Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - Lost Contact #1 (2026) Comic Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Thursday. Happy SNW Premiere Day to all of my fellow Trekkies who are reading this. In honour of the season 4 premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is today, I decided to review a Star Trek comic. Specifically the first issue of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - Lost Contact, which is a mini-series based on the Starfleet Academy TV series that came out with its first season earlier this year. There will be a few spoilers in this review because it is a single issue out of however many the series is supposed to be, and I can't talk about anything if I don't include some spoilers. Let's get into it.

The cadets of both Starfleet Academy and the War College are on a training exercise with their ship/Starfleet Academy's central building, the USS Athena, which is on a planet that is supposedly abandoned. Genesis, Caleb, Tarima, Jay-Den and Kyle were chosen for the exercise so SAM and Darem Reymi don't appear in this issue, neither does Tarima's brother, Ocam. I don't know if they appear in the following two issues that have come out so far, but they aren't in this one. However, something goes wrong and the cadets end up being stranded on the planet, cut off from the Athena, so now the cadets have to learn how to survive on this supposedly abandoned planet, while overcoming their usual trials and tribulations, namely Genesis's need to lead even in situations where she really shouldn't be the leader, or wasn't chosen to be the leader to begin with. I'll talk about that a bit more later.

It was really interesting to see Kelrec, Nahla Ake, and the cadets in comic book form. It was cool though. Corali Espuna is the artist on this book and they do a really good job. Nora Serrano is the colorist. My favourite panel in this issue is at the beginning when Kelrec and Ake are briefing the cadets and the panel is a shot of Ake and she's rolling her eyes at Kelrec, as she has a habit of doing whenever he says something stupid, which is a lot. That's it. That's the panel. Eye rolling isn't something I've ever seen captured in a comic book before. Not even a Star Trek comic. So I just thought that Espuna and Serrano captured it so well in that one panel.

Based on the Stardate at the beginning of this issue (Stardate 869013.5), the miniseries takes place between episode 7, "Ko'Zeine", which doesn't have a Stardate attached to it, and episode 8, "The Life of the Stars" (Stardate 869372.1). Which makes sense given Genesis's attitude in this issue. Though, if I'm being honest, she's very close minded and unreasonable when it comes to listening to her fellow cadets. Even more than the show portrayed her as. Especially because Jay-Den and Caleb were making very good suggestions for their situation, but Genesis is like, "we're gonna do the opposite of that". For no other reason than "I'm an admiral's daughter, and this will look good on my transcript when I graduate in four years". Which completely ignores the empathy and willingness to listen to others that she gained in episode 3 following the war games simulation debacle she and Darem butted heads during that episode.

I really didn't like Genesis in this issue for that reason. I don't know if this is an example of the comic book writer, Layne Morgan, not being able to see episodes of the show before writing the comic, or if the writer simply chose to write Genesis as a more hotheaded individual than she was portrayed as in the show. Not knowing the production history of this comic in particular, I can't say for certain. 

However, given my knowledge of the history of comics based on Star Trek, particularly the original Gold Key series, which was published during the time the original show was on the air in the late '60s, and the first comic book miniseries that DC published based on TNG in 1988, chances are pretty good that the writer of this book had to have it written before the show started coming out, so they weren't able to watch it beforehand. That's how it feels to me anyway. Like the writer was only able to look at the character descriptions for the cadets and wrote them based off of those descriptions rather than based off of how the actors and actresses portrayed them in the show.

Overall, this was a good issue, but it's very much a setup issue. It's also not a comic I would hand to someone who hasn't watched Starfleet Academy just because it does little to set up the characters overall, and simply, and quickly, just sets them up for this particular story. I would recommend it if you've already seen the show, love the show, and need to spend time with these characters again before season 2 starts sometime next year. 

Alright my friends that's it for me for today. I'll be back on Saturday for my review of the season premiere of season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds as I'm recording it on cable when the episodes air tonight, so I can watch them tomorrow night. So, no Rental Recommendations this week over on My Nostalgia Blog. Until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

The Weight of Everything (2026) Book Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing very well. It's a humid, rainy Wednesday here today, which is the perfect kind of day for a blog post. Luckily, I knew exactly what today's post was going to be on. A week ago I ordered two books from Amazon. One was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the other was a brand new book called The Weight of Everything by an author named Steven L. Morgan. That's the book I read first, and I finished it before bed last night, so that's what I'm going to be talking about today. Let's get into it!

