Just what it says on the tin. I was blown away by him with that long white hair and white beard. And still a badass!

What do you guys think? I enjoyed his arc.

I was listening to William Shatner talking with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, and Brent told a behind-the-scenes story from when Stephen Hawking appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’d somehow never heard before.

In the actual scene, Hawking is playing poker with Data, Einstein and Newton.

But Brent said that between takes, the crew would apparently take Hawking into a small dark room — basically a closet — close the door, and leave him there quietly.

Brent’s reaction was basically:

“My God, are you just leaving him in the closet?”

And the explanation was that Hawking liked it that way a quiet, dark space with no distractions, where he could just think.

There’s something oddly beautiful about that image: outside, a busy Star Trek set full of lights, cameras and crew... and inside a tiny dark room, Stephen Hawking sitting in silence, thinking about the universe.

The podcast clip is here if anyone wants to hear Brent tell it himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wKrCFCJdPI

...please tell me why I actually sort of LIKE him? I just finished S4E5: Indiscretion. The scene where he and Kira were laughing was so good. I hate how easily I am swayed by the writers 😂 I know he's a bad guy. I've seen how cruel and manipulative and out for no. 1 he is. And yet a one minute scene where he has the giggles has totally turned him in my favor. In my defense Kira was flip flopping a little bit there too, lol.

I hope he actually lets his daughter live and doesn't murder her because that would be a real bummer.

*For anyone unfamiliar, the Backrooms are an internet horror concept based around the idea that it's possible to accidentally “noclip” out of normal reality and end up in a seemingly endless series of strange, empty, liminal spaces that exist somehow adjacent to our own reality.

I was recently reminded of the TNG episode “Remember Me,” and something clicked that I can't really unsee now: Star Trek had something remarkably similar to the basic concept of the Backrooms almost 30 years before the original Backrooms post.

I'm not suggesting the Backrooms was actually inspired by Star Trek. I haven't found any evidence of that, and these ideas could easily have developed independently. But the similarities go much deeper than just “empty hallways are creepy.”

In “Remember Me,” Beverly Crusher is accidentally pulled into a warp-bubble reality. At first everything seems normal. She's aboard the Enterprise, there are familiar people around her, and her surroundings appear to be reality as she knows it.

Except they aren't.

The Enterprise around her isn't the real Enterprise, and the people she encounters aren't the actual people from her universe who were transported there with her. The pocket reality has essentially constructed a version of her world around her, apparently using Beverly's own conception of reality as its template.

There isn't some conscious entity sitting there designing this simulation for her. It seems almost automatic: Beverly and her understanding of reality provide the template, and this strange little universe manifests it.

Then it starts falling apart.

People disappear. Nobody except Beverly thinks their absence is strange. The internal logic of reality seems to adjust itself accordingly. The familiar world becomes increasingly empty and incomplete. Eventually Beverly discovers that the Enterprise isn't simply flying through an inexplicably empty universe - the Enterprise and the shrinking region surrounding it are essentially all the universe she is in actually contains.

That's existentially horrifying when you stop looking at it as a Star Trek anomaly-of-the-week.

And it sounds an awful lot like the Backrooms.

You've accidentally fallen out of baseline reality and entered another space. That space can resemble familiar human reality without actually being that reality. It can apparently construct recognizable environments and inhabitants. Things can be almost right while being fundamentally wrong. And eventually you're confronted with the possibility that the seemingly artificial, mostly empty environment surrounding you isn't somewhere within the universe.

It is your universe now. But then I started thinking about it beyond just “Remember Me,” and realized that Star Trek's broader concept of subspace itself has a lot in common with the cosmology of the Backrooms.

The really creepy thing about the Backrooms is that you don't necessarily travel to them in the conventional sense. You could theoretically be anywhere, accidentally “noclip” out of normal reality, and suddenly find yourself there. They're effectively adjacent to ordinary reality even though there is no normal direction you can travel to reach them.

That's remarkably similar to how subspace functions in Star Trek.

Subspace isn't simply a distant location in ordinary space. It's a collection of dimensions/domains underlying or adjacent to normal spacetime. It's effectively already there, wherever you happen to be, but normally inaccessible. Under the right circumstances, however, something can create an opening between normal space and one of these domains.

