Star Trek at 50: The Genesis Trilogy

In December 1979, Paramount Pictures released Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a lavish, big-budget adaptation of the Star Trek TV series to the big screen. In public, they were confident and enthusiastic. Behind the scenes they were in a state of panic. The film's budget had tripled during production and post-production, and early reviews had not been the kindest. In the event, the movie did quite well and brought home a solid profit.

Leonard Nimoy was still not entirely comfortable with playing Spock when asked back for Star Trek II. He returned after he was told he would get a memorable death scene. His enjoyment of making the film and his involvement in creative decisions led to him committing wholeheartedly to the character for the rest of his career.

The Paramount executives quietly shuffled Gene Roddenberry into a consulting role, blaming his constant rewrites and creative meddling for causing the budget inflation on the first movie. This wasn't entirely fair, as Paramount's own prevaricating over the script, whether there were making a movie or a TV series, hiring a perfectionist director and delaying hiring an effects team until after the last possible minute all played their roles in pushing the costs upwards. But Roddenberry had certainly been the leading advocate of making a slow-paced, 2001-style cerebral film instead of an action film, which Paramount now considered a mistake.

To make the sequel, Paramount brought on board veteran TV writer and producer Harve Bennett. Bennett knew how to make projects quickly but with integrity, delivering excellent value for money and finding the cleverest ways to extract maximum bang for their buck. He was also a good judge of character and an excellent negotiator. When he called Leonard Nimoy to judge his interest in the project, Nimoy expressed concerns that the character of Spock was played out. Bennett offered him the chance for an amazing, emotional and intense death scene. Nimoy thought briefly about it and then accepted.

Bennett was an excellent producer and writer, but had a slight problem in that he'd never watched the original Star Trek series. He holed up in an office at Paramount with a screening room and all 79 episodes of the series. He made notes on each episode, searching for inspiration. Towards the end of the first season, he was intrigued by the episode Space Seed. In this episode a genetically-engineered dictator and tyrant, Khan Noonien Singh, is found on a sleeper ship in deep space. He and his followers are at first grateful to Kirk and the Enterprise crew for rescuing him, but then he tries to take over the ship with the help of a crew woman who has fallen in love with him. Khan is defeated and he and his crew are exiled on the planet Ceti Alpha V, a verdant but untamed paradise planet. Kirk promises to check up on Khan, but this never happened in later episodes. Bennett was pleased that there hadn't been a sequel as it meant he could re-use Khan as the villain for the movie. The first draft revolved around Khan manipulating Kirk's hitherto unknown son into fighting against his father. Additional drafts, plotted with the help of Jack B. Sowards, introduced a devastating Starfleet superweapon known as the Omega System that Khan is trying to steal.

Paramount and the team were pleased with the rapid progress that was being made, but they hit on a snag that it was unlikely that the Federation would create a planet-destroying weapon of mass destruction (fears of similarities with the Death Star of Star Wars may have played a part). Bennett and Soward struggled with this until the art director, Michael Minor, suggested that it could be a terraforming device instead: an object of profoundly peaceful intent that is perverted into a weapon. Bennett literally hugged Minor, declaring that he had "saved Star Trek." The Omega System was retitled the Genesis Device.

A new draft was produced which featured Spock dying very early in the script, a shocking move inspired by Psycho. Negative fan reaction after the script leak led to the studio backing away on the idea of Spock dying. Bennett hit upon a sneaky idea, however, by showing Spock dying in the opening minutes of the film only for it to turn out to be a training simulation. This would trick viewers into thinking that the story had been changed so Spock wouldn't die at all. Instead, his death was moved to the back end of the film and turned into a heroic, "blaze of glory" ending that Leonard Nimoy felt was quite moving. Although the script was becoming more familiar, it was still a bit flabby and Bennett felt a fresh pair of eyes would be useful. Nicholas Meyer, the director of Time After Time, was recommended to him. Meyer had no experience of Trek so viewed the script as a stand-alone move. He made a list of everything he liked from the previous drafts and delivered a streamlined, focused version in just two weeks. This new script had more action, space battles and explosions but also developed a strong thematic link of ageing, the next generation coming up and taking over and the old generation passing away. Meyer linked this in with the Genesis Device to create a theme of death, life and rebirth that underlines the space battles and impassioned speeches between Kirk and Khan. This impressed Paramount and Bennett so much that they offered him the job of directing the movie.

Ricardo Montalban was 61 years old and suffering from back problems when the film was shot, but still practised a formidable daily exercise regime and was in better shape than some of his younger co-stars.

Everything was in place...except for the villain. Bennett had assumed that someone in casting had checked with Ricardo Montalban's availability and his willingness to reprise the role. Casting had assumed he'd done it. In a bit of a panic, Bennett contacted Montalban. The veteran actor was uncertain if he could reprise the role, and was concerned if playing a cold-blooded villain would upset fans of his character Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island. However, he was impressed by the script and quickly got back into character. The producers were especially impressed with Montalban's formidable physical condition: despite being in his sixties and having a back condition, Montalban still vigorously worked out every day. After the movie came out some viewers complained about Khan's "prosthetic chest", which both the producers and Montalban found deeply amusing. Initial script drafts had depicted a lengthy confrontation between Kirk and Khan, including one suggestion that fight using swords, but Meyer had disregarded these. Unable to come up with a plausible way Kirk would survive a direct confrontation (given Khan's genetically-engineered superior strength, speed and stamina), he simply didn't have them meet at all, instead exchanging threats and glowers through viewscreens.

The rest of the Star Trek cast reunited for the film with Meyer keen to give each character their moment in the sun: McCoy and Spock have a series of witty exchanges in the spirit of the TV series, whilst Scotty's nephew joins the crew. Scotty is incredibly proud, but then distraught when he dies in the opening engagement with the Reliant. Sulu is promoted to Captain of the USS Excelsior, but agrees to do "one last training mission" for Kirk. This scene was cut and in the event George Takei had to wait ten years until Star Trek VI showed him commanding the Excelsior. Bennett and Meyer liked the ship name and held onto it for the next movie. Uhura also had more dialogue and scenes, acting as a conduit of information to the bridge in a more naval command-and-control role than in the series. Finally, Chekov was promoted to first officer of the USS Reliant and forced to betray his shipmates with the use of mind-controlling eels. Meyer was worried about this plot element, feeling it was corny, but felt that casting the respected actor Paul Winfield as Captain Terrell helped sell the scene. He also cast an up-and-coming young actress, Kirstie Alley, as Spock's Vulcan protege, Lt. Saavik.

Leonard Nimoy was excited to film Spock's death scene, but when the day of filming arrived he surprised Meyer and Bennett by telling them that he had thoroughly enjoyed making the film and the more collaborative atmosphere of production. He asked them if there was a way he could return in the future if necessary, especially since Paramount had already begun talking about a third film. The death scene was rewritten to include a sequence where Spock mind melds with Dr. McCoy, and a new shot showing his funeral casket lying on the surface of the newly-created Genesis Planet was added in post production.

Star Trek II's visual effects, although fewer in number and simpler than The Motion Picture's, received praise for their clarity and quality.

Shooting began on 9 November 1981 and concluded on 29 January 1982. To reduce costs, a very large chunk of the film took place on just one set: the bridge of the Enterprise, which then doubled as the simulator room at Starfleet Academy and then as the bridge of the USS Reliant, the ship Khan steals and turns against the Federation. Initially the producers were going to depict the Reliant as a ship of the same class as the Enterprise so they could use the same model, but the special effects crew threw a fit. They hated the big, bulky and elaborate Enterprise model and said it'd be cheaper to design and build a whole new model. Bennett and Meyer agreed and the Reliant became a Miranda-class starship, smaller but more manoeuvrable than the Enterprise. The Reliant in fact became the first non-Constitution-class Federation starship to appear in the Star Trek franchise. Compared to the laborious post-production process for The Motion Picture, Star Trek II's visual effects process was more streamlined and even had time to allow for experimental shots, such as using cloud and water tanks to generate the concluding battle in the Mutara Nebula. Production of the effects also proceeded alongside shooting rather than afterwards, allowing closer integration of the effects into live-action scenes.

One area were there were problems was depicting the rapid terraforming of a planet in the Genesis Project demonstration video. Effects supervisor Jim Veilleux was frustrated and turned to Lucasfilm, who had an embryonic studio dabbling in the earliest computer-generated visual effects. They agreed to provide a wholly computer-generated 60-second animation showing the Genesis Device terraforming a planet from a ball of rock into an Earthlike world. This was the first scene in a live-action movie to be generated completely through CGI. The Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group used the scene as a demonstration of what they could do: a few years later they spun off as a new company called Pixar.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was released on 4 June 1982, barely four months after shooting finished. It was a lean, tight and focused movie. It had been made for $11.2 million (which was considered pretty cheap even then), came in at an audience-friendly 112 minutes and was immediately showered with praise by both fans and critics alike. The film opened to a $14.3 million weekend, at that time an all-time record, and took home $80 million in the United States and $97 million in total. Although this was down on The Motion Picture, it was vastly more profitable compared to the film's production costs. There was tremendous approval of the film's action scenes and visual effects sequences, but a lot of praise was lavished on Montalban and Shatner's palpable mutual hatred, the themes of death and rebirth, on the extraordinary musical score by newcomer James Horner and on the film's focus. Even Gene Roddenberry, who had had little to do with the movie, grudgingly accepted it was "exciting".

Star Trek III introduced several of the franchise's most iconic spacecraft designs, including (pictured here) the USS Excelsior and the Spacedock station orbiting above Earth. The movie also introduced the Oberth-class science vessel and the Klingon Bird of Prey.

Paramount quickly moved forwards with a third Star Trek movie. Harve Bennett agreed to return as producer and it was decided to make the movie a direct sequel to The Wrath of Khan. They decided that the plot would focus on the return of Spock, but Bennett was keen that the resurrection could only come at a profound personal cost to Kirk. Working backwards through the script, he decided that Kirk was lose his son, David (introduced in the previous movie), he would be forced out of Starfleet and that the Enterprise would be destroyed. Nicholas Meyer was asked to return, but Meyer was unhappy with the way the final edit of the film was handled by Paramount (including much more blatant foreshadowing of Spock's survival than Meyer had intended) and decided to sit the movie out. Bennett hit on the idea of Nimoy himself directing: the actor had been directing TV episodes, plays and smaller TV films for over a decade and had familiarity with the franchise, the cast and the crew (many of them returning from The Wrath of Khan). Nimoy relished the challenge, especially since he didn't have to appear in front of the camera apart from right at the very end of the movie.

As with The Wrath of Khan it was decided to have a memorable villain, and the first draft focused on the Romulans, including a return for their Bird-of-Prey class warship from the episode Balance of Terror, now updated to a new design. However, it was later decided to change the villains to the Klingons, who a more general audience would be more familiar with. Nimoy decided to cast Christopher Lloyd as the Klingon Captain Kruge, citing his dramatic work rather than his comedy role on Taxi which viewers were more familiar with. Nimoy was particularly praised for his direction of his friend and co-star Shatner, reigning in his tendency to chew the scenery. George Takei was also impressed by how Nimoy and Bennett handled him complaining about a massive security guard calling him "Tiny," which Takei found unnecessary. However, watching the complete sequence back (including the "Don't call me Tiny," rejoinder after Sulu kicks the guard's butt) impressed Takei, who immediately apologised.

Spock's return was well-received by fans, especially given it was achieved with difficulty and only at cost.

