Renegades was/is an excellent Star Trek Fan Funded story directed by Tim Russ and produced by Sky Conway, but with a new reimagined Trekverse, new uniform designs, ship designs, and many characters from various Trek- mostly original series, Deep Space 9, and Voyager.
As a standalone Star Trek film, the first "episode" was an excellent film, quality-wise much better than "Of Gods and Men" which Tim Russ had made a couple of years earlier.
It is about an hour and a half of an interesting Trek, Pavel Chekov as head of Starfleet Security needs to try to get into the dripping red meat of a certain problem, but he cannot trust his own department, so he employs a group of renegades, led by the daughter of KHAN, yes, that KHAN. Or, granddaughter, it doesn't really say where she came from, OR how she could be as young as she is 150 years after Khan turned into the core of the Genesis planet.
Maybe her story was planned to be told in a future episode. But shortly after this was made, CBS sued just about everybody who was making fan productions and nobody was allowed to use references to Star Trek. Also, CB has put forth a stupid rule that no fan production could be longer than 15 minutes or so. But this first pre-lawsuit entry included Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, Tuvok, Chekov, Admiral Paris, and Icheb, all played by the actors that played the parts. I thoroughly enjoyed the first entry, although it was a lot darker than any Trek I had seen, it was done rather well.
After the CBS lawsuit, the second entry, "the Requiem", is not only 30 minutes shorter, but it was cut into two different 25 minute parts, part one and part two. Neither of which could, until recently, be watched at the same time.
Fortunately I was able to obtain both parts which I immediately loaded into my video editing program and Cut out the credits from part one and I joined them both together. So for the first time I was able to watch it as a coherent story, as one episode, for my personal enjoyment. And as I didn't expect it to be as good as the first story with all of the new meddling by CBS, it was still good, although not as good as when they could reference Star Trek characters and stories.
There are even more Star Trek characters in the Requiem, but unfortunately their names all had to be changed, even their alien races had to be changed. But the second entry includes Jadzia Dax freshly cloned and back to life, NOG, Jake Sisko, Tuvok, Chekov, Uhura, Chakotay, Icheb, along with Gary Graham's shape changing "Ragnar". An alien girl which was originally Andorian lost her antenna, and all Vulcans had an ear-ectomy and became either humans or other races.
"The names were changed to protect the copywrong".
As a story it was adequate, but I didn't feel like the special effects or the production value was as good as the first entry.
But I still love these fan funded Star Trek shows, and Tim Russ is a very good director. Sometimes they don't get enough money to do the production as well as they could.
People who have no experience writing stories or directing television shows have come into this IMDb entry with their size 12 Doc Martin spaceboots to stomp all over it, and I just say they can go to blazes.
If you don't like it? Go write your own Star Trek show and find some money to fund it, and then find people who can act in it and directors who can direct it and special effects houses who will cheaply make you starships and other special effects.
Then we can go into your IMDb feature pages and downvote them all to Oblivion.
People who have no inkling of the difficulties in creating, writing, directing and producing Filmed or Taped media should become aware of said difficulties before commenting on not just fan film productions, but any film or television show. Because "it's sucks" just doesn't cut it.
Because I do understand those difficulties and I don't hand out 10 star reviews to every fan production, however Tim Russ and Sky Conway have done the best they could with this show. I wish it could be told as a Star Trek show without the need for them to change the nature of the characters. But even with that massive change in the second episode, they still kept the spirit of the story that was being told intact despite being forced to remove every reference to Star Trek.
I have been waiting for this review to appear but I wanted to make these changes and resubmit before that happened.
