Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast artwork

Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast

129 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 21 ratings

Primitive Culture is a Trek.fm podcast dedicated to a deep examination of the connections between Star Trek and our own history and culture. In each episode, Duncan Barrett and his guests take you on a fascinating exploration of how our world inspires the franchise we love—and how that franchise inspires us.

Society & Culture History ds9 startrek tos voy culture deepspacenine ent enterprise history society
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Episodes

126: Progressive Nostalgia?

March 09, 2023 00:40 - 59 minutes - 41.2 MB

Music in Star Trek From Alexander Courage’s “bright galactic beguine” in The Original Series to Jeff Russo’s churning, Game of Thrones-style theme for Discovery, the music of Star Trek has always embodied the spirit of its time, as much as it looks to the future. Rick Berman famously sacked composer Ron Jones from The Next Generation because he felt his scores drew too much attention to themselves. In his mind, the underscore should be a kind of wallpaper, as unobtrusive as the soft pastel...

125: Five-Year Mission

October 03, 2022 11:44 - 1 hour - 62.6 MB

Half a Decade of Primitive Culture Star Trek’s original five-year mission was brought to a premature end in 1969. But over the ensuing half-century and more, the franchise has continued boldly going to new frontiers. By the 1980s, when a second generation of fans came to seek out fresh adventures, the voyage had become a continuing mission … with no end in sight. In this episode of Primitive Culture, recorded earlier this year on our own five-year anniversary, host Duncan Barrett is join...

124: Just Following Orders?

September 06, 2022 13:12 - 1 hour - 79.3 MB

Cardassian war crimes and The Man in the Glass Booth For many fans of Deep Space Nine, the penultimate installment of Season 1, “Duet,” is also the show’s first classic episode. A bleak exploration of guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness in the aftermath of war, it’s a story that could scarcely have been told on any other Star Trek series. One of Trek’s most popular bottle episodes, “Duet” is built on intense two-hander scenes between Nana Visitor and guest star Harris Yuelin, giving it ...

123: Neurodiversity in Infinite Combinations

August 25, 2022 11:51 - 1 hour - 42.9 MB

Autistic representation in Star Trek “Perhaps you’re just different,” Tam Elbrun tells Data in the Next Generation episode “Tin Man.” “Not a sin, you know, though you may have heard otherwise.” Both characters—the emotionally sensitive Betazoid and the supposedly emotionless android—have been seen by fans as allegories of a particular kind of difference, standing in for those on the broad spectrum of neurodiversity. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by a...

122: Identical Strangers

July 30, 2022 04:56 - 1 hour - 71.8 MB

Star Trek’s Double Troubles Don’t they say you die if you meet yourself? Our intrepid Starfleet officers had better hope the answer is no, since encounters with doubles, doppelgängers, and duplicates appear to be just part of the job. From the two Kirks in “The Enemy Within” to Lower Decks’s twinned Boimlers, Star Trek has offered up a host of alt versions of our regular characters over the years. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Clara Cook for a loo...

121: When Is an Allegory Not an Allegory?

July 17, 2022 12:34 - 1 hour - 50 MB

Trans representation in Star Trek. In 2022, trans characters in Star Trek have become part of the fabric of humanity’s shared future in space. In addition to Adira and Gray Tal in Discovery, we’ve been treated to the villainess Captain Angel in Strange New Worlds and even an explicitly non-binary character, the Medusan Zero, in Prodigy. But a few decades ago, Star Trek’s most direct engagement with trans culture was the truly toe-curling Deep Space Nine episode “Profit and Lace.” That said...

120: Resurrecting Nightmares

June 30, 2022 15:53 - 1 hour - 48.1 MB

The Alien franchise and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In space, no one can hear you scream. But for unlucky Starfleet landing parties, meeting a nightmarish alien menace can prove as traumatic as deadly. For La'an Noonien-Singh, who carries the burden of having survived captivity in a Gorn breeding colony during childhood, another encounter with the monstrous lizards proves both physically and mentally challenging. And to make sure the audience is equally freaked out by the terrifying enc...

119: Cowboy Diplomats

May 29, 2022 12:17 - 1 hour - 59.9 MB

How Star Trek’s leaders reflect our own. Young, charismatic, and a bit of a ladies’ man, Captain James T. Kirk was cast in the mould of President John F. Kennedy, the beloved US leader who had been killed just three years before Star Trek debuted. But over the course of more than half a century, Star Trek’s captains have often echoed the great politicians of the day; and sometimes they may even have paved the way for political careers in the real world. In this episode of Primitive Cultu...

118: Servants to Two Masters

May 05, 2022 02:28 - 56 minutes - 39.4 MB

Star Trek’s backdoor pilots. The year is 1968. As Star Trek goes off the air for good, a new show—Assignment: Earth—debuts from some of the same creative team. For dedicated Trekkies, the premise is already familiar and the two leads, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, have a head start garnering fans of their own. That, at least, is what might have been had Star Trek not been renewed for a third season. As things turned out, the episode featuring Seven and Lincoln was simply the finale of St...

117: What If ...

April 05, 2022 08:25 - 1 hour - 52.7 MB

… it wasn’t the Vulcans who made first contact? April 5, 2063. In Star Trek’s imagined history, it was on this date that humanity made first contact with an alien race. The event led to societal transformation on a global scale and ushered in a bright future. But what if it wasn’t the Vulcans who happened to be passing by that day? What if first contact had been made with the Klingons or Romulans instead? In this episode of Primitive Culture, originally recorded for The Sanctuary, but ne...

116: Sex and Shooting

March 27, 2022 02:09 - 1 hour - 55.8 MB

Captain Picard and Indiana Jones. Wise, measured, and distinctly unromantic, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was conceived from the start as very different from his predecessor, James T. Kirk. But for Patrick Stewart, the lack of physical drama felt creatively unsatisfying. In October 1988, he wrote a letter to Gene Roddenberry outlining his desire for Picard to get some “action”—in more ways than one. It would be over a year before Stewart’s request was granted, in the third-season episode “Cap...

115: A Fantastic Education

March 15, 2022 02:29 - 49 minutes - 34.2 MB

Lisa Klink on Writing for Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Starting with a short-term position as a writing intern on Deep Space Nine, Lisa Klink rose rapidly through the Star Trek ranks, penning more than a dozen episodes over the course of just three years. In episodes such as “Resistance” and “Sacred Ground,” she proved her skill at handling character-based drama, while “Blood Fever,” “Message in a Bottle” and “The Omega Directive” cemented her credentials as one of the series’ finest story...

114: A Tragic Necessity?

February 28, 2022 01:55 - 1 hour - 57.8 MB

How Star Trek tackled the Vietnam War. Every Star Trek series has engaged with the issues of the time, and perhaps none more so than *The Original Series*. Episodes touching on the hippy counterculture and NASA's bold Apollo program grounded the show as much in the 1960s as the 2260s. But perhaps no contemporary subject loomed over TOS more so than the Vietnam War. Sometimes quite bluntly and at other times more obliquely, over the course of three seasons the show charted a constantly deve...

113: Doing the Unthinkable

December 31, 2021 13:10 - 1 hour - 61.9 MB

Jack Bauer and Jonathan Archer. Premiering just after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Enterprise took another two seasons to fully engage with the radically changed real world in its storytelling. When the show did reveal its own 9/11 story in the third season, it followed in the wake of another intensely serialized, monster-hit TV show: 24. Jack Bauer might seem an unlikely model for a Starfleet captain, but throughout the course of the Xindi arch Jona...

112: Best Idea Wins

December 12, 2021 14:52 - 58 minutes - 40.5 MB

Naren Shankar on a life in science fiction. While Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga took the Star Trek: Next Generation cast to the big screen—not to mention reinventing classic space shows Battlestar Galactica and Cosmos—it was another young writer from the TNG stable, Naren Shankar, who would contribute to the most science-fiction TV in his post-Trek career. Over three decades as a screenwriter and showrunner, Shankar has worked on genre classics such as SeaQuest, Farscape, The Outer Lim...

111: Living The Dream

November 21, 2021 14:55 - 1 hour - 64.9 MB

Live from Destination Star Trek London 2021. After the cancellation of last year’s Destination Star Trek (DST) in London, anticipation for 2021 event, billed as Europe’s largest Trek convention, was greater than ever. A slew of last-minute guest dropouts—combined with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—didn’t stop thousands of Trekkies from descending on ExCel London exhibition and convention center for the three-day celebration. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett s...

