What's Past is Prologue

**** (4 stars out of 5)

The evil Terrans, in the course of wrecking up planets and junk, are sucking non-renewable energy from the mushroom network and if not stopped will suck the life out of the entire multiverse. Why, did you need higher stakes?

Gabriel "Make The Empire Glorious Again" Lorca's been a Mirror Man all along. To paraphrase Devo, Gabriel Lorca "is a man with a mission. A boy with a gun. He has a picture in his pocket of the lucky one. He is a big, big mess." He frees his ACTUAL crew including the Mirror Ellen Landry (poked a bear in episode 4, torn to shreds?) from their year-long agony booth spa day and throws them into the Emperor's cannons. Nobody who hears Lorca's tale of torpedos, transporters, ion storms and probably a mongoose bite that all converged to swap him with the (good?) Lorca a year ago survives this episode. Lorca also claims he shared a bed and coup attempt with Mirror Michael Burnham but at this point I wouldn't believe Lorca if he told me Kelpians are delicious.

And I certainly do love the taste of Saru in command! His speech to his now entirely trustworthy infiltrator-free team about ideals in the face of certain death is bitchin'.

If Michael and the Ewoks can get the shields down from the inside, Discovery can stop the evil energy orb, and as an added bonus, Paul can surf the explosion back to home base.

The Emperor backstabs Lorca and he screams exactly, I mean EXACTLY like a TIE fighter as he is (disintegrated?) by the spore network that can send you anywhere. Never to be heard from again. NEVER.

It's a grandiose SFX heavy firefight. I do miss Star Trek phaser beams instead of Star Wars blaster bolts- I didn’t know what universe I was watching BEFORE I didn’t know what universe I was watching.

STAR TREK BEYOND

**** (4 stars out of 5) 
Well, it was the 50th Anniversary- so it was time for a Fast and Furious Impossible Mission!

Having dropped Bruce Banner into a black hole and frozen Steven Strange in earlier tales to astonish, our rebooted young crew must now ride motorbikes at Heimdall's head!

It's 2263 and we're clearly bored & listless- Kirk's feeling old (he turned THIRTY, poor kid) & eyeing the exit while Spock & Uhura break up. Speaking of break-ups, poor Enterprise bites the dust yet again. Lured into a treacherous dark nebula as a take-out meal for the tormented Krall & his cronies, our stalwarts must struggle upward once more for the fate of the civilized worlds.

Kirk, Spock, McCoy & Scotty have the most to do, but that's always been the case. Carol Marcus and her underpants have wandered away, possibly wherever Gaila and her underpants got to. But that leaves some room for a hip new lady character whose underpants do not feature: one of Scotty's French Girls... Aliens or "Lassies" as they are known. She's named Feisty Jennifer Lawrence, or Jaylah for short. Jaylah has oodles of kicks and holographic tricks. Uhura came along but she has so little to say that the 13th Trek film becomes (ugh) the 7th one unable to pass the Bechdel test. Still, a technical pass in the diversity category as it turns out the Kelvin Sulu is gay space married while Prime Sulu was straight as a space arrow. Points for trying, and either way our Hikarus seem like good Demora daddies.

Yes, I loved it. But I have some questions. Was a wormhole accident how the Franklin ended up buried ass-backward in the top of a mountain? How did Krall get his well-equipped gang? Is he recruiting from the people he's stranded and sometimes eaten?  How did he earn any loyalty whatsoever? They're organized enough to bring down the Enterprise in minutes, but they kill several of their own team with their bee swarm strikes. Why do Edison's vampire buddies speak an alien language among themselves  if they hate aliens so much? They're old racists who absorb aliens & they look like what they eat... but why would they take alien names? 

What makes a Kelvin Pod different from a regular escape pod? Is it their N64 controllers?

O.K., the first warp 5 starship was the NX-01, so why, then, would the first ship capable of warp 4 be the NX-326? (Found my answer: registry is Nimoy's birthday.) Still so sad about Anton Yelchin and Leonard Nimoy.

I literally just read the Wikipedia entry and I have no earthly idea what Krall's doomsday device is called. The Abernathy? Like cinematic Galactus & Parallax it's some kind of ill-defined evil cloud. Anyway, it probably got all the explanation it deserved, but it was still no explanation.

Finally, it's not a question, but the saucer flipping seems wildly, goofily impossible. Kirk, Chekov & hot-on-their-heels Kalara make a vertical slide yet she ends up standing out in the open just watching that massive saucepan lid crash down on her while they somehow scuttle off unscathed?

Nerd Do Well brings a fun, fast-paced, & even sometimes moving script, the arrival at Yorktown starbase is phenomenal- especially with the superb score, and the USS Franklin might be the last good-looking ship we see from Star Trek (sorry, spoilers).

The teeny, terrified Teenaxi who eschews pants, Keenser's acid sneezes, and Ensign Syl's hidey-hole head are adorable- how could Krall hate aliens so much when they're clearly the best thing about outer space? As my wee granny used to say "Ye cannae break a stick in a bundle." Especially if your stick bundle is also your own hair.

Evidently it didn't score high enough financially, but it's still a darn fine film. With time, my affection for "Into Darkness" has waned, so I would've only given that one 3 stars if I was reviewing it today, but Beyond does hold up. 

I had a great time- my friend Kirk took me to this one as a birthday gift after a long, crummy day at work, then shortly afterward my wife Trish won me a free copy from @Joshrimer on twitter. My friends are the best in the galaxy. 

Flashback

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Tuvok encounters an azure nebula which reminds him of THE Azure Nebula, which is a gaseous anomaly on the Federation/Klingon border.

This triggers a memory of an adventure Ensign Tuvok had when he was 29 years old. Eighty years ago, he was a junior officer under Commander Janice Rand and Captain Hikaru Sulu of the Excelsior. Remember them? Remember?

This triggers Tuvok's memory of losing his grip on some little girl who drops off a precipice.

Which is an excuse to revisit Star Trek The Undiscovered Country for Trek's 30th Anniversary and because it's so darn cool.

A t'lokan schism is a uniquely Vulcan reaction to a repressed memory that can result in an internally generated lobotomy. Good Lord, but Evolution is a capricious bitch, isn't it? What sort of beneficial result could come from evolving a brain like that?! Do Vulcans also have bile sacs that can spew arsenic into their own duodenums, killing them instantly so their corpses will taste nasty to possible predators?

The only cure for the schism is a mind meld with a trusted family member to act as a "pyllora" or observer/guide. Janeway takes this role, tagging along in a form that only Tuvok can see and hear. Despite the parallels, she does not smoke a cigar and can thus not be mistaken for Al from Quantum Leap.

Impetuous Young Tuvok formally protested Sulu's loyalty to his friends above his loyalty to orders. The Excelsior's Captain is going to help Kirk and McCoy: "Let The Regulations Be Damned".

Sulu trades pleasantries with Kang (sporting a new forehead for the 2290's!). Then he disables the Klingon vessel by igniting some nearby sirillium gas. "Like tossing a match in a pool of gasoline."

If this isn't enough for the fans, Tuvok nerve pinches Rand and he and Janeway steal her clothes (!) Say, this is already turning into 'slash' fiction!

Precipice Girl is a dead herring: a parasite masquerading as a memory. Tuvok caught it from his bunkmate Dmitri Valtane when the guy died in battle. It's been dormant for eight decades because Tuvok has NEVER seen a blue nebula again in his thirty plus years of space travel or in Vulcan's Big Book of Space.

By watching Tuvok's life, Janeway learns that young Tuvok resented his Starfleet career and the humans his parents made him hang out with. After becoming a parent himself he realized how satisfying travel far, far away from his own squalling brats could be. Kidding.

"Isn't this more fun than charting gaseous anomalies?" asks Valtane. If you mean the episode, Dmitri, my answer might surprise you.

I used to be really over the moon of Praxis about "Flashback", now it just seems O.K. I'm not entirely certain WHY it is wearing out its welcome with me, but rest assured it's NOT because of Captain Sulu. I love that guy. I gotta say I love the look of those movie uniforms and sets, too. It's really a marvellous recreation. Wouldn't it have been a lot more fun to have the whole crew meet Sulu, though? Or a Captain Sulu SERIES? Sadly, this never happened on screen. As Tuvok puts it: "Perhaps you can be nostalgic for both of us."