Nick Cavicchio – ScienceFiction.com

Final Frontier Friday: ‘Infinite Regress’

Nick Cavicchio — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 18:52:49 +0000

Welcome to ‘Final Frontier Friday’ everyone! After a brief hiatus, we’re back with more of the content you crave – if what you is crave rambling, long-winded reflections on old ‘Star Trek’ episodes. You might say it’s fortuitous that our glorious return coincides (sort of) with that of Seven of Nine, who during our break made her ‘Star Trek: Picard‘ debut in the episode, ‘Stardust City Rag’, which we’ll be covering… some other time (that joke might’ve actually worked if I didn’t insist on naming the episode in the article title). We are doing a Seven episode though, it’s just one from her ‘Voyager’ days. So settle in and join us for a look back at ‘Infinite Regress’, in which an errant piece of Borg technology causes Seven to manifest the personalities of individuals assimilated by the Collective. ‘Infinite Regress’ is an episode that started life as two unrelated pitches. One of these – which was ultimately rejected as it was deemed implausible – has been described by producer Kenneth Biller one in which Voyager would have encountered someone who would try to extract (for want of a better word) the personality of an assimilated loved one from Seven of […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Remembrance’

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 01:53:00 +0000

It’s here at last! Welcome to ‘Final Frontier Friday’, where this week we’ll be returning to the halcyon days of, well, two weeks ago for a look at ‘Remembrance’, the first episode of ‘Star Trek: Picard’. Two years ago, ‘Star Trek’ returned to television (or at least to not-movie-theaters) with the premiere of ‘Star Trek: Discovery’. Much was made of that in press coverage, including at this very site. After all, ‘Star Trek’ was back! It was a big deal! And yet the debut of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ feels like the return of ‘Star Trek’ in a way that ‘Discovery’ never quite did. I suspect that’s partly because of the different roles each show fills in terms of what you might call the broad arc of ‘Star Trek’ history. Think of ‘Star Trek’ as one long narrative, spanning from ‘Enterprise’ at one end and moving chronologically the original series, the movies, ‘TNG’ and all the rest before culminating in ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’. In that context, ‘Discovery’ has been a show that fills gaps in the timeline, whereas ‘Picard’ is, by contrast, a show that by virtue of its late twenty-fourth century setting moves the narrative forward. This is the first […]

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Final Frontier Friday: “Children Of Mars” (‘Star Trek: Short Treks’)

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 25 Jan 2020 01:29:26 +0000

Welcome to ‘Final Frontier Friday’! This week, the day we’ve all been waiting for finally came! Yes, ‘Star Trek: Picard’ has arrived on CBS All Access after what feels like years of teasing. And if I’d had a bit more lead time, I might have actually covered the debut episode! But some times in this line of work, you have to meet the universe halfway. And so this week we’re turning an eye to ‘Children of Mars’, the latest installment of ‘Star Trek: Short Treks’. This season of ‘Short Treks’ has largely been self-contained, presenting shorts that are either done in one experiment (the animated duo, for example) or similarly standalone affairs designed to give those fans clamoring for a Pike series a bit more of the recast Enterprise crew seen on ‘Discovery’. ‘Children of Mars,’ by contrast, places itself more in the tradition of earlier ‘Short Treks’ like ‘Runaway’ and ‘The Brightest Star‘, which tied directly into the second season of ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ (though – as in the case of ‘Runaway’ – this wasn’t necessarily obvious at the time). In this case, though, “Children of Mars” is a tie-in (or teaser, if you prefer) to ‘Star Trek: Picard’. […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Tomorrow Is Yesterday’

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 11 Jan 2020 02:10:42 +0000

New year, new column! Same old writer, though. For the first ‘Final Frontier Friday’ of 2020, we’re kicking off the new year with a look back to the original series episode ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’ Penned by the late, great D.C. Fontana, ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’ started life as the second half of a planned two-parter. That’s right, the original ‘Star Trek’ very nearly had a two-part episode that wasn’t stuffed with an hour’s worth of (cleverly) recycled footage! As initially conceived, the episode would have picked up where ‘The Naked Time’ left off. As you may recall, that installment ended with the Enterprise being thrown three days back in time. Presumably a two-part version of the story would have cast them a bit farther back, (After all, where’s the drama in staying out of your own way for a long weekend?) but we may never know. So what happened? Why did the planned two-parter become a pair of standalone episodes? Well, it’s actually surprisingly difficult to find a definitive recounting of the events leading to the abandonment of ‘Naked Time 2’, though the closest is probably the version contained in the first volume of Marc Cushman’s superlative original series reference work, […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Ephraim And Dot’

