Relics

An old ship, an older engineer, and a structure that’s older than anyone knows. Old things, but not useless things. It is part flashback, part after school special. Say hello again to Montgomery Scott when we put Relics in the Mission Log. Were it not for the fact that he retired from doing the “next episode” voice-overs in 1990, you could almost hear Ernie Anderson reading this: Scotty returns for a final adventure on an all-new Staaaaaaaar Trek: The Next Generation! How many star systems would have to give up their metal to create one Dyson Sphere? Thousands? Millions? Was Franklin wearing a red shirt when he stepped into the transporter that day? TWO sponsors?? Woo hoo! Ken will be able to trade up from his 1975 Pacer to maybe a 1998 Delta 88. Does Blue Apron deliver? I keep waiting for you to do a podcast with your mouth full. Ah well… Fun episode, albeit a little sad in places. I wish they’d left in the Troi scene; that would have made sense. Anyway– Thanks, as always. Yeah, the sphere, despite being super cool, seems like a pretty silly idea in practice. The pure mass you need for it, the energy you need for harvesting and assembly would surely negate any advantages. Then again, maybe that’s why the builders gave it up again. Or they all died from sheer exhaustion afterwards 😉 I assume Nivens “Ringworld” and many other such ideas are based on this. IIRC, it was a ring of “plates” connected by wires. The oft-mentioned Banks with his Culture series also used the concept. Even the recent Beyond with the Yorktown kinda looked like that (and I think it’s pretty safe to assume that either Pegg or Jung, or both, have read Banks). I’m going to be that guy. Not that guy who thinks mac ‘n’ cheese is its own food group (though I will totally back Ken up on that), but that guy who’s kind of cranky and iconoclastic about an episode that everyone else unreservedly loves. I’m a huge Ron Moore fan, but at this stage in his life…well, I’ll just say it: what did he know about what Scotty would be feeling here? I just feel like Jeri Taylor or someone senior who had some inkling of what it’s like had helped to guide things. (I mention Jeri because she had a direct hand in asking the casting directors to find some background extras over the age of 30 to put in Starfleet uniforms, rather than all of them being painfully young; she clearly had a vested interest in the age issue, which I appreciate more and more now that modern TV seems to stray only occasionally from the norm of casting Beautful People [TM, pat. pend.].) Jimmy Doohan is why this episode comes as close to working as it does. I know it’s close to the top of everyone’s favorite list, but it could’ve been a great “issue” show that had a lot of eyeballs on it thanks to its guest star. It could have even gone meta and addressed some of the issues Gene himself experienced as TNG was, more and more, under other people’s control – how cool would that have been? But it didn’t do that. It’s a featherweight, and it throws featherweight punches: a Very Special Episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Also, the very notion of reconstructing the Enterprise bridge sure opened a can of worms, didn’t it? Barely a pie slice of the bridge here… and now there are several working film sets (and one set that’s turned into a licensed tourist attraction) that are 360-degree recreations. One of them just relocated to barely two hours’ drive from me. Relics let the genie out of the bottle there; fandom wasn’t going to sit still for just a pie slice. Gotta have the whole pie. Maybe more than one pie. If I can just lay off the pie, I hope to fit into a red shirt for one of these newfangled fan films the kids are making these days. Just kill me quick, that’s all I ask. 🙂 I’m curious who wrote/directed “The Cost of Living”?- to me that was the aging episode. Older folks forced to check out before becoming “useless” or a “burden”. Obviously, a jacked up premise and concept but I do like the powe