A Sound of Sheer Silence

Episodes Civilization Fortunate Sun Cold Front Silent Enemy Shadows of P'Jem One of the go-to plot points in Star Trek is time travel.  Of the twelve (12!) Star Trek movies, three of them featured time travel as a core plot point (if you are scoring at home-- Star Trek IV [where Kirk et al. go to modern San Francisco to pick up a whale], Star Trek: First Contact [where Picard et al. go to about 100 years before Enterprise to fight the Borg and watch the meeting with the Vulcans], and the Abrams Star Trek reboot [where the bad guy, and Spock, go back in time to destroy/save Vulcan]. Despite the fact that those three movies are pretty good, I don't really like time travel plots very much.  I understand it is a trope of Star Trek, but like other Star Trek tropes (i.e., "the Holodeck episode"), it has big problems that are baked-into the concept of time travel as a storytelling device.  It's hard to care about the outcome, since any particular resolution i...

Episodes Unexpected Terra Nova The Andorian Incident Breaking the Ice Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Star Trek knows about Spock, the Vulcan (OK, to be pedantic, the half-Vulcan).  Spock, like all Vulcans, is all about logic, making him a little dense to certain kinds of normal human interactions.  Still, Spock is definitely a good guy and a relateable character. Enterprise , at least so far, has really tried to deconstruct that idea, and explore the notion that a species based completely on logic would be kind of obnoxious, even dickish.  The best example of this so far is the episode "The Andorian Incident."  In the episode, Archer decides to pay a visit to a Vulcan monastery, in the hopes of doing some cultural diplomacy.  When he gets there, he, T'Pol, and Trip are taken prisoner by the Andorians, who have occupied the monastery.  If you're curious, the Andorians look like this: The Andorian commander is convinced the Vulcans...

Episodes Broken Bow, Parts I and II (the Pilot) Fight or Flight Strange New World Remember when you got your first car?  Not the car your parents may have let you drive, but the first car that was yours .  Prior to that, you had to abide by the limits placed on you by your parents--when you could drive, where you could go, who could be in the car with you.  All that ended when you got a car of your own.  Now you were free.  You could go where you wanted, when you wanted.  Even if the rules put on your by your parents were basically reasonable (mine certainly were) and you recognized that they had your best interests at heart, you couldn't wait to go out on your own, take road trips for no reason, see what was out there. That's basically the plot of Enterprise. Enterprise is set 100 years before the events of the Original Series, and 200 years before The Next Generation/Deep Space 9/Voyager .  One hundred years before the events of Enterprise ...

I have tried, with almost no success, to broaden the focus of this blog to include topics other than religion.  Don't get me wrong--I like talking about religion very much.  But I like a bunch of other things as well, and I want to have a more diverse set of topics to write about.  The question, of course, is what to write about. In the last couple of months, I have been getting in closer touch with my inner nerd.  He has always been there, but for a while I have tried to keep him under wraps.  I am a serious person, and so I need to put that stuff aside, or at least keep it hidden.  Well, the hell with that--no one cares, least of all me. But, here's the thing: there are major gaps in my nerd-dom.  The world of nerd-dom is basically binary--one is either a Star Wars person, or a Star Trek person.  I always viewed myself as a Star Trek person, but the truth is that I am a faux-Star Trek person because I haven't watched much of the prodigious S...