I found out about this book because Perry, my good friend from the The Cassette Phase YouTube channel, reviewed it on the channel last week as part of a larger conversation about the nostalgic books and comics he'd been reading, and because The Weight of Everything is set in two different time periods, 1984-1986, and then in 1999, Perry chose to talk about it in that video. I liked the premise of the book enough that the day after I watched Perry's video, I ordered a copy for myself. It arrived on Friday and that night before bed, I started reading it. I was hooked.

The Weight of Everything is about a 25 year old named William Hawthorne is called to have a DNA sample taken at a lab in Abilene, Texas, and he thinks it has to do with the disappearance of his best friend, Marty Winslow, which happened in the spring of 1985, when William, then known as Billy, was 11 years old. During his long trip from where he was living in Tennessee to the lab in Abilene, Texas, Billy remembers the events leading up to Marty's disappearance as well as the immediate aftermath of that event.

While that may be the premise of this book, The Weight of Everything isn't about that. It's about friendship, first crushes, peer pressure, family, summer nights, school, and the daily life that we all shared regardless of the decade we grew up in. It's about childhood, and being that age just before you reach your teenage years.

The most important thing this book is about is people. I relate to stories the most when the focus is on the people involved in them. The thing that kept me watching The Goldbergs for almost the entire time the show was on the air was the characters. The people. The '80s references were great, but the show wouldn't've stayed on the air for ten years if the show was only about the '80s pop culture references. And what kept me engaged with this book were the characters. The people. Because they felt like people. 

Growing up, I knew girls named Jessica, Laura, Stacy, and Amber and boys named Billy, Jimmy, Desmond, and Marty. I lived in a small town where everybody knew everybody. I went to school with the kids of the people my mom and my uncle went to school with when they were growing up. I had indoor recesses when it was raining or really cold out. I wondered who my teacher would be the following school year, until the phone call or letter came to let us know who it would be. 

And so, after reading several chapters each night, I'd think about the kids I went to school with from 1994 to 1999. I thought about the teachers I had. I thought about everything I did at recess every day, as well as what I did when I got home from school. The nurses I had. 

So not only was I spending time with Billy, Marty, Jessica, Laura, Amber, Jimmy, Stacey, Darnell, and Desmond while I read this book, but I was back in the schoolyard at Greely Elementary School from September 1994 to June 1999 with Garrett, Spencer, Maegan, Meagan, Trina, Ashley, Morgan, Tracy, Jessica, Jasmine, Heather, Kayla, Chelsea, Lindsay, Jesse, David R., David F., Faith, Rob, Tyler, Tyler T., Chad, Dillon, Colin, Cory, Jaime, Jason B, Jason S., Leslie, Stacy, Jordan B. Jordan C., Rachel, Patrick, Alex, Eric, Gloria, and every other kid I ever went to school with during the five years that I spent at that school.

Steven L. Morgan, the author of The Weight of Everything, said in his author's note that writing this book took him back to when he was the age of Billy and his friends, getting into the same kind of shenanigans that Billy and his friends got into in the book. It shows. 

One of the problems I have with Ernest Cline's books, Ready Player One and Armada (I haven't read Ready Player Two yet) is that they have the flimsiest plots and one dimensional characters and so the pop culture references, all from the '70s and '80s (or earlier) end up carrying the stories because there isn't anything else there. The references are there because the stories wouldn't work without them. And some TV shows and movies focusing on nostalgia have the same problem. The references are the focus, not the characters. The Weight of Everything does not have that problem. The references are there because the characters experience them. They aren't the center of the story. Steven didn't cram as many as he could into the plot. They occurred naturally, because that's the time period the story is set in. So what were kids into in 1984 and 1985? G.I. Joe, The Transformers, and Cabbage Patch Kids. All three are mentioned in this book. 

