The Ready Room: A Star Trek Podcast

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 When Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered as a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery, many fans were over the moon with the return to episodic televisions with tie-ins to The Original Series. For a time, it felt as if Trek's golden age was back. But as the series evolved, the producers and writers began to see it as a playground for experimental storytelling wi...

The State of Star Trek 2022 We long called the 1990s the golden age of Star Trek. From 1993 to 1999, two series overlapped one another on the airwaves and, once The Next Generation left the small screen, we even got doses of three incarnations of Gene Roddenberry’s vision from time to time. But it all came to an abrupt end in May 2005, with the final episode of Enterprise. J.J. Abrams would later...

Star Trek: Lower Decks after two seasons. When it was announced that a Star Trek comedy was being developed—and that it would be animated—the news was met with a bit more trepidation than usual. Could Star Trek and comedy really mix? Was Rick and Morty-style humor really appropriate for Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future? In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jones and Larry Nemece...

Marking our 10th anniversary. Many people say that time flies. Doctor Tolian Soran said that time is the fire in which we burn. Whichever you subscribe to, time moves forward and people—as well as their views—change. On May 31, 2011, we aired the first episode of The Ready Room. What began as a singular podcast hosted by two hew-mons—C Bryan Jones and Greg Harbin—evolved into the Trek.fm network a...

Adil Hussain interview. We’ve all lived through extraordinary times over the past year, and we’re still trying to find our way back to the world we remember. The same can be said for Michael Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery after their jump from the 23rd to the 32nd century. In both cases, catastrophe turned life upside down. But when Burnham finally came in contact with remnants of the F...

Looking Back at Discovery Season Three. When Michael Burnham and the USS Discovery emerged from their Red Angel-created wormhole into the 32nd century, things didn’t go quite as planned. Terralysium was not in the neighborhood and temporal wackiness left Michael and the ship a year apart. But once reunited, they set off on a grand adventure to find what was left of the Federation. They also had to...

Discovery Season 3 preview. The third season of Star Trek: Discovery is finally here after a pandemic-induced delay. At least we didn’t have to wait 930 years. That’s how much time has passed for most people when the crew of the USS Discovery arrives in the Beta Quadrant after their jump to put the sphere data permanently out of reach of Section 31’s Control AI. This temporal shift—along with a ne...

Lower Decks midseason review.   After a long wait and much speculation on what an animated comedy take on Star Trek might mean, we’re now halfway through the first season of Mike McMahan’s Star Trek: Lower Decks. And in a short time, the adventures and banter of Beckett Mariner, Bradward Boimler, D’Vana Tendi, Sam Rutherford—and even Durango and Ron Emmanuel Docent, Jr. —have won over many fans, e...

Expanding the Star Trek universe. Star Trek content has been blossoming in recent years, and franchise showrunner Alex Kurtzman recently talked to Deadline and Variety about the rapid expansion. After years of no voyages on TV—and just a slow trickle on the big screen—the studio is showering fans with series after series, with more to come. In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jones an...

Lower Decks pre-launch thoughts and Star Trek Emmy nominations. After almost five decades, Star Trek is returning to animation under the guidance of Mike McMahan, writer and producer of the Cartoon Network animated comedy series Rick and Morty and creator of the Hulu animated series Solar Opposites. What does he have in store for Star Trek fans? In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jon...

Picard Recap and Strange New Worlds. The first season of Star Trek: Picard is behind us, and Jean-Luc Picard has a new body to carry him through Season 2. But before we speculate on what that might mean and where the La Sirena crew are headed, we must consider the broader impact of Patrick Stewart’s return on the health of the franchise. In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jones and L...

Midseason Picard. Seeing Patrick Stewart on screen once again in the role of Jean-Luc Picard has been a dream come true for fans—particularly those who grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation. But while the opening scene brought us two familiar faces aboard a familiar ship, this new series is far from a return to TNG. Nearly twenty years after the film Nemesis, Picard finds himself in the mids...

Star Trek’s second golden age. The mid-1990s were a glorious time for Star Trek fans. With The Next Generation transitioning from the small screen to big, Deep Space Nine paving the way for serialized storytelling on television, and Voyager taking us to the other side of the galaxy, fans were spoiled for choice. But such riches don’t always last, and when Enterprise was cancelled in 2005, it seeme...

