Beyond the Farthest Star

WHY AM I WATCHING BEYOND THE FARTHEST STAR? 

In which we boldly take a detour

These guys. These fucking guys,

We start out with a surprisingly tense opening for a Saturday morning cartoon. The Enterprise is trapped in a star's gravity well and can't escape. They manage to stabilize their orbit, but soon find themselves face to face with a giant fuck off alien ship. There are no life signs and no energy readings of any type, so Kirk leads an away mission to the ship to get some answers. They equip themselves with life support belts, essentially personal force fields. These things are cool for two reasons. First, from a practical standpoint, the animators can save money by just drawing a line around the characters, and they don't have to design new space suits. But you don't really notice this because they're a pretty cool idea. It allows Starfleet officers survive in the cold vacuum of space, and protects them in other neat ways, which we will get into later. They're a great example of taking a technology that exists (force fields) and using it in interesting and unique ways. 

Anyhoo, the tension continues on the alien ship. Filmation's lackadaisical pacing continues to work to the shows benefit. It makes the crew seem nervous and uneasy as they explore this abandoned ship. They find the ship's bridge. But when they get there, they find that their phasers, tricorders, and communicators don't work. Spock realizes that this was a security measure cobbled together at the last minute to keep intruders out. They find the captain's final log entry. He's some crab faced motherfucker who has dire warnings of how his ship must be destroyed for the good of the galaxy. And that's when all hell breaks loose. 

Something is trying to break through the main bridge doors. Alarms are going off, strobe lights are in full strobe, and before Spock can translate the captain's speech, there's weird alien talk adding to the chaos. Then the bridge doors blow open and shit goes nuts. Just every fucking thing starts exploding. But with the energy dampening field down, Kirk is able to call the ship and everyone beams out in the nick of time. 

The away team gets back before the alien ship explodes, but they brought back a green fog with them. The fog freaks the fuck out and escapes into the air vents. Then it gets into the Enterprise's systems, and we get (as far as I know) the first story where the ship comes alive and tries to kill the crew. At least the ship doesn't have a baby. 

The alien wants the ship to be taken to the heart of Federation space. He's taken over the bridge's security system, a disco ball outfitted with phasers, to force the crew to do his bidding. But my boy Kirk don't shiv. He balls nasty. He blows up the navigation console and sends Scotty down to Engineering to set off the self destruct. Because fuck you, if Kirk can't have this ship, no one can. And, keep the Federation safe, I guess. 

The entity pushes Scotty into a barrel and slams the lid on him, but Scotty's personal force field is keeping the lid open, and also keeping Scotty from being cut in half. See what I mean about these things being cool? So an engineering crew works to save Scotty, while up on the bridge, Kirk is working on a patented Kirk Bluff. Basically he aims the ship straight at the star they're orbiting. The alien controlling the ship isn't happy about this, to put it mildly. He starts shooting Kirk with the disco phasers. But his force field belt protects him. I seriously love these things. The entity, thinking Kirk is going to destroy his ship, leaps back to the star, and at the last second, Sulu uses the star's gravity to slingshot themselves out of it's gravity well and sends them on their way. We hear the plaintive cries of the entity as the ship heads off into the sunset. "So lonely... please don't leave me..." Another victory for our intrepid crew! 

That is a cool looking ship. And I guess the aliens look nice too.

THE RANDOM THOUGHTS

• For that time the Enterprise had a baby, please see the TNG episode Emergence
• For that time Kirk said "Fuck you, if I can't have this ship, no one can." please see The Motion Picture. 
• The Animated Series isn't well regarded among Star Trek fans. I watched it a few years back and thought it was fine. Better than Voyager, anyways. But watching it again, I really liked this episode a lot. I'm sure the show won't be able to keep up this level of quality, but they sure picked the right episode to start with. 
• So, over the course of this series, I'm going to be giving Filmation (the animation company) a lot of shit. And it's mostly deserved. They were known for being incredibly stingy and recycling animation to a comical degree. I'm pretty sure He-Man fought a guy who looked exactly like Spock at one point. 
• But that said a lot of this show visually works. The main stock shots of the Enterprise are gorgeous. Granted, I love pretty much all Federation design, but still. The ship looks great, and they obviously spent a lot of time and effort on the interior backgrounds to make them as accurate to the live action show as they can. And the alien ship looked amazing. It's semi-organic, and they did a great job designing it with smooth, flowing lines and different colors to contrast it with the Enterprise's angles and gray color scheme. 
• The character designs are great too. The crew looks like the actors without being creepy and the aliens are great. If the crab faced motherfucker who was in command of the alien ship is any indication, they will be taking full advantage of the benefits of animation. And we haven't even gotten to the newest member of Starfleet, Arex, the three armed goat man.
• And, it should be noted, all your live action Star Trek favorites are here. All of the main cast provides the voices of their characters (Chekov is absent, but seriously, fuck Chekov) but we also get Lt. Kyle (and his glorious mustache) working the transporter, and Nurse Chapel is in the background of the Sickbay scenes. 
• And finally, a few quick technical notes. I hate when blogs and podcasts talk about their schedule, so I'll be quick. 
• It's the one year anniversary of this blog, so I wanted to do something to celebrate. There are 22 weekdays in July, and there are 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series. So every day, Monday through Friday, there will be a new recap/review. 
• And I know I'm not great with deadlines, so the original plan was to keep these short and do them on my phone. Since I am a hip, young, on-the-go urbanite, this seemed to be the best way to keep a daily deadline. But it turns out I have a lot to say about Star Trek (who knew?) and also Blogger's mobile app is garbage upon garbage. So we'll see what happens moving forward, but I will finish this series with more frequent updates before getting back to Lost. 
• Ok, one other thing. This is ground that has already been covered by my pals over at The Post Atomic Horror. I'm going to do my best not to repeat/plagiarize them, but we've got very similar thoughts about Star Trek so some crossover is inevitable. Apologies in advance.   

Mr. Scott, if you smelt it, the only logical conclusion is that you delt it.