The book isn't all sunshine and rainbows however. Marty disappears and is presumed dead, back in town Billy ends up under suspicion as he was the last person to see Marty as they'd been on a camping trip in the woods just outside of town, and other bad things happen within a short span of time, which causes Billy and his family to leave Hemlock Grove. Without spoiling the end though, what takes him to Abilene, Texas, and eventually back to Hemlock Grove, in 1999 has nothing to do with Marty's disappearance, and he discovers some good things have happened as well as some unexpected things. In fact, there's quite a twist at the beginning of the book's final act. I never saw it coming, and yet when it was revealed to me, I felt nothing but joy for William/Billy.

I loved the dynamic between Billy and Amber. We all remember that first crush. It can be so awkward sometimes. Especially when your feelings are reciprocated by the person you have a crush on. And yet, it can be the best feeling in the world. Especially when you're between the ages of 10 and 13. The friend group is great too. The girls join the boys for just about every activity, except for the prank that Billy and Marty played on the girls having a sleepover at Amber's house obviously. There's none of that boys thinking the girls can't play video games with them at the arcade simply because they're girls crap going on. Which I'm thankful for, because that also wasn't my experience growing up. Not at the age that Billy and his friends are in the book.

By the way, one more thing I remember happening in my life that was in the book, was that not all of my friends were in the same grade as me. In the book, Amber is a grade behind Billy and the others, while Darnell and Desmond are a grade ahead of them. The book doesn't mention split grade classes like I had for grades 3, 4, and 6 (grade 2/3 split for grade 3, grade 4/5 split for grade 4, and grade 5/6 split for grade 6), but yeah, not all of my friends were in the same grade as me. Some were in the grade behind me, some were in the grade ahead of me, some were two grades behind me and some were two grades ahead of me. And sometimes that meant that those who were in the grade ahead of me would start at a new school because Greely Elementary only went up to grade 6 or I'd end up at the new school before my friends who were a grade behind me.

Overall, this was an awesome book. I highly recommend that you read it. Especially if you're into nostalgia the way I am, or just grew up in the '80s or even the '90s. Steven self-published it through Amazon, so it's available on Amazon if you'd like to get a copy for yourself. Just type "The Weight of Everything by Steven L. Morgan" into the Amazon search bar and it should pop up immediately. It's such a fun read, and like it said, it brought me back to when I was the age that Billy and his friends are in the book, and brought me back to all the people that I haven't seen in almost 30 years, because they either didn't continue going to the same schools as I did or they moved away at some point.

That's going to be it for me for today my friends. I'll be over on My Nostalgia Blog at some point to talk more about my time at Greely Elementary School in the mid to late '90s, and for this week's Rental Recommendations post. Until then have a great week and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

My Pet Monster (1986) Movie Review

 Hey everyone! Happy Friday! How're you all doing today? I'm pretty good. As promised I'm back with my review of the 1986 direct-to-video movie, My Pet Monster since I watched it on Wednesday night with Katie and Nat for the VHS Club monthly movie watch party. I don't really have a whole lot to say other than, this was the first time I'd ever watched it. I'd heard of this movie and heard some fairly negative things about it, so I was a bit prepared for it to be bad. It was actually pretty good. I'll get into that more in the review. So, let's get into it!

Like The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin the year before, My Pet Monster was produced as the pilot for a live action TV show. Unlike The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, there doesn't seem to be a reason for why the series remained unproduced. The movie didn't air on TV, as far as I'm aware, but it was released on VHS in lieu of airing on TV. Instead, a 13 episode cartoon series was produced by Canadian animation studio, Nelvana Limited and aired on Global TV here in Canada and on ABC in the U.S.

