Star Trek: Short Treks - Season 2 Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've got a whole batch of reviews for you! Short ones.

I don't know if Short Treks comes in seasons, but I'm calling this 'season two' just to keep things organised. In fact I don't even know if this is considered to be a separate series to Star Trek: Discovery these days. I went into it assuming it had become its own thing, seeing as none of these stories feature the USS Discovery or her crew (except for young Burnham), but it's still got the same Discovery-style title with the starship herself flying past, and it's still got the same theme, so I don't even know.

One thing I do know is that all these episodes were put together with the season one stories and released on Blu-Ray together... except for Children of Mars. So now I'm wondering if that's its own thing. It doesn't have the Short Treks title sequence on it and it has a version of the Picard theme playing over the end credits, so is it actually episode 1 of Short Picard Treks? Are we going to be getting Short Lower Decks Treks next year?

Anyway, I'm just going to write about all of the latest Trek shorts without worrying about what counts. Beyond this point you will find six separate reviews, each of them written back when I first saw the episode and packed with general Star Trek SPOILERS.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian - Season 1 Review

The week on Sci-Fi Adventures... is going to be the last week for a while I'm afraid. I'll be writing about video games on Super Adventures instead for the next two months so that hopefully I don't go insane. But before that I'm going to be sharing my thoughts about season one of The Mandalorian, the very first live action Star Wars TV series!

Man, it took them bloody long enough. Star Trek made the jump from live action series to movies 13 years after it first premiered, but it took Star Wars 42 years to do the opposite! On the other end of the scale, Doctor Who and Firefly hit cinemas just 3 years after their first episodes aired, which is the same amount of time that Stargate took to evolve into a TV franchise. Even Lost in Space beats Star Wars, as it got a movie after 33 years (then jumped back to TV 20 years later). Plus if you count TV movies, Babylon 5 progressed from pilot movie to series after just a year, Battlestar Galactica got a film after 29 years, and Red Dwarf actually got its promised movie after 32 years. Okay I'm done now.

Wait, Indiana Jones (11 years). Sorry, now I'm done.

The reason a Star Wars series took so long to get made is that they were waiting for the technology to make it possible to produce on a TV schedule and budget. George Lucas actually had something like 40-50 scripts for a show called Star Wars: Underworld (from writers like DS9/BSG's Ronald D. Moore), which was planned to be produced in the late 2000s, but it just wasn't time yet. Lucasfilm apparently took some of the story concepts and ideas and put them into things like Rebels, Rogue One and Solo instead. It turns out the technology they needed was a set made of giant LED walls featuring a resolution high enough for them to be used for both lighting and as the backdrop, with the scenery rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 4 so that the parallax is always correct from the camera's point of view. But they've got that now, so it's cool.

Anyway, I wrote these reviews right after watching the episodes so if I sound like I don't know what's coming next, that's because I actually didn't at the time. There'll be SPOILERS here for the whole first season and maybe a few of the movies, so I recommend you stop reading here if that's going to be a problem.

The Orville: Season 2 Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm demonstrating my ongoing commitment to occasionally posting something to this site that isn't Babylon 5 related by sharing my opinions on some Orville episodes! Not full scene-by-scene recaps or analysis, just opinions.

In fact I'll be writing about the entirety of season two in one go, all 14 episodes from Ja'loja to The Road Not Taken, so for both our sakes I'll be keeping my reviews brief. Though to be honest, I actually wrote about each episode right after watching them, so if it seems like I'm clueless about where the season's going, that's because I was.

Warning: there may be SPOILERS for for both seasons of The Orville, and I'm also going to be talking about the fates of certain Star Trek: The Next Generation characters and a particular notorious plot development in Star Trek: Discovery's first season. Being any less vague would be a spoiler.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 2 Review - Part 4

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've ran out of Star Trek: Discovery episodes to review, so now I'm reviewing the series' second season overall. That's 12 or so hours of television, so it's lucky for me I've got a good memory. Wait, I forgot to include the Short Treks in that... or shouldn't they count?

Star Trek spin-offs have rarely had much luck with their second seasons, despite the 'Growing the Beard' trope getting its name from Will Riker's season 2 look, as at this point they were typically still sorting themselves out both in front of and behind the scenes. Sure their first seasons were often worse, but Trek's sophomore seasons have been plenty awkward in their own right. Discovery found itself with a new showrunner five episodes into the season, so it's been living up to Trek tradition behind the camera, but was its second year enough of a mess on screen for it to truly be considered proper Star Trek?

Honestly I don't think Discovery is set up in a way that allows it to fail as spectacularly as previous series, as it has much shorter seasons and it's too serialised. Sure it can put out some rubbish, but it just doesn't have what it takes to produce episodes as legendarily terrible as The Omega Glory, The Outrageous Okona, Threshold or A Night in Sickbay. And unless the budget gets slashed, there's no way it'll ever inflict a Shades of Gray style clip show on us either.

Though does that mean this has actually has a shot at being the best second season a Trek series has ever had? Is this block of episodes really capable of going up against the seasons that gave us The Trouble with Tribbles, The Measure of a Man, Whispers, Projections, and Regeneration? I am going to answer that question for you! Eventually. After I've rambled on about Michael Burnham and time travel for ages first.

I'll also be dropping SPOILERS for the whole season, from Brother to Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2, and maybe some older Trek as well, so if you haven't seen it yet you should probably go watch it first. Unless you don't care about having the whole plot ruined for you; I know some people aren't really that bothered.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 2 Review - Part 3

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing the second half of Star Trek: Discovery's second season! That's If Memory Serves to Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2, all created during Alex Kurtzman's time as the show's showrunner. He was already the executive producer, plus he's the guy in charge of all the other new Trek projects being set up, but after five episodes he took the reins on Discovery personally, like an admiral or commodore taking command of a starship. Which usually goes pretty well in Star Trek to my recollection.

All these reviews were written right after I watched the episode and the next time trailer, so you're getting my first reactions and genuine predictions. You're getting SPOILERS as well, and not just for Discovery as I'm considering the rest of Trek to be fair game as well. Especially the Kelvin Timeline movies.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 2 Review - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's my second part of my Star Trek: Discovery season 2 review; the part where I actually start to review actual episodes of Discovery's actual second season instead of the Short Treks! 

Below this introduction you'll find reviews for the first seven episodes of the second season, Brother to Light and Shadows, basically covering the time that season one showrunners Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts still shared the captain's chair. Before they were kicked out for yelling at writers and spending too much money, or whatever actually happened there.

These reviews were all written right after I watched each episode, so you're getting my first impressions and legitimate cluelessness. You're also getting SPOILERS for each episode and I'm considering the rest of Trek to be fair game as well. Plus somewhere in here you'll find a free bonus spoiler for the Ray Bradbury story A Sound of Thunder (hint: it's in my review for The Sound of Thunder).

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 2 Review - Part 1

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I vaguely remember mentioning that I wasn't going to be reviewing Star Trek: Discovery's second season, but I went and did it anyway. I can't help myself.

Nothing's been going exactly as I planned to be honest. I decided to nick the format from my Doctor Who review marathon from last year and cover a whole season of episodes in a page of micro-reviews to save myself a lot of work. Unfortunately my brain didn't cooperate and hundreds of words came spilling out as usual, and I realised that if I put all the text I'd written into one long article it would be one long article.

So I've split the season up into four parts instead, which is still considerably less than the 15 it could've been. Well, 19 actually, as this first part features tiny reviews for the four tiny Short Treks that came out before the season began. I'm not sure if Short Treks is technically a separate series or not, but the episodes have a similar title sequence, they feature Discovery characters, two are set on the ship itself and they've all got the same style. So I'm including them.

I actually wrote these reviews up right after watching each episode, with no knowledge about what was going to happen next beyond what was in the trailers, so I can promise genuine confusion and wrong guesses. This also means there'll be SPOILERS for each episode, and the Trek that precedes them, but I won't be spoiling what happens next. Because at the time I didn't know.

Doctor Who (2005) - New Year's Day 2019: Resolution (Quick Review)

Episode:

851

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Serial:

287

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Writer:

Chris Chibnall

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Air Date:

01-Jan-2019

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I hope you weren't looking forward to that Doctor Who series 11 review I promised, because this ain't that. I got distracted with other things and ran out of December to put it in. I believe I also mentioned that I might not be reviewing the New Year's special because I'd written about enough Doctor Who already, but that was before they revealed that this was going to be the only episode aired in all of 2019. How am I suppose to leave it out now? What sort of a monster would go from An Unearthly Child to the very latest season (skipping a year or ten along the way) and then stop exactly one episode before the end?

I kind of assumed that we were done with year-long breaks in between seasons now that the series has a different showrunner who's not trying to write Sherlock at the same time, but I guess that's just how the series is these days. The only difference is that in the Chris Chibnall era we get the one-off episode on New Year's Day instead of Christmas Day, because after thirteen consecutive Christmas specials they've used up every possible way of shoehorning Christmas into a Doctor Who story. Which means no more Christmasified opening titles! No opening titles at all in fact, for perhaps the third time ever in the series' history.

Resolution is also unique among Thirteenth Doctor stories as right now it's the first and only episode to allow anything major from an earlier season to return. Series 11 was very much about the new, with new actors, monsters, writers, a new visual effects house and a new composer, but this episode brings back director Wayne Yip! Also the antagonist might be a bit familiar too but I'll not spoil that here.

All my SPOILERS are safely contained below the next screencap, so continue at your own risk.