But the Breen culture we get is one of factions all vying for power, and didn’t we already do this with the Klingons in season one? And L’ak is important because he’s a scion of the royal family, so we get yet another alien species that has futuristic technology alongside medieval notions like primogeniture and the political importance of genetics and bloodlines over more relevant criteria, and bleah. It’s been done before and nothing interesting is done with it here.
On top of that, we get some other tired clichés here, including one of my least favorite: Incompetent Starfleet Security. Moll moves to escape sickbay after L’ak distracts everyone by overdosing on tricordrazine. (How the super-duper 32nd-century technology can allow a patient to possibly overdose themselves is left as an exercise for the viewer. Especialy since it winds up killing him.) The two nameless security guards are taken out in nothing flat, and then Culber tries to stop her and he actually does better than the trained security personnel, mostly because he’s an opening-credits regular and therefore a bigger badass than the trained security personnel. Sigh.
We start this week with the Discovery crew doing what it does best: working its way through a scientific problem. Back in season two, Ethan Peck’s Spock matter-of-factly stated “I like science.” (Peck himself owns a T-shirt with that saying on it that he has worn to many a public appearance.) That’s pretty much the Discovery ethos, and some of the best scenes in this show’s five-year history have been various crewmembers tossing ideas around to figure out a problem. In this case, it’s Stamets, Adria, Tilly, and Burnham trying to determine what the clue they found last week is supposed to mean—which is hard, as it’s just a vial of distilled water with some scratches on it.
Ah yes, the Cleveland Booker connection. The prior iteration of the Dread Pirate Booker had promised Moll and her mother that they’d be able to retire to a planet in the GQ. (Presumably accessed via the Bajoran Wormhole?) But he never returned home. Moll, of course, hates his guts, which torpedoes Book’s plan to appeal to their mutual relationship with her Dad.
It’s fun seeing folks in the old uniforms, and in some cases in their old hairstyles—Burnham, Owosekun, and Tilly all get their first-season hair back for some scenes. And it’s especially nice to see Hannah Cheesman return as Airiam, and also Ronnie Rowe Jr. as Bryce. And you can tell that we’re back on Lorca’s Discovery (and they’re in the middle of a war), because everyone is angry and trigger-happy. When Burnham explains that in her future Airiam is dead, Bryce whips out a phaser and points it angrily at Burnham, refusing to believe that nonsense.
He was a scientist who worked with the Romulan whose scout ship was found last week, along with a bunch of other scientists, after the Romulan found the Progenitors’ technology. This all happened at the height of the Dominion War, which—as we know from DS9—was a time of significant paranoia in the Alpha Quadrant. Because of that, and because of how dangerous the technology had the potential to be, the scientists all agreed to hide it and only have it be findable by someone who can figure out the clues and who could be counted on to use it for good.
Having this all happen during the Dominion War was very clever, as that was a time when worry about things like Changeling infiltration was at its height. And it’s remained a big secret since then simply because nobody knows where it is without the Romulan journal.
Played with Spiner-esque curiosity-filled deadpan by J. Adam Brown, Fred is a collector of ancient things, and he’s thrilled at the twenty-fourth-century artifact. He’s also easily able to open the Tak zhekran, which contains a diary, written in Romulan. Being a synth, Fred is able to read the entire thing in half a second. He’s also not willing to pay a fair price—or, indeed, any price, and the negotiation turns into a fight, which ends with Fred and his security dead. (Why Fred doesn’t have the super-strength and speed seen in other synths like Data is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Book figured out that Fred would be the fence in this little adventure, and so Discovery and Antares head there, but by the time they arrive, Fred’s dead, baby—Fred’s dead. Luckily, Fred is a synth, so they send the body up to Discovery, where between them, Stamets and Culber are able to extract his memory, including his speed-read of the diary. Which means they also have the text of the diary.
The most interesting part of the rewatches for me has been the revelations. I’ve been watching Star Trek since birth. I grew up on the reruns of the original series on Channel 11 in New York City, and eagerly consumed all the movies as they were released, was a devoted viewer of TNG and DS9, a somewhat less devoted viewer of Voyager and Enterprise, and now am an equally devoted viewer of the various new shows.
On top of that, I’ve been a professional Trek fiction writer since 1999, having written sixteen novels, thirteen novellas, ten short stories (with two more on the way), six comic books, one reference book, one RPG module, and a bunch of material for an RPG sourcebook.
I mention all that, not to show off, but to say that I know a lot about Trek. Despite this, each rewatch gave me new insights into the shows in question that I did not expect.
