I’ve been in a Star Trek mood for a little while and it’s not gone away. I’m a fan, but not a massive fan. During lockdown I started a rewatch of Deep Space NIne and after running Modiphius’ Dishonored RPG I started reading up on their Star Trek one. I think that in that time and even now, I needed a glimpse of something a touch utopian.

Starfleet… they’re not a perfect organisation, but they’re generally on the right track. While there are some bad seeds, the group as a whole are pretty good. It feels like there’s a split of turbo nerds and swashbuckling idiots in Starfleet. People who love examining rocks and people punching and/or sleeping with anything they find in space. That combination seems to work out for them as a whole.

I’ve run RPGs set in the Star Trek universe a few times and once had a couple of massive bin bags of Star Trek VHS tapes thanks to a friend. They were mostly unlabelled tapes taken from the television, so I watched and filed most of them before eventually getting them disposed of because VHS tapes weren’t a thing anymore.

Anyway, podcasts… I’m a fan of podcasts like Battle of the Atom, BatChat with Matt and Will, and the podcast within the War Rocket Ajax podcast, Every Story Ever. They cover a few comics in each episode, ranking them on a big list from best to worst. I found BatChat when I was playing Arkham City, and I started looking for a Star Trek equivalent. There wasn’t one, and the idea of making my own version game into my head.

Enter Miles.

We were part of the same writing group who met every November for NaNoWriMo, and would keep meeting up even when the other people dwindled away. Every Sunday we’d write, chat about things and write some more. Miles moved to Wisconsin to be with his love, and we fell out of contact. He visited Brighton once after, we got chatting like old times and each realised the other religiously listened to Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men. From that point, we would regularly chatter on Facebook Messenger about comics and general other things.

I told Miles about my idea to make a Star Trek podcast, and the bastard called me on it.

I appeared on the Who Dares Rolls podcast, but I literally just showed up, spoke into a Rock Band mic (later a fancy gamer headset from my brother) and that was all the experience I had.

The challenge was set, and I figured I’d try it and pretty much learn as I went.

Miles and I recorded a test episode, calibrating our tastes in which Star Trek series we liked more than others, our own experiences of the shows and our favourite characters. I used that to try out Audacity and learn how to edit. It worked, so we came up with more of a plan for episode one, and even more of one for episodes two onwards. I’ve edited the first three episodes and the fifth’s been recorded. You’ll hear our test episode as a bit of bonus content between episodes two and three.

This Monday, you’ll get to hear our first episode, “Flat Galaxy Theory”, where we watch the first three pilot episodes from Star Trek series, discuss them and put them on a big list of best to worst. We’re both fans of Star Trek, but it’s not our biggest fandom, so as folks who think Star Trek’s “Pretty decent”, we should be the objective authority about whether or not any given episode of Star Trek is better than the last.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and probably a number of other podcatchers. If you do that, then on Monday morning at 11am, you’ll get an episode of our podcast, followed by another every fortnight.

This podcast is part of the Nerd & Tie Network, and you can find the official announcement along with some of those podcatcher links here.