on Q. Because Loxana Troy always has a different person she wants to shag every episode, and having sort of worked her way through Picard and Riker and a few others, this book's like, well, what if she wanted to shag Q? How would that work? But one of the subplots on that is that Wesley does something that saves the life of some delegate, so in acknowledgement of his good deed, they give him a sex slave. And like this this young girl is basically there, and Wesley's like, well, you know, that's not appropriate, but he's a teenager, so he's also like, Yeah, but hang on, she's up for it. So, you know, like like it's it's it's kind of all about that, which again, as a 13-year-old, you go, that's a really interesting moral quandary. What would I do if I had a sex slave girl? And as an adult, you go, What the fuck? Yeah. And and it's the same with this, like, there's there's there's some really good romance in in this. For the most part, Diana Troy really gets to be the stronger one in the relationship. She's the one that Riker's just, you know, like every other woman in the book, Riker walks in and they go, Oh my god, Riker, you're so awesome. Let's shag. And Diana Troy is the one where it's like, no, no, no, I I don't do that. And they actually have to, you know, meet at the intellectual level. So it works on that until the moment when Diana Troy gives in, and suddenly it's just the author being an avatar for half of Trick Fandom, going, let's discuss over several chapters what screwing Diana Troy is like.

SPEAKER_02 43:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:13

And that's that's a bit icky.

SPEAKER_02 43:15

Yeah, absolutely. It's very much told through the male gaze in terms of how heterosexual relationships function. I don't know how sort of realistic that is from a female point of view. I guess while we're there, we're talking about things that have aged badly. So let's delve a bit further into that.

SPEAKER_03 43:32

I just want to say it does remind me, again, and we're coming to this as Doctor Who fans, of a number of the Virgin You adventures where very clearly the author desperately wants to shag Ace andor Sophie Aldred. And it makes it very clear. And you read them now and you go, okay, I get you're a horny 24 year old, but dude, this is ick. Yeah. It's a very similar vibe.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

Do we know how old Peter David was?

SPEAKER_03 43:55

I actually haven't dared look him up because I um I'm worried it's gonna be like John Peel. And it's actually going to turn out he has no excuse whatsoever. Given that he did pass away last year, I don't think he was super young at the time.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

Yeah, I mean, I do think in the 90s you go through quite a lot of this fanboy written literature, whether it's officially canon or it's in a fanzine somewhere, and there is a certain amount of projection of horny teenage fantasies. And again, when I'm 13 reading stuff like this, I it's probably slightly more relatable for me. But you sort of go, oh wow, this is a really adult, edgy take on Star Trek, Doctor Who, whatever. But when you're sort of in your 40s, you go, actually, 24 is quite young to be writing a book like this comparatively. And it's all a bit icky, and it is very much still in the teenage boys' fantasy realm, even at 24, rather than I've got an adult take on sex and relationships and the nuances of this relationship. So yeah, that some of those things were a bit icky. I should say, actually, I should have mentioned this earlier. I listened to the audio book, first of all, which is very much abridged. And then I had a look online and it was missing a lot of the slightly ickier stuff. So I then went back and read the actual book because I didn't feel like actually I could give a clear review and discuss some of these things with you today. So if you want a more sanitized version that there are still bits of it in there, then check out the uh abridged audio book, which is about three hours. But as you say, three hours you're not getting 350 pages a no.

SPEAKER_03 45:31

Um, and indeed I I happen to know that with the uh audio adaptation of Q in Law, all the Wesley sex slave stuff is absolutely cut out. That is, that does not make the abridged version either. It's also very interesting, like the contrast, if you have somebody walk in on a couple on TV and Star Trek Next Generation, they'll both be reasonably clothed. Like maybe Riker's got his shirt open, that's like the limit of it, or or Picard's in his little sort of, you know, low-cup dressing gown. But that's that's the most. This book has, I think, at least three occasions where somebody walks into somebody's room and there's a couple naked in bed. Like it actually happens on a regular basis, which again you can do because you're in the book. So is it right to explore things beyond the TV show? Yes, is the thing that you most want to explore when you're relieved of those limitations. People walking in on other people naked. Maybe not the choice I would have made.

SPEAKER_02 46:21

Because, like, for all the liberalness of Star Trek's future, it's not in the era of uh, oh, free the nipple and there's girls walking around topless or like or anything like that. It's just not, it's not that world. There's still restrictions in terms of I know part of it's the where it sits in TV schedules and things like that, but it's not, it's not that Starship Troopers moment where the men and the women are in the showers together, for instance.

SPEAKER_03 46:44

No, no, no. I mean, I mean, let's let's face it, 90% of Star Trek's philosophical sexual liberalism is Gene Roddenberry's view that women in the future should be free to shag him as much as they want.

SPEAKER_02 46:57

Yeah, fair. So are there any other things within the book that have aged badly, or is it mainly how it treats Troy and women?

SPEAKER_03 47:05

Uh, that was the only thing that I really sort of felt uncomfortable, or not even uncomfortable with, just sort of like roll my eyes a bit out. Um did you pick up anything?

SPEAKER_02 47:15

No, not really. I don't think it really detracts too much from the rest of the story. But when you are, as you say, there's those sort of two or three chapters where you kind of walk away and go, oh, you know, that that doesn't sit well with me now.

SPEAKER_03 47:28

Yeah, because there was there was certainly no sort of escalated violence. People still just get shot and stunned with phases. When the Slindering raiding leader, Amara, you know, dies in the mud pit. It's it's exactly like you would imagine it being done in 1992 Star Trek. You know, it's uh it's a very quick effect, it's a blink and he's gone. There's no real sort of gore or anything like that. So it that that that stuff was very much in tune with the with the show.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Riker and Troy are at the center of it, but how does it handle the rest of the TNG uh regular characters?