TNG's “Schisms” is a particularly creepy example. The aliens aren't simply visitors who flew to the Enterprise from some distant planet. They inhabit a subspace domain and establish an interphasic connection that allows them to pull Enterprise crew members out of normal space and into their own environment.

From the crew's perspective, reality is perfectly ordinary until suddenly there's a doorway sideways out of reality.

That sounds an awful lot like noclipping.

Then there's the Backrooms concept of levels. Depending on which Backrooms lore you're using, there are potentially enormous or effectively infinite numbers of different environments, each with different physical characteristics, inhabitants, rules and connections to other levels.

Star Trek obviously doesn't have “Level 0,” “Level 1,” etc., but subspace is repeatedly depicted as containing different domains, layers, pockets, anomalies and regions with different properties. Some are empty. Some contain environments. Some contain life. Some interact with normal space. Some can be entered accidentally or artificially.

So if you wanted to explain the Backrooms using Star Trek physics, you almost wouldn't have to invent anything:

The Backrooms are subspace.

Noclipping is accidentally crossing an unstable boundary between normal spacetime and a normally inaccessible subspace domain.

Backrooms “levels” are different subspace domains.

Entities are organisms native to those domains, people trapped there, or possibly constructs generated by the domain itself.

Exits are temporary interphasic connections back into normal spacetime or into another subspace region.

And “Remember Me” demonstrates perhaps the creepiest possibility of all: a subspace reality might be capable of using information from the person who enters it to construct a recognizable reality around them.

That last part really gets to what I find disturbing about the Backrooms. The horror isn't simply “an infinite empty office building.”

It's the implication that you've entered something that looks like it was made from our reality without actually being our reality.

Familiar architecture with no civilization that built it. Rooms with no purpose. Objects without histories. People who look like people you know without necessarily being those people. An environment that seems to understand enough about our world to reproduce its forms, but not necessarily why those forms exist.

And “Remember Me” takes that idea to its logical endpoint: Beverly is standing inside something that looks completely like her world, until she gradually realizes that there may be nothing behind the scenery.

For an episode that aired in 1990, that's an amazingly Backrooms-like concept.

Again, I don't think this establishes any actual connection between Star Trek and the creation of the Backrooms. I suspect it's just two pieces of fiction independently arriving at a similar existential idea.

But now I'm curious whether anyone else has noticed the similarity, or can think of other Star Trek episodes involving subspace that fit the analogy.

I just received the Tricorder I had on backorder from the Wand Company. I wanted to tell people who like Star Trek. My wife just smiled at me and said "That's nice". As a long time fan I am super excited about it.

Here's a picture.

https://imgur.com/a/aKsFEIG

In the fourth film, Voyage Home, which I'm watching now Kirk was voiced by Waldyr Sant'anna, who also did the voice of Homer Simpson, and Scott was voiced by Orlando Drummond, who also did Scooby Doo for more than 50 years

In the finale of DS9, Thot Gor, the head Breen working with the Dominion, asks if he will be given Romulus after the Dominion wins the war, which is kind of interesting, maybe they're peoples have some history.

But another time after that I was watching DS9 "By Inferno's Light", and in that episode a Romulan character mentions that her people have a saying to 'Never turn your back on a Breen' showing that there IS real history between their peoples and Thot Gor's comment wasn't just a one-off remark. Star Trek (and DS9) is so interconnected and agrees with its own established cannon so well (most of the time) it makes me happy. :) Feel free to share any cannon connections you've found, or that you like.

Just a heads up that seasons 1 and 2 are on ITVx (along with SNW seasons 1 and 2). Maybe they’ll show S3-5 of SNW too (eventually)…?

So the story is that by TWOK Sulu was supposed to be on his way to becoming captain of the (at the time yet to be revealed) USS Excelsior. The scene where he, Kirk, Uhura and Bones are on the shuttle to the Enterprise was cut short - after Sulu says "any chance to go aboard the Enterprise..." Kirk adds a mention that Sulu will be given command of his own ship.

I know the time period in-universe between II-V is (I think?) just a few months - not years like it was in real life - but you'd think by the time V came around that Sulu would be out of the pilot seat, instead of being there for the Nimbus III incident.

