Star Trek Continues
A love-letter to the original series
TV Review: Star Trek Continues (2013)
4.5/5
This is a Chef’s Kiss fan effort spearheaded by Vic Mignogna, who made his bones doing anime voice work. Apparently he’s also a huge Trek fan, and this series is a gold-standard expression of that. This is a series of episodes (10, or 11 if you count the two-part finale) that carry the original series directly forward. The series fills in several big gap-assumptions that exist in Trek canon but haven’t gotten much attention (what happened to all of Enterprise’s sister ships? Why did Starfleet adopt Kirk’s Enterprise arrowhead fleetwide?) as well as “introducing” ideas that form a bridge to The Next Generation (The Enterprise installs a prototype holodeck-room and participates in a pilot Ship’s Counselor program) I’m sad I had no idea this existed until a couple of months ago.
And when I say the original series (TOS), I mean these could have been original series episodes and fit seamlessly with the rest. The sets, costumes, makeup, effects, acting, scripts, pacing, soundtrack, fight choreography, the whole thing is as loving a re-creation of TOS as you’ll ever see. The craftsmanship involved in this kind of precise duplication is amazing on its own. The social commentary is as skillfully threaded as it ever was, and in places moves a story begun in TOS forward in striking fashion. Episode 3, “Fairest of Them All,” picks up right where the classic “Mirror, Mirror” left off and tells an entire story of the mirror-crew reaction to the events of that old episode. It’s delicious.
It’s a love letter to TOS. James Doohan’s son plays Scottie. Marina Sirtis does the computer voice. Watch for convention-circuit genre hands like Erin Gray and Lou Ferrigno (Lou Ferrigno!). And Mignogna channels Shatner--he’s got the walk, the smirk, the vocal cadence, the whole thing nailed--without making it weird. If you dig the old Trek, for whatever reason, you’ve got to check this out. The series has its own channel on YouTube, but it’s being mirrored by fans on BitChute if you’ve got an alt-tech preference.
4.5 stars of 5: I really liked it, and would watch it again.