SPEAKER_03 47:59

Yeah, I thought that this was a bit of a strength of the book because having set up at the start of the book that Troy is dead and Rike is now old and crusty and hates his life, and then explaining how Troy died, it so i i in sort of what we're meant to, I guess, assume is contemporaneous with where the TV show is. So we imagine that's like season six of Trek. Then there's a large part of the book which is how Riker and Troy met, and then there's the moment at the end of that where Rike is thinking, wow, I really miss her. And old Riker walks in and goes, Hey, young dude, the timeline's been screwed around with this is what the rest of the book looks like. And then you have sort of the back 30% of the book, which is all about restoring the timeline, and so Riker has to go back to the actual contemporary enterprise. Let's call it season six enterprise. And that that that's pretty good. I think that data suddenly comes off very well here because you get the fun of the contemporary data who has no idea what's going on, and then you get data from the future who's been sent back to stop Riker from the future changing things in the present. And that's where you have data going, well, it is actually my mission to make sure that Deana Troy dies and this conference happens as it happens without Dana Troy going, hang on, my powers go, you're a baddie, you're up to no good, and the conference is gonna cancel. Like that, that that's that that's the focal point of all of everything. So Data's job is to make sure that Troy dies before she can do that. And I just think there's some really wonderful characterization because you you get the tension of data about to kill Troy. And and and not in a nasty way, just data going, well, if I broke her neck here, that would be quick and painless and she wouldn't cry out, which is good for everybody involved. Like it's it's humorous and terrifying and tense, but it feels like real data.

SPEAKER_00 49:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:47

You know, Crusher to the extent she's there, feels like real crusher. Picard feels a little bit more like grumpy earlier Picard than later Picard, but he's not in the book all that much.

SPEAKER_02 49:57

No. As with the TV show, you know, they're film filming different episodes at the same time, and certain characters take the forefront. But it was only when I got to the end I was like, there isn't actually that much Picard in this book. But, you know, I'm fine with that.

SPEAKER_03 50:09

Yeah, and like the TV show, the books do the same thing. Well, there'll be a Picard heavy book, there'll be a Crusher Heavy book. Another of my favourites, Boogie Men, is a Wesley Crusher heavy book, which which actually treats Wesley Crusher as a serious and self-aware sort of teenager, which, you know, as a teenager at the time who literally copied Wesley Crusher's haircut, you know, I really enjoyed.

SPEAKER_02 50:29

Amazing. Much like you, I really enjoyed the data stuff because one of the appeals of TNG is how they handle the data character, which kind of comes to the forefront in several episodes, and of course, first contact is sort of heavily played up there. I like that data's obviously constantly learning, but is also very fact and data-driven and trying to do the right thing in that respect. And the book just allows you to jump a little bit more into his psyche and his thinking in a way that in the TV series, his whole quandary will be done in a couple of sentences. That so I think Data's somebody who, if I was to jump into more TNG Extended Universe stuff, I'd love to read some more books that were very much focused on him.

SPEAKER_03 51:10

Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think Data's internal monologue is one of the most interesting things you can do in a book, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:16

Yeah. We've talked a bit about Doctor Who here. The ultimate comparison between what was going on in Doctor Who fiction, extended universe fiction at the time, and this book. Do you is there much more you want to say on that part of it?

SPEAKER_03 51:28

I think that there are similarities in in terms of the very war-heavy trying to prove that they're going beyond the bounds by doing a lot more sexy stuff is contemporary to both of them. I do think that the Star Trek books feel like a more inverted commerce professional outfit, and that they're being done by a big publisher, they're hitting the New York Times bestseller list. I'm fairly sure they're not taking fan submissions in the way that the Doctor Who books were. So there is, I think, a sense that I think at this point Star Trek, particularly in the US, is a very almost mainstream thing, in a way that Doctor Who is now in the UK basically a dead thing. So one range is trying to make mainstream stuff that is actually going to be sold in the millions, and Doctor Who's making stuff written by fans to an offshoot of a publishing company with two employees that is being read by a few thousand fans. So it's it's it's really different. And and I think then you have another level again with Star Wars, where you've got like serious authors writing very serious books that are having serious money put behind them.

SPEAKER_02 52:33

I think so. I think this is much more true to the TV series and not in any way less interesting because of that, but there's certainly somebody going through any manuscript with a red pen and going, don't do that, you can do that. And even though it does, as we said, get a bit more sexier than the TV series ever would, and sort of delve into bits of that, it never strays too far from what you would get in an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

No, no, absolutely. I think that provided a few people put on some clothes at a few particular moments, you you could basically make this story as a two-part episode of TNG without any problems whatsoever. You couldn't say that about most original fiction in Doctor Who.

SPEAKER_02 53:18

Yeah, absolutely. Is there much more you want to say on Mzardi?

SPEAKER_03 53:23

I think I'll just say that the one thing the author does very well is get all the characters right to the point that Loak Zana is an actually interesting, thoughtful, and sympathetic character rather than somebody I just find annoying when she's on television.

SPEAKER_02 53:35

Fair, fair. For me, I think it was an interesting dip into TNG and it made me immediately nostalgic for it. And I jumped in and watched a bunch of Star Trek episodes once I'd finished it, which I think is a fairly good indication that it it left me wanting more, be it a book or an episode of the actual TV show.

SPEAKER_03 53:57

No, absolutely. I finished this one and thought I really enjoyed that. I really do feel nostalgic for being 12 or 13 again, and I went to my bookshelf and thought, what's another checkbook that I really enjoyed at that age? I'm going to pull that in and start reading that as well. So I have started on Boogeyman.

SPEAKER_02 54:12

Amazing. So is it a clanger, a banger, or an average meander?

SPEAKER_03 54:16

I would have to call it a near banger. I can't quite give it absolute banger status, because there is better out there in the range, but it is it is enjoyable, it's fun. So a near banger.

SPEAKER_02 54:27

Yeah, I think I'd go the same. It feels like an episode of TNG. And I think if if I'd gone in blind and you'd asked me, oh, is this a novelisation or something like that? I think I probably would have gone, yeah, I could absolutely, as you said, see it on TV. So it works really well, but it's not quite at that peak level of the TV show. And I think, as you have said, perhaps there's better books out there, but it was an enjoyable read. And if you're in any way a TNG fan, I'd suggest jumping into the book or the audio adaptation because it was great fun to read and a very easy read. I agree. Make it so. The next thing we're going to cover is from Star Trek New Voyages. It was a two-episode story called Blood and Fire. It was written by David Gerald and Carlos Pedraza and also directed by David Gerald. Part one came out on December 20th, 2008, and part two came out November 20th, 2009. In 2008, post-production on Star Trek is completed, the JJ Abrams film. The paperbacks of the IDW series Star Trek Assignment Earth and Star Trek Mirror Image are released, and Sacrifices of War, the third book in the Errand of Fury trilogy, is released. In 2009, Star Trek music from the motion picture is released. There is a ton of DVDs and Blu-rays released, including Star Trek Legends of the Final Frontier, The Best of Star Trek The Original series, Titan Books released Star Trek The Art of the Film, and Star Trek Vanguard novel Precipice was released. So that's sort of what's going on in the Star Trek world at the time. So have you got any memories of anything happening there? Any fond thoughts? Any negative thoughts?

SPEAKER_03 56:22

I certainly remember the Star Trek movie coming out in 2009, and I have heard of some of those books, but I and I've read a couple of in a couple of those ranges, but no, I haven't read any of those specific titles.

SPEAKER_02 56:33

When that Star Trek movie came out, that certainly was the time Star Trek felt the most mainstream in the UK for me, where people I know who never liked Star Trek, have never seen Star Trek, were suddenly like, oh, I'd love to go and see this. This looks really cool. And indeed, my partner Daisy, who I know has seen no Star Trek apart from those three films. And I imagine if one someday I said, Oh, should we put this on? She would have no problem in a way that if I said, Do you want to see Strange New Worlds? She'd go, absolutely not.

SPEAKER_03 57:05

Yeah, look, I think that's probably right. Although I I think some of the other earlier movies were quite mainstream as well. Um Voyage Home, which is the most financially successful one, if you uh adjust for inflation, is kind of well known. Uh First Contact was was pretty well known. Although uh a point that you've made on podcasts in the past, Dylan, is that like Doctor Who, even Doctor Who is most successful and Star Trek at its most successful, even though they're both cultural phenomena, they still aren't ever that successful. They're never Star Wars successful, they're never Marvel successful, they're never sort of doing, you know, that Harry Potter successful. Like they've got a cap, but you're right. I think to the extent that Star Trek is actually seen by the mainstream, it is the movies, particularly I think 4.8 and 2009.

SPEAKER_02 57:55

Yeah, I remember first contact kids in my school who were not into Star Trek going to see that and thinking it was it was really cool because it is a really cool movie, and it's likewise, it's a great sci-fi movie. And I think Star Trek, the the sort of 2008-2009 iteration, was that version of that. It was suddenly a mainstream movie that just people got excited about, and for a lot of people, it would have been the first time they'd seen Star Trek or the first time they'd seen it since they were 10 years old and remember it on TV as something they were watching while they were eating their beans on toast.

SPEAKER_03 58:30

Absolutely. No, I had a similar experience when um a day at the cricket was rained out. My mate said, Let's go see a movie. That Star Trek movie looks pretty cool. I was like, look, I I saw it on you know opening night with a bunch of Star Trek fans, but I'll see it again, don't worry.

SPEAKER_02 58:47

Peter Kirk, newly assigned to the Enterprise under the shadow of his famous uncle, James T. Kirk, is closely watched by Lieutenant Alex Freeman in Sick Bay, who is his lover. Kirk's decision to bar Peter from an initial rescue mission, replacing him with Alex, sparks resentment, but also reveals Kirk's fear of favoritism and loss. Alone together, Alex and Peter plan a future beyond Starfleet regulations, openly imagining marriage aboard the Enterprise, which they later inform James T. Kirk of. With both Peter and Alex eventually going on the mission, it spirals into catastrophe. When escape becomes impossible, Alex chooses to stay behind, sacrificing himself so that Peter and many others may live. His death devastates Peter, who is consumed by guilt and grief, believing Alex died because of him. James T. Kirk ultimately helps Peter understand that Alex's sacrifice was an act of love and courage, and he's not to blame. In the aftermath, Peter chooses to remain on the Enterprise where Alex served and died, honoring their bond as James T. Kirk acknowledges both Alex's place in the ship's legacy and Peter's right to belong. Not as a protected nephew, but as a man shaped by love and loss. So, Blood and Fire, parts one and two, although it's been edited together into sort of a movie format now. What is this and why did you pick it?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:11

When you agreed that we'll do Imzadi as the first half of this episode, you issued me the challenge going, find something different we can pair it with. And I thought, Dylan's literally written books about fan-made Doctor Who spin-off stuff. So why not go down that path, which is where we've gone, with which is basically a Star Trek fan-made version of Star Trek. So this is all part of Star Trek New Voyagers, which for a while was known as Phase 2 or Star Trek Phase 2. This is basically a bunch of Star Trek fans who are who are in the industry, they're very early in their careers in front of or behind the camera, but they are people with IMDB credits. We'll talk a bit about that shortly. But they have gone and gone, let's just make Star Trek ourselves. What's very interesting is that they're actually allowed to make Star Trek, and they actually don't play Captain Blurk and Mr. Spook. They actually play Kirk and Spock, which will again something we need to talk about. Why I picked this one was because I thought it would have some really good stuff to talk about, because it did start its life as a script, as a pitch from David Gerald, who whose probably most famous contribution is he wrote The Trouble with Tribbles back in back in the original series. So very well-known episode. And he hasn't got a cameo in um Trials and Tribulations in DS9. But he actually submitted this script as a script to Star Trek The Next Generation in season one. It was rejected outright. It wasn't sent to the writer's room to be worked out. It wasn't, look, we'll take the A plot but dip to the B plot and we'll give you some money. It's like we will never make this, take it away and never show it to us again. And it became a bit of a legend. And so these guys have gone, hey, would you mind if we made your script? And he's gone, yeah, I guess so. And that eventually evolves to, as you said at the start, he actually becomes a co-writer in um actually adapting the script for for the fans. So I thought it's got a lot of things to talk about and uh is a very interesting piece of Star Trek.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:13

