- Download Netscape Now! If you've been living under a rock for the last 30 years and don't know anything about Star Trek, you might want to have a look at a brief history of the future...
Have you noticed how some of the Trek storylines are either totally unbelievable, full of impossible TrekTech™, or just rehash a clichéd storyline "borrowed" from somewhere else. I did. I also hated the way that many of the episodes had nothing to do with SF, but were merely social conscience exploration set on a starship. Some people have argued that this is precisely what Star Trek is supposed to be about - Gene Roddenberry's vision of the 24th century. I disagree, I feel that Star Trek should live up to the voice over that TNG began with:
Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
Its continuing mission:
to explore strange new worlds,
to seek out new life and new civilizations,
to boldly go where no-one has gone before!
There is very little "boldly going" anymore.
In 1992, when TNG series 2 was screening in Australia, I wrote up a few lines on what I thought of the previous night's episode and mailed it to some friends. The comments tended to be sarcastic, but nonetheless people found them funny... so I expanded the mailing-list and started making the reviews more complete.
The Next Cliché was born! It seemed an appropriate name at as it is a sarcastic review of the title of the show.
I am writing similar reviews Deep Space Nine episodes. The name for these reviews also needed to be a parody on the name of the series. It took me a while to settle on... Deep Sixty Nine! As an interesting coincidence, the first series of DS9 is set in the year 2369.
Voyager is now showing in Australia, and when I get around to it, I will do reviews of those episodes too. Given the basic plot sounds vaguely like so many other series, there is no question that they will be called Vaguely.
More than two years and a hundred reviews later, this web site was started to archive all my reviews. I will eventually go back and review all the episodes there are, but it will take some time. Maybe when I'm finished I'll publish them as a book.