There’s an episode of Star Trek Continues that made me want to say “We’re better than that in real life already.” And then I dragged my feet on posting this review after the election, and now I think maybe we’re not better than that in real life just yet. I’ll delve into that episode after some background on Star Trek Continues and skimming over the previous episodes.
To Paramount executives, Star Trek is a cash cow, and they seem to consider the fans to be idiots who will pay for whatever Star Trek content the studio produces, like Angela Collier in her 4-hour rant about Star Trek: Picard. To some Star Trek fans, Star Trek is almost a holy scripture that of late has become barnacled with apocrypha.
Maybe there is an antidote to the Paramount+ cash grab of new Star Trek shows that don’t quite seem to align with Gene Roddenberry’s vision. That antidote might just be a fan production that you can watch for free on YouTube (though bedeviled with annoyingly timed ads).
Although Star Trek Continues does boast a few people from “official” Star Trek in its cast and crew, it is not an official Star Trek production, but it does respect canon established during original series creator Gene Roddenberry’s lifetime.
It is important for any writer working in a franchise to respect established canon. To disregard established canon runs the risk of directly contradicting an earlier episode or movie, breaking the suspension of disbelief. Fans tend to be less willing to forgive factual contradictions than they are to forgive taking known characters in unexpected directions.
The original mission of the Enterprise commanded by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) was supposed to be a 5-year mission, but Star Trek only lasted three seasons, and thus presumably only covers the first three years of the 5-year mission.
So the idea of Star Trek Continues then is that it covers the last two years of the 5-year mission. Vic Mignona stars as Captain Kirk, and it looks like he wrote almost all the episodes… and he also edits the audio and video?
The best episode of Star Trek Continues in my opinion is “The Fairest of Them All,” which is set in the Mirror Universe first introduced in the classic Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror.” I completely believe Vic Mignona as the evil Mirror Universe Kirk, but I have trouble believing him as the “prime universe” Kirk.
Spoiler warning. I will freely talk about the endings of episodes of Star Trek Continues, episodes of the original series and maybe also other series predating the CBS All Access/Paramount+ shows.
Part of the problem with this prime universe Kirk is that a lot of his decisions turn out to be inconsequential. In “Lolani,” for example, Kirk decides to disobey a direct order and chase a ship carrying an Orion slave girl (the titular Lolani), to rescue her from slavery. But that ship is destroyed before the Enterprise can rescue anyone off of it.
Or in “Divided We Stand,” Kirk and Dr. McCoy (Chuck Huber) get into a shared coma in which they imagine themselves on opposite sides of the first (and last?) U. S. Civil War. It’s not time travel, so they could change the outcome of the war if they wanted to and it wouldn’t affect the real present.
Or in “Embracing the Winds,” Kirk almost gets the tiebreaker vote as to whether Commander Garrett (Clare Kramer), a woman, will command the USS Hood, but that decision is rendered moot when the Hood blows up before it can be salvaged.
The USS Hood is a derelict ship that the Enterprise goes to recover, while Kirk and Commander Spock (Todd Haberkorn) will go to a starbase for a meeting with Commodore Gray (Erin Gray) and Commander Garrett.
It turns out that Garrett and Spock are the two top choices to be the new captain of the Hood. Kirk seems to think Spock is the best choice, but he wants to keep Spock as his first officer on the Enterprise.
But the Hood was in just too bad a shape to be recovered, and it explodes precisely just before Kirk could cast his vote for the new captain. Kirk’s vote then becomes a hypothetical of interest only to the two captain candidates.
Kirk gets dangerously close to expressing the opinion that a woman should command a Constitution-class starship. Just not whichever woman is being considered right now. There are men in real life who feel that way about the United States having a woman president: it should happen, just not now, not with any of the women currently being considered.
The whole motivation for the episode “Embracing the Winds” was to explain a line in the original series episode “Turnabout Intruder” which Roddenberry himself is said to have acknowledged was simply sexist. “Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women,” Janice Lester (Sandra Smith) says to Kirk in that “classic” episode.
After the successes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, all set roughly a century after the original series, Star Trek: Enterprise was set like a century before the original series, and provided a lot of retroactive continuity for the Star Trek franchise as a whole.
Of all the Star Trek inconsistencies Star Trek: Enterprise tried to smooth over, this one with “Turnabout Intruder” was just not one of them. That a woman, Captain Erica Hernandez (Ada Maris), is chosen to command Starfleet’s second Warp 5-capable starship, about a century before the events of “Turnabout Intruder,” is presented as something completely natural and not requiring any kind of explanation.
Captain Erica Hernandez (Ada Maris) listens to Commander Tucker's recommendations in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Later on in the franchise’s history, there were subtle examples that Starfleet does have women starship captains in Kirk's time, the earliest perhaps being an unnamed captain played by Madge Sinclair in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, though I don’t think she was commanding a Constitution-class starship.
More generally, “The Lorelei Signal” from the animated Star Trek series shows women can be in command at various levels of the hierarchy. And indeed the Enterprise might not have survived the Lorelei incident with an all-male crew.
There has never been an explicit correction in official Star Trek of the mistake of Janice Lester’s infamous “Turnabout Intruder” line. But in my opinion, the whole “Turnabout Intruder” episode is a mistake on so many levels.
Without the context of later Star Trek (the episode was unfortunately the last of the original series), one comes away with the impression that Starfleet forbids women from being starship captains, and the only way for a woman to be a captain is the farfetched notion of switching bodies with a man who’s already a captain. It’s insulting.