It absolutely is.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:14

So as you said, it's a fan film. And I don't mean that term disparagingly, because certainly, in terms of uh what it achieves, it is very much of a of a high standard of fan films. There's an interesting thing where Doctor Who fan films, there's sort of two levels, there's BBV, who was sort of making Doctor Who an all but name, and in certain places licensing actual characters from Doctor Who, and these things were released commercially in the high street because they skirted around the copyright, as you say, with the equivalent of Captain Blurk. So you had the stranger rather than the doctor, but it was played by Colin Baker, who played the Doctor. Whereas this is fans and they are recast roles essentially. But Doctor Who fan films, much like Doctor Who itself and its classic iteration, are a lot of times people messing around in a quarry or a forest somewhere. Whereas this is set builds, special effects, relatively big casts considering they're presumably dealing with a small budget. So even though it was made in 2008-2009, very much it it feels like an episode of the original series of Star Trek, production values and all, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:27

Yeah, so the way I first discovered this maybe five, ten years ago, was I was doing some research on something else and discovered David Gerald's spec script of Blood and Fire and thought this is really interesting. And I did a bit of a Google search for David Gerald Blood and Fire, and it came up with a video, and I thought, what the fuck's this? And I've clicked on it and suddenly it's like, okay, this is clearly not proper Star Trek, but this looks pretty good. This this can't just be a fan-made stuff. This isn't, you know, this isn't BBV. It's certainly not one of those old Dwas, you know, homemade fan production. It's really, really good. So I I sort of discovered, then, you know, started to look up what it what it all was. I think it's useful perhaps just to talk about that official or acceptable levels of official nature of it, because as you said at the time in Doctor Who, you couldn't do anything like this without licensing the character of the Doctor or licensing you're getting licensed on the BBC. It'll just not be acceptable. Whereas Paramount and CBS at the time did say, as long as you don't make any money out of this, you can do whatever you like. Um, and even allowed Walter Koenig, George Decay, Major Barrett Roddenberry, Grace Lee Whitney, all turn up in this thing. So it's fairly seriously done. And I just want to contrast that with what else was going on in terms of uh copyright enforcement by Paramount CBS. Because going back to our time in fandom, as we discussed earlier in this episode, Dylan, uh our countries, particularly Australia, would get TV from the UK and the US sometimes three or four years after it was initially broadcast. So fan clubs would watch illicit copies of these TV shows. You know, I grew up watching a lot of the McQueer of Doctor Who on video in a fan club meeting before it was shown on the ABC, sometimes by eight months, two years. And the same happened for Babylon 5, the same happened for Star Trek. Technically, when we're making a profit, you know, the money was just to cover the higher of the hall. Although I must admit, when we showed stuff like Babylon 5 or the Doctor Who Telly movie, we sold so many tickets, we absolutely were just covering the higher of the hall. And we're almost at, well, we were absolutely a breach of copyright. Now, I'll tell you something that happened in Star Trek Phantom in Australia. I'll I'll start by telling you the legend that was conveyed to me at the time, and then what I can absolutely verify. And that is that in the mid 90s, a Star Trek club in Australia was having their usual meeting. The committee stopped and said, you know, welcome, here's a few notices and what's going on. Anyway, great news. We've got a tape of some. Episode from the America, Let's All Sit Down and Watch. And it was like, yeah, awesome. At which point somebody stands up in the back of the hall and says, you know, I'm Mr. Smith from the law firm that represents Paramount in Australia. If you press play on that VCR, we will sue you for copyright infringement.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:15

Now that that's the story that was told me at the time. I haven't in my last few days found anyone who can verify that, but I have found people who can absolutely say that their local club got cease and desist letters from Paramount saying you are not to show fan videos and we are actively watching you. And there was also a period where Paramount decided it would be good if they only had one official fan club for Star Trek that was run by them. And if you wanted to have a local affiliate fan club, then you could pay a licence fee to the official club to be an affiliate in, you know, whatever country you are. That obviously didn't go anywhere. But Paramount does go through these sort of up and down phases where one moment they're suing people for showing a tape. One moment one moment they're like saying, no, no, the only official Star Trek convention will be the one that we run, which is what's been happening sort of in recent times. Yet at this time, briefly, they're saying, yeah, if you want to cast yourself as Captain Kirk and go make a fan video, fill your boots. That eventually does change in 2016, where Paramount changes what they called their fan film guidelines. And they basically said, if you are doing anything related to Star Trek that could in any way impinge upon anything that anybody involved with Star Trek has ever done, then it is for Boden and not just issue those rules, but they actively and very, very aggressively sued another fan film group that was making films and actually took quite a bit of money from them. And and and you know, not just sort of like, you know, we issued a seasoned desist and then took you to court and then we settled. It's like, no, no, no, we're going to arbitration. We're not settling, we are going through with this. You are paying costs, and then when there was a minor breach of the settlement, like went after them again. So Paramount could be very, very vicious. And that did shut down Star Trek New Voyages. In fact, they were in production for three episodes that they just had to pull the pin instantly and say, we're never going to be able to make these. So it's this weird window where Paramount were not being arseholes.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:14

Was it something to do with there was a Star Trek fan film, wasn't there, that basically did a crowdfunder and were asking for quite a lot of money to get the thing funded. And so as a result, they came down on all fan films.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:27

I don't know if that was the catalyst or just happening at the same time. But yeah, there've been a number of sort of you know variations of this because Star Trek fandom is is pretty big and at this stage it's just come off a whole bunch of TV series. So we're sort of in the gap between the TV series ending and the new film starting. But but again, like if if you'd said to me they did that in 2009, when the Abrahams film is coming out, you go, okay, well, that that makes sense. It's kind of like when the BBC brought Doctor Who back in 96 and said, Right, we're pulling in all our licenses. But no, this is this is happening whilst the JJ movies are happening. So it's weird and bizarre, but I it's it's fantastic that briefly they were letting fans do this. And and as you say, like really, really well.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:13

