smeth

I didn't realize saying "I'm the landlord" or "I'm the lawyer" allows people to walk into an active crime scene. A suggestion to any aspiring screenwriters: If you want to write about something you don't have personal experience with, there is no shame in doing research. It might make the story more believable.

This was high quality offering from UPN's first season. It was a smart, flashy, behind the scenes drama about an L.A. tv news program. The writing and stories were uniformly good, the look and feel of the show very slick (almost to a fault), the use of background music exceptional. The actors were all good and worked together well. A minor drawback was that all the actors were so good-looking to the point of straining credibility.

This time they go out on a limb with a story that doesn't involve saving the lives of millions or billions of people (as in ST:I,IV,VII,VIII) but only 600. The story is meant to have parallels with episodes in our past, the forced relocation of people for the benefit of larger, more powerful group. I'm glad to see a more personal Trek that is more character driven than usual, and where its hard to tell the heroes and the villains apart.

Where the movie starts to lose me is with the portrayal of the oppressed people. We meet this settlement of blonde haired, earnest, white skinned humans who live in paradise. The planet they live on gives them a special energy that keeps them young-looking, good-looking, and thin.They knead their bread and weed their gardens under sunny skies with no hardships, dirty fingernails, nor storm clouds on the horizon. Apparently the makers of the movie chose non-"ethnic" extras so the audience wouldn't immediately think of American Indians, Jews, Palestinians, ethnic Albanians. To me, however this oppressed group comes across more like affluent and tan Californians in a gated community who want to preserve their way of life from the people who didn't make it in before the gate closed. While ST:Next Generation has always been awfully tidy and utopian, this ends up being too much like a yuppie Celestine fantasy for me to empathize with these people.

Finally, a couple of sticky points. Is it realistic to have a group of people who have rejected all machines, yet have warp capability and can work on an android's positronic brain? Wouldn't there be tools for android-fixing and something to practice the tools on? Wouldn't there also be a space ship somewhere? If they had let the ship get rusty they wouldn't still have warp capability, if they kept it running they'd have at least on very complex machine. Also, considering that there is just one town of 600 people who only travel on foot and have no interest in starting new little towns, couldn't they let the Federation folks set up a few quiet hospital/spas on the other side of the planet?