Cynical Cinema

Star Trek is one of the great phenomena in pop culture. Somehow it has managed to maintain it’s relevance over the course of five incarnations, with similar stories and similar characters and similar sets throughout all five. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a box set tomorrow, September 16th, that highlights the similarities between all five series. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective contains episodes from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyageur, and Enterprise. It’s a box set featuring 20 episodes of Star Trek that explore alternative realities. And by that they mean mirror universes, parallel dimensions, twisted realities, and alternate lives.

What this box set does, most of all, is highlight the similarities between the five series. For example, no matter which version of Star Trek you watch, trouble causes the flight deck to shake and shudder, and makes the lights flicker, no matter what that problem actually is. And at the end of every one of these “alternative realities” episodes, the bizarre occurrences are easily explained away as “a temporal discharge of abnormal anomalies”, or some such thing. Most of these episodes fall into one of two categories. Either they are like clip shows - there are crossovers with old episodes, sometimes even other series, and they are really easy to do with a minimum of effort. For example, the episode of Voyageur where one of the characters is able to pass from deck to deck in the spaceship, and each level exists in another time frame. So old episodes get recycled. Or, they function as a reason for the creators of the series to do something totally different for one episode. Like the episode of The Next Generation where Captain Picard is in a coma and lives another man’s life on another planet while in his coma.

Perhaps that makes this box set less than appealing for true Star Trek nerds, or maybe it’s even more appealing. I really don’t know. But as a non-Star Trek afficionado, I found it to be very interesting. There are some great episodes here. The episode of Voyageur where two of the crew members cause the destruction of the ship, and send a message from fifteen years in the future in order to avert the catastrophe. Or the episode where a hot woman appears to be constantly jumping backwards in time, from the moment she dies until the moment she is conceived.

But the best episode on this box set, the one that makes it all worthwhile, is the episode of the Original Series where there is an evil Captain Kirk and a good Captain Kirk, and William Shatner fights himself. There is, I believe, no moment in television history (outside of that Star Wars holiday special) that involved worse acting than does this one. You see, Captain Kirk’s personality has been split in two - one of them all of his evil characteristics, and one of them all his good ones. The Evil Kirk makes it known that he is evil by twitching his face like a hamster. It is absolutely hilarious! William Shatner was silly at the best of times, but here he sets some kind of record for over-the-top silliness. This episode alone is worth the price of the box set. However, for those of you who don’t want to spend the money buying this massive box set, but would still dearly love to watch William Shatner fight himself, check out the bargain-basement DVD White Comanche, in which he plays long-lost twins, one who has grown up cowboy and one who has grown up Indian. The final showdown is as bonkers and hilarious as is this episode. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective hits stores tomorrow.