The original series episode compounds this insult by showing that this implied ban on women captains is justified when Janice Lester in Captain Kirk’s body cracks under the pressure of command.
That’s one interpretation of the episode, though. Viewed strictly “in-universe,” we can explain away “Turnabout Intruder” as being the experience of one mentally unbalanced individual who would still have been unfit for command if she had been a man instead.
As for the infamous line, we’d do well to remember that fictional characters can speak imprecisely, or they can say false things they believe to be true, and they can even willfully deceive.
There’s a line from “Turnabout Intruder” that has gotten considerably less attention.
Then the infamous line can be understood as an imprecise statement about Kirk’s preference as to which captains he socializes with when he’s in the company of other captains; or it can be that Lester honestly believes women are barred from the captain’s chair but that’s actually false; or she knows this to be false but she says it anyway? We can come up with many explanations of varying plausibility.
None of the official Star Trek writers have felt any need to say which of these explanations is the right one. Starfleet has had women captains since Captain Erika Hernandez of the Columbia NX-02 through Captain Kathryn Janeway of Voyager and for centuries beyond, and in the big picture view of Star Trek it doesn’t really matter why Janice Lester would say otherwise.
Oh, but wait, there’s a line from Kirk that has gotten much less attention, even though it’s the very last line of the original series: “Her life could have been as rich as any woman's, if only. If only.” Instead of refuting the idea that women are not allowed to command starships, canon Kirk affirms it. Kirk is essentially saying that Janice Lester should have pursued ambitions other than being a starship captain. Like maybe being the woman who brings the captain coffee and the duty roster in the morning.
So that’s where Star Trek Continues decided to go. It is true that Starfleet has had women captains for maybe all of its existence, but there are currently no women captains in command of Constitution-class ships like the Enterprise NCC-1701 because… the Tellarites object?
It makes about as much sense as Americans objecting to some other NATO member’s choice of captain for one of their aircraft carriers. Quick, do you know who commands the HMS Queen Elizabeth? Do you even care?
In real life, the United States still do not have a woman president, and for this we can’t blame the Tellarites. Or maybe blaming the Tellarites is more plausible than some of the other reasons that have been given for Vice President Kamala Harris’s tragic loss at the ballot box. For example, Kamala Harris has a weird laugh, so we should vote for the guy who has a weird everything. See? Blaming the Tellarites makes a lot more sense.
Near the end of “Embracing the Winds,” we see a Tellarite explain that he disagrees with a lot of other Tellarites on this issue. But that conversation happens after the Hood blows up. By the way, the Tellarite man looks like a man in a Halloween costume. But Tellarites did not look that much more believable on the original series. Would’ve been better to aim to make them look like the Tellarites in Star Trek: Enterprise.
Not all Star Trek canon is worth all this deference and reverence, certainly not Star Trek Season 3 clunkers like “Spock’s Brain” or “Turnabout Intruder.”
No episode of Star Trek Continues is as bad as “Spock’s Brain,” but that’s damning with faint praise. The worst episodes of Star Trek Continues are merely boring. There’s the Star Trek Continues episode “The White Iris,” in which Kirk forgets his password. This is the episode of Star Trek Continues that most shows that this Kirk is weak and indecisive. If he doesn’t make any bold decisions, maybe he doesn’t violate canon.
But with a billion planets just in our corner of the galaxy in real life, isn’t it possible to just invent a planet the Enterprise hasn’t been to before? The Enterprise enters orbit, then Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down and learn there’s something weird going on with the planet’s inhabitants. Kirk doesn’t like it, so he does something to smash the status quo. That should bring at least a couple of original series episodes to mind.
That’s more or less what happens in the Star Trek Continues episode “What Are Ships for?” The Abicians are supposedly barbarians trying to invade Hylenas, a planet that is also dealing with a viral epidemic (by the way, this episode came out in 2017).
From the Star Trek Continues episode “What Are Ships For?” Sekara (Elizabeth Maxwell) goes through the transporter’s dematerialization and rematerialization just fine, but what she then sees horrifies her.
In that episode, Kirk kisses an Abician woman. It was the first time that Vic Mignona’s prime universe Kirk felt genuine to me. Like, what other facet of Kirk’s would make someone want to take on the rôle of Kirk, write most the episodes and edit all of them?
It still strikes me as a bit odd that Vic Mignona is the editor of this show. Or maybe it was because the crowdfunding campaigns didn’t raise enough to have guest stars like John de Lancie and have a separate person edit the show.
I wanted to like this show, I wanted it to demonstrate that it’s possible to tell interesting new stories about the Enterprise while hewing fairly close to canon. After all, the original series only covers some of the Enterprise’s 5-year mission. The rest of the time they were either scanning uninhabited planets or doing interesting stuff that for whatever reason didn’t make it into an episode. Surely there’s room to tell interesting stories of the Enterprise crew doing consequential things without directly contradicting canon. Star Trek Continues doesn’t really do that.
I give Star Trek Continues ★★★☆☆. There are worse series you could watch. Like Star Trek: Picard (in my opinion). There are also better series.
I think Star Trek: Strange New Worlds strikes a much better balance between doing stand-alone episodes and carrying character arcs without getting bogged down in upholding continuity that is better forgotten. Though on the other hand, I haven’t seen Season 2 yet...
I’d like to hear your thoughts on Star Trek Continues on its own merits and in relation to the original series. But please, let’s keep the bashing of official new Star Trek in the comments to a minimum.