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 01:26:47 +0000

Hello and welcome to the last ‘Final Frontier Friday’ of 2019! We’re bringing the year to a close with a look at one of the two ‘Short Treks’ that debuted earlier this month, specifically ‘Ephraim and Dot’. Animation is coming to the ‘Star Trek’ universe. As part of executive producer Alex Kurtzman’s mandate to fill the airwaves with ‘Star Trek’ content, he is fulfilling his longstanding desire to expand the franchise into animation, most notably with the upcoming Mike McMahan-created series ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks‘, which is expected to debut sometime in 2020. Of course, it’s not the first time ‘Star Trek’ has ventured into the animated realm (‘Star Trek: The Animated Series‘ reunited much of the original cast and creative staff for the franchise’s first of many revivals in 1973), but it has always been first and foremost a live-action affair. As part of the lead up to ‘Lower Decks’ and other animated endeavors, it was decided that two of the six installments in the second season of ‘Star Trek: Short Treks’ would be animated. While neither of these shorts has any ties to the upcoming animated projects, save for the fact that they are animated. The purpose of […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 02:15:44 +0000

Welcome to this week’s ‘Final Frontier Friday’! This time around, we’re taking a look back at ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ in honor of the landmark film’s fortieth anniversary. By the end of 1969, ‘Star Trek’ was dead. The show had been cancelled, and no matter how disappointed its fanbase may have been (to say nothing of all the actors, writers and behind the scenes staff who now needed to find new jobs), there was no reason to expect that there’d ever be any more of it. That was just how the television industry worked at the time. But then a funny thing happened. Despite having fallen short of one hundred episodes (traditionally, the point at which a show is considered to have produced enough material to have a viable commercial afterlife), it was sold into off-network syndication. It was only then, in reruns, that a show that had been at best a modest success during its initial run truly found an audience. So significant was this post-mortem boost in popularity that by 1972 the Associated Press had come to describe ‘Star Trek’ as “the show that won’t die.” As a result of this enduring (and, it seemed, ever-increasing -popularity), […]

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‘Star Trek’ Legend D.C. Fontana Dead At 80

Nick Cavicchio — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 01:38:07 +0000

Dorothy Catherine “D.C” Fontana has died at the age of 80. According to StarTrek.com, Fontana passed peacefully following a short illness on December 2nd. Fontana is best recognized as a major figure in the early history of ‘Star Trek’. Having initially adopted the gender neutral screen credit “D.C. Fontana” to submit scripts for the earlier Roddenberry series ‘The Lieutenant’, she was among the first writers recruited for the original ‘Star Trek’. Over the course of its three season run, she would turn in several classic stories and contribute to several more, particularly during the second season, for which she served as story editor. In the early seventies, she resumed the role of story editor for ‘Star Trek: The Animated Series‘, for which she also served as an associate producer. She would later contribute scripts to the inaugural seasons of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’. Her most important contribution to ‘Star Trek’, though, may well be Spock. No, she didn’t create the character, but it was the episodes she wrote – including classics like ‘This Side of Paradise’, ‘Journey to Babel‘, and the animated installment ‘Yesteryear‘ – that arguably did the most to establish the […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Angel One’

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:42:55 +0000

Welcome to this special Black Friday edition of ‘Final Frontier Friday’! I don’t know what makes it special, but I’ve decided that it is! And to mark the occasion, we’re returning to the first season of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ to take a look back at the timeless anti-classic ‘Angel One’. I hope my pain can at least bring you some small measure of joy. In what is sure to become a leitmotif for this article, ‘Angel One’ had the potential to be so much more interesting than it was. While producer Herbert Wright was wary from the start of having the Enterprise crew encounter a matriarchal society (given the sci-fi and fantasy genres’ long history of “Amazon women” and other such clichés), it was quickly decided that the show would use the crew’s encounter with Angel I to weave an allegory for South African apartheid, with the society being divided along gender rather than racial lines. As the story proceeded through the customary round of rewrites, though, the sexual elements were played up (something that Wright credits at least in part to Gene Roddenberry) and the intended allegory was all but lost and we ended up with, well, […]