110: Boys with Toys

October 17, 2021 14:29 - 1 hour - 50.3 MB

James Bond and Julian Bashir. Not many film franchises can boast 25 installments over the course of more than half a century, so for sheer longevity the James Bond cinematic franchise certainly gives Star Trek a run for its money. In some ways, the old-fashioned brutal masculine ethos of Bond feels very much out of place in the utopian Trek future, and yet both are properties forged in the cultural crucible of the 1960s that have been forced to reinvent themselves with every passing gener...

109: Getting From There to Here

August 30, 2021 13:51 - 55 minutes - 38.2 MB

Tony Black’s new book: *Star Trek, History and Us*     From 1960s hippies in “The Way to Eden” to the War on Terror in Enterprise Season 3, Star Trek has always reflected the cultural moment from which it springs. In his new book, Star Trek, History and Us, Tony Black brings the Primitive Culture approach to print, taking a long view of the past half-century through the prism of Star Trek's 800 episodes and films. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Ton...

108: I Want to Direct NOW!

July 19, 2021 12:20 - 1 hour - 44 MB

Robert Duncan McNeill on Star Trek's Directors' School. To Star Trek fans, he is Tom Paris, the cocksure pilot of the USS Voyager. But in Hollywood, Robert Duncan McNeill is better known as a different kind of helmsman. From his first day of filming on the Voyager pilot "Caretaker," McNeill declared his intention to take a shot at the director's chair, following in the footsteps of fellow Trek such as stars Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, and Leonard Nimoy. Two years later, when Frakes was ...

107: Under the Sea

July 01, 2021 10:52 - 1 hour - 53 MB

Twenty Thousand Leagues across the Delta Quadrant.  Throughout Star Trek: Voyager’s seven seasons, Tom Paris repeatedly proved his credentials as a mid-20th-century history buff, with his replicated TV set, black-and-white B-movie holonovels, and even his own 3D cinema. But in the fifth-season episode “Thirty Days,” he reveals a boyhood fascination with a much earlier period of history and literature: the age of great nautical exploration. In particular, young Tom was obsessed with Jules V...

106: Time After Time After Time

May 28, 2021 00:49 - 1 hour - 60.4 MB

How Nicholas Meyer’s other time-travel caper inspired The Voyage Home When Nicholas Meyer was called in to write a new script for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, just weeks before pre-production was due to begin, he must have been struck with a bad case of déjà vu. Leonard Nimoy explained that the story outline he would be working from involved the crew of the Enterprise traveling back to present-day San Francisco for a nice fish-out-of-water comedy. Just a few years earlier, Meyer had made...

105: Room for All Philosophies?

May 08, 2021 09:43 - 1 hour - 70.1 MB

The Scopes Monkey Trial, Inherit the Wind, and DS9’s “In the Hands of the Prophets.” The trial of US high school teacher John Scopes in 1925 was perhaps the definitive 20th-century showdown between religion and science. Indicted for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in defiance of creationist state law, Scopes turned the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, into the center of a political carnival. Household names headed up the legal teams on both sides, vast crowds packed into the courthou...

104: Absolute Horror

April 15, 2021 00:04 - 1 hour - 50.5 MB

Suspiria and “Cold Fire” Despite being teased in the series premiere, it took Star Trek: Voyager well over a year to actually introduce its female caretaker, a being with the power to send the ship home on a whim. And when the entity did appear, in the second-season episode “Cold Fire,” she turned out to have a surprising and distinctly sinister name: Suspiria. An apparent reference to Dario Aregnto’s 1977 film of the same name, in which a young ballet student stumbles into a coven of witc...

103: What’s in a Name, Part VII

April 01, 2021 01:42 - 2 hours - 104 MB

Episode titles since 2009. Concluding our look at Star Trek’s 800-plus episode titles to date, in this episode of Primitive Culture host Duncan Barrett is joined by Tony Black to consider naming strategies for the Kelvin films, Short Treks, Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks. What exactly lies “beyond” the final frontier? Can magic really make the sanest man go mad? And how moist can a vessel get before it becomes little more than broken pieces? Host Duncan Barrett Guest Tony Black...

