The Ready Room: A Star Trek Podcast

Catspaw. Many TV series have Halloween specials, but Star Trek is NOT one of them. Of course, it isn’t like they didn’t try.  The Original Series  did its part; the later series just didn’t follow suit. On October 27, 1967, Kirk, Spock, and Bones got quite a fright with the airing of “Catspaw.” It was the first episode produced for Season Two, yet was held until the week of Halloween. In this epis...

Precious Cargo. As one of the Starfleet's earliest explorers, James T. Kirk gained a reputation for finding an alien love interest on every world he visited. A century earlier, in Kirk-like fashion, Trip Tucker found himself in a situation that could have easily taken place on  The Original Series as he rescued a princess. It's Sleeping Beauty with a twist—and a dash of Han and Leia—packaged with...

Pathfinder. Reginald Barclay is a fan favorite from  The Next Generation  despite appearing in only five episodes. But did you realize he appeared in more episodes of  Voyager than TNG? It took the writers a long while to bring Reg back after his appearance in the second-season episode “Projections,” but once they did he played a key role in getting  Voyager  home starting with “Pathfinder” in Sea...

Defiant. When a transporter accident turned William Thomas into two separate people, it did more than just get Troi all excited about the prospect of two Rikers. It also set up a great crossover opportunity for TNG and DS9. Once The Next Generation had left the air and Deep Space Nine was in its third season, bringing Jonathan Frakes to the Station made perfect sense. But this was better than a ca...

A Matter of Time. We’ve all asked ourselves, at least once, if the crew of the Enterprise-D has a grasp of the fundamentals. And, of course, the best way to find out would be to travel to the year 2368 and observe them first hand. That’s what Professor Berlinghoff Rasmussen did in the fifth-season episode “A Matter of Time,” where the "inventor" from 22nd-century New Jersey with a 26th-century tim...

The Green Girl. One of the most famous aliens in Star Trek is the Orion slave girl, and the most classic “green” moment comes from “The Cage,” compliments of Susan Oliver. The prolific star is best known to Star Trek fans for this role, yet her appearance in Star Trek is but a speck on the landscape of her career as an actress and director. In this episode of The Ready Room we take a break from ou...

The Enterprise Incident. The cloaking device is one of the most powerful strategic technologies in Star Trek, coveted by the Federation even in 24th century. So when the little space birds started tweeting about the Romulans having one, Kirk and Spock had no choice but to stage an elaborate play in order to get their hands on it. It came to be known as "The Enterprise Incident," and introduced a n...

Dear Doctor. In the vast majority of Star Trek episodes we know that our crews are being guided by Starfleet General Order One, or the Prime Directive. It’s Starfleet’s highest law and a framework for interactive with alien cultures. Captain Archer had no such directive to guide his actions, and the need for one became very obvious when a request for medical assistance led the NX-01 to the planet...

The Thaw. Over the years Starfleet crews have faced off against a dizzying array of opponents. Mainstream baddies like Klingons, Romulans, and Borg are formidable but straightforward. Technical glitches like holodeck malfunctions or sentient silicon are also fairly routine. But what happens when your opponent isn’t something tangible but rather an emotion? We’ve gone on yellow alert against out ow...

If Wishes Were Horses. Aliens appearing onboard a starship or space station is nothing new to Star Trek. But normally you expect to see a menace like Klingons, the Borg, or a woman in go-go boots and a bling belt—none of whom can spin straw into gold. As Terry J. Erdmann said in the DS9 Companion, “If Wishes Were Horses” could have been just another “mysterious-aliens-play-head-games-with-the-Star...

Launching TNG with Mission Log. Few creators get a second change to explore their original vision. Gene Roddenberry got such a chance with The Next Generation twenty-one years after the original Star Trek first aired. TNG’s pilot "Encounter at Farpoint" is a restatement of Gene's utopian ideas, which are challenged by Q. But, of course, these ideas evolved a bit over the course of two decades. In...

TNG Films Face-off. When the the Original Series cast set foot on the big screen, it was a dream come true for a generation of fans who had supported the short-lived show through the dark 1970s. For fans of The Next Generation, however, the experience was quite different. As soon as the final episode wrapped, the cast jumped right into shooting their first movie. The result was a film that felt mo...

