Inspired by a moving collection of pieces on how Star Trek has saved lives and salved mental wounds and trauma, I wanted to share my own story of how the franchise offered a light in during my darkest time. Sparing some of the details, and for ease of […]
Right from the get-go, the prospect of The Mandalorian never exactly appealed to me. Oh, of course, I was excited about getting a live action Star Wars TV series, but at best I was ambivalent. Even the involvement of animation mastermind Dave Filoni and a host of diverse and […]
For all Star Trek got right over the years in terms of representation and tackling important social issues, there are many areas where the franchise could have done better. One in particular is the portrayal of pregnancy. Deanna Troi and the ‘mystical pregnancy’ trope In ‘The Child’, the […]
It’s difficult to deny our innate call to storytelling, exercised each time we interact with character and plot. Certain tropes and archetypes have resonated down through the ages and myths and poems thousands of years old can feel as fresh, vibrant and subversive today as they were when […]
Recently I’ve been thinking about the fundamental differences between Star Wars and Star Trek. At this point, however, both franchises have grown far beyond any easy definition so that the simplest way to differentiate them is by genre and setting – Star Wars takes place in a mythic […]
Most people have a favourite television theme and Star Trek fans could probably rank the franchise’s main themes in order of preference. Fortunately for me, my favourite TV and Trek theme are one and the same. The Voyager theme was specifically written for the show by long-time Trek […]
The Borg are the ultimate enemy because they defy definition. They are whatever the plot requires them to be, from a frightening new adversary to even an ally. Since they were first introduced to Star Trek canon in The Next Generation episode ‘Q Who?’ in 1989, the Borg […]
Even before The Last Jedi shook up the status quo, it was clear that Star Wars was always about much more than heroes and dynasties and the evils of right-wing ideology. The story threads woven throughout the saga films and the auxiliary story materials was as much a […]
If, as Churchill proclaimed, “history is written by the victors” then any account accepted by a cultural majority is a prescribed and biased narrative. Individual accounts of the same events rarely align, but on the national scale this becomes much more sinister. Taking charge of an information stream […]
People have pointed to the latter half of 2019 as a golden era for Star Wars, proof if it were needed, that far from being in a death spiral, the franchise is in better health than it has ever been. That’s all well and good, and while I’m […]