Yeah. I've seen a handful of fan films from I've seen some Doctor Who ones, obviously. I've seen quite a few Terminator ones, uh, and I've seen quite a few Star Trek ones, uh including Star Trek of Gods and Men, which isn't the same team, but it's a similar sort of ilk and a similar sort of standard. And then there's a couple where I don't know whether it's this run or a different run, but Doctor Who stars like Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker show up in sort of little cameos, if I'm remembering correctly. I've definitely seen those ones. But this one, I've not seen it before, and the and the whole sort of premise felt felt new to me.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:48

Yeah, it's it's definitely new and different. And there are things that are very original Trek and things that are very not original Trek. But but again, it's been done by serious professional people, like the producers actually were trying to get into the TV industry, producing other stuff. Some of them went on to have really good careers. The guy who plays Peter Kirk, Bobby Rice, he has IMDB credits right up to the present day. Uh, whereas uh Evan Fowler, who plays Alex Freeman, has one other credit, and that is a barman in the TV series looking. So some of their careers took off, others didn't, but like they they all have IMDP pages with at least one other credit.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:22

I think you can tell that in terms of sort of the standard of performances. Obviously, every character is recast and we get the full old school enterprise crew. So, what do we think of the standard of performances and the standard of casting here?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:39

I would be very happy to say that there is no bad acting. I will say that there is some inconsistent acting. There are certainly a lot of actors who are very early in their craft, and some of the scenes you go, that's really, really good, that that is proper television acting. And then other scenes you go, okay, you didn't quite have the range or the experience to do that at that point. So it is very inconsistent, but none of them are consistently bad. I think that what is perhaps difficult is some of them are very clearly trying to recreate the character that they've been cast as, as if they are in the original series. So the guy who plays Chekhov has decided that he's absolutely going to play not so much Chekhov, but Walter Koenig playing Chekh. And he's he's he's aping the mannerisms, he's aping the accent, and and that that works reasonably well. He's actually reasonably good at that. Uh, the guy who plays Scotty has clearly decided he's gonna play James Dewan playing Scotty. So you have someone doing a take on James Dewan's attempt at a Scottish accent, and that's just sort of a level of it's just a couple of levels away from a real Scottish accent, and it just completely fails. And you go, like, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to do Jimmy Dewan's Scottish accent, but like he just gets away with it, your copy of it is now version too bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:01

Yeah, uh the Scotty is the weak link for me here, and yeah, I'd need to see the actor and something else to talk talk properly about their skills as an actor, but you're right. James Dewey's charisma is lacking from trying to emulate that performance. Yeah, and so it it it just sounds like a really bad Scottish accent. So unfortunately, that that was definitely the performance that didn't land for me.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:26

Yeah, and and then you get like the guy who plays McCoy, and for most of that, he's he's a very capable actor. But when he's trying to do the DeForest Kelly, irascible Dr. McCoy, that that's something that requires a level of acting experience and craft that this guy just isn't at yet. Uh, I don't know if he ever got there. I I he may well, I don't know. But but you know, if you're not DeForest Kelly, you can't quite pull that off. And it's not that it's bad, it's just we all know what he's trying to do, and he doesn't quite get there.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:59

Yeah, because uh they're all quite young, and as you say, early in their careers, some of which go somewhere and some of which don't. The guy who plays Kirk, for instance, like I think he's sort of doing his own take on Kirk, but there are some throwbacks. He doesn't try and emulate um the William Shatner of it all, which is a wise thing to do because you can only really parody William Shatner. I don't think you can sort of impersonate him. So I I I think he does wise and uh to to do that, and I think he's I can see why he's got an IMDB credits list that sort of goes on and on and on, because he feels certainly like the most capable performer of of the recasts.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:38

Yeah, and James Cawley, who plays Kirk, is one of the two people along with Jack Marshall, actually founded the um the series.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:45

Yeah, but I think there's enough there for me to go, okay, that's still the character that I recognise. There are some shoddier moments where you're like, oh, a bit more time or a bit more experience, and this would really bring it up to scratch because it's not quite at what you could call a broadcast standard. Although at the same time, I have seen worse performances on television in daytime soaps and things like that. So, you know, who who who am I to judge? Yeah. But it's I'm assuming here we're watching people learning their craft rather than people at the top of their game, you know?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:20

Yeah, absolutely. And as I say, there was there was no one I looked at across the whole thing and said, you are a bad actor. There were there were people I said, you are an imperfect actor, an inconsistent actor. And there were definitely moments I've thought, yeah, you could not broadcast that performance. But it's it's a bit of a performance, it's not a whole performance.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:37

Agreed. So you you said this the script was uh rejected by TNG. So where did where does the script go after this and how does it end up here?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:47

So it's written by David Gerald, who obviously has been involved with Star Trek for a long time. It essentially was rejected, and we'll go down this path, I suspect, in a moment, because it involved a homosexual couple and it involved an age allegory. And they were two things where the Trek production office slash the network uh said, We are just not doing that, and are we kind of annoyed you ever suggested that? Please go away. And because it was rejected for those particular things, and because David Gerald had been involved in in Star Trek, he'd written for the original series, he'd written books, he'd he'd written novelizations, and obviously was on the convention circuit in America. So, like this was a sort of a a thing that grew a bit of a legend around it. And so I think that's why fans knew about it, particularly because of the issues it explored and and the lack of exploration of those as the series went on. So I suspect that's where it came from. I wouldn't be surprised if this was well known in in Trek fandom and particularly the convention circuit.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:46

Let's jump into the meat of it. As you said there, the script was rejected because at the heart of it there is this gay relationship, which I think would have been a really interesting thing to handle in TNG in the 90s. It's the sort of thing that I think it's missed its boat and you couldn't do it now because LGBTQI rights have come such a way that seeing those relationships on television in prime time shows is normalized. It's almost an outdated story to tell now. But I think, you know, in the 90s, we're certainly not telling those sort of stories until the past the watershed. Or if we are seeing any sort of gay stories, they're very much scandal, plot twists. When you see them in soaps, when you I there was a kids' TV show over here called Biker Grove and Grange Hill as well. They both had gay storylines, and it was very much this is a bad thing, whereas this is it's a different, better take on that, I think. So, how do you think it's handled?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:46

