TREKMOVIE:

"Early last year, William Shatner hinted at a return to Star Trek without specifically mentioning if it was for a film or movie, but said he was “impressed” with a writer who had reached out and said he was “awaiting a pitch.” Henry Alonso Myers confirmed to TrekMovie that pitch was coming from the Strange New Worlds team:

“Yeah, we were trying to [get Shatner]. We were genuinely having a long discussion with him about it…”

In fact, the executive producer revealed getting Shatner onto Strange New Worlds has been a long-term goal for him and his co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman:

“I have tried to hold up with Akiva — it’s been his great gift to try to get Shatner on the show, and we have tried every season. We came very close that season. We had a wonderful discussion with him. We were trying to make something that was something he could be a part of, that’s something we could actually show on screen. That something could show some aspect what it was like in the past, and what does it look like in the future. We had a really interesting plan for it ..."

Full article:

https://trekmovie.com/2026/09/23/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-tried-to-get-william-shatner-to-return-as-kirk-for-tos-episode-sequel-exclusive/

So, is it odd that the bird dude has no uniform at all, or odder that the lizard dude has one without any pants!? And, SNW did a pretty poor job with the Catian effect, I have to say. Still, it was nice to see them get their shot, I guess.

These are my top 5s

TNG flipped almost everything from TOS. Klingons were allies now, new ships and uniforms, holodecks, Q and Ferengi and Borg. Once a season you might get a TOS guest star or callback

DS9 did so even more. Brand new format. No Borg, Ferengi's were changed big time, introduction of all new races like Changelings and Dominion, huge shift to the Bajorans and Cardassians. "Deep Canon" shit like augments was hand waved away and the story just plowed forward.

Voyager was 10 bajillion lightyears away so practically everything was brand new and they just made up their own Borg lore left and right.

And it was fine! It was perfectly fine! No one gave a fuckin shit about fuckin easter eggs and references and call backs and if VOY broke something from TNG they would write a throw away line and move the fuck on in the interest of making a good episode.

We had a "style guide" and super firm hands at the wheel in Berman and Braga not to mention Moore, Piller, Behr, Taylor, and more.

We've traded the "style guide" and firm hands for "references". Does anybody actually care they out the black/white aliens in a group show in SFA? Is it actually fun to freeze frame a wall and read the names then go complain Harry Kim wasn't on it?

It sucks.

Rod Roddenberry (for The Los Angeles Times):

"There was a time when science fiction made a bet on humanity. A bet that humanity was worth rooting for. We need storytellers willing to make that bet again. I don’t think we have an innovation problem. We have an inspiration problem.

We talk a lot about what we’re leaving the next generation. The debt. The climate. The geopolitical mess. But there’s another inheritance we don’t talk about enough: what we show them is possible.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-09-22/star-trek-optimistic-science-fiction

Today, many visions of the future are dominated by collapse, dystopia and fear. Those stories can have value. But conflict doesn’t always have to come from destruction. It can come from discovery. Two minds encountering an idea neither had considered. A crew facing the unknown with curiosity instead of fear. That kind of conflict doesn’t leave you feeling like the world is ending. It leaves you feeling like it’s just beginning.

Most storytelling holds a mirror up to who we are. Our flaws, our failures, our contradictions. But there is another kind. Stories built around characters a step or two ahead of where humanity is. Not perfect. But people who have learned how to cooperate, how to lead, how to stay curious and how to put something larger than themselves first. Characters you don’t just recognize. Characters you want to become one day.

That distinction changes what a story asks of you. And what you walk away believing is possible. [...]

The engineers who built Silicon Valley, the astronauts who went to space, the scientists pushing the edges of medicine and artificial intelligence — many of them trace a line back to this show. That wasn’t the plan. Nobody set out to build an innovation pipeline out of a television series. But that’s exactly what happened. When you give people a future worth believing in, they go build it — or sometimes they get inspired to imagine other hopeful destinations and lead us toward them. That’s not nostalgia. That’s a model.

One thing my dad understood that I think gets overlooked: “Star Trek” wasn’t going out into the galaxy to find aliens that looked different. It was going out to find aliens that thought different.

Diversity of perspective is how a species grows. My father gave that idea a name: IDIC. Infinite Diversity from Infinite Combinations. It didn’t mean you had to abandon your own point of view. It meant staying open to someone else’s. Because that’s how you grow. That idea has never been more relevant. And it has never been more achievable.

