Borderland

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

Ask a Star Trek fan what five things they'd like to see most, take the top answers, and film the results. You'd get "Borderland", a delicious Star Trek goulash that tastes as great the second day as it did the first.

Spock's ancestor may have solved mysteries in Victorian drawing rooms, and Picard's ancestor may have founded the Martian Colonies, but Data's ancestor is a jailbird. Meet Dr. Arik Soong, a smug super-genius devoted to improving the human genome in a culture not terribly eager to repeat the 30-odd-million deaths they had the last time back in the Eugenics Wars.

Thoroughly Misguided Soong raised a dandy little crop of Nietzscheans, and they were left to their own devices when he was arrested. They may not have the common sense to get new clothes (unless the artfully ripped chest holes are 22nd Century Chic?), but they sure know how to kick stuff! Klingon butt, mainly.

Archer needs Arik to pacify his overpowering proteges before they make the Klingons mad enough to go to war... oh, too late. But first, the disgraced geneticist must come to the rescue when Orion slavers sell T'Pol in a market down on Verex III. You just don't get that personal touch when you buy your harem girls on eBay!

Real, Honest-To-Gor Orions! The third and final Hertzler Klingon! A Tellarite being a chauvinist pig! And all the infighting and bedroom antics of the gene-spliced Augments. Let's give a hand (before they take it by force) to Malik, Persis, and Raakin: the Khannabes, everybody!

Future's End

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

Attacked without provocation by time-traveling twenty-ninth century jack-hole Captain Braxton of the Federation Timeship Aeon, our heroes wind up orbiting Earth in the late twentieth century. A benighted, backward era before iPads and Ugg boots, when the very height of cellphone fashion was an archaic flip device the like of which would not be seen again until the 2150s.

Braxton was even less fortunate; in that a filthy hippie jacked his ride in 1967. The hippie became the local Steve Jobs, a corporate sell-out kajillionaire called Henry Starling who caused the computer revolution we know and love. Everything from bar code readers to the Crazy Frog Ringtone can be laid at the feet of the corporate giant known as Chronowerx. (You've seen them: they have a Starfleet chevron on their laptops instead of an apple. Also, hundreds of factory deaths from improperly tuned Chroniton Reactors. Patent Pending!)

Janeway finds Braxton eking out a meager hobo living. He's railing helplessly against the End of the Universe, which will happen rather early if Starling should ever step on the Aeon's gas pedal.

Gangsta Tuvok and Groovy Paris, the original odd couple, chase down a SETI astronomer working in the Griffith Observatory... to destroy her life's work. The stargazer, Rain Robinson, spotted Voyager and e-mailed them those pornographic "Hello, Alien Nudists" greeting cards Earth put on their Voyager probes. So naturally, Starling's phaser-brandishing goon is trying to kill her. She knows too much! And she thinks Jesus Is Magic! To the Mystery Machine, Scoobies!

Oh, also, Starling pirates the EMH (File-Sharing: The Victimless Crime my butt!)

P.P.S: Somebody got a grainy picture of low-flying Voyager on a camcorder. Now that Whack-A-Doo from Squatch My Sasquatch is on their trail!

"Future's End" takes place in 1996, the very year Khan and his genetically engineered supersoldiers were overthrown from the many, many countries they'd conquered and fled into space exile! But, as usual, nobody in Los Angeles noticed anything anyone else in the world was doing.

I kid, I kid. In fact, Rain Robinson DOES have a photograph of the launch of Botany Bay in her office, or at least a DY class ship just like it. So while it's not our dimension (there's no Star Trek TV show there, for example, so Rain's Talosian action figure must be a really similar creature from Battlestar Galactica or possibly Battletoads) it's not just having a silly romp, it's still faithfully following Star Trek's history. Sort of.