So I I I I think it's handled very, very well. And I think it's important, as you intimated there, to explore the context of this because it is a bit of a skeleton in the closet, black sheep, whatever terminology you want to use of Star Trek that this what I would call in the British sense a liberal TV show. Some would call it a progressive TV show. Many have had long fights over which label you use, but it but it is a show that has consistently wanted to show an optimistic future, a show that shows modernity. You know, it had it had a very interracial cast in the 1960s. You know, networks didn't want to show TV shows that had black characters in some parts of America in the 60s. So, you know, it it has been a very modern and futuristic and and and spiritually positive show in that sense, showing, you know, women in positive roles, although I'd argue it's not really until you get to Deep Space Nine, you have really strong female characters who aren't the psychologist or the doctor. Um but you know, they they put women in good roles, they put you know black characters in strong roles, they have Asian characters, they have a Russian character, they do all these things, except have any gay characters. And right across Star Trek in the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s, it is a complete blank slate in terms of gay characters. Gene Roddenreed did give an interview towards the end of his life, very close to the end of his life, in fact, where he did admit that he'd had to go on a bit of a journey with his own homophobia and explode and approach to homosexuality. And he he was very confident there'll be a gay character soon in Star Trek The Next Generation. There wasn't. Uh Rick Berman has given interviews saying that it was a very big mistake on everybody's part that, you know, uh Star Trek in his era never did a gay character. And, you know, nobody's really quite sure why that is, but clearly someone was making a decision that there wouldn't be. And it's it's not until 2016 where Sulu is retconned in the movie to be gay that you get their first official on-screen appearance of a gay character, then you get Discovery in 2017, where half the crew is somewhere in the LGBT spectrum, and you know, it sort of goes from there. And you know, you can feel the trauma of this in Trek Fandom because there's almost this sort of desperation to try and retcon that there wasn't this huge, gaping, intolerant hole at the start in the middle of this so-called progressive program. Andrew Robertson, who played Garrick in Deep Space Nine, has since come out and gone, no, no, it's okay. I was always playing Garrick as bisexual. And it's like, well, that's nice, dude, but none of that comes out on screen. None of that was intended by the creators. So, you know, that's a nice bit of retcon to make us all feel good. Lieutenant Hawke in the movie First Contact, there were rumors at the time he was going to be a gay character. The studio was very clear that that was not the intent and he would not be gay. He's been retconned in the spin-off media as being gay, but again, that's something they've invented after the fact. I read somewhere that Simon Tarsus turned out to be gay, but I can't find anything to back that up at all. So there's this sort of this desperate, oh no, no, no, no. We we weren't we weren't homophobic on Star Trek in the 90s. There were gay characters, you just have to look really closely, which is complete and anabolics. It's just, it's just fans wanted to go. Our progressive show was not at fault here, to the point that they wouldn't put gay characters in in the TV show. And and in fact, Whoopi Goldberg actually had a fight on set once where she had to give the line, well, when a man and a woman fall in love, and she said, I will not say that. I will only say when two people fall in love. And just to get that change in dialogue was still a a fight on the set. So it it is it is a big thing. TNG did do the episode The Outcast, which it's very well-meaning, but terrible. And then the Enterprise did do a uh episode a bit called Stigma, which was an HRV allegory, which again is very well-meaning, but just one of the clunkiest grips you'll ever read in Star Trek. So that's a very long, ranty way of saying Star Trek and missed a fleet of boats on on the LGBT issue at this time. So you then get this fan-made thing, which does it almost perfectly, because you get the character of Peter Kirk, he's introduced, he's he's what you'd expect of Captain Kirk's nephew, and Peter Kirk is an actual character from an episode of TOS, he's from uh Operation Annihilate, although he's about 10 in that episode. So Peter Kirk's introduced, you then have where Peter Kirk's being treated after this Klingon attack in Sick Bay by one of the doctors, and McCoy's like, just because he's Captain Kirk's nephew, don't give him extra attention, stop molycodling, go go deal with these people. And you're thinking, okay, this is going to be a story about nepotism and and how you deal with being the nephew of a famous captain and and all that sort of thing. And then Peter Kirk's having that's round, he goes back to his quarters, and the doctor comes in after him, and they start embracing on the bed in a way that makes it very clear that they are lovers. And something you're like, oh, he wasn't treating him special because he was Captain Kirk's nephew, he's treating him in special because he's his boyfriend. And it's not done in any way that's like, hey, everybody, let's look at this gay character. It's not done in a, you know, oh, I'm glad my my cabin mates left now. It's just how two people who are dating would act when they're in each other's company. And it's done that way the whole way through. And it's just extraordinary that it's a fan film that does it so well when the main franchise wasn't doing it at all. Anyway, that's that's my view from someone with lots of views and rants. How did you feel about it all?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:13

As you say, it's lovely to see that relationship just be another relationship, and it would have been great for you would have never got it in the original series, just society wasn't there. The 90s is that that sort of turning point, and I think by DS9, I don't see a reason why there couldn't have been something there. Even if it was just two extras in the background having a kiss or something in a bar or something, but it just wasn't to be.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:38

DS9 does have the famous woman-on-woman prime time kiss, but you know, it's done for space reasons, not for anything else.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:47

And also like women kissing in the 90s was very much it we always felt like it they were doing it for the men rather than doing it for the LGBTQI audience. Totally. But there was one clunky line that that that got me at the start that sort of tripped me up, which is when Kirk goes, I didn't realize, or something like that, or was I the only person that didn't know? I couldn't make that out of whether it was because they were in a relationship, because his nephew was gay, or because his nephew was getting married. Like that was the only bit where I was like, oh, I think that needed a little bit of fine-tuning. Because if it is because his nephew's gay, that shouldn't be an issue in the liberal future of Star Trek.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:27