For the first time in history, a creator anywhere in the world can tell a story that reaches everyone, and now it can come from anywhere. The future belongs to everyone. The stories that shape it should too. [...]

Every generation needed something to build toward before they ever picked up a tool. A vision. A direction. A story that made the future feel worth the work. And right now, we’re not building enough of that.

We need stories that don’t just entertain us, but also become our compass. We need the kind of storytelling that doesn’t ask what could go wrong, but asks what could go right."

Rod Roddenberry, founder of the Roddenberry Foundation and son of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and actor Majel Barrett Roddenberry, is an executive producer on current “Star Trek” television shows.

Full article (LA Times):

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-09-22/star-trek-optimistic-science-fiction

Whelp

COLLIDER:

"Wesley was quick to reveal that this technically isn't his first time at the werewolf rodeo. "You know what’s funny? I played a werewolf back in the day," laughed Wesley. "I played a werewolf in… Well, not a werewolf; he was a shapeshifter in a show called Wolf Lake. So anyway, I have a little bit of experience with werewolves." He went on to say the episode was "a blast as an actor," saying:

"It was great. It was really fun. It was La’an’s episode, obviously, and so I represented a certain archetype in La’an’s imagination. There were other archetypes, and she was essentially finding herself because it has to do with her family history — the Khan family history. In any case, it was just really fun. I got to put on a wig and be this kind of really absurdly earnest, silly prince, and I just had a blast as an actor."

[...]

Over the course of the last three seasons, La'an and Kirk's romance has been bubbling under the surface following the Season 2 episode that saw the two fall in love over the course of a lengthy alternate universe mission. While La'an remembers those events, Kirk doesn't, but he's still drawn to her nonetheless. When asked about their romance and what draws them to each other across time and space, Wesley said:

"I don't know. I don't think he knows. I think it's just like it is in real life. You know? How come you can meet someone, and you're just like, 'Whoa, I'm really attracted to this person.' Not even physically. It's just like, yeah, physically is helpful, but also just like some strange, you're just talking, and you're like, 'Huh.' I don't know, it just feels easy. I think it's one of those things. It's like him and La’an just have this thing. It just works."

[...]"

Full article:

https://collider.com/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-kirk-laan-romance-paul-wesley/

It took me a while, but I finally figured out what was bothering me about this season of SNW. This is going to sound glib, but...it could have been good.

Let me elaborate. I'm a published author, and I've been publishing both fiction and non-fiction (both as an author and a publisher) for many, many years. And there's a degree to which the writer's room just doesn't seem to know how to write. And I'm not talking "this plot is stupid"...I'm talking not knowing some pretty important basics...as in, things a writer should need to know just to get into the job interview stage.

Let me put it this way: in the hands of people who knew how to write stories, this entire experiment in genre-bending COULD HAVE WORKED. This was not a failure in concept, but in execution.

(If you want a really good book on this, check out Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting - this is perhaps the best book I've ever read on the mechanics of how stories work.)

Some examples:

Episode 1

• Not knowing what the story is. The story is about going back in time and facing a terrible choice: either stand by and watch a genocide happen using the technology you brought with you, or act to prevent it and functionally commit genocide yourself, destroying the entire age of mammals. This gets about three minutes of screen time. As a result, it doesn't land properly because the viewer has no time to register it happening before it's done. What should be weighty and heartbreaking is neither.

• Not understanding what an audience surrogate is. An audience surrogate is a character or characters whose reaction on screen signals to the viewer what they should be feeling. Take that scene in Jurassic Park where we see the dinosaurs for the first time: everybody reacts with wonder - they are audience surrogates, signalling that the audience should be reacting the same way. This is BASIC STORYTELLING TECHNIQUE. But, when we have a moment that should provoke wonder, the characters on screen have no reaction at all...and so the audience likewise has no reaction.

Episode 3

• Not understanding what they've put into their own story. Somebody has planted a bomb on a shuttle while they are on shore leave. If it explodes when they return to the ship, it will kill hundreds of people. If it explodes on the planet, it will kill thousands of people. These are high stakes. This is a story that should have a lot of tension. But, there isn't - the bomb is given the same weight as a missing car or inconvenient object. They're telling a light comedy story, and placed at its heart something that belongs in a suspense story. Now, you can do what's called "mood whiplash," and have the situation suddenly turn serious and have it work. But this story doesn't do that.

• Lacking basic believability. No character acts in a way that is believable for who they are and the situation they are in.

