Casual Trek’s Birthday!
August marked one year since the start of Casual Trek. In our first 27 episodes we’ve managed to cover 7.91% of Star Trek history.
That includes
- 65 episodes
- Two movies
- One graphic novel
- One chat about having a lovely walk
- One chat about Lord of the Rings
- Several deaths in a Star Trek choose your own adventure type book
- A LOT of tangents
It’s been a fun time, and in episode 26 we took a little time to chill out and talk about our findings so far. We also discuss a little bit about what we’re hoping for in the coming year.
KHAN!
We’d intended on covering Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan a little earlier to try and make a habit of doing a movie every twelve episodes. Better opportunities came up, so we put it off until episode 26, and of course there was a perfect episode to pair it up with.
Star Trek: The Original Series “Space Seed”
I’d seen barely any episodes of The Original Series prior to starting Casual Trek. I’d known there was an episode where Khan came from, but never sought it out. After watching this episode, that was probably for the best. It’s fine, with a few weird things, but not essential viewing for Star Trek II unless you’re covering it for a Star Trek ranking podcast and need to see everything Star Trek.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
The main feature, and my word, what a film. I’d not seen this for at least a couple of decades and it was a joy to come back to. I know it’s hardly a controversial statement to say that this movie which has a great reputation is good, but we get into what we liked in particular, what holds up, the connective tissue between Space Seed and the movie, set design, space rats and whether Khan’s actually pursuing a one-sided grudge against Kirk.
Music!
We’ve had a few episodes which have been linked to recently-released episodes of Strange New Worlds. It means we’ll have less to cover in the long run, but at the same time it’s been a joy watching the episodes and we’ve been able to match them quite well to other Star Trek episodes.
Star Trek: Voyager “Virtuoso”
This episode ended up being a talk about AI art and the slurry of ‘content’, as a bunch of artless aliens get all excited about how The Doctor can perform music. They become weird fans, although they’re really more into him for the maths of what he does instead of the art. Of course, he finds this out only after letting this all go to his head. It’s a fun episode, and shows that there are some real jerks in the Delta Quadrant.
Picard “Two of One”
It sounds almost unbelievable that this episode inspired our musical theme on the spreadsheet a while before hearing Subspace Rhapsody was ever going to be a thing, but we need ways to crowbar in episodes of Picard and its so serialised it’s kind of tricky to do. This one is both a heist and a musical episode as the Borg Queen possessing one of the cast ends up performing a musical number. It’s a weird choice, but in a show where it’s difficult remembering any single episode, it makes this one stand out.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody”
Finally we have the reason this theme was bumped to the top of the queue, a full musical episode. Not only is this a musical episode in the style of Buffy, The Magicians and so on, but it actually uses the mechanics of musicals to present problems and solutions. Thanks to some probability shenanigans, the cast find themselves starting to sing. Similar to Once More With Feeling, this means truths get spilled in song form and a lot of personal drama can be aired before the horrors of the finale.
Faked Tales 