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Beyond Infinite Earths: Kevin Conroy Is Batman

Nick Cavicchio — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 07:55:34 +0000

When you think about Batman there are any number of faces that might come to mind, from Christian Bale to the classic comic book renderings of Dick Sprang and everything in between. But as many faces as there are to choose from, there’s only one voice: that of Kevin Conroy. Conroy has been voicing the Dark Knight on a regular basis since 1992, most famously for the various series that make up the DC Animated Universe, but also for countless video games and animated movies. Ahead of the recent Blu-ray release of ‘Batman Beyond’, we had the opportunity to speak with Conroy. Our conversation included discussion of his now-legendary Batman voice, bringing a live version of Bruce Wayne into the ‘Crisis in Infinite Earths’ crossover, his thoughts on Robert Pattinson, and more! I like the beard. Are you growing it for a job? Well I’m doing a job right now… ‘Crisis’? I’m playing Old Bruce Wayne. With a beard. Are you shooting it yet? Yeah, I flew in from Vancouver last night. I’m in the midst of doing it now. The producers let me come, isn’t that cool? It’s awesome. Ruby Rose is so great! She’s really such a generous […]

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Tana Ford Takes On The TSA With ‘LaGuardia’

Nick Cavicchio — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 23:48:22 +0000

Allegory is among the proudest traditions in science fiction, having permeated the genre for as long as it’s been a genre. It makes sense, of course. In a genre that allows you to frame issues outside of their familiar, contemporary context, it’s naturally easier to encourage your audience to consider them from a new perspective. Sometimes that means slipping some obvious-in-retrospect social commentary past Standards and Practices. Others it’s about embedding themes in a work that may only become apparent on the third or fourth read. In any case, it means that science fiction is often uniquely equipped to address the issues of the day. And in this day, one of the biggest issues is that of immigration. That’s where ‘LaGuardia’ – the latest collaboration between writer Nnedi Okorafor and artist Tana Ford – comes in. Set in a near future world in which aliens have – more or less – integrated with human society, ‘LaGuardia’ interrogates issues surrounding immigration in a manner reminiscent of ‘District 9’. We had the opportunity to speak with Tana Ford about the book, which is now available in trade paperback. Our conversation covered the origins of the story, Tana’s artistic influences, and the trials and […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Brother’

Nick Cavicchio — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:40:31 +0000

Welcome back to ‘Final Frontier Friday’! This week we’re returning to the halcyon days of January 2019 for a look at ‘Brother’, the second season premiere of ‘Star Trek: Discovery’. Which I’m definitely not covering because the season just came out on Blu-ray and I wanted an excuse to watch it. Nope, not at all! The first season of ‘Discovery’ had an odd relationship to the pre-existing ‘Star Trek’ canon. Like most prequels, it was accused in some fan circles of not being sufficiently reverent of the franchise’s established continuity. This isn’t exactly new to ‘Trek’. ‘Enterprise‘, after all, faced similar accusations throughout its run. But whereas ‘Enterprise’ was generally acknowledged as having improved when embarked on the sort of continuity deep dives that often served as retroactive set-up for the original series, ‘Discovery’ had that opposite problem. That is to say that the show’s biggest stumbling blocks early on came when it tried to tie itself directly to the original series (which takes place a mere ten years later). The biggest example of this, of course, is the backstory of one Michael Burnham, which basically crowbarred the character into the backstory of franchise mainstay Spock. With all this in […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘Space Seed’

Nick Cavicchio — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 01:21:27 +0000