102: And Then I Woke Up and It Was All a Dream

February 22, 2021 08:22 - 1 hour - 68.6 MB

The original reset button. It’s one of the oldest of literary tropes: a sudden, last-minute reveal that an apparent fictional reality is actually doubly invented. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on, writers have thrilled in pulling the rug out from under readers and characters alike, allowing carefully constructed scenarios to collapse like a house of cards as their protagonists awake from an alarmingly realistic fantasy. The medical drama St. Elsewhere went as far as to imply that ...

101: What’s in a Name, Part VI

January 17, 2021 14:20 - 2 hours - 85.8 MB

Episode titles in Voyager and Enterprise. Does hubris always lead to nemesis? What can you see in a mirror, darkly? And how do you know when you’ve finally reached the endgame? In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Tony Black to continue our look at Star Trek episode titles as we wrap up Voyager, Enterprise, and the Next Generation films. Host Duncan Barrett Guest Tony Black Production Tony Black (Editor) Duncan Barrett (Producer) C Bryan Jones (E...

100: Champagne and Confetti

December 23, 2020 14:12 - 1 hour - 79 MB

Milestone Episodes of Star Trek. For most TV shows, making it to the one-hundredth episode is a significant achievement. In the Star Trek franchise, only the three 1990s spinoffs—The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager were able to reach this milestone. But collectively, more than half a century since Gene Roddenberry’s original show debuted in 1966, the nine series that now comprise Star Trek are about to deliver their 800th installment. In this episode of Primitive Culture, h...

99: Workers of All Worlds Unite

December 06, 2020 14:20 - 1 hour - 58 MB

A Marxist analysis of “Bar Association,” with Will Nguyen. From lowly dogsbody to Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Alliance, Quark’s brother Rom went on quite a journey during Deep Space Nine’s seven seasons. Perhaps the most pivotal moment for the character came in the episode “Bar Association,” in which Rom outrages Ferengi custom by setting up a union for the bar staff. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Will Nguyen, better known online as The Trekkie Com...

98: What’s in a Name, Part V

November 22, 2020 03:18 - 2 hours - 84.9 MB

Episode titles up to “What You Leave Behind” When is a scorpion not just a scorpion? What wrongs are darker than death or night? And what happens when you cross a dark frontier to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? In this episode of Primitive Culture, we continue our trek through Star Trek’s episode titles as host Duncan Barrett is joined by Lee Hutchison for a look at the final seasons of Deep Space Nine and the middle years of Voyager. Host Duncan Barrett Guest Lee Hutc...

97: Back from the Brink (Reissue)

November 06, 2020 08:40 - 47 minutes - 33.4 MB

Dan Davidson on how “Captive Pursuit” saved his life. For many fans, Star Trek has been a force for good in their lives—but few can say with certainty that they wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for their favorite show. In this episode of Primitive Culture, a supplement to the previous episode’s look at suicide in Star Trek, host Duncan Barrett shares an interview he conducted last year with Dan Davidson. Twenty years ago, Dan was on the point of ending his own life when the Deep Space ...

96: A Very Human Ending

October 31, 2020 10:19 - 1 hour - 77.4 MB

For Starfleet officers, saving lives is perhaps the most important part of the job, even more so than exploring the galaxy and making contact with new civilizations. So when a character such as Quinn, the Q in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Death Wish,” chooses to end their own life, it invariably comes as a shock—just as, in our own lives, the death of a loved one by suicide can be a particularly disturbing loss. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Clar...

95: What’s in a Name, Part IV

October 22, 2020 13:52 - 2 hours - 93.4 MB

Episode titles from “The Search” to *Star Trek: First Contact*. As we continue our voyage through Star Trek’s episode titles, host Duncan Barrett is joined in this episode of Primitive Culture by Lee Hutchison for a look at some more episode titles from Deep Space Nine and Voyager. What exactly is the way of a warrior? How hard is it to fit through the eye of a needle? And where’s the right place to go looking for par’Mach, after all? Host Duncan Barrett Guest Lee Hutchison Produc...

94: Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?

September 27, 2020 02:35 - 1 hour - 65.4 MB

McCarthy, The Crucible, and “The Drumhead” In 1953, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible used the Salem witch trials of 1692–93 as an allegory for the contemporary persecution of alleged communists by US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Four decades later, the Star Trek: Next Generation episode “The Drumhead” drew on both the legacy of McCarthyism—as the senator’s search for communists in the US government came to be dubbed—and Miller’s play to craft a caution...