Yeah, I also had a moment at that line, and I did sort of read it as because Kirk's been sort of talking about how he's had this nephew. He's since after Kirk's brother is killed in the original series, his nephew sent off with some other relative to sort of be brought up, and he he has sort of got that moment of like, well, I didn't really invest in my nephew's growing up, and now here he is as one of my ensign on the Enterprise. And I think he's realised just how much of his nephew's life he's missed by the fact that he has at some point come out, whatever the version of that is in the 23rd century, and is in love with a member of his crew to the point where they're about to get married. And and I think it is just that that that sort of almost sitcommy moment of the person closest to him has just not noticed anything, but everybody else around him has.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:17

Yeah. You can sort of brush it off with that, with with that approach. I still think it has that late 90s, early noughties thing of kill your gaze, you know, which uh I think media's trying to get away from. But broadly speaking, I think it's just a well-presented relationship as you would present any others. And I think the the two actors manage to convey the love and the chemistry between them, and I think it's very sweet, but it is quite obvious from the get-go that one of them is going to get killed. You're just not sure which one.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:47

Yeah, it it is absolutely clear that the moment they both go on that away mission, at least one of them is not coming back. The only tension is which one.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:55

But I think when you have non-regular characters or guest characters and couples on in Star Trek and there's an away mission, that's always the case, regardless of the sexuality of the people within the relationship.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:08

Yeah, we we we know that they don't have plot armor.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:13

So I think it's a a lovely script, and I I do think it's a shame it it wasn't made. It would have been the sort of production that annoyed the right sort of people and made the right sort of people very happy, if that if that makes sense. And anything for that sort of representation in the 90s, I think, would have been really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:31

Yeah, and and what's really important is that whilst yes, it obviously has got an openly gay set of characters in relationship on screen, that that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is all about this plague of blood worms that's on board this derelict spaceship, and the enterprise crew go over, and now they've broken quarantine, so they're at risk. And do we get them back or do we have to destroy them with the ship? And then, you know, suddenly you see the the space worms, and my god, that's a creepy effect for an amateur production, but very, very well done. And I I thought part one was really, really good. I I thought that was a really good 40-something minutes. It flowed by really well, it had good pacing. I I thought part two wasn't quite as good because it really does slow down for about 20, 25 minutes, where they're just like, okay, well, maybe not all of the crew is going to get back because you've got to we've got to send you back two at a time. So, okay, you two can go. Now you two can go, and now you two can, and then you're sort of getting, you know, more and more, you know, and you get to the point where it's like McCoy Spock and um, you know, the other character left over, and you're like, Well, I know which of these three is not making it out of this story. And yeah, you know, it's it's done very well, but but they do sort of spend a long time building up to how they're gonna leave this one character on the ship. And in the end, yes, to he commits suicide rather than to being eaten by the blood worms. And and then there's some good action, and then there's sort of 15 minutes of everybody talking earnestly over view screens. So I I did think the pacing was perhaps a little off, and uh maybe if they'd done this as a sort of a one-hour special rather than two 40-minute episodes, it might have worked out a bit better.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:10

Yeah, I think had this ended up in the Star Trek writer's room, even if it didn't get made, at some point someone would have gone, This is a fit, this is 50 minutes of television, not an hour and a half's worth of television. Did they successfully turn it from a next generation script into an original series script, do you think?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:26

Yeah, I I I thought they absolutely did that very, very well. It helps that it was written for season one of The Next Generation, which let's face it, a lot of its stories were just left over original track scripts that were left in a drawer for 20 years and then made. So it's not that hard. And David Gerald himself said that before he got their draft, he was very impressed with what they'd done to turn it into an original script before he did a draft. There was no point other than the obvious things that we've discussed, where I've gone, this doesn't feel like an original series script. All the characters are who they should be, the classics. Klingons are being 1960s Klingons. Yeah, it was fine.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:03

Do you know who was it just generic crewman of the week that was gay in the TNG version, or was it Picard's nephew, Riker's nephew, or whatever? Do you know?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:12

I believe that they were new characters.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:15

Right. Okay. One thing we do get in this is we get a cameo from Denise Crosby. How does she weave into it all?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:23

Well, Denise Crosby, who I think has now done more cameos or guest appearances on television than actually regular appearances in Star Trek Next Generation season one. I was very interested to see her there. I I think that she performs the story perfectly well. I I don't think it's her finest piece of acting, but it's not terrible. I was a little bit disappointed though that at the end they had to sort of do the whole, oh, and by the way, I've got a daughter whose name's Yah. Um, and it's sort of like I didn't need you to be, you know, a couple of generations removed of Tasha Yah. Can't you just turn up and play a character? I thought that was a bit fan wanky.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:02

Yeah, I mean, she shows up and plays a character. I don't think it's her best performance. Um it's it's very much a who can we get to fill this role? There's no reason why it needs to be her. But also, if you're a Star Trek fan and an actual Star Trek star says, yeah, I'll be in it, why wouldn't you put them in it?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:20

No, absolutely, absolutely. Um, question for you, Dylan. As well as having a gay relationship, this was meant to be an HIV age allegory. If you didn't know that going in, would you have spotted that?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:33

No, absolutely not. I think the allegory may have been lost in the adaptation or lost in the sort of fleshing out of the script, but I didn't really, really get it. It just doesn't quite jump out at me. What about that?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:46

No, I I was I was the same. The fact that the infection is really, really bad and scary, okay, but so are lots of things. I mean, COVID was pretty bad and scary. The fact that it involves blood, okay, but yes, so does a lot of other things. There was one one line of dialogue where the doctors are talking to each other and they they talk about how even if they suppressed the viral load, you'd have to go on suppression after suppression, and it would be an ongoing process. And and and the language they used around that did feel very sort of early 2000s HIV medication terminology. But even that perhaps is a bit of a reach, but that was the only moment I thought, oh, I could see what they're saying there. So I don't know whether it was never there in the way that legend says or it was just diluted. But if you hadn't told me there was an HIV-aid allegory in here, I would not have picked it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:38

Yeah, no, I I think that is a weaker element of the script. And I think there's certainly a story to be told there, but it's just that they haven't quite nailed it, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:48