The cast for this movie is great. We've got Sunny Besen Thrasher as Max/Monster, he also voiced Max, who was a separate character from Monster in the cartoon, Alyson Court as Max's sister, Melanie, Colin Fox as Dr. Snyder, the antagonist, Yannick Bisson as Max and Melanie's older brother, Rod, and Kelly Rowan as Rod's girlfriend, Stephanie. Aside from voicing Max in the cartoon, Thrasher was in a bunch of cartoons as various voices, including the Care Bears, Alyson Court voiced Max's sister, Jill in the cartoon, but she is also very well known as Loonette the Clown on The Big Comfy Couch and a girl named Ruthie that Big Bird encounters on a farm in the 1985 movie Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, as well as tons of cartoons. Colin Fox played the storekeeper in the first episode of the 1995 Goosebumps TV series, Yannick Bisson played Agent Jack Hudson on Sue Thomas: F.B. Eye, and Detective William Murdoch on Murdoch Mysteries, and Kelly Rowan is very well known as Kirsten Cohen on The O.C. So this movie has a pretty stacked cast.

The plot of the movie is that Max and his sister go on a field trip to a museum, where Max gets turned into a monster by a statue, which he transforms into whenever he's hungry. Meanwhile, the scientist who theorized about the monster's existence while studying the statues discovers what happened to Max and wants to use him to gain fame and fortune for his work.

I loved this movie. Like I said earlier, I'd only heard bad things about it, but it's actually pretty good. It's definitely different from what the cartoon series is, but that doesn't automatically make it bad. Sure, the production quality isn't great, but it was made with a low budget because it was supposed to be the pilot episode for a TV series that never got produced, and it was released direct-to-video. 

What makes this movie fun is that there's the mundane aspect of Rod trying to get on his girlfriend's good side by taking care of her dog for her, to get her ready for a dog show. Of course, he tries to take the cheap way out and the greedy dog groomers end up kidnapping the dog, so it's up to Max as the Monster, Melanie, and Rod to get the dog back.

This sounds like the craziest '80s movie plot, and yet it works so well. Dr. Snyder is a typical '80s kids show antagonist that isn't a supervillain. He's greedy and a glory hound, and Colin Fox plays him really well. Max and Melanie are my favourite characters though. Of course I grew up watching Alyson Court on The Big Comfy Couch and in Follow That Bird, but the character of Melanie is pretty great and was always willing to help Max when he turned into Monster. 

Overall this was a really fun movie. It's nothing spectacular, but it was a great watch for a Wednesday night virtual movie night with friends. I had a great time watching it.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for this week. I'll be back soon with another blog post. I have an idea of what I want to talk about next. Until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin (1985) TV Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So last night was the monthly VHS Club Watch Party that Katie, Nat, and I do and we watched a double feature of mid-80s non-theatrical films. The first was the made for TV movie, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, which aired on the ABC Weekend Special on November 30th and December 7th 1985, then got released on VHS in 1986, and the second was the 1986 direct-to-video movie based on the My Pet Monster toyline. So today I'm going to review The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin and then tomorrow I'll come back and review My Pet Monster. Let's get into it.

The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin is the first VHS tape my parents ever rented for me when I was a little kid. I was 3 years old when they first rented it for me in 1990. I watched it endlessly. The first time we rented it they had gotten it from West Coast Video, and then everytime after that it was from Rogers Video. Eventually, Rogers discontinued the tape, and we ended up buying it and I watched it numerous times after that.

This was originally meant to be the pilot episode for a full live action/animatronic TV series, and it aired in two parts on ABC in the U.S. I don't actually know what channel it aired on here in Canada, if it even aired here in Canada. It may have only been direct-to-video here, I don't know. Regardless, I wasn't born yet when the special aired on ABC, so all of my memories of it come from the VHS.

The reason this pilot never went to series is because the animatronics would've been too expensive for a weekly or daily series, and the network didn't want to spend that much money. In the '80s ABC wasn't owned by Disney yet, and Disney didn't have any involvement with AlchemyII's work on the show (unlike with Welcome to Pooh Corner only a couple of years earlier). Basically the special cost $1.5 million dollars, which was a much higher cost than most TV specials on ABC at the time. Which is why for the The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin TV show that aired in 1987, they went with an animated series in first run syndication.

The voice cast for this special is pretty much everybody who voiced the various characters in the original Teddy Ruxpin book and tape stories that were produced to go with the toy. Phil Baron voiced Teddy, Will Ryan voiced Grubby, Tweeg, Prince Arin, Wooly, and Louie the Grunge (the Wizard's cameraman), Tony Pope voiced Gimmick, Katie Leigh voiced Princess Aruzia, and Russi Taylor voiced Leota.

