zaterdag 25 juni 2016

Star Trek Hidden Frontiers season 1

Labelled on their own website as "The Star Trek fan series that became legend..." I finally found time to watch the very first season, and I liked it.

Now, this project has so far generated quite a few series, and I`ll be watching them one by one over the coming weeks.

Plot

The story takes place in the same area as Deep Space Nine and Voyager, right after the Dominion War.  It follows the adventures of the USS Excelsior, NCC-77246, a Galaxy Dreadnought class vessel (okay, this is a bit odd, as it was an alternate universe class from TNG`s episode Yesterdays' Enterprise), as it encounters a new alien menace.

This race, called "The Grey" are ancient enemies of the Iconians and use psionic powers to mind-control crews of other vessels.  After the initial defeat at their hands, the Excelsior under captain Knapp is based at Deep Space 12 in the Briar Patch.

While the crew also runs into the Titanic and a Star Wars Executor star destroyer, they manage to finally find a way to counter the Grey technology with the help of Wesley Crusher, we stepped back from his life as a Traveller.

Opinion

It`s a well constructed series, even though it has some cast changes over the season without knowing what happened (the original First officer for one).  But it follows the sequence of a regular series, in that you have an overarcing plot spanning four of the 6 episodes of the first season (the three parter series starter as well as the finale), combined with two "filler" episodes of stand alone stories, involving time travel for one and dimensional technology in the other.

I do find the choice of main ship a bit odd, but heck, I play Star Trek Online and the more varied ships the better.  The CGI is decent, and while the remastering "glow" might need a bit of getting used to in the beginning, it`s okay after the first minutes of watching this.

And I love the Star Trek / Star wars cross dimension theory.

The series also draws on some (semi-) canonical points, in that Robin Lefler is chief engineer on the Excelsior, Wesley Crusher joins the crew in the finale, and Elisabeth Shelby is transferred from the Excalibur of Mackenzy Calhoun (the Peter David novels) to the Excelsior as the new Number One.  including the cheesy "You`re in my way" line.

Rating: 7 / 10

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