The visual effects team had more work to do on this film, including designing no less than four iconic new designs: the Federation Spacedock, the Oberth-class USS Grissom, the Klingon Bird-of-Prey and of course the colossal USS Excelsior. All of these designs would go on to feature heavily in future Trek films and TV series. In particular, Nimoy and Bennett were able to increase the visual effects budget by reusing numerous sets, props and costumes from The Wrath of Khan, and by using an interior set for the Genesis Planet rather than most costly exterior shooting. As a result, the film's budget of $16 million (almost 50% higher than The Wrath of Khan's) went a lot further, allowing for the elaborate planet set to break apart as the Genesis Planet disintegrates and for a lengthy sequence showing the destruction of the Enterprise. Bennett was annoyed when Gene Roddenberry, who loathed the idea of destroying the ship, leaked word of the ship's destruction to fans, resulting in derogatory letters being sent in. The visual effects crew, who hated the badly-wired and unwieldy Enterprise model with a passion, were keen to take a hammer to the model to destroy it completely, but were stopped by Bennett and Nimoy, in case it was needed in the future.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was released on 1 June 1984. The film took $87 million worldwide and was considered a success, but the critical reception was more muted. Some reviews were critical of the obvious sets used to depict the Genesis Planet (although some said they enjoyed this was a throwback to the original series) but for the most part Nimoy's direction was praised, along with the visual effects. The film was the first in the series to be criticised for relying on continuity from the previous movie and not doing enough to work as a stand-alone film.

Paramount were keen to continue the franchise, but wanted a change of direction: this coincided with both Nimoy and Bennett's feelings as well, that the fourth movie should be a break away from the past. Nimoy in particular was to change gears and make a film that was lighter, more comedic and less reliant on staples such as warp drive, phasers and menacing villains. However, Bennett was also keen that lingering continuity issues from the previous films - such as the knowledge of the Genesis Device being made public, the Klingon outrage after the death of Kruge and Kirk and his crew being fired from Starfleet and facing criminal charges - should be addressed. However, the whole plan was nearly derailed when Shatner refused to sign up for the movie unless he got a bit pay rise. Paramount, possibly as a negotiating ploy, asked Bennet and Nimoy to consider a new film set in Starfleet Academy with the characters played by younger actors. It seems that this threat, combined with a more modest pay increase and production approval, convinced Shatner to sign on. New ideas came on board, such as time travel and the idea of something on contemporary Earth that doesn't exist in the future being key to saving the day. The idea of using humpback whales appealed to Nimoy, who wanted to include a message about conservation but not to the detriment of the drama. Wrath of Khan writer-director Nicholas Meyer returned to polish the script and help integrate the best ideas from the development process.

Star Trek IV's contemporary setting led to a well-received change of pace, but also introduced production headaches for director Leonard Nimoy.

The new film invoked time travel so that he bulk of the film was set in contemporary San Francisco. Real locations were used wherever possible to help keep costs down, along with props and models being reused from the previous movies. The Reliant model, for example, was re-employed to depict the USS Saratoga and the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, Earth Spacedock and the Excelsior models were broken out of storage. The only major new model constructed for the film was the alien probe which menaces Earth in the opening and closing sections.

Nimoy found that directing the film was a more daunting task than The Search for Spock, since he had to appear on-screen as well as direct. There were also logistical difficulties with filming scenes involving traffic (which required set-ups taking 30 minutes each) and extras recruited off the street. There were also some positive nods to long-term fans of the series, such as using the US Navy's Enterprise aircraft carrier (although the ship was actually at sea, so the USS Ranger was substituted). The film also nearly cast long-term Star Trek fan Eddie Murphy in a role as a professor, but Murphy wanted to play an alien or Starfleet officer instead. The issue was resolved when he went to film The Golden Child instead, a decision he later regretted.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was released on 26 November 1986. The film was marketed differently from its predecessors, with emphasis placed on the contemporary setting, the more comedic tone and the fact there was no need to be familiar with the franchise to enjoy the film. Traditional fans were dismayed by some of these elements, such as the whales, but found that the movie handled them far better than was expected and were happy with the ending, in which Kirk is demoted from Admiral to Captain and placed in command of a new USS Enterprise. The movie attracted both critical and commercial praise and took home over $133 million, just $6 million shy of The Motion Picture's take but on less than half the cost (The Voyage Home came in on a $21 million budget).

Star Trek IV ended with the crew given a new Enterprise...but Paramount had a slightly different direction in mind for the future of the franchise.

Paramount was extremely happy with the film's profitability and critical acclaim. It was also astonished by the franchise's longevity, and the fact that the original series was still generating significant revenue in syndication twenty years after it debuted. However, the wage increases for the original actors had become significant and Paramount wanted to approach the franchise from a different angle.

On 10 October 1986, one month before The Voyage Home debuted, Paramount announced that Star Trek was coming home to television with a new, weekly TV series featuring a new ship and a new crew: Star Trek: The Next Generation.

ALTERED CARBON TV series gets lead actor and director

Netflix have made some announcements about their forthcoming 10-episode TV series based on Richard Morgan's seminal cyberpunk novel Altered Carbon.

Joel Kinnaman (The Killing) has been cast as Takeshi Kovacs, a body-swapping Envoy (highly-trained elite soldier) who is called in to investigate an unusual crime on 26th Century Earth. Kovacs can move from body to body, so it's possible that future seasons will see the character played by other actors. Miguel Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) will also direct the first episode of the series.

I had assumed that this project was some way off, but with cast and crew already being assembled, it's more likely we'll see this filmed later this year and on the air as soon as early next year.

The Lost Reviews: Part 8 - Season 2, Episodes 9-12

Welcome to the Lost rewatch project. I am currently rewatching all 121 episodes of the TV series which aired for six seasons from 2004 to 2010. This is very much a rewatch thread, with the show watched with knowledge of what is to come in later seasons. If you've never watched Lost before, you definitely do not want to read this blog series.

Without further ado, let us continue after the jump.

The Horse of Bewilderment.

CIVILIZATION VI announced by Lord Boromir Stark

Firaxis Games have employed the mighty Sean Bean to formally announced that Civilization VI will be released on 21 October this year.

This will be (obviously) the sixth title in the series that began with Sid Meier's original, classic strategy game back in 1991. I must admit I thought this was a bit soon, but then I saw that Civilization IV (which I still think of as quite new) was released in 2005 and V (which I own but haven't played once yet) in 2010. I think I can safely say that it will be some considerable time before I get around to playing this.

Civilization VI will build on elements of V and will come with all of the features introduced in that game's DLC as standard. VI also promises to "unstack the cities" in the same way that V "unstacked the armies". VI will feature areas around each city where you can place additional buildings and facilities. The developers are also promising a stronger focus on AI and diplomacy than ever before.

If Sean Bean is a character in the game, I can confidently predicted he will be nuked to death by Gandhi before the endgame is reached.