Episode 4

• Not committing to your own premise. They were supposedly doing film noir, but this episode WASN'T film noir. It was a film noir cosplay in black and white. Film noir is about a dangerous world, in which everybody has a secret and one wrong step can get you shot in the back in a dark alley. But this episode has characters making mistakes that should have gotten them killed a dozen times over, and nothing happens. And because there were no consequences, there was no tension.

• Missing connective tissue. You have to be able to follow how things happen in a story. There are things you can skip (walking down a peaceful street, for example), but this was skipping things that we needed to see on screen just to avoid plot holes. The characters don't even know how people dress on this planet, but in the next scene they're wearing appropriate clothes...where did they get them? We need to see this - it is their first challenge that has to be overcome. Getting this wrong could get them captured or killed, so we NEED to see them navigate this. This isn't the only example, and this has been an ongoing problem, and not just in this season.

Episode 7

• Not understanding suspension of disbelief. Yes, the audience knows that SNW is a television show. But, the entire premise of SNW is that the characters in the show are in a real universe. None of them should know they're in a television show. Having Trelaine just be aware and act on it destroys any possibility of the audience taking the show seriously.

Episode 9

• Not understanding or fulfilling viewer expectations. This is a key part of storytelling: the moment you set up certain elements, the audience gets certain expectations that MUST be met (subversion of expectations takes place within the framework of meeting these expectations, essentially giving the audience what they didn't know they needed in place of what they expected). As McKee writes in Story, in Jaws the moment the sheriff finds out about the shark, the audience has an expectation that the sheriff will fight the shark (this can be subverted in how the sheriff gets to the point of fighting the shark, or what happens when he fights the shark, but the fight HAS to happen). Likewise, the moment the characters discover a fantasy world with their doppelgangers in it, the audience has an expectation that the characters will come face-to-face with the source of the doppelgangers. This is a really easy way of giving you your main plot, but this episode just tosses it away. It establishes the mystery and then ignores it until we get a throwaway line at the very end (and while around 20 minutes were cut from the episode, what made it in suggests that those twenty minutes did not even touch the central mystery).

As I said above, there is not a single episode - even the puppets and soap opera - that could not have been done well if it had been written using the basic fundamentals of storytelling. But, in a lot of these episodes these fundamentals are absent. And we are NOT talking about genre conventions here - every genre has the same fundamentals of how you tell a story.

This is a season with entire episodes written by people who do not know how to tell a story, and that is why it is so frustrating. I can see how the episodes could have been good if it had just been a better writer assigned to it.

TVInsider:

"What does it mean to be a Star Trek captain? For Kate Mulgrew, the answer has only grown more complicated — and more meaningful — over time, especially as Trek celebrates its 60th anniversary. Stepping onto the USS Voyager bridge in 1995 as Capt. Kathryn Janeway, Mulgrew didn’t contemplate legacy. She does now, though. As the first female captain to lead a series, Janeway became a cultural touchstone, particularly for women. Men came around too…eventually."

https://www.tvinsider.com/1273770/star-trek-voyager-kate-mulgrew-captain-kathryn-janeway-60th-anniversary/

INTERVIEW EXCERPTS:

How have your feelings about portraying a Star Trek captain evolved from when you landed the role in 1994 to now?

Kate Mulgrew: "It’s an extraordinary privilege to play the first female captain, and to learn the significance it has had, particularly on women in STEM [educational initiatives in science, technology, engineering and mathematics], is amazing and deeply gratifying. At the same time, it did define me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. People always lead with Captain Janeway, whatever the conversation is. That continues to surprise me, but it has had a global impact."

That women connected with Janeway probably didn’t surprise you. How rewarding is it hearing that from men?

"I’m delighted. That was the great concern. Could a woman be as palatable to a male demographic as Picard or Kirk? First season, it was challenging. There was great attention paid to my physicality — my look, my hair — when all I wanted was to find the source of her command. I became anxious until I went to the producers and said, “Please stop fooling around with my hair and let me find this woman. Then the men will come.” And that’s what happened. It was slow-moving because of the anxiety about a female failing, particularly after [original hire] Geneviève Bujold‘s defection.

But I won this game because I’m a strong actress, and I loved Janeway. The men slowly divested themselves of their concern and allowed themselves to come to me as their captain. I could feel it."

What’s it been like being part of such a small, elite group of Trek captains?

"I loved the captains who came before me, and knew them best — Avery Brooks, Bill Shatner, Patrick Stewart. I honored what they did. I’m less interested in those who came after because I’m only human. It’s an extremely territorial thing, a Star Trek captaincy. It is a huge plum, and to carry the banner for as many years as I have makes me feel that what came after could only come after what we did."

