The View From The Mountain

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...

I've been building models since I was very young, and when I was a kid, I would think about building a space station for my Star Trek model ships, using the Styrofoam packing pieces that came with various items. I tried building a space dock for one of my ships by gluing several Styrofoam pieces together, but I was stymied when the model glue literally started eating the Styrofoam. p> Recently, I wound up with some Styrofoam pieces after buying a new printer. I used them as a temporary space dock around one of my Star Trek ship models. Not bad. I had a good idea as a kid. I just need to work on the execution without the Styrofoam.

I had this 1/1000th scale model kit (from Polar Lights) of the Klingon D-7 battleship from Star Trek on my hands. So I decided to build a space dock for it. I knew I wanted some kind of gantry covering the ship on top, so I used these plastic girders from Evergreen and assembled them into the basic shape of the D-7. I scratch-built the buildings you see on the gantry from styrene sheet. Then I covered them with greeblies--these are bits and pieces of model kits that I placed on the surface of the buildings to give them some texture. I also made sure to give the D-7 plenty of battle damage, so as to give it a good reason to come in for repairs. And so, after a really rambunctious time on the Romulan DMZ, the Klingon Battlecruiser K'Prang pulls in for repairs and some blood wine. Then it...

The Orville has long been an entertaining science fiction show that got even better with its third (and possibly final) season. With shooting on the third season getting held up by the pandemic, Seth MacFarlane--who created the series, as well as stars as its Captain, Ed Mercer--seemingly took the added time to rework the scripts. And that was a very good thing. When The Orville first debuted, it was seen as a comedy that offered a funny, satirical view of Star Trek, the classic series from which The Orville was inspired by. The humor was very broad and bombastic, sometimes going a little over the top. But even in the first two seasons, the slapstick humor began to slowly be replaced by earnest storytelling as MacFarlane and his writers fleshed out their characters and the universe they lived in. And by doing this, The Orville only got better. While there’s still humor in the third season, and it’s much welcome (because the humor here is still genuinely fu...

I bought this resin figure of a Starfleet alien from a Chiller convention about twenty--twenty five--years ago. And ever since then he's been knocking around unpainted...until now.  No assembly was required on the figure itself. I just had to paint him. Since he was clad in the standard uniform of Starfleet in the Next Generation era, I decided to make him an engineer.  So I gave him the gold shirt and trimmings of the Starfleet engineer of that era. I also gave him a blue skin tone, setting down a darker blue base that was highlighted with a lighter blue dry-brushing. I painted his eyes red, which tend to pop nicely in these pictures. The base is one of those wooden jobs that you get in the hobby store for really cheap. I covered it with a layer of Sculpt-A-Mold, then painted it to look like the surface of an alien planet. The plant was cut from a branch of a plastic aquarium plant and painted purple with yellow for that 'alien plant' look. Working on this took a couple of...

I recently saw this model kit of the Romulan Bird of Prey (from Star Trek) online from Polar Lights. It was cheap enough, and not so large that it would take up too much room on my shelf, so I got it. It wound up being the perfect model to build during a pandemic lockdown. Not too hard, but not that easy, either. The hardest part of this kit is the water-slide decal of the bird of prey that fits underneath the ship. I wound up breaking it up into five separate sections, and that did the trick. Once all of the decals were on, it became a very striking ship. With this Bird of Prey on patrol, Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise had better watch their backs!

Nostalgia can be a great thing, especially in hard times like now. Re-watching your favorite movie or TV show during a particularly rough patch in your life can help you get through the worse of things. Sometimes, a reboot of a classic movie or TV show can be even more satisfying, because it feels like your old friends have returned to give you comfort during dark times. And so, when CBS All Access offered their pay-walled channel for free for a brief period during the 2020 Pandemic (which was a classy move on their part), I jumped at the chance to be able to finally watch Star Trek: Picard . I had been a fan of the original Star Trek series from the 1960s (I watched it in reruns as a boy in the 1970s), and had watched every incarnation of Star Trek --both movie and TV show--that had been produced since. I was really looking forward to going on new adventures with the calm, cool Jean-Luc Picard, in the hopes that his new series would take my mind off of these troubling times, if just...

I was a Star Trek fan since I was a little spud. Although I don’t remember it, my parents told me that, as a toddler, I watched the original Star Trek series with them when it first aired in the late sixties. But it wasn’t until Star Trek was in syndication in the seventies that I really got into the series. Aside from being a thrilling SF adventure, Star Trek was a constant, soothing reminder for me that we humans would still be striving for a brighter future, no matter how dire the present day appeared--which was a very reassuring thing to hear for a boy growing up in the seventies. When I first heard that Star Trek was returning in late 1979 as a movie, I was extremely happy. I remember being thrilled at the ads for the film that appeared on the back of comic books--which showed a redesign of the Enterprise that didn’t quite match the final refit ship seen in the movie, but I didn’t care. I finally saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture with my father during a wondrous science fictio...

Warning: Spoilers! Coming on the heels of the far superior Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , Star Trek III: The Search for Spock had a lot to live up to--and, to be blunt, the third film in the Star Trek film series (released 35 years ago this year) is sorely lacking when compared to Wrath of Khan . However, Search For Spock , while far from being a great film, does fulfill some important fan service duties to the Star Trek canon. As its name implies, The Search for Spock goes looking for the popular character, who was played by Leonard Nimoy in the classic Star Trek TV series that aired in the late 1960s. But it’s not an easy search; Spock famously died at the end of Wrath of Khan --which was reportedly at the behest of Nimoy, who had grown tired of playing the half human/half Vulcan after three seasons of Star Trek , as well as the first Star Trek film, The Motion(less) Picture , which was released to lackluster reviews (from both critics and fans) in 1979. Yet when Wrath of Kha...