Star Trek at 50: Phase II and The Motion Picture

Star Trek: The Original Series ran for three seasons on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and was a modest success. However, the show really found its footing in syndication and became a huge smash hit, with millions of viewers tuning in. In 1973-74 an animated series aired which was moderately successful, but fans were clamouring to see more live-action adventures.

 Concept artwork for Star Trek: Phase II.

So were Gene Roddenberry and Paramount Pictures, who had inherited the Star Trek franchise when they bought up Desilu. However, there were early disagreements over how to proceed. The fans wanted a new TV series which could explore many more characters and stories. Paramount were keener on a mid-budget film series. The cast were divided, but certainly Leonard Nimoy was highly ambivalent over returning to play Spock on a regular basis out of fear of typecasting (perhaps groundlessly, as he had among the busier post-Trek careers of his colleagues).

In May 1975 Paramount decided to proceed with a feature film and Roddenberry began considering ideas. He initially toyed with a prequel showing the Enterprise crew forming and coming together, but ultimately settled on the idea of a malfunctioning AI declaring itself a deity and travelling towards Earth. With the working title The God-Thing, the script underwent several revisions with writers such as Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Silverberg taking passes. However, Paramount were unnerved by the script's anti-religious overtones (especially the insinuation that by the 23rd Century religion had effectively become extinct on Earth) and pulled Roddenberry from the project. The new creative team developed a fresh idea called Planet of the Titans and considered a more action-oriented story featuring Spock fighting a Klingon nemesis played by Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.

Two years into development, Star Wars was released and Paramount got cold feet about launching a mid-budget production that would not be able to compete with George Lucas's movie in terms of visual effects. Reasoning that audiences would not be interested in two movie SF franchises at the same time, they brought Roddenberry back in and began developing a new Star Trek series, with the working title Phase II.

With Paramount looking to put the series into a reasonably fast turn-around to debut on their new TV network, Roddenberry quickly reworked The God-Thing into a much-less controversial script called In Thy Image, now envisaged as a two-part pilot episode. The new series would see the bulk of the old crew (including Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura) return on a drastically upgraded and rebuilt version of the Enterprise, Roddenberry using the real-life naval tradition of "refits" to justify the change in design. New characters would also feature, most notably Commander Decker as first officer, Lt. Ilia as a psychiatrist and counsellor and Lt. Xon as the new science officer. Spock would be reduced to a recurring role, playing a large role in the occasional episode but sitting out of most episodes. This was to satisfy Leonard Nimoy's conflicting desire to still do the series as a professional courtesy to Roddenberry and the fans, but not commit to it to the exclusion of other projects.

Sets were designed, costume and make-up tests were undertaken and original designer Matt Jefferies began updating the Enterprise model. Everything was going well and it looked like Star Trek: Phase II would enter production in November 1977.

The cast of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

What happened next took everyone by surprise: Paramount announced the cancellation of Phase II less than a fortnight before filming was due to begin. Apparently the studio had gotten wind of the pre-release excitement and hype for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whilst Fox had announced that a Star Wars sequel movie was in development. Paramount had concluded that the marketplace could sustain multiple big SF movies simultaneously, and this was confirmed when Close Encounters came out at the end of November and was a massive hit. Paramount mandated that not only would Star Trek now become a feature film, but it would be a big-budget affair. But they wanted it in production yesterday.

Roddenberry and his team of writers began reworking the script for In Thy Image into a movie script. With a much bigger budget available, they mandated sweeping shots of much more elaborate starship models than they had first envisaged and ordered the construction of much larger and more elaborate sets. Satisfied with early work, Paramount announced in March 1978 that Robert Wise would be directing Star Trek: The Motion Picture, based on a script by Harold Livingstone and a story by Gene Roddenberry. The budget was set at $15 million.

Richard Taylor and Andrew Probert updated the Enterprise design and model from the Phase II version into what would - arguably - become the most iconic and definitive version of the ship for the films. Syd Mead was brought into design the V'Ger spacecraft, a titanic model that ended up being over 68 feet (21m) long.

Filming began on 7 August 1978; delays had been caused by script dissatisfaction, especially with the ending, but these had been overcome. The intervening period had also been useful in allowing Gene Roddenberry to convince Leonard Nimoy to play a larger role in the story (Nimoy had originally planned to sit out the film altogether). However, as filming started the script was still being tweaked, with Roddenberry, Robert Wise and even Nimoy and Shatner suggesting a near-constant stream of updates and changes. There were also significant production problems, including faulty lights, dubious electrical issues and illness among the cast.

The refit version of the original USS Enterprise is often cited as the best version of the ship to date. It was so popular that the second Enterprise simply reused the same design.

Shooting finally wrapped on 26 January 1979, 125 days after it began, and a massive wrap party was held. Post-production then got underway, but even this spiralled out of control as the effects shots became more and more elaborate. Multiple companies and effects teams were brought in until Douglas Trumbull stepped in. Despite having only nine months to complete twice as many effects shots as Star Wars (which was developed over a three-year period) and a famously exacting nature, Trumbull managed to pull off the feat. However, the effects budget had ballooned out of control in the meantime.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released on 7 December 1979. To the horror of Paramount, the budget had ballooned to $46 million (over four times the budget of Star Wars and almost twice the budget of its then-in-production sequel, The Empire Strikes Back) and they began to fear a disasterous flop. Fortunately, this didn't happen. The film made $11 million on its opening weekend, which was considered very good, and ultimately the film grossed $139 million worldwide. This was not considered to be a massive, phenomenal success, but it was considered to be a good return given the critical reception.

The film was dubbed Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture almost immediately, with critics agreeing that the effects were dazzling but went on for far too long at the expense of characterisation. Robert Wise later regretted not test-screening the movie first, as he could have cut out some of the effects and reinstated some of the character material that had been cut for time. However, the film's cerebral core and interest in diplomacy and science over action and violence did go down quite well with some viewers and fans, who had feared a violent action-fest inspired by Star Wars.

