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 always loved the paranoid thriller. It’s the type of thriller that sees our hero either go on the run (usually for something that they didn’t do), or try to deal with such a vast, monolithic conspiracy that it makes them want to go on the run. Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest , Oliver Stone’s JFK , and The X-Files all immediately come to mind as the type of paranoid thriller that I love. These are the kind of manic, gotta-keep-moving, paranoid thrillers that leave their heroes unable to trust anybody, even their dogs (“Et tu, Rover? You little Shih Tzu!”). Three new paranoid thriller TV series are available on streaming right now, and the first of these I’ve watched is The Diplomat , on Netflix, starring the sublime Keri Russell. An explosion aboard a British aircraft carrier creates an international crisis that Kate Wyler (Russell), the newly appointed American ambassador to England, must avert. Wyler is a veteran Foreign Service officer who’s used to doing a l...

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 re-watched some old episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, the sequel series to Stargate: SG-1 (which was the TV sequel to Stargate, the movie, released back in 1994), and I came across the fifth season episode Whispers. Whispers was this series' loving take on horror movies, and re-watching it some ten years later, I have to say that it holds up very well. Directed by William Waring, Whispers uses all of the cliches of the horror genre--but instead of being a jokey (and forgettable) send off, the episode treats its threat very seriously, and winds up giving us some truly scary moments. The SG team consists of Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) and Dr. Beckett (Paul McGillion), along with an all-women Stargate unit led by Christina Cox (Blood Ties), with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nicole de Boer rounding out the team as its science expert.  While the episode has plenty of jump scares, many of which feature real threats, it's the overall creepiness of Whispers that makes it so good--espec...

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...

Like most people these days, I was suffering from zombie fatigue, and so when I heard about a new zombie series on Netflix called Black Summer , I was tempted to just ignore it, because, you know, zombies…ugh. However, with Stephen King giving the show a verbal thumbs up on Twitter, I decided to reconsider my embargo on all things zombies long enough to give Black Summer a chance. I was only going to watch the first episode of Black Summer , just to gauge how good the series is, and I wound up watching the first four episodes back to back before I finally reluctantly gave into sleep--yes, it’s that good. Taking place in the early days of a zombie outbreak, with civilization teetering on the verge of catastrophe, Black Summer details how an orderly march of suburbanites into an evacuation by the military quickly becomes a horrific fight for survival once things start going sideways. Jaime King plays Rose, who gets separated from her young daughter right at the start of the show. The...

Not having seen the original Sabrina TV series (and not really having any great desire to) I went into the brand new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina completely cold and unknowing of whatever the previous incarnation was about. But I wound up enjoying the new version immensely. Thankfully, the new Sabrina has ditched the cheesy sitcom trappings of its predecessor in favor of an hour-long drama format--and thanks to it being on Netflix, we really get full-hour episodes. Also thanks to Netflix, the new Sabrina series is allowed to fully embrace its horror-movie inspirations. This was the first great thing that the new series has done: diving head-first into the horror genre with full-on gore and some genuinely frightening scare moments that managed to catch this old horror movie fan off guard. Like the original sitcom, Sabrina is a teenage witch who lives with her two witch aunts and whose familiar is a cat named Salem. Unlike the sitcom, the cat never speaks but transforms into a rea...

When I first started watching Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House , I out-right hated it. I loved the original novel, which is a classic horror novel, written by Shirley Jackson, that deals with the excursion into a famously (or infamously) haunted house by a team of paranormal investigators. It was turned into a masterpiece of a film, titled The Haunting , directed by Robert Wise, back in 1963. It was then remade into a really shitty movie in 1999 (despite having a great cast, the remake was pretty bad). This time, Netflix has turned The Haunting of Hill House into a ten episode mini-series, and they’ve made some major changes, which was why I initially hated the first episode. Three of the characters from the book who were a part of the paranormal team, Nell, Theo and Luke, have been turned into siblings in the series, now part of a large family that moved into Hill House when they were children. Their parents, Hugh and Olivia Crain (Henry Thomas and Carla Gugino) are hoping to “...

I first caught Lost In Space while it ran in syndication back when I was a little spud. I loved the otherworldly adventures featuring a loving family who always had each other’s back regardless of what crazed situation they faced. As I got older, I realized that LIS wasn’t exactly Shakespeare (“ The Great Vegetable Rebellion ,” anyone?). Episodes that seemed like an engrossing adventure to an eight year old looked very silly when viewed by my older self. But despite the fact that LIS didn’t age well, it still held a warm place within my heart for all of these years. The Lost In Space movie that was released twenty years ago was a misbegotten mess that tried to keep the camp while updating the overall concept with disastrous results. As if that wasn't bad enough, the same writer of that debacle became one of the executive producers on Star Trek: Discovery , promptly screwing up yet another one of my childhood favorites with terrible, clueless scripts. It made me extremely relu...