R. Alan Siler is the author of three books about Doctor Who—Children of Time: The Companions of Doctor Who, Facing the Raven: Doctor Who Series Nine in Review, and Doctor Who's Greatest Hits: A Guide to the Best Episodes from Time and Space. His next book is Star Trek's Greatest Hits: A Guide to the Best Episodes from the Final Frontier. He has a children's picture book in the works, as well as a book about the life and career of David Bowie.
The Klingons—newly redesigned seemingly for the express purpose of making fanboys gripe less—make their Season 2 debut while Michael Burnham confronts her mother and Tilly sees belligerent dead people in this week’s Star Trek: Discovery episode, “Point of Light.” There’s an awful lot of seemingly disparate and very talky plot threads all competing for prominence this […] More
Faith: The Final Frontier. That’s essentially where Star Trek: Discovery seems to be heading in Season 2. Science vs. Faith. Proof vs. Belief. Empirical knowledge vs. Spirituality. Where does one end and the other begin? How can either be justified in the face of the other? These are the questions raised by the second episode (“New Eden,” […] More
As Season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery drew to its epic close after a season of war with the Klingons and a harrowing excursion into the Mirror Universe, the crew of the USS Discovery answered a distress call from none other than the legendary USS Enterprise under the command of Captain Christopher Pike. Season 2 picks up immediately from that […] More
The fourth installment of Star Trek: Short Treks—the series of monthly mini-episodes leading up to the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery Season 2—brings to a close an enjoyable run of stories focusing on both main and secondary Discovery characters. Each one has given us a little window into a corner of the Discovery universe that we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, adding […] More
Prequels in a franchise as long-lived as Star Trek can be problematic. The temptation to create whole plotlines and new character races is strong, even though those plotlines and races have no reference in preceding but post-dated series. Just ask Star Trek: Enterprise! A decade and a half ago, ENT introduced us to the Denobulans, a race that we saw […] More
Star Trek is an action adventure story set on an advanced starship in a future in which a Federation of allied worlds fights to uphold an ideal in the face of opposition from its enemies. It’s space battles; it’s morality play; it’s high-tech derring-do. In other words, it’s space opera. But the beauty of the Star Trek formula […] More
To say that the first season of Star Trek: Discovery was a success is to sell it short. Both its domestic run on CBS All Access (the network’s streaming service) and the international Netflix release proved to be incredibly lucrative. So much so that we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented Trek deluge, to include Star Trek: Lower Decks, […] More
23 November 2018 marks Doctor Who‘s 55th anniversary—not as flashy as the 50th, with all its merchandising, special documentaries, and the worldwide broadcast of a very expensively-made multi-Doctor episode shot in 3D, but it’s still worth noting. For a show to have a near-continuous run for that long (there was that unfortunate fallow period in the […] More
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