No, and it it is one of those things, but that to work properly and to be a proper allegory and and and you know, teachable moment, you need to have intolerance in the crew. Uh, it's it's kind of like Imbalance of Terror in season one of Trek, where suddenly, you know, one of the members of the bridge crew is a horrible racist because you need to talk about prejudice. And it just feels really, really weird that suddenly this random new member of the bridge crew is a horrible racist. And again, you sort of get a moment there where one of the crew's like, I've heard that there's this, you know, blood worm infection. I don't want it here, and everyone's like, well, that's a bit mean. It's like, yeah, you're right, it's a bit mean. Sorry, yeah, trek values. Yeah. Yeah. Like, unless you have intolerance, you can't really tell that story. And if you have intolerance in the Starfleet crew, it just feels weird.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:34

Yeah, I never quite got how heavy the threat of the bloodworms were. Because sure, like there's the thing where you see the actual sort of big ones and they eat people alive and stuff like that. That felt like a threat, but actually having the virus didn't quite feel like any more threatening, as you say, than any other virus that you could catch, be it a space one or a real one.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:55

Yeah, no, no, I I think I think that's absolutely right. The other thing that really didn't quite gel with sort of Trek law is where it's revealed that the people doing the secret research are from section 31. And given that that wasn't a thing in original Trek, it wasn't a thing in the next generation, it wasn't really a thing until the last couple of seasons of Deep Space Nine. And even then, Cisco is like, I've never heard of these guys. I've done some investigation, no one denies they exist. But like it, but in this, which is meant to be set in original Trek, he goes, I'm from Section 31. And everyone's like, Oh my god, section 31. And that was just it was again, it was a it was a nice reference, and I love section 31. I think it's a great concept in Deep Space Nine, but it that that felt like a bunch of fans making a fan film going, let's put in this really cool reference because we're fans.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:42

Yeah, we can't resist it as fans, it's just it's just one of those things. Do you think it should have been made?

SPEAKER_03 1:32:49

Yeah, absolutely. Fans making things to make themselves happy is always a good thing, and when they're not embarrassing, it's even better. And this this is definitely not embarrassing. I mean, as I said, the acting's a bit inconsistent. Uh some of the CGI i i i is great, but some of it's a bit bit patchy. Uh, Kirk's chair wobbles even more than it did in the original series. But it's I I I had no problems watching this as a piece of drama, as a piece of television.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:17

I think it actually works better as an original series script than it probably would have done as a next gen one, because it's not flawlessly executed in terms of the script, in terms of the the HIV thing. Obviously, you have the thing that HIV was not a thing in the 1960s, but it it it's sort of the areas where it doesn't quite succeed, I'd be more forgiving of in the original series than I would have been had it been made as a TNG script, I think. Yeah, that's probably fair. But I I can kind of see politically where things were at why this wouldn't have been made by the TNG crew at the time, although I d I I still think it's a shame that they they weren't more liberal with their their sort of relationships and castings of characters or even their character bios in terms of homosexuality. But I can see why a mainstream station wouldn't have made it, which is an unfortunate thing of uh of the times, but it it is where we were at, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:13

I can absolutely forgive season one next generation in 1987, not making something with a gay character. For them to hit in the mid-90s and still be like, no, we're not even gonna try and do this. You know, the the franchise that fought hard to have one of the first interracial kisses on television, not even wanting to just consider how we might do this, I think is a shame.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:36

Yeah, it's a very mainstream American thing to not want to delve into those relationships, unfortunately. And, you know, great that we live in times that, as you say, now pretty much everybody somewhere on the spectrum in modern Star Trek, which perhaps tips it a bit too much the other way, but who knows? That's a debate for a whole nother time.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:57

Exactly. Uh is there much more you want to say on this one?

SPEAKER_03 1:35:00

No, I've I've got all my notes uh neatly crossed out at this point.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:04

Amazing. I thought it was a a great fan film. I think the production values were excellent, the acting did enough to sell the emotion of the story, the threat of the story. I thought Death by the sort of physical blood worms was suitably gruesome and nice to have a cameo by Denise Crosby and to see this script materialise in a visual form. So, you know, it was it was a lot of fun for me. Clanger, banger, average meander.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:32

Look, if I was rating this compared to everything else in the Star Trek franchise, including all the televised series and movies and the books, I'll I'll have to call it an average meander. But if I'm judging it as a fan-made film, this has gotta be a banger because I can't think of any fan-made production from any other comparable franchise that is as good as this.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:53

Yeah, absolutely. For a fan film, it's it's in the upper echelons. But yeah, as an episode of Star or two episodes of Star Trek, it's it meanders a little bit. Yeah. But it was it was great fun to see it. And I would advise anybody who, if you're a fan of Star Trek, go out and seek it out and see what the fans were doing, you know, only 15 years ago now.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:14

Yep. And then go and watch a Dwess fan made film to see the other end of the spectrum.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:23

Well, look, Dave, thanks for coming to talk to me about Star Trek today. It was great fun to jump into these two different iterations of Extended Universe Trek. Uh, if people want to find you on the internet and want to hear more of you, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_03 1:36:38

So I'm the co-host of the Doctor Who Show, which is a podcast about Doctor Who. I'm the co-host of Spaceful, a Blake Seven podcast, which is all about Blake Seven, and I used to be the co-host of the Goodies Pirate Podcast, which is now completed. If you are interested in any of those shows, look those up and you'll find me there.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:56

Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:58

Well, I will be back in a couple of weeks' time when I will be joined by Mark Harrison and we'll be talking about the expanded universe of Coronation Street. Okay, so maybe for genre fans, you're not really feeling Coronation Street, but there might be some red dwarf involved, and there also might be some Russell T. Davis, so don't dismiss it just yet. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as it helps people to find the pod. Look for Too Hot for TV on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at TooHotTheNumber4 Pod. That's Too Hot the Number Four Pod for the latest updates and additional content. But until next time, I've been Dylan. Fucking Dave. And this has been Too Hot for TV. I've probably seen sorry, the original series on Blu-ray. That's my my my Doctor Who's creeping in there.