The special is an adaptation of the first two book and tape stories, The Airship and The Missing Princess. Tweeg and L.B. weren't in the original book and tape stories, most likely because the Child Safety PSA at the end of The Missing Princess took up enough time that there wasn't time to include the two characters in the story, as a result they were removed from The Airship. At least that's the prevaling theory in the Teddy Ruxpin fandom, as it's never been talked about why Tweeg and L.B. weren't included in the first two book and tape stories even though they were part of the original story that Teddy Ruxpin creator, Ken Forsse, wrote for the book and tapes.

I love this special. It's not only nostalgic for me, but it actually holds up pretty well for something that's over 40 years old. The animatronic suits and model work are really good. For the time obviously. But it's all practical effects. Which is really cool.

Overall this is a very good special. Both Katie and Nat enjoyed it when we watched it last night, and of course, I love it because it's so comforting. You might appreciate it more if you have some history with Teddy Ruxpin, be it through the animated series or the original toy in the '80s, but I think it's enjoyable on its own.

That's gonna be it for me for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with my review of My Pet Monster. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord (2026) Season 1 Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. The season finale of Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord dropped on Monday, and I watched both episodes that night, but I wanted to give it a day to simmer in my brain before I wrote about it. So, here's my review of the first season of Maul: Shadow Lord. There will be some spoilers for the end of the season, so if you've been watching the show and haven't watched episodes 9 and 10 yet, this is your warning. Let's get into it.

I'll admit that I was a bit on the fence about this show when it was announced, and even as the marketing campaign for the show started up and trailers came out. Mostly because, as you all know by now, I'm not a fan of shows or movies about villain characters. This comes from the fact that I was born in an era where villains were evil, without any kind of redemption or morally grey elements to them or anything like that. Nobody was writing them or portraying them as sympathetic. Especially in animation. However, I was also interested because, of course, it was produced by the same team at Lucasfilm Animation who did The Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Bad Batch, and I knew they'd do Maul justice in a show focused on him. Plus, I love Sam Witwer as an actor, particularly as the voice of Maul. Even then, I didn't start watching the show as soon as the episodes started coming out, mostly because I kinda wanted the hype for the show within the Star Wars fandom to die down a bit before I started watching it.

It was a really good show. I liked the characters, especially the characters of Devon (a Twi'lek), Two-Boots (a Tactical Defense Droid), and Brander Lawson (a human). Devon and her master, Eeko-Dio Daki (a Mosyk, an alien race new to this show) are survivors of Order 66, and have been in hiding from the Empire for the last however many years since the end of the Clone Wars. Lawson is a law enforcement officer on the planet Janix, which is a new planet to this show. They all become embroiled in Maul's schemes to take out local crime lords so he can use Crimson Dawn's resources to take out Palpatine and Vader. It doesn't happen obviously being that this takes place years before Maul's appearance in Rebels, but at least he has a goal in mind for revenge against Sidious.

I haven't seen any of Maul's appearances in The Clone Wars, so I don't really have any context for where Maul is at this point in the timeline. But, that didn't diminish my enjoyment of the show, because like so much of Star Wars, you don't need to have seen a previous show or movie to enjoy the current one. Having said that though, I'm sure there are some nods to The Clone Wars that I didn't pick up on since I haven't seen anything past the halfway mark of season 2, but they weren't all that obvious.

With a show like this it's difficult to talk about individual episodes because they all lead into one another, however, my only real complaint is that the last two or three episodes of the season was basically just one long lightsaber duel between various characters. Not that that's a bad thing necessarily, because it was Maul, Devon, and Daki against two Inquisitors, First Brother and Eleventh Brother for some of it. But, then Darth Vader shows up, and without a single word he attacks Maul and the two Jedi survivors. And when I say Vader doesn't speak, I mean doesn't speak AT ALL, like no lines of dialogue. Not even to taunt Maul. Both Lawson and Daki are killed by the Imperials and Vader, but that's not why I have a problem with this lightsaber duel. My problem with it is that Vader showed up at all.

I get it, Vader was Palpatine's enforcer, but I kinda feel like he was unnecessary in this show. The two Inquisitors were more than a match for Maul and the two Jedi, as was shown in earlier episodes of this season, so Vader just made them a bit too overpowered. Plus, it just feels like the story people were just repeating what was done in the season 2 finale of Rebels, right down to Maul trying to turn Devon to the Dark Side, much as he tried to do with Ezra in Rebels. Or would try to do with Ezra in Rebels depending on whether you wanna look at it from the real world perspective, where Rebels in 2018, or look at it from the in-universe perspective where the events of Rebels haven't happened yet. And not in the "it's like poetry. It rhymes" way that George Lucas crafted elements of the Prequel Trilogy either. It's more like Filoni has wanted to see Maul and Vader duel each other for the past 27 years, even though there was a story where Vader and Maul dueled in a comic book story called "Resurrection", which was published in Star Wars Tales #9 back in 2001.

My favourite part was the dynamic that Lawson had with his son, Riley, as well as with Two-Boots. I'm not a huge fan of police procedurals, the fact that Lawson's storyline feels like a police procedural, where the cop or detective is also a single father, it makes the Lawsons more relatable and makes their story more familiar for the audience. Well, except for the fact that his ex-wife, Riley's mom, works directly for and with the Empire, believing strongly in its ideals and policies. Which makes me really wonder what kind of person the former Mrs. Lawson is, given what kind of entity the Empire actually is.

Overall, this was a great season of television. Despite the singular problem that I have with the season finale, it was really fun. I thought Maul's status at this point in time was interesting because it gives a bit more context for his appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story, since he was the head of Crimson Dawn, with Dryden Vos as his lieutenant. I loved all the new characters though and am excited to see where Devon and Riley go in season 2 since of all the new characters, they're the only ones, besides Two-Boots, to survive the season.

That's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back soon with another review. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

Redshirts by John Scalzi (2012) Book Discussion

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I'm going to be talking about Redshirts by John Scalzi and published in 2012. I don't have much of an introduction for this one because I really just wanna start talking about it. So let's get into it.

I had originally planned to talk about this book on here when I first read it over the Christmas holidays, however I had so much going on that I just ended up not doing it. So this time around I read it specifically so I could talk about it here.

I probably first heard about this book about ten years ago. My sister told me about it even though she hadn't read it before. Fast forward to late 2024-early 2025, and I read my first Scalzi novel, Starter Villain, which I already talked about here on the blog and that book really got me excited to read more from John Scalzi because I'd never read anything written by him before I read Starter Villain. Honestly, that book was so insane and out there in terms of the story that I had to read Redshirts next, because obviously, I'm a huge Star Trek fan, and this book calls out the stupidest tropes that Star Trek ever had.

This book is about an Ensign aboard the Universal Union Starship, Intrepid, the flagship of the Union Navy, named Andrew Dahl. He's fresh out of the academy, but he notices some strange things going on onboard the ship. Then he and his friends discover they're characters on a TV show and decide to put an end to the crappy writing that caused the deaths of so many "Redshirt" characters. Hilarity and hijinks ensues. 

I'm not going into spoilers but that's my general synopsis of the book. It's hilarious. Also, you have to remember that this came out in 2012, before Seth MacFarlane ever came up with The Orville, but at the same time, it's also 2012, 13 years after Galaxy Quest. So this book sits right in the middle, between two Star Trek parodies. But I don't think anything, with the exception of some episodes of Stargate SG-1, and maybe Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, had fully copied the Star Trek formula or setting the way Galaxy Quest, Redshirts, and The Orville have. 

My favourite character, who doesn't get as much to do as Andy does, is Maia Duvall. I know, it's not a surprise that I like the female character the best, but when they're well written, even if she isn't the main focus of a story, I like them the best. I guess it's because many of them remind me of the awesome women in my life. Not all, but many. In the case of Duvall, she's not the voice of reason, she's there for the ride, and takes things in stride, leaving Hester and Finn to be the doubters in this scenario. She's also a security officer. Not the ship's chief of security like Tasha Yar was in the first season of TNG and La'an is in Strange New Worlds, but a solid security officer. Again, no spoilers.