Looking Back at Discovery Season Two. It never happened. Or so they say. But we watched it with our own eyes, and so talk about it we must. The second season of Star Trek: Discovery started off with a decidedly old-school flavor before taking us on a search for Spock and a mind-bending trip through time. In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jones and Larry Nemecek look back at Star Tre...

Future Trek. As Star Trek: Discovery returns for its second season, the ball is just starting to roll toward what could be a new golden age for the franchise. Shorts Treks have shown how versatile Star Trek can be, and a whole slew of new projects are either in production, preparing to start, or under series consideration. In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jones and Larry Nemecek ri...

Patrick Stewart’s Return, Kelvin Trouble, and Discovery Changes. Few characters in Star Trek history are as widely loved as Captain Jean Luc Picard. When the final credits of Nemesis rolled in December 2002, fans thought they had seen the last of the The Next Generation’s inspirational leader. So, when Patrick Stewart took the stage at this year’s Las Vegas convention—nearly 16 years after after h...

The Expansion of Star Trek. When CBS announced in November 2015 that Star Trek would return to television, we all celebrated the light at the end of the tunnel. The fallow years were coming to an end and, soon, the voyages of our future selves would continue where they belong: on the small screen. But details were scarce, and it took some time before we knew what to expect. Almost three years late...

Proto-TNG and the Pike Memo. We’ve all heard the stories about how Star Trek: The Next Generation was created. Or have we? While rummaging through Gene Roddenberry’s drawers, Larry Nemecek, John Champion, and Rod Roddenberry uncovered a long-lost memo from 1986 that presents a TNG that is very different from the one we know. The document, prepared by Paramount Network Television President John S....

DS9 at 25. It’s been a quarter century since Benjamin Sisko arrived at one of the Federation’s most remote outposts—Deep Space 9—and began a journey of self discovery that would turn the Star Trek model on its head. Overshadowed by The Next Generation and then Voyager, Deep Space Nine quietly flew under the radar and developed into a series that would later emerge as what many consider the franchi...

Discovery Post-Premiere. After nearly two years of waiting—and much speculation—we’re now well into the Star Trek: Discovery story. How does what we’ve seen compare to our expectations? What do we think of the writing and creative decisions so far? In this episode of The Ready Room, C Bryan Jones and Larry Nemecek revisit some the topics from their last discussion—including an ancient Klingon secr...

Star Trek: Discovery Latest Details and Summer Con Preview. We’re just two months away from the launch of Star Trek’s seventh venture onto the small screen: Discovery. As summer heats up and convention season kicks into gear, news about the series, images from the set, and interviews with creators are bringing us new details and stirring the pot of speculation more feverishly than ever. In this ep...

The Cloud Minders. Kirk has a history of getting involved in the domestic disputes of other worlds and trying to set the locals straight. That’s why the little Federation clean-up ship is always trailing the Enterprise. Of course, when the planet in question is a member of the Federation, is refusing to do its part to help another member world, and is torturing its own people, it’s a lot easier to...

Vanishing Point. Sometimes it would be nice to have a transporter. What Star Trek fans hasn’t had that thought? But would we really want to be disassembled atom by atom and put back together somewhere far away? Hoshi certainly didn’t in the second-season Enterprise episode “Vanishing Point,” but it was her only way out of a deadly situation. In this episode of The Ready Room, host C Bryan Jones is...

Workforce. We all want to escape from our lives sometimes. What if you could really do it? What if you couldn’t remember the life you left behind? And what if it was all against your will? That’s what happens to the crew of the Starship Voyager in the seventh-season episode “Workforce.” In this episode of The Ready Room, hosts C Bryan Jones and Larry Nemecek are joined by Kay Elizabeth Shaw of To...

Star Trek: Discovery and a Look Back at 50. The premiere of the next Star Trek series may be delayed, but there’s still plenty to talk about. In this episode of The Ready Room, host C Bryan Jones returns from medical leave and hops on mic with Larry Nemecek to discuss some of the news from the past eight months. Looking at Star Trek: Discovery, we delve into the time period, ships, stories, writer...