While the fourth season is better than the previous three, it’s too little, way too late. By the time the fall of 2004 rolled around, Enterprise had hemorrhaged viewers to the point that no matter what they did in season four, it wasn’t going to be seen by enough viewers to justify the expense of producing the show. Three years of Mediocre White People Failing Upward had not proven to be a winning story strategy, and the final season did little to ameliorate that. Excellent work by various guest stars—the likes of Spiner, Gary Graham (whose Soval was at his best this season), Jeffrey Combs, John Schuck, James Avery, Bill Cobbs, Harry Groener, Peter Weller, Joanna Cassidy, Michael Nouri, and Vaughn Armstrong all served to show up how incredibly lackluster the main cast was. No one more embodied this than Ada Maris, whose Captain Hernandez proved in three episodes to be far more charismatic and interesting a shipmaster than Scott Bakula was able to scrape together over four seasons.
Always nice to see that stuff I wrote back around the turn of the millennium is still getting some love. Found two recent reviews online of things I wrote in 2003.
The site Roqoo Depot, which reviews lots of tie-ins, mostly to Star Wars, but to other properties as well, recently had a review of my first I.K.S. Gorkon novel, A Good Day to Die. The review by Jonathan Koan is very favorable, giving the book a 4.5 out of 5.
An excerpt:
There are themes about honor and duty, as you’d expect in a Klingon focused book, but there are also themes about revenge, pettiness, and sacrifice. I thought DeCandido handled these themes well.
Overall, this is an incredibly well written and exciting book. It’s definitely part one of an overarching story, and I’m excited to see where it goes.
Meanwhile, over at Bloody Disgusting, Paul Lê writes a very detailed think-piece on the 2003 movie Darkness Falls, one which looks, not just at the movie, but also my novelization, comparing and contrasting the different takes, including the edits to the screenplay that changed the focus of the movie, but which I kept in my novelization.
An excerpt:
While novelizations tend to be different from their cinematic counterparts, Keith R. A. DeCandido’s literary adaptation of Darkness Falls stays largely true to the movie. In fact, this book uses a more intact version of James Vanderbilt and John Fasano’s original screenplay, which was based on Joe Harris’ story and short film Tooth Fairy. Director Jonathan Liebesman and those others behind the camera of Darkness Falls made the right call about certain changes. However, the over-editing also had its drawbacks, including the unfortunate downsizing of the movie’s antagonist.
Author DeCandido had the luxury of expanding on events that led to Darkness Falls’ curse. Meanwhile, the movie condenses Dixon’s origin into a two-minute prologue doubling as an exposition dump. As one might guess, this reduction in Dixon’s life story entailed changes both big and small. According to the movie’s visual preface, Dixon was an older woman with no husband to speak of, whereas the novelization depicts her as a younger widow shortly before her death. Several years before her public execution in 1841 — after her being wrongly accused of murdering two children — Matilda’s husband, Sonny, died in a fishing accident. His passing, needless to say, had a profound effect on a woman whose sole wish was to have children of her own.
At the time, TB&TB was historic, as it was the first single story to encompass all five extant Trek series — there was a prelude involving Enterprise, then each book had two novellas focusing on one of the other shows: the original series and DS9 in Book 1, Voyager and TNG in Book 2.
But there was an added wrinkle: the four novellas had a theme of “starship team-up,” where each crew we knew from television teamed up with another ship. So we see Kirk’s Enterprise joining forces with Commodore Matt Decker’s Constellation (about a year prior to “The Doomsday Machine” — it was clear in that episode that Kirk and Decker knew each other, and TB&TB shows their first meeting), Sisko and the gang from Deep Space 9 teaming up with Captain Declan Keogh’s Odyssey (in a story that takes place just prior to “The Jem’Hadar”), and Picard’s Enterprise on an adventure with Captain Klag and the I.K.S. Gorkon (Klag having first met the Enterprise crew in “A Matter of Honor,” and whom I’d established as shipmaster of the Gorkon in my 2001 novel Diplomatic Implausibility). For Voyager we had to do a double team-up, as the story took place prior to “Caretaker,” so we had Janeway’s Voyager on its shakedown cruise meeting up with Captain Robert DeSoto and the U.S.S. Hood, while we also get a pairing of two Maquis cells, the ones run by Chakotay and Cal Hudson. This enabled me to tell the story of how and why Tuvok infiltrated the Maquis in the first place.
In addition, the final portion — the TNG/Gorkon team-up — featured an additional team-up that I enjoyed immensely, Ambassadors Spock and Worf (this story took place between DS9‘s finale and Nemesis, when Worf was serving as Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire). The scene where the two mind-melds remains one of my favorite things I’ve ever written.
KRAD's Inaccurate Guide to Life 