With the film a success, Gene Roddenberry presented Paramount with an idea for a sequel, involving time travel and the assassination of JFK. Paramount thanked him for his and "kicked him upstairs" to a consulting role. They brought in a new writer and producer, Harve Bennett, who had been doing good work on television working on low and mid-budget productions. They asked him for his honest thoughts about The Motion Picture and he replied that he found it a bit boring. They then asked him if he could make a sequel for "less than forty-five f***ing million dollars". Bennett said he could make five movies for that amount of money. Bennett was hired on the spot. He did raise one objection: he'd never actually seen any Star Trek. He was given a screening room and the reels of all 79 episodes to familiarise himself with the characters and premise, as well as look at ideas for a story. Bennett was actually looking for something more specific: an antagonist, juding it a major weakness of The Motion Picture that it had no enemy or bad guy. It actually wasn't that long before Bennett found what he was looking for.

"Hi. I'm here to save your franchise."

FINAL FANTASY X and X-II to be released this week on Steam

Square Enix have confirmed that Final Fantasy X and its slightly bizarrely-named sequel, Final Fantasy X-II, will be released on Steam this week in a remastered form.

This continues Square's push into the PC game space, having recently released or re-released Final Fantasy III through IX, as well as XIII, XIII-II and Lightning Returns, as well as Type-0 (XI and XIV, being multiplayer-focused games, were already on the platform). The remaster of X was known to be on the cards for a while since Square had announced it was coming to mobile devices, with the PC versions of the games being a result of those remasterings.

Sales for the PC versions of these older RPGs have been apparently very impressive, with each port getting more care and attention than the last one. This bodes well for a good technical port of the two RPGs.

Whether the upcoming Final Fantasy XV and the comprehensive remake of the classic Final Fantasy VII will also be released on PC alongside their PlayStation 4 and X-Box One versions remains to be seen.

Final Fantasy X was originally released in 2001 and was the first game in the series to be released on the PlayStation 2. It was also the first game in the series to have a full 3D world (rather than the hybrid 3D characters/2D backdrops of FF VII through IX) and voice acting. Controversially, it was the first game to remove the overworld map and limit the freedom of the characters to travel where they liked. The main character Tidus also received criticism for awful dialogue. Despite these weaknesses, the game received generally good reviews and sold very well. Final Fantasy X-II, the first direct sequel Square has ever made to a Final Fantasy game (each game is set in its own world and possibly its own universe), was released in 2003 and is a much lighter game, more reliant on humour. For the first time in a Final Fantasy title, the entire main cast is also female, which was seen as a interesting shift away from the balanced or male-dominated casts of the earlier games. X-II was also well-received, particularly its battle system and much more freeform style of gameplay.

This flurry of re-releases leaves only Final Fantasy XII unavailable on PC. It is unknown if this will follow, but on the basis of the other re-releases this appears to be likely.

Final Fantasy X/X-II HD Remaster will be released on Steam on May 12th.

Star Trek at 50: The Original Series

In early 1966 NBC and Desilu Productions signed an agreement formally committing to producing a full season of television based on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. To get to that point Roddenberry had had to create two pilots, hire a cast and build elaborate sets over a period of eighteen months, and still nothing had actually made it to the screen. The formal greenlight allowed him, his writers and his actors to breathe a sigh of relief.

"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Just a few weeks later, Desilu almost killed the series. Although the production company was influential and capable, it was not the largest in Hollywood and it could not afford to mount a number of large projects simultaneously. Bruce Geller had proposed a new, expensive spy drama series to Desilu that had gotten a number of networks very excited, more excited than they were over Star Trek. Desilu agreed to proceed with this series, but it put the future of the Star Trek deal in doubt, as it financially overextended the company. Herb Solow, the Desilu director of programming who was Star Trek's champion, had to meet the head of Desilu, the formidable actress and producer Lucille Ball, and convince her to back both shows simultaneously. Ball agreed and work resumed on both Trek and the spy show, which became known as Mission: Impossible, making this one of the more notably successful such gambles in the history of Hollywood.

For the series itself a number of additional castmembers were added. The second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, saw William Shatner cast as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy retained as Mr. Spock and them both joined by James Dooham as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott and George Takei as Mr. Sulu. Sulu was initially characterised as a scientist but for the show itself became the helmsman of the Enterprise. Paul Fix played Dr. Piper in the second pilot but for the series he was replaced by DeForest Kelley at Dr. Leonard McCoy. Gene Roddenberry was interested in diversifying the cast with female roles, so retained Majel Barrett from the original pilot, The Cage, in the new role of Nurse Christine Chapel and cast Grace Lee Whitney as Janice Rand, the captain's yeoman. However, Roddenberry wanted a female character front and centre on the bridge, so cast the young African-American actress Nichelle Nichols as communications officer Lt. Uhura. This was an unusual move in the racially sensitive period of the 1960s, but Roddenberry felt it was essential to show an aspirational future free of the petty prejudices of the day.

Filming commenced in the summer of 1966 and the first episode, The Man Trap, was aired on 8 September 1966. The show initially had favourable ratings, but a mixed critical reception. The show's ratings also dipped as the season continued. However, NBC had started studying the demographics of viewership rather than just the raw numbers and concluded that Star Trek's audience, although small, was committed and also young. Using these figures, it was able to still sell advertising space at a favourable rate which kept the show on the air for the rest of the first season.

The Hugo Award-winning City on the Edge of Forever is widely (but not unanimously) regarded as the best episode of The Original Series. It was written by Harlan Ellison, with rewrites by a team including D.C. Fontana, Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon.

The first season of the original Star Trek is often regarded as the best, featuring episodes such as The Galileo Seven, Balance of Terror and, most memorably, Space Seed and The City on the Edge of Forever. Space Seed saw Ricardo Montalban cast as Khan, a genetically-engineered super-criminal who nearly seizes control of the ship with the help of a Starfleet traitor. Kirk exiles Khan to the planet Ceti Alpha V at the end of the episode and them promptly forgets about him. City on the Edge of Forever, written by popular SF novelist and short story writer Harlan Ellison, was unusual for Star Trek in that it mixed in time travel with a love story, featuring William Shatner's Kirk falling in love with a political activist played by Joan Collins. The script would be partially rewritten by D.C. Fontana and Roddenberry himself, amongst others, to bring it in on time and budget. The episode won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and became something of a pop culture phenomenon even outside Star Trek's own fanbase: the 1990s British sitcom Men Behaving Badly set an entire episode around the characters watching this episode on a rerun.

Star Trek's first season also saw NBC receive a large amount of praise for the show. It received 30,000 pieces of mail about the series, including letters from scientists, doctors and engineers praising the show. The Smithsonian Institution requested a copy of the series to be stored in its archives as it was of scientific and cultural interest. NBC was taken aback and this support helped it make the decision to renew the series, even though the ratings had already been good enough to ensure that anyway.

The second season saw only a few cosmetic changes to the formula from the first. The most notable was the addition of Walter Koenig to the cast as Ensign Pavel Chekov. Roddenberry had decided that adding a Russian character was a good idea to show that in the future the United States and Russia would have put aside their differences and reconciled, which he thought was a healthier message than other shows which were using the Cold War as a source for action and conflict.

More subtle, although irritating to some of the cast, was the fact that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had emerged as the stars of the show and were now given the lion's share of the action. DeForest Kelley's Dr. McCoy became an excellent foil to the two so the show became centred on the three leads (although McCoy had relatively few episodes about him specifically, compared to Kirk and Spock), with the other characters becoming supporting roles. Nichelle Nichols considered leaving the show at this point and to use her newfound fame to get work on Broadway. However, at a charity fundraiser she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose civil rights movement was at its height. He told Nichols that she was an inspirational role model for both women and people of colour across the United States and asked her to stay. She agreed.

The second season saw additional memorable and classic episodes, including Amok Time, The Changeling, The Doomsday Machine, Journey to Babel (which introduced Spock's parents) and The Trouble with Tribbles. The show continued to gain fans but the ratings remained less than what NBC would have preferred. However, Star Trek was outperforming the opposition and the demographics continued to show that affluent and professional people were watching the series. A change in transmission date meant that some of the younger viewers from the first season were no longer watching, which have led to some brief discussions at NBC and the rumour that they were considering cancelling the series. This does not appear to have been seriously on the cards, but Gene Roddenberry fanned the flames of the rumour at a series of SF conventions. 116,000 pieces of fan mail flooded the NBC letter room begging them to keep the show on the air. NBC made the unusual step of announcing the renewal live on air, just to let the fans know the show would definitely be coming back.

Things looked rosy for Star Trek but then a problem emerged: internal network politics. The plan had been to move Star Trek to a Monday night, which was considered prime airing real estate. However, the producer of the comedy show it would have replaced angrily objected and, due to contractual agreements, that show could not be moved. Trek had to be dropped back to Friday nights. This was considered the kiss of death as Trek's target audience frequently went out on a Friday evening, but there was no other slot available. The advertising revenue for this slot was also lower than Trek's old slot, so this resulted in a 10% budget cut compared even to Season 1.

Shatner and Nimoy were "unimpressed" with the quality of scripts for the show's third and final season, but particularly despised Spock's Brain, possibly the nadir of the entire Star Trek franchise.

Roddenberry was utterly furious and spent months locking horns with NBC to get them to change their minds, to no avail. He was so annoyed that he withdrew from day-to-day production duties on the show. Roddenberry's previous co-producer had been Gene L. Coon (aka "The Forgotten Gene"), who had joined halfway through Season 1 and won the respect of the cast and the writers as a skilled, even-handed showrunner with a fine eye for quality scripts. Unfortunately, Coon had been offered an excellent deal at Universal and left towards the end of Season 2 (to the later woe of the cast and crew alike), although he continued to contribute scripts under a pseudonym. NBC appointed Fred Freiberger to take charge of the production instead. Freiberger was less interested in serious SF stories and instead mandated more action and monster stories, to the consternation of the cast, writers and fans. The third season was critically mauled compared to the first two, especially the mind-bogglingly awful episode Spock's Brain which opened the season. Nimoy and Shatner were both embarrassed and annoyed by the script, and Nimoy considered the episode the most appalling thing he'd ever worked on. Freiberger's influence on the show was regarded as highly detrimental, replacing the more serious SF of the first two seasons with shlock and cheap sensationalism. A decade later, he would do the same thing when he took over the running of Space: 1999 for its second season and likewise sent the quality of the show right off the edge of a cliff.

Later episodes were better, however, with The Enterprise Incident, The Tholian Web and Day of the Dove considered to be quite strong pieces. The season also managed to score two notable points for political commentary: Plato's Stepchildren featured a kiss between a mind-controlled Kirk and Uhura. Although not quite the first interracial kiss on American television (Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nancy Sinatra had kissed on a TV show a year earlier), it was still considered provocative and daring, and attracted complaints from NBC affiliates in the South. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was an allegorical episode, featuring the Enterprise crew stumbling on a planet with an overclass who consider themselves racially superior to the underclass, yet both are identical: black on one side of the face and white on the other. The crew are baffled when they realise that the sides of the colours are inverted between the two sides, a completely arbitrary distinction. The racial allegory was unsubtle but somewhat effective.

Ratings for the third season, as expected, tanked and this time no amount of letter-writing could save the show. Turnabout Intruder, the final episode of Star Trek, aired on 3 June 1969. The sets were struck and the actors moved onto other projects. Leonard Nimoy, in fact, only moved across the lot to join the cast of Mission: Impossible. Star Trek, it appeared, was done.

Or maybe not. One month after the final episode aired in the States, the show aired in the United Kingdom for the first time, on the BBC. Glossy and in full colour, Star Trek showed up the BBC's own Doctor Who as looking a bit tired and antiquated, helping inspire a full, dramatic revamp of that show (less episodes, higher budgets and a move to full colour). The show also started airing in many other countries, where it quickly became popular. Star Trek also finished airing just a few weeks short of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Suddenly science fiction was a hot property, and everywhere. NBC's cancellation of Star Trek after just 79 episodes fell short of the normal number required for syndication (roughly 104, allowing stations to show two episodes a week year-round), but they found a lot of interest anyway and sold the entire series to local networks to air as and when they pleased.