The crazy thing is is that this book specifically targets Star Trek because no other Science Fiction TV show has ever had the "Redshirt" character so frequently. Oh sure, the Stargate franchise has the nameless soldiers that got killed off protecting the main characters in whichever Stargate show the main characters were part of, but Star Trek was the only show, up until 2015 when The Expanse debuted, to have the starship setting be the main setting of a show. Yes, there was Firefly for like 12 or 13 episodes in the early 2000s, but that wasn't a Starship with a full crew complement, exploring space and meeting new species every week. Star Trek is the only TV show to have that. And, there are episodes that have really shitty writing in them, and really stupid things happen that kill characters off for no reason other than the sake of drama on a weekly television drama series. 

This book asks the question, "But, what if, in some other timeline that's affected by the writers of the show, those characters are real people?" They ask the question, "What if Ensign Ricky is real?" "What if Captain Picard is real?". It's an insane question to ask, but as a lifelong Star Trek fan, many of these characters are more real to me than some of the people I see in the news. Because I've lived with them on my TV screen for nearly 39 years. And so that question is a valid question for those of us who are fans of Star Trek, but makes less sense to those who aren't. 

This is Scalzi's third standalone novel, and it's very well written. It's exactly the kind of book I need these days. The funny thing is is that back in 2012, I would've stayed far away from this book as possible. The reason being that I felt that parody was pure evil because it always made fun of a movie, book, TV show, or comic book and I felt it was just unfair to the work being made fun of. Look guys, I was 25 years old, naive, and took this kind of shit way too seriously at the time. I didn't understand that it was supposed to be funny, because so much that has come out as parody for things that I love, has ended up being mean spirited, especially in the '90s and early 2000s, before The Big Bang Theory, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man finally made it okay to be a geek in the eyes of the outside world. Of course, we've swung back around on that again unfortunately it seems, but hey, society sucks, and we still gotta live in it, while still staying true to ourselves and never letting anyone else tell us what we should and shouldn't like when it comes to the books we read or the movies and TV shows we watch, if those are things that we like to do.

Scalzi is a geek. A full on geek. He worked on Stargate Universe, he loves Star Trek and Star Wars. And I think that's what makes it okay for this book to make fun of Star Trek a little bit. It's not someone on the outside making fun of this stuff, while making fun of the fans for liking it. It's one of us saying, "It's okay to be a fan of Star Trek, but Star Trek does a lot of dumb shit". Which is true. Star Trek has done a lot of dumb shit. In fact, they've done some of the dumbest shit ever in all of Science Fiction, but that dumb shit was done with heart and in a way that resonates with those of us who are fans. And we're not so uptight that we can't make fun of some of it ourselves. Like, Tasha Yar getting killed off by an evil oil slick is pretty dumb. But, it worked...sort of. 

Alright my friends, I think that's going to be it for my discussion on Redshirts. I debated doing this post on The Star Trek Journal, but since it's not a Star Trek book, I decided to post it here on Josh's Geek Cave. If you've never read it before, I definitely recommend you do so. It's pretty great. That's it for me for today. I'll be back over on The Star Trek Journal tomorrow discussing the state of Star Trek in 2026 in the wake of the cancellation of Starfleet Academy. Until then, have a great evening, stay safe out there, and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

Clerks Movie Discussion and DVD Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay. Today I'm here to talk about Kevin Smith's 1994 debut film, my history with Kevin Smith's films, and the DVD release, which I got last week. So, let's get into it and talk about Clerks!

 A few months ago I picked up Mallrats on Blu-ray and I also got it on VHS at Ottawa Comiccon. However, Clerks is a very different movie than Mallrats is. Probably because Clerks was made so independently and is much cruder than Kevin Smith's later films in terms of how it was made. The movie was filmed in black and white, which is probably the filmstock that Smith could afford in the early '90s when he was making this movie, being that filmmaking was still analogue, even if visual effects were starting to become digital. Of course by the time Clerks was being made, black and white movies weren't as common as they had been from the late 1800s (the dawn of film) to the early 1960s, when colour film was deemed too expensive for most studios to use, so it was a pretty unique choice to film this movie in black and white.

I really enjoyed watching Clerks. I've heard about it for so many years, yet I never got spoiled on the actual events in the movie. Not even by Mallrats. I don't really have a favourite character, but obviously I was excited to see the beginnings of Jay and Silent Bob, played by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith. Mainly because of when I first encountered them and how I first encountered them. I loved Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti) as a character, but I wish she'd been in it more. I think it's because I saw Mallrats first and Brandi (Claire Forlani) and Rene (Shannen Doherty) played a much larger role in that movie than Veronica and Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer) play in this movie, so I was anticipating that Dante's girlfriends, both present and past, were going to play a bigger role than they did.

I was surprised by the scene where Dante and Randal are talking about the contractors who potentially worked on the Death Star in the Star Wars franchise. I wasn't surprised by the scene, because in an issue of Star Wars Insider magazine from 2007 that had an article on the novel, Death Star, in it, they mention that scene. However, I was surprised because I'd forgotten that the article mentions that Dante and Randal are talking about the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, not the original Death Star from Star Wars. I just looked up that article, and reread the first couple of lines which talks about the scene from Clerks before going on to the topic of the article.

My introduction to Kevin Smith actually came from the DVD for Spider-Man in 2005. I'd owned the movie on VHS but I'd gotten the DVD for Spider-Man 2 for my birthday or Christmas in 2004. So a year later, I picked up the DVD for the 2002 movie since I'd just gotten my first DVD player, which was a portable one. Kevin Smith is interviewed in the bonus feature covering Spider-Man's history and people's love of the character on the second disc. 

My next encounter with Kevin Smith came in the form of his guest role in season 5 of Degrassi: The Next Generation where he played a fictional version of himself, making a new Jay and Silent Bob film that gets filmed in Degrassi Community School. within the fictional movie, he also plays Silent Bob. This was actually my introduction to Jason Mewes. After this I've mainly encountered him through his work as a writer on the Green Arrow comic (reading it in trade of course), and as a director on several episodes of The Flash, Supergirl, and The Goldbergs.

 

Like I said, back in August I picked up Mallrats on Blu-ray and then I ended up watching it that night. This was the first Kevin Smith movie I ever watched and I loved it. To the point where I asked Brad to grab the VHS for me at Ottawa Comiccon in September, since I wasn't going until the Sunday and couldn't guarantee that the VHS would still be there when I got there on Sunday morning. And then I decided that if I found Clerks on DVD, Blu-ray, or VHS, I'd grab it too at the very least. When I was out with Brad a week ago I found Clerks on DVD, so I grabbed it.

I found the Canadian version of the 1999 DVD for Clerks, which is really cool since I don't have a whole lot of DVDs from the late '90s. It's a pretty decent DVD release for 1999. It doesn't have a ton of bonus features (they saved those for the 10th anniversary Clerks X DVD that came out in 2004), but it has the alternate ending and deleted scenes as well as a music video and a Film Recommendations section. One of the movies in that section is Chasing Amy, which has a "Coming Soon" tag beneath the title. Clerks was originally released on DVD on June 29th, 1999 while Chasing Amy was released on DVD on April 2nd, 2000. So almost a year apart. But I'm wondering if Chasing Amy was supposed to come out in late 1999, but got pushed back to April 2000 instead. That would make sense if the people who produced the DVD thought Chasing Amy was coming out sooner than it did, but didn't have any kind of release date for it, hence why they included the "Coming Soon" tagline under the movie's title (and VHS cover) in the Film Recommendations section on the Clerks DVD.

Overall this was a fun movie and I'm glad that I finally got to see it after all these years. I'm also glad that I found it on DVD. Physical media is very important to me. Particularly physical media formats from the '90s and early 2000s like VHS tapes, DVDs, and CDs. Those are the formats I grew up with and I love finding movies, TV shows, and music from that era on those formats. So finding the first DVD release of Clerks from 1999, albeit the Canadian version, is pretty cool. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I don't know when I'll be back on here or over on The Star Trek Journal, because I got stuff going on next week that may prevent me from posting. I promise that I'll be back as soon as I can. Until then have a great afternoon and I will talk to you all later. Take care.