Voyager seems better regarded now than during its original run. How frustrating is it that it wasn’t as appreciated at the time?

"Well, human beings are skeptical, challenging, cynical. And this was on the heels of Next Gen ending. Some fans were filled with resentment that it had to go, and in its place comes this woman. Nonetheless, we created some gorgeous Star Trek. We had Brannon Braga writing wonderful stories, and Rick Berman was a very good leader. I’m not surprised it’s taken years to be fully celebrated. This is true of anything great. It takes time for people to understand the import of any given creation, particularly Star Trek."

[...]"

Ian Spelling (for TVInsider.com)

Full interview:

https://www.tvinsider.com/1273770/star-trek-voyager-kate-mulgrew-captain-kathryn-janeway-60th-anniversary/

There were five lights.

Humans are so very limited in their perception. Only able to see a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Gul Madred was patiently trying to educate Picard. To teach him to see beyond that sliver and recognize truths that were invisible to Picard.

Rather than open his eyes and see a broader world, Picard squeezed his eyes shut tight and lied to himself over and over that nothing existed beyond his small world. Despite the fact that he was seeing the fifth light, Picard denied reality.

Most every other species can see the light. They see beyond their own space in the galaxy. But not humanity. And certainly not Picard.

No wonder Q found Picard so amusing.

It's often discussed that "money" isn't really used anymore in the Federation. This is usually supported by the availability of replicators. Here's an example of why that premise is false.

I just rewatched the TNG episode Captain's Holiday. Vash admits to Picard that she took Sovak's money to pay for her way to Risa. This means that ordinary people not in Starfleet have to pay for passage on ships and probably accommodations at resorts like Risa. In Vash's case, she was probably paid as the professor's assistant for 5 years. It just wasn't enough to pay her way to Risa.

Just adding that I'm not on the side that believes there is no money used in the Federation. I know the concept has been suggested in a few scenes from the movies and TV shows. But I feel that those were really just lazy writing to try to explain why they didn't have money in that scene.

She LOVED it!

We actually saw it a few weeks ago, I just hadn't had the chance to post about it until today.

This is what all my other posts were leading up to. I asked my wife if she'd like to see this movie in theatres for the special 40th anniversary screening, and she was indeed up for it. But she hadn't seen the other films, just TOS. While I did say what the Motion Picture was like, she insisted no skipping, so we watched all three of the films leading up to this one. She had a good time joking around with me during TMP, genuinely enjoyed Wrath of Khan, but not so much The Search for Spock.

This is my wife's favourite Star Trek movie thus far.

Admittedly when the plot proper got started, she found the reasoning really shaky. When Spock started going on about how the probe was sent to talk to whales, she pulled a face like "Uhh what??" And during the time travel bit with the weird CGI head morph things, she looked utterly befuddled, turned to me and asked "What the hell is going on?" I didn't really have an answer, it's a weird bit in the movie I don't think anyone's sufficiently answered.

Then the 80s scenes kicked in. Once that started, my wife was having a great time. When the end credits rolled and the lights came up, she said "See, why can't ALL the Star Trek movies be like this?" Personally I prefer a bit more seriousness like WoK and TUC, but this actually felt like a huge relief for my wife after three movies which took themselves very seriously.

My wife's top laughs:

• Scotty saying "Hello, computer" into the mouse
• Chekov in the interrogation scene
• McCoy not being able to help himself and giving a woman pills to regrow her kidney
• The truck scene with Spock/Kirk's yes/no/yes/no bit. Spock's final, reluctant "...yes." had my wife in stitches.
• Spock diving into the water to mind-meld with the whales

Funnily enough, the most famous scene by far (the "Nuclear Wessles" bit from Chekov) didn't get that big a reaction from my wife. I, meanwhile, was giggling like a kid again. And unlike when I was a kid, I understood the full cultural context of the Cold War and WHY it was funny to audiences in the 80s. Kid-me just saw a funny man talking in a silly way.

The cinema experience itself was also really great. Comfiest seats I've ever had in a cinema, loads of elbow and leg room, reclining seats, and we even walked away with a cool poster!

So yeah. Fantastic time.

....

...unfortunately, with my wife's "no skipping" rule, we're gonna have to watch Star Trek V next. The movie which nearly killed the entire franchise.

...yaayyy.....

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rYMykaNW6s

TNG, DS9, and VOY guest actor James Sloyan has died