A Taste of Armageddon. According to Elaine Benes, Tolstoy once said “War, what is it good for?” And while she may have been wrong about the source, apparently Kirk shared the sentiment. When the Enterprise was dispatched to establish diplomatic relations with a planet that apparently wanted no part of the Federation, Kirk and his crew found themselves casualties of a war fought through computers....

The Communicator. At the end of “A Piece of the Action,” Doctor McCoy reveals that he left his communicator behind in Oxmyx’s office. It’s essentially laughed off and the NCC-1701 continues on to its encounter with a giant space amoeba. Kirk says that, with that kind of technology, the Iotians might one day want a piece of the Federation’s action. But what might be the actual repercussions of such...

Death Wish. When Voyager premiered, it seemed a given that the fan-favorite Q would turn up on the series. But the producers were cautious in using John de Lancie’s character yet again. As loved as Q was, he always ran the risk of being a one-verse song played over and over—a danger highlighted by his single appearance on Deep Space Nine. The door to Q’s return was finally opened by an unexpected...

Rapture. When we visited Deep Space 9 for the very first time, Picard made it clear to Sisko that his mission was to do everything, short of violating the Prime Directive, to prepare Bajor for admission into the Federation. It took five seasons, but finally Bajor's petition was approved and the ceremony was set to take place—at least until the Emissary began having visions. After becoming obsessed...

I, Borg. When you think about how long-lived Star Trek is, it’s incredible to think that the storytelling moment that has been nearly impossible to top came 24 years ago. “The Best of Both Worlds” was so big, so bold, so impactful that the writers shied away from returning to the story's villain, the Borg, because, well, where do you go from there? Two seasons later they finally hit on an approach...

The Doomsday Machine. If you ask fans of The Original Series to name their favorite episodes, invariably “The Doomsday Machine” comes up. Even James Doohan named the episode his favorite of the series. In 1968, “The Doomsday Machine” received a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation; but not all are in love with the story. D.C. Fontana named the episode her least favorite of the seri...

Vox Sola. Star Trek has presented us with more aliens that we can count. But most of these have been humanoid. Even the exceptions—Tholians, Excalbians, even Species 8472—are still easy for us to imagine being real… somewhere out there. In the first-season Enterprise episode “Vox Sola,” the writers and creative team attempted to give us, as Brannon Braga put it, “a wildly alien alien.” The title o...

The Romulan War. One of the most momentous conflicts in Federation history is also one of the most mysterious ones—at least for fandom. Of course Starfleet itself knows what happened, but the writers didn't give us a lot to work with over the years. First introduced in the Original Series episode "Balance of Terror," the Earth-Romulan War is the basis for centuries of animosity between these two p...

Coda. Jeri Taylor wrote the book on Janeway. Literally. Two of them in fact! So it was no surprise that a third-season story about Janeway's death came from her pen. "Coda" pulls together a number of familiar Star Trek themes to explore issues of death, how it affects both the survivors and the deceased, and even throws in a Dying Swan for good measure. In this episode of The Ready Room we're join...

The Sound of Her Voice. War changes people. And that’s no different whether you're in the 21st century or the 24th. Just before DS9 kicked into high gear for its final season, our crew took a quiet moment to reflect in “The Sound of Her Voice,” the penultimate episode of Season Six. It's a unique take on a bottle show that reveals a great deal about the station's crew. In this episode of The Ready...

Starship Mine. Life and death situations and small talk go together like Picard and Earl Grey, Troi and chocolate, or Geordi and PowerPoint presentations. Right? Well, they do in “Starship Mine,” a sixth season TNG episode that features a never-before-heard-of particle, a horse saddle, and possibly the most annoying commander in Starfleet. But "Starship Mine" is much more than a bad party with The...

Spectre of the Gun. The date is October 26, 1881. The place is Tombstone, Arizona. It’s the day of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. So what are Kirk and his crew doing here? Well, Chekov is here to hit on the ladies. That much is clear. But what about the others? It wasn't unusual for the Enterprise crew to visit locales that looked a lot like Earth. Usually the buildings in those places had four...

Broken Bow. In 2001, Star Trek landed with great fanfare in a cornfield in Oklahoma. It was the launch of Enterprise, as the series was known for its first two seasons, and the pilot episode, "Broken Bow," was well received. Over the years, perceptions of the series have changed more than once. The story of "Broken Bow" and Enterprise is one of creative change, great promises mixed with missed opp...