Star Trek Ruminations

It’s light on philosophical pondering, heavy on eye-candy, and throws in a cliché or two, but for me it’s still one of the most entertaining installments of Voyager . “Renaissance Man” starts by creating a suspenseful atmosphere. Bodies are piling up in the morgue as the Doctor renders the senior staff unconscious one by one. We feel the tension rise as he juggles impersonating more and more people. And it all builds to his showdown with Tuvok in sickbay. Now Worf seemed like the chief of security long before he became the chief of security. In any given episode you knew that was his function on the ship. Tuvok on the other hand lives in the shadow of Spock and Data—making him seem more like a science officer than chief of security. But make no mistake about it, Vulcans can be very menacing security forces. They have the brains and the brawn, and in this scene there is no question that Tuvok is in charge. He anticipates and deflects the Doctor’s attempt to render him unconsciou...

Earlier, while discussing the fractal-like organization of the Borg collective , I raised the following issue: On the Matter of Unimatricies - The term Unimatrix has been thrown around as a unit or division within the collective. Each unimatrix is a miniature collective, much as I have described above. We know that the Unicomplex is called Unimatrix 001. Beyond that, I am not certain if the term has been used consistently enough to be precisely defined. Is each Borg ship a Unimatrix, or does a Unimatrix encompass multiple ships? In other words, where does a Unimatrix fit in the layers of collectives? Any thoughts or observations on this would be appreciated. Recently I saw "Dark Frontier" ( VOY ) again and drew a significant conclusion: I don't think the writers had any clue what a Unimatrix is. The episode manages to use the term in at least two different and seemingly contradictory ways. In the opening sequence the Borg "coffin" ship says, "A vessel has...

This is a review of the Grand Prize winner from the Strange New Worlds 9 collection. It is therefore more thorough and contains significant spoilers. One of the draw backs of many episodes of Star Trek is that in the end our heroes fly off into the galaxy and completely leave behind the alien/planet/problem-of-the-week never to be heard of again. The grand prize winning stories picks up one of these dropped story lines and follows through. Consider the episode"The Hunted" ( TNG ). In this story the Angosian government created genetically enhanced soldiers. When the war was over, the soldier were discarded, confined to a penal moon because they were too violent to be reintegrated into society. We learn all of this when one of these soldiers, Roga Danar, escapes and runs amok on the Enterprise . But when the episode is over, Picard literally beams off of the planet when these super-soldiers storm the Angosian capital. And we never hear of the Angosians again . . . . . ....