93: What’s in a Name, Part III

September 17, 2020 14:38 - 2 hours - 57.2 MB

Episode titles from “Emissary” to “All Good Things … “ As we continue our voyage through Star Trek’s episode titles, host Duncan Barrett is joined in this episode of Primitive Culture by Lee Hutchison for a look at the tail end of The Next Generation and the early years of Deep Space Nine. What happens when wishes become horses? To whose own self must we be true? And do all good things really have to come to an end? Chapters Intro (00:00:00) Undiscovered Countries (00:08:10) Emissary ...

92: It’s Alive!

August 13, 2020 07:16 - 1 hour - 37.4 MB

Frankenstein and the Star Trek universe. Originally published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking gothic novel Frankenstein has been a major influence on many works of dystopian science fiction—so much so that many critics argue she invented the genre. Star Trek itself has borrowed from the literary masterpiece—as well as it’s most famous film adaptation—on numerous occasions, from Guinan joking that the eponymous scientist was an old friend in “Evolution” to the crew of the NX-01 bicke...

91: What’s in a Name, Part II

August 06, 2020 14:28 - 1 hour - 54.5 MB

Episode titles in The Animated Series and The Next Generation. As we continue our look at Star Trek episode titles, host Duncan Barrett is joined in this episode of Primitive Culture by Tony Black for a look at the naming strategies of The Animated Series and The Next Generation. Did Michael Piller really put an end to the era of the poetic, evocative title, or did TNG simply find other ways to play with the weekly nomenclature? What is sharper than a serpent’s tooth? Just who does watch t...

90: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die

July 23, 2020 07:06 - 1 hour - 33.1 MB

Talking Horror with Brannon Braga. In space, no one can hear you scream. And while the well-lit corridors of a Federation starship may seem worlds away from the grimy darkness of the Nostromo, even Starfleet’s best and brightest are sometimes caught in the grip of a full on horrorfest. Perhaps no one in Star Trek’s history has penned more chilling and gruesome tales than Brannon Braga, whose hundred-odd franchise installments run the gamut from spine-tinglers such as “Schisms” and “Frame o...

89: What’s in a Name, Part I

July 16, 2020 02:04 - 1 hour - 50.5 MB

Episode Titles in The Original Series. “What’s in a name?” Juliet demands of Romeo. “That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” In 1968, the Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name” took more than just its title from Shakespeare—it used Juliet’s words as a jumping-off point to consider what makes us human. But it was also characteristic of the Original Series scriptwriters to lean on such rich literary source material when it came time to name this particular episode....

88: You Have to Keep Making the Sausage

July 09, 2020 11:44 - 1 hour - 46.8 MB

Trekonomics, with Manu Saadia. “The economics of the future are somewhat different,” Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells Lily Sloane in Star Trek: First Contact. “You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.” But the “primitive” 21st-century human is instinctively appalled: “No money? You mean you don’t get paid?” To some viewers, the post-scarcity economic system that underpins the Star Trek universe—what author Manu Saadia calls “Trekonomics”—can seem equally baffling. But is the utopian ...

87: Brigadon’t

June 30, 2020 12:57 - 1 hour - 49.7 MB

DS9’s “Meridian” and the 1954 Hollywood musical that inspired it. Perhaps more so than any other Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine leaned heavily for inspiration on the world of 20th-century film. But not every futuristic retooling of a classic movie could reach the heights of “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang,” which we discussed in our previous episode. Perhaps the least-successful of DS9’s cinematic adaptations was the third-season episode “Meridian,” which took its central conceit from the 1954 M...

86: The Best Is Yet to Come

June 13, 2020 00:32 - 1 hour - 48.4 MB

Ocean’s 11 (1960) and “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang.” Long before George Clooney assembled his star-studded gang of high-rolling thieves, the original Danny Ocean—Frank Sinatra—successfully knocked off five casinos in a single night in the original 1960 Ocean’s 11. With help from Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and the rest of the Rat Pack, Sinatra brought his own brand of cool to the caper genre in a film that, arguably, proved more iconic than creatively successful. Three decades later, when the...

85: The End of History

May 30, 2020 09:08 - 1 hour - 57.7 MB

Cold War Détente and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. When Nicholas Meyer returned to the Star Trek cinematic universe with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, he produced one of the franchise’s most flagrant—and successful—examples of “ripped from the headlines” storytelling, reimagining the collapse of the USSR in space. Gorbachev became Gorkon and Chernobyl became Praxis. And, in the story’s imagined cabal, who will stop at nothing to preserve the Cold War status quo, the fi...

84: The Ultimate Family Doctor

May 14, 2020 13:29 - 1 hour - 69.4 MB

Voyager’s “Critical Care” and the current global pandemic. A healthcare system struggling with inadequate resources. Patients dying, untreated, as politicians and administrators grapple with a humanitarian crisis. In some ways, the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Critical Care” seems eerily prescient. Originally intended as classic Trek-style social commentary on the health maintenance organizations that exercise a vise-like grip on the US healthcare system, this dystopian parable has been in...

83: From Nemesis to Hubris

April 30, 2020 01:27 - 2 hours - 84.5 MB

Picard Season 1, Part II. Ancient utopias? Lovecraftian monsters? A quixotic quest, where the windmills may be giants after all? The second half of Picard’s first season continues to draw on a rich well of inspiration. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is once again joined by Tony Black to continue their discussion of the historical and cultural influences on Star Trek: Picard, this time focusing on the back half of the season. From impossible boxes to Arcadian gol...

82: Nothing But Blue Skies

April 23, 2020 13:53 - 2 hours - 84.5 MB

Picard Season 1, Part I. With a Pulitzer Prize-winning author at the helm, it’s perhaps no surprise that the first season of Star Trek: Picard should be one of the richest in Star Trek history, at least in terms of literary, cultural, and historical allusions. From Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel Don Quixote to the Dunkirk evacuation of World War II, the show delights in its real-world reference points. Often, it wears its influences proudly—very much in keeping with showrunner Michael...

REISSUE 81: A History of Cut-and-Paste

April 05, 2020 16:59 - 45 minutes - 31.3 MB

Nicholas Meyer interview: On writing Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. To Star Trek fans, Nicholas Meyer is one of the most highly regarded writers to have played in Gene Roddenberry’s sandbox. As someone with only a passing familiarity with the original 1960s TV series, his outsider’s perspective was invaluable when it came to working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—a film that reinvigorated the franchise after the disappointing performance of The Motion Picture. But Meyer is equally ad...

81: A History of Cut-and-Paste

April 05, 2020 14:58 - 45 minutes - 31 MB

Nicholas Meyer interview: On writing Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. To Star Trek fans, Nicholas Meyer is one of the most highly regarded writers to have played in Gene Roddenberry’s sandbox. As someone with only a passing familiarity with the original 1960s TV series, his outsider’s perspective was invaluable when it came to working on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan—a film that reinvigorated the franchise after the disappointing performance of The Motion Picture. But Meyer is equally ad...

80: The Game

April 03, 2020 03:43 - 2 hours - 83.2 MB

Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes’s famous maxim is one that any self-respecting Starfleet science officer could live by. So it should come as no surprise that Star Trek’s two most-celebrated rational minds—Spock and Data—should both draw comparisons with the great detective. When Spock, in The Undiscovered Country, suggested that Holmes was an ancestor on his human side, the joke was...

79: Previously on Star Trek

March 18, 2020 14:10 - 1 hour - 72.4 MB

The Legacy of The Original Series. Of all Star Trek’s live-action iterations, it was The Original Series that was cut short the soonest, managing just three seasons and 79 episodes before succumbing to the axe of cancelation. But as Star Trek was reborn time and again over the ensuing 50 years, those 79 episodes have remained a touchstone for the almost 700 that have followed. But throughout the 1990s, as Star Trek attempted to chart a new course, the relationship between old and new was a...

78: Reigning in Hell

March 06, 2020 13:04 - 1 hour - 53 MB

The Eugenics Wars, with Greg Cox. For a high-tech futuristic utopia, the United Federation of Planets can seem surprisingly cautious when it comes to new technologies. Time and again, Star Trek has played out the science fiction staple of technology run amok. In some cases, the response we have seen has been a kind of retrenchment, a refusal to make use of certain technologies because of their perceived moral cost. The complex web of problems surrounding the banning of synthetic lifeforms...

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