Trekathon 966: What is Starfleet? (SNW)

Could this be the first ‘faux documentary’ for Trek? Can it be The Office style? Spoilers.

This is a difficult type of episode to make work. And it doesn’t work here. The suspicious tone of the documentary just doesn’t make sense given the Federation. And why on earth did they let the documentary crew on board for this mission? That was entirely within Starfleet’s control. And maybe they could have picked a director with less of an axe to grind about their family.

The other problem is that the underlying story is just a bit too muddled with too many moving parts. And because of the POV it’s a bit too confusing and messy. The story doesn’t really have enough time to be told because of all the framing elements. From a technical perspective it’s fairly well done, but that’s not enough to reduce what I thought was overall a ‘miss’.

Quick hits:

  • Yep, this is going full fake documentary.

  • He couldn’t get a good celebrity voice over? Who’s the Morgan Freeman of the 24th century?

  • There is a real ‘documentary’ feel to the shot selection here. I wonder if they got a director in with experience in that?

  • Ortegas is repairing a motorcycle in her quarters?

  • Nice little detail with the commbadge doubling as a dog tag.

  • The Jikaru look a lot like Mothra.

  • There are some very odd camera choices for the security cameras. Straight up helm’s face, rather than focused on the controls say.

964 down.


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