The result was an explosion of popularity. Suddenly Star Trek was in constant reruns all over the United States and many other countries. Books started appearing, and in December 1972 a Star Trek-specific convention was organised in New York City, attended by Gene Roddenberry. Soon Trek conventions became an annual event, attracting thousands of attendees with castmembers regularly showing up.

Star Trek: The Animated Series ran for two seasons in 1973 and 1974. It reunited most of the original cast for a new series of adventures, mostly scripted by writers from the original series. Gene Roddenberry was not a fan of animation and later "decanonised" the series. However, it was restored to official status in the 1990s.

This belated success caused Roddenberry and NBC to consider a revival of the show. The actors and writers had other commitments which made this difficult, but in 1973 the cast did regroup to make Star Trek: The Animated Series. This ran for two seasons on NBC and was a moderate success, particularly for the way it allowed much more alien creatures and worlds to be used, but the fans were keen for new live-action adventures.

What followed was story of conflicting interests, with Paramount keen to use the name appeal of the show to launch a feature film series and Roddenberry and the fans generally more inclined to want another TV series which would allow them to see more of the characters. Other factors came into this, such as Leonard Nimoy's reluctance to reprise the role of Spock for long periods (his first 1975 autobiography, I Am Not Spock, saw him engaging in this debate publicly) out of fear of typecasting. This series of battles and corporate conflicts was finally settled in May 1977: the release and massive success of Star Wars led - somewhat bafflingly - to Paramount concluding that no-one would go and see two science fiction movies so close together, so they formally greenlit Star Trek: Phase II, a new TV series reuniting the original cast but adding new characters and featuring Spock only as an occasionally recurring role.

Star Trek was on its way back to the screen.

The Lost Reviews: Part 7 - Season 2, Episodes 5-8

Welcome to the Lost rewatch project. I am currently rewatching all 121 episodes of the TV series which aired for six seasons from 2004 to 2010. This is very much a rewatch thread, with the show watched with knowledge of what is to come in later seasons. If you've never watched Lost before, you definitely do not want to read this blog series.

Without further ado, let us continue after the jump.

Jin and Sun's first meeting.

Paul Kearney's new novel out now

Paul Kearney's new novel, The Wolf in the Attic, is out now (UK, USA). This is the author's first new novel in four years, since he completed his Macht Trilogy with Kings of Morning in 2012.

This book is set in Oxford in 1929 and sees the protagonist, a young Greek refugee named Anna, drawn into unusual events involving her father, the loss of her home in Smyrna and two Oxford dons named Lewis and Tolkien. It's a move away from the epic fantasy series that Kearney is perhaps best-known for, and more of a return to his early stand-alone novels that melded the fantastic with the real world.

There's been some good coverage of the book and some excellent reviews:

Guest blog from Paul at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.
Interview at Sci-Fi Bulletin.
Interview at Rising Shadow.


Review at Living For Books.
Review at My Books, My Life, My Escape.
Review at Lipstick and Libraries.
Review at Bastian's Book Reviews.
Review at Queen of Blades.
Review at Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing.
Review at Bookhaunt.
Review at City of Lost Books.
Review at My Bookish Ways.
Review at The Quidnunc.


I am currently about halfway through the novel and hope to bring you all a review shortly.

Blogging in the Age of Austerity

This week the veteran, multi-award-winning science fiction and fantasy blog SF Signal announced it was shutting down. The news sent shockwaves through SFF fandom: SF Signal was founded in 2003, in the earliest, most nascent days of the blogosphere when the world was still young. Other blogs had come and gone, but SF Signal was an eternal presence on the scene. Indeed, with three Hugo Awards to its name and a large number of guest and contributing editors providing content under the eyes of founders John DeNardo and JP Frantz, the future looked quite bright for SF Signal.

Their reasons for shuttering the blog are very understandable: even if others could provide content, the blog was still their baby and still consumed a lot of their free time. Both editors had reached a point where they could not justify giving up that time at the expense of spending time with their families, so decided to shut down the blog. No doubt there were options for passing SF Signal onto other writers and editors, but the site was theirs and they didn't want it to continue without them, hence the closure. This news came on the heels of Charlie Jane Anders stepping away from SFF mega-site io9 to concentrate on her fiction. That was a different case, as Gawker Media who hosted, paid for and maintained io9. Anders was the co-founder and helped establish the tone and direction of the site, but as a corporate entity io9 could keep going under new management in the form of long-time contributor and arch-snarkmaster Rob Bricken. More distinctively, as a corporate media concern, the people working on io9 get paid. The people working on SF Signal do not.


Back in the autumn of 2005, for the first time in my life, I was finally able to move into a house with broadband. Before that my web-browsing was carried out in internet cafes and libraries. As a lifelong fan of SFF, this had been rather frustrating but I wasted no time in hanging around. Within hours of getting my first broadband connection installed I had signed up on several of the major SFF forums: Westeros, Wotmania (defunct), SFX (defunct) and Dragonmount. In the following weeks and months I would join many others: SFF Chronicles, SFFWorld, Malazanempire, Paizo and SFX. Due to good timing and good fortune, I would meet George R.R. Martin for the very time within a few weeks of that time and post a detailed report of that meeting on Westeros, leading to me becoming a moderator there. I posted numerous book reviews over the following months, which led to people suggesting that I start my own blog, which I finally did in November 2006. And here we are, ten years later (well, nine and a half).

Writing the blog has been immensely satisfying, especially when I've reviewed a less well-known book and seen dozens of people go and buy a copy. For a few people, it was on the Wertzone that they first heard there was a new Star Wars movie coming out, or that A Dance with Dragons finally had a publishing date, or that Fallout 4 existed. The satisfaction of writing and working on the blog for a reading audience is tremendous, and I often feel the need that my readers deserve and need the best content I can put out. Hence how a planned mild rebuttal to a cheesy "Best Fantasy Evaaah" article on another website ended up becoming a 66,000-word series on the history of the entire genre. I like to think that this commitment to original content, long posts and a fairly prolific output is why the blog is doing so well. Since 2011, during the period when I've been repeatedly told that blogging is dead, the Wertzone has increased its hit rate to unprecedented heights. All of this is fantastic and has had significant knock-on effects: attending conventions, hosting and taking part on panels, and - very occasionally - doing paying work for publishers or magazines.

