Thursday, January 19, 2017

Buckle your nerdbelt...

Coming eventually.
You're killing me CBS, figuratively killing me. Star Trek: Discovery, the new Star Trek series that was supposed to start January and was then delayed until May is now delayed until they bloody well get around to it. Yes, they went from coming this May to 'no definite air date.' Now you might think that this is a ridiculous thing to worry about given climate change, violent extremists, superbugs and...well, you know that thing we're apparently going to go through with tomorrow.

And you'd be right. Of course we have bigger problems than a TV show getting delayed, I get that. It's just that it'd be nice to have some new Star Trek episodes to look forward to while civilization collapses down around our ears.
It'll give us something to do while we're waiting
for the papier-mâché to dry on our effigies. 
Here he is arguing with a space pig,
because Star Trek is kind of ridiculous. 
But we'll just have to suck it up like so many other things we'll be sucking over the next few years. It's not all bad news however (about Star Trek I mean, Trump's still happening), they also announced that James Frain will play, get this, Sarek. Who? Allow me to nerdsplain: Sarek is Spock's father and was originally played by Marc Leonard in the original series. You might remember that Sarek died horribly from the Vulcan equivalent of Alzheimer's on an episode of TNG but since Discovery is set before the original series Frain will be playing a younger, less dead version of the character.

I don't know a lot of James Frain's work, but he was on The Tutors as Thomas Cromwell where he dies horribly from pissing off deranged King Henry VIII.
I don't think it counts as a spoiler if it happened in 1540.
Pictured: the moment Star Trek decided to
eat itself
 instead of coming up with new ideas.
So on the one hand this sounds a little like Discovery falling into the prequel trap where every character and story has to be derived from the source material. Sort of like how in the Star Wars prequels we keep running into baby Greedo and like a million Boba Fetts, or pretty much the entire fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise. On the other hand, Sarek's pretty great and enough of a recurring character that it seems like there's still somewhere to go with him. Really, as long as they don't make a habit of retreading old Star Trek episodes I'll be happy, which I'm sure is CBS's goal.

Anyway, it's pretty cool that Sarek's coming back and I'm glad to read that the show begins filming next week in Toronto, even though the likelihood of me being discovered and then cast as an Andorian is looking increasingly dim. Still, I can't help but feel like the producers timed the news about Frain playing Sarek so as to soften the blow that we're still goddamn waiting for the new show. They basically pulled a Picard maneuver.
It's when you use your warp drive to appear in two places at once thus
distracting your opponent while you...what? You're judging me aren't you?

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