Skip to main content

Star Trek: Season 4 -- a review

I was originally going to list my top five favorite episodes of the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, until I thought: to hell with it, let’s review ALL of the episodes. So come join me on the transporter pad and let’s get to it.

Valles Marineris: This is a grand, epic science fiction adventure featuring dinosaurs (!!!), and it’s just as much fun as a summer popcorn movie. I loved it.

The Griffin Incident: This is the “haunted starship” episode, and it’s GREAT. Kirk, Spock and La’an encounter a derelict Federation starship that was lost nine years ago. This is basically a horror movie that has some genuinely chilling moments. It’s fantastic, extremely scary, and a perfect watch for Halloween.

Human Best Friend: Everybody goes on vacation, gets stoned, and then the wackiness ensues! People online have referred to this as the “Dude, Where’s My Shuttlecraft” episode. I agree. But I didn’t care for this one. I’m tired of these characters being reduced to idiots just for cheap laughs.

A Case of Chiaroscuro: A Trek Noir episode that’s shot in black and white with Una leading a resistance movement against the Klingons. It just didn’t grab me, at all. Casablanca did this story line much better.

Level-Five Transporter Accident: “Oh no! Run, flee!” That was my attitude before seeing this. After I saw it, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I laughed out loud in some parts. Just relax and let the great puppet majesty flow over you.

Off-Hour: An extremely gripping episode with a focus on Nurse Chapel. Jess Bush gives a marvelous performance here as Chapel in a tight situation.

Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass: Another Trelane (engagingly played by Rhys Darby) episode, and I liked it better than the first one. With Pike (Anson Mount) finding himself trapped in a literal soap opera, the humor is more subtle and still funny without insulting the characters.

Orders of Magnitude: Another “evil Admiral takes over the ship” episode, but it’s a good one, thanks to Joe Morton’s (Terminator 2) superb performance as the evil (or is he, really?) admiral taking over the Enterprise.

Once La'An a Time: Another sequel, to the episode in the first season, where everybody finds themselves in a fairy tale. It was great fun watching Christina Chong ham it up here (and her dog makes a cameo once again), but overall, this one’s nothing to write home about.

Tomorrow's Enterprise: Despite Celia Rose Gooding’s solid performance as two sets of Uhuras in another timey wimey episode, I didn’t care for this one. Interestingly, this was originally going to be the series’ finale, before they got an extension with a shortened fifth season.

Overall, I enjoyed the fourth season. It was better, and more confident than the third season. Enough of the episodes were good enough to make me want to pick this season up on physical media. Onward to season five in 2027. --SF

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is currently only available on Paramount+. However, it will be released on physical media soon.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Logan's Run -- a review

I first saw Logan’s Run in a New Jersey movie theater fifty years ago, when I was a boy. The theater, somewhere in the suburban wilds of the Garden State, was packed to the gills with people. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the movie back then—all I cared about that it was a brand new science fiction film, in an age when big budget SF properties on both TV and the big screen was very rare (of course, Star Wars , which would be released the very next year, would change all of that). Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run is a futuristic tale about a man named Logan 5 (Michael York) who has a special job in a place filled with hedonistic leisure. Logan lives within the splendor of a Utopian society whose population dwells within large domes. The interior is presented as a vast, upscale shopping mall where its citizens want for nothing. Every need, every whim, and every fantasy is met. Of course, there’s a catc...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Conjuring: Last Rites

Whether you believe in the “true” exploits of demonologists Ed & Lorraine Warren or not (I don’t), The Conjuring series of films, based on their “true” stories, have all been very entertaining, with everything now supposedly coming to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites . After a prologue in 1964, where we witness the traumatic birth of the Warren’s daughter, Judy, the rest of the movie advances to 1986, with the Warrens now somewhat retired. They’re still speaking at colleges, before giggly students who crack Ghostbusters jokes at them, but the Warrens have ceased personally investigating creepy cases on their own. That is, until their good friend Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) winds up hanging from a noose, thanks to a demonic attack. Father Gordon had been trying to get the Warrens to investigate the case of the Smurls--a family in Pennsylvania who are suffering through a severe haunting in their house, and when the Warrens finally do get involved, the demons come...
Post a Comment
Read more