All of this requires a substantial time investment, however. It's frequently involved coming in from eight hours at the day job to jumping straight into four or five hours on the site, several times a week. Sometimes that's been fine and sometimes it hasn't, and I've scaled things back. The balance of investment and reward in any activity needs to be weighed, and for the most part I've been happy with that balance.

As I get older, though, it becomes harder to justify spending so much time blogging in favour of doing other things, such as spending more time with friends, family or a significant other or just more time relaxing after work. Right now, I don't actually have a significant other (for the last couple of months) or a day job (for the last month), hence why the Wertzone was unusually busy in April. I made a conscious decision last month to, whilst undertaking my normal jobsearching activities, to also put eight hours a day into the blog and treating it like a day job. This is why there double the normal number of posts last month, and a corresponding rise in hits, social media activity, getting new Twitter followers etc. It was fortuitous that a couple of big, attention-grabbing stories came up during that time (most notably the Wheel of Time TV series news).

This never happens.

For bloggers who do have day jobs and families, it's become clear that the lack of material reward for blogging means greater pressure to step away and spend that time instead with loved ones or doing other things. And that's why it's easy to see why the guys at SF Signal decided to step away. If I get one of the several jobs I'm currently going through the recruitment process for, the amount of blogging on the site will have to fall as I devote time to that instead.

Is there a way around this? Should there be? Kind of. For a lot of bloggers, blogging is a springboard into writing fiction and once they make that transition, the blogging is left behind. For me, I have no interest in writing fiction day in, day out. I may one day try my hand at writing a short story or a novel if a story demands to be told, but I'm never going to be a career fiction writer. I much prefer writing about the genre as a critic, but the paid market for that is much smaller. After over five months doing the rounds with my agent, A History of Epic Fantasy has failed to garner as much as the merest flicker of interest from a professional publisher, despite the people nominating it for awards (and in any year but this one, it might even have stood a chance of making the shortlist) and clamouring for the book version (look for an update on that soon). But even if that takes off, that's just one project. Being an SFF critic isn't much of a career path these days, especially with venues drying up (even the mighty SFX Magazine seems to be in financial trouble and may not last much longer).

This never happens. Well, not any more anyway.

Hey, don't you get paid in free books?

Nope, or at least not any longer. Back in the day, being a successful book-focused blogger meant receiving lots of ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies), pre-release editions of books sent out for free to reviewers to drum up interest in novels before they come out. Some took this to be a reward in itself, and for a year or two there was a "controversy" about conflicts of interests and these things constituting bribery and so forth. But ARCs have largely become a thing of the past: I received over 150 in 2010 and in 2016 so far I have received exactly four (Children of Earth and Sky, The Call and The Wolf in the Attic for those curious, with The Great Ordeal on its way). ARCs have been largely replaced by e-ARCs and NetGalley, and since I can't read novels from a computer screen (vision issues; sometimes even just the blogging and internet research causes me problems), the result of that is that I no longer receive, and almost never ask for, ARCs any more. So they're out, and that's not a problem. I still have the better part of 200 books on the to-read pile and that will take me years to get through if I never buy or receive another book during that time.

So to justify continuing to blog at my current rate, I really need to make the blog pay, either enough for me to work on it full-time or enough to mean that I only need to get a part-time job. And to date I've tried two ways of generating income from the blog.

The first thing I did was put up a tipjar on the blog for contributors to make donations. I did that on 30 October 2012, so three and a half years ago. In that timeframe, I've received in total about £300 (and £100 of that from one very generous donor). That is absolutely fantastic, and that money went back into the site in the form of sourcing more content, travelling to events and buying more books and other media for review on the blog. But, to put it in perspective, that's about one-quarter of one month's pay at the UK minimum wage (and rather less than the actual living wage). It's a lovely bonus, but it will never pay for me to work full-time on the site.

More recently, back in October last year, I instigated advertising on the site, at a (hopefully) low-key and unobtrusive level. This brings in approximately £60 every four months. Again, excellent and gratefully-received, but it's not going to be paying for me to run the site any time soon. I could ramp up the advertising, even do those wrap-around adverts that would bring in a bit more, but I find those insanely annoying and it really would constitute a conflict of interest if I got paid to host an advert for a book I then reviewed.

Two additional ideas have been floated to me. The first is that I try my hand at podcasting. I've always been reluctant to try this because I read information at a vastly faster rate that watching or listening to it. I once sat down and tried to listen to the A Game of Thrones audiobook and it drove me crazy because in the time that it took Roy Dotrice to read the prologue I could have easily read three or four chapters of the book with my actual head-eyes. However, I am assured that there a lot of other people don't have that issue and there are certainly time efficiencies from podcasting (being able to listen or watch them on the move, at work, on headphones, in the car etc) that text blogging can't compete with. I don't actually have any equipment to do podcasting with, but it is something I'll probably look into later this year, especially when we move closer to the History of Epic Fantasy project moving forwards, as that would be a good way of introducing the book.

The second one is a bit more straightforward: Patreon. For those unaware of it (as I was until a few months ago), this is a crowdsourcing site where you basically get people to pledge a monthly payment in return for exclusive content/rewards (either completely exclusive or time-sensitive, so you'd get an article a month before non-pledgers). This doesn't seem like such a bad idea, although I'm dubious about the support I'd get and I do have a slight location-based issue: I have the temerity to be based in the UK, with a highly unfavourable exchange rate with, well, most of the rest of the world but especially the USA, where a large number of my readers are. But it's certainly worth a look and I'll probably be pursuing that in the near future.

Like Neo, I do always have the option of making a new Bill & Ted movie to fall back on.

But what if you fail?

Er, then I'll carry on as I am now. I don't see a situation where I'll ever quit, give up or retire from blogging, but certainly I can see situations where I have to drastically reduce my output and contributions due to other commitments. Which would suck.


But hey, do we even need bloggers in the first place?

I think the genre needs as many voices in it as possible discussing books, authors, TV shows, video games and the other things that make the genre what it is. The more voices, the more chances of the good stuff rising to the top and the stronger and healthier the field. Whether the field needs me, or any individual blogger specifically, is a different question and one that's down to the readers.