North Star

**** (4 stars out of 5)

"North Star" is Cowboys and Aliens, only unlike the movie, it's good. It's no Firefly, but then, what is?

The Delphic Expanse-dwelling Skagarans took a page from the Briori of the Delta Quadrant, travelling vast distances to capture primitive pre-spaceflight Americans for (what cannot possibly be cheap) slave labour. Building an Old West replica town, for example! Well, probably that was after brave, butchering Cooper Smith overthrew their cruel Skag overlords and set humans up in their rightful place as... cruel overlords!

Actually, firm but fair Sheriff "Morshower" MacReady is just doing his job, maintaining the laws against altering fashion, architecture, and lingo even one solitary smidgen over the centuries... but still somehow ripe for someone to mosey on by and tell him he can totally ease off on the racism while still maintaining the peace. His choice in deputies, however...

Well, a classic gunfight with scum-suckin' Skag-lynchin' Deputy Benning and his boys goes to show... lasers beat lead every time!

Archer's orbital field trip for schoolmarm Bethany (along with her brief encounter with Phlox's Medicinal Tube-Top... for medicinal purposes, of course) encourages her efforts to raise the tone for both the humans and the Skagaran kids she teaches illegally (and is slightly related to). The good captain dangles the promise of egalitarian, high-minded Starfleet coming back for them all one day, and hoping that when they do they've learned how to get along. Or else.

Actually, I don't think there was an "or else". We gotta save our ammo for killin' Xindi.

A Fistful of Datas

***** (5 stars out of 5)

It's true what they say. There's nothing so great as a holodeck episode. If anyone says that.

The nerds of Team Dordi spend their free time tinkering with Data's brain. Geordi hopes that in a crisis, Data could plug in and run the ship all by himself. Because the M-5 did a bang-up job a century back in 'The Ultimate Computer' and its high time somebody put a disembodied robot brain in charge of a starship once again.

As might be expected by anyone who's seen anything, it all goes awry, swapping the recreational library systems with bits of Data's mind.

This fills the replicators with cat food, trades Crusher's play for Data's cat-themed poetry, and (nothing to do with kitties) puts super-strong, super-fast copies of Data into the roles of the cowboys of Alexander's Ancient West program.  Speaking of kitties, Alexander and Mr. Barclay wrote the program for a little father-son bonding time, with 'Miss Kitty's House of Pleasure' as a game bonus level nobody's going to be playing during family viewing hours.

Sheriff Worf of Deadwood (minus all the HBO cussing) must rescue his hostage Deputy Sonny from the clutches of the Dastardly Data Gang with the help of "Durango", The Mysterious Rifle-Toting Stranger from Betazed.

Ruthless villain Frank Hollander could gun even a Klingon down before he twitches a whisker.
Worf must draw on his ingenuity to cobble together a Brainiac 5 Forcefield Belt from a communicator and a telegraph machine to survive the obligatory shoot-out.

"A Fistful of Datas", originally written as "The Good, The Bad, & The Klingon" is both a great new take on the 'holodeck breaks down' story and a quality SF rendering of western tropes.

A VR western, a bar fight, Cowboys and Aliens, wanted posters, dynamite, and an android using a spittoon. You don't get this stuff anywhere else! Unless you watch Red Dwarf's 'Gunfighters of the Apocalypse'. Which I kind of want to do right now. So long, part'ners... (Mike rides off into sunset on imaginary space horse.)