Welcome to this week’s ‘Final Frontier Friday’! Today we’re looking at one of the heavyweights of the original ‘Star Trek’, namely ‘Space Seed’. Why do I do this to myself? Like last time, I’ve once again stuck myself with a “tricky” review, albeit for different reasons. The challenge of ‘The Trouble With Edward‘ was that I was still sorting out just how I felt about the show. With ‘Space Seed’, on the other hand? Well, the thing about ‘Space Seed’ is that since 1982 it has become ever more difficult to separate what was originally a one-off episode from the legend of ‘The Wrath of Khan’, which even after the better part of four decades and nearly a dozen subsequent films remains the high water mark of cinematic ‘Star Trek’. That can be an especially tricky distinction to make given my own history with ‘Star Trek’. I grew up (to whatever extent I can be said to have done so) at a time when the most convenient way to watch old episodes of ‘Star Trek’ was in reruns, meaning watching whatever was on and that catching a specific episodes was often down to luck of the draw. The movies, though, were […]

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Final Frontier Friday: ‘The Trouble With Edward’

Nick Cavicchio — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 23:48:35 +0000

Welcome to ‘Final Frontier Friday’! We’re doing something a little different this week and reviewing a new episode. The newest episode, in fact. I’m referring of course, to ‘The Trouble With Edward’, the latest installment of the second season (or whatever we’re calling these production blocks) of ‘Short Treks’. Penned by Graham Wagner, ‘The Trouble With Edward’ functions as a prequel of sorts to the original series episode to which its title so clearly alludes. If there’s one thing that should be apparent after the first two seasons of ‘Discovery’, it’s that this can be sticky territory. ‘Discovery’, after all, is often at its best when it embraces the spirit of the original ‘Star Trek’ without trying to shoehorn itself into that show’s continuity. That being said, when those continuity ties have worked, they’ve actually tended to work quite well (case in point: any time Anson Mount is on screen as Captain Pike). But when it doesn’t work? It gets a bit rough. The first season, in particular, is replete with examples of the latter. So which category does ‘The Trouble With Edward’ fall into? Well, it’s funny you should ask. Usually, when I end a paragraph like that in […]

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Exclusive Interview: Todd Nauck Joins The Riffing With ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Comic’

Nick Cavicchio — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 22:57:15 +0000

I know what you’re thinking. “How the hell do you make a comic out of Mystery Science Theater 3000?” It’s the first question I asked when the book was announced. But thankfully, ‘MST3K’ maestro Joel Hodgson is smarter than me. In retrospect though, the answer is obvious. Instead of riffing on movies, the comic versions of Jonah and the bots riff on, well, comics. Specifically, Golden and Silver age comics that have since lapsed into the public domain. And if you know your comics history, you know that comics of that vintage give them plenty of material to work with! Unlike the series, in which the hosts watch the movies and crack jokes, the riffing here works by turning Jonah and company into participants in the events of the books on which they are riffing. But of course, it’s not all riffs. Like the show it’s based on, ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Comic’ also includes host segments with the bots, TV’s Son of TV’s Frank, and the rest of the Netflix-era cast. At this year’s New York Comic Con, we had the opportunity to chat with artist Todd Nauck, who pencilled the comic’s host segments. Our conversation touched on […]

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Exclusive Interview: Jody Houser Brings ‘Stranger Things’ To Dark Horse

Nick Cavicchio — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 17:00:13 +0000

During the hiatus between its second and third seasons, ‘Stranger Things‘ did what all hit genre shows eventually must: It expanded beyond its humble, televised roots into other media. And given the show’s obvious affinity for the geek culture of the eighties, comics were a natural fit. And so, over the past year, Dark Horse has teamed with writer Jody Houser to turn the comics world Upside Down. At this year’s New York Comic Con, we had the opportunity to sit down with Jody Houser to her work expanding the world of the Netflix giant. Our conversation covered both ‘The Other Side’ and ‘Six’, the future of ‘Stranger Things’ at Dark Horse, and more. Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get involved with the ‘Stranger Things’ comics in the first place? Well, Spencer – who was my editor – reached out to me. I ‘d worked with him previously on a ‘Halo’ issue for Dark Horse, and he asked if I was interested in ‘Stranger Things’ and maybe writing a comic. I replied that I had dressed as Eleven for the past two Halloweens, so yes! The two ‘Stranger Things’ stories you’ve told so far […]

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