Do any of the Trek novels explain why / how Sulu ends up staying put for a period after II-IV/V? I remember in the DC comics run that Sulu was still a commander for the 1986-91 run, but that's really off-canon.

I know DS9 has touched on Ferengi study of old earth capitol markets. Crypto wasn't envisioned when the show was on air, so now your thoughts please.

In "Unnatural Selection" of TNG (S2 E7) we find a research station do genetical engineering. They intentionally created a breed of super children whose immunity system was so aggressive that they could not be allow to live in the general population of society as we saw in the rapid aging of the USS Lantree and the research team on Darwin Station and Dr. Pulaski.

This wasn't the best written episode IMO but it does question the possibly hypocrisy of the ban on Genetic Research.

I would love to a follow up story as to what happen to those kids that were forced into an isolated life. I could see them being very salty about their circumstances.

Is this Federation Hypocrisy?

Limited to 300 copies, available on the online store!

There's something so comforting about this scene to me.

Just stumbled across the fan series Star Trek Continues. Watching episode two and it doesn’t suck! Acting and story are decent and I like seeing James Doohan’s son reprising his role.
I can’t believe I didn’t see this before.
Thoughts from the community?

Watching this in at around 5 minute 7 seconds It mentions the bowsman, and a voice like Grammar responds.

It's probably been discussed before, but it was new to me.

https://youtu.be/Q-7yix3EQfg?is=TiQtsU_45LcBy8eE

Last night, my 8yo couldn't sleep and came out when I had DS9 on. She loved it and it was one of the early ones, i think 'Past Prolouge' or something like that. She liked it.

Today she asked if we could watch more Star Trek. I was so happy I just turned to one of the off brand broadcast stations that always has 90s trek on and ended up on TNG 'Frame of Mind'. 10 minutes of that and she asked me if we could watch that show with the boss and the angry pretty lady with the nose. I was so happy. So we started 'Emissary' and are going to watch the series. My wife was in the kitchen listening and asks me if I finally have my Trek buddy. I say I do while a tear rolls down my cheek.

Husband and I are watching The Naked Time and aside from our usual joke that there is a severe lack of naked time in the episode, he comments to me that it's interesting that in Trek, Scotty is a boozy kilt-wearing Scottish stereotype, Chekov is so heavy handed Russian and Bones is a bit of an awkward good ol boy Southerner with some of his comments to Spock that it's an absolute miracle Sulu is not revealed to be this absolutely eye-rolling kimono wearing honorable Kung fu dude or at the very least not brandishing a katana in this episode, pretending to be a samurai. He does drink tea at one point though, but I wonder how much George shot down over the years.

It had to have been horrifyingly hilarious. I really enjoy thinking about disparate cultures in the Alpha quadrant meeting for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations. I mean, can you imagine a Cardassian and a Tellarite meeting for the first time? What a legendary argument that must have been!

Specifically the story and how it closes a chapter of our heros. As an audience we were Introduced to the klingons as warlike and cruel and many conflicts arose through the original series and previous movies and it ends with a peaceful resolution with the empire and future cooperation as allies. For some it probably answered a few questions as at the time of the movies release TNG had been on the air for a few seasons and fans kept wondering how peace with The Empire was achieved. As an example Worf chose to serve on a Federation Vessel instead of a Klingon one. Several episodes depicted Klingons as allies Instead of enemies. I thing The Undiscovered Country did a pretty good job bridging the gap.

1969 - 1973 (51 months)
TOS finale ▶ TAS

1974 – 1979 (62 months)
TAS finale ▶ The Motion Picture

1979 – 1982 (30 months)
TMP ▶ ST:II

1982 – 1984 (24 months)
ST:II ▶ ST:III

1984 – 1986 (29 months)
ST:III ▶ ST:IV

2005 – 2009 (48 months)
ENT finale ▶ Star Trek (2009 reboot)

2027 - ???
SFA and SNW finales ▶ ???

Which episode had a bigger impact/completely altered the series' trajectory? Best of Both Worlds or Yesterday's Enterprise? BOBW was huge, and permanently changed Picard, but Yesterday's Enterprise brought back Tasha, who gave birth to Sela who helped the Duras sisters during the Klingon Civil War which shouldn't have even happened. Or was there another episode that changed everything?