Star Trek: Intrepid
"Where There's A Sea"
Review by W. Joseph Thomas
"We can't do this without you."
"That was the idea."
--Lt. Cole and Capt. Hunter
3.5 out of 4 stars
Bottom Line: Wow. Who knew you could pack so much win into so little time?
It’s a hell of a good time to be a consumer of Star Trek fan films. There are a lot of obvious ways to figure this out, of course. After all, hardly a week goes by, that another fan production doesn’t either put out a casting call, release a pilot episode, or, as in the case of Star Trek: Beyond this month, suddenly appear on the collective radar with episode forty-something. I recently saw a list over at the TrekBBS—the lurker’s paradise—that listed something like fifty different amateur Trek productions in the drama category alone (totaling a shocking 146 episodes’ worth of filmed and recorded material).
But the best gauge of the good times in which we are currently rolling are works like “Where There’s A Sea,” the latest short out of Star Trek: Intrepid and their first release since their episode-length pilot last year. When fan films are regularly transcending their low-budget boundaries and transporting me into the Star Trek universe, sneaking up on my critic’s brain and switching it off without my noticing… then I am a happy man. “Where There’s A Sea” did this to me a few times in its short, twelve-minute runtime, albeit with a good deal of help from the suspension-of-disbelief reflex I learned watching 1960’s Star Trek.
Now, the problem with a twelve-minute episode is that, if you read slow, getting through this review might take you longer than watching the actual show. “Sea”’s brevity prevents me from talking too much about the specific details of the plot, particularly because “Where There’s A Sea” works by playing its cards very close to its chest. It will have to suffice to say that, as the viewer can tell from the moment the camera opens on Chiron Station, the Intrepid wrapped in shadow above, the series is taking a turn for the darker after the rather lightweight “Heavy Lies the Crown.” “Sea,” at its heart, is a scenario designed to show the audience the conflicting interests between the major Federation players in the Charybdis Sectors—and aggravate those tensions a great deal. It’s something I wish Voyager had done a lot more of during that first season, when the Maquis were still integrating with the Starfleet crew. On Voyager, B’Elanna broke Joe Carey’s nose in “Parallax,” and that was that. Never again would Starfleet-Maquis tension be shown on Voyager, except when it provided a convenient and fairly superficial plot. For all intents and purposes, they were One Crew: a Starfleet crew. (Bear in mind here that I do like Voyager a great deal, but this is one of the points on which I strongly agree with Ronald D. Moore’s analysis.) Here in the Charybdis Sector, though, it appears that we’re going to have all the interesting conflict between 24th-century characters that hasn’t been seen in Trek canon since Deep Space Nine. Intrepid isn’t the first fan show to try to do this—The Section 31 Files, for one, practically made this its mission statement—but, so far, Intrepid is doing it the best.
It helps that “Sea” is so well-acted. Nick Cook is writer, executive producer, and plays the lead character on Intrepid. This is almost universally a bad idea. I cannot overemphasize how much it has hindered Phase II (the recently-rebranded New Voyages) that James Cawley plays Captain Kirk. He is a wonderful producer who runs easily the most technically marvelous no-budget show in history, and I though “World Enough and Time” deserved that Hugo nomination (although the award will, I predict, go to “Blink” —and deservingly so), but, as an actor, I would call Cawley as convincing as a bar of soap, except that I know several brands of soap that would do considerably better in the role than he does. This is a sadly prevalent phenomenon across many fan productions. The producer started the show as a vehicle to play captain, and, by gum, he’s going to do it whether it hurts the show or not! This is a perfectly understandable decision, speaking as one who used to wander around my back yard as a four-year-old hunting “Klingons” and using the family sandbox as the bridge of the Enterprise, and far be it from me to begrudge the producers who give me free Star Trek their little indulgences, but, as a critic, this decision damages more productions than I can count on one hand.
Not so Nick Cook. Captain Hunter is spot-on, hands-down among my top three favorite captains in the fifty-odd fan films. In fact, he’s one of a very small number of people in fan film whose characters I can consistently remember from scene to scene. This should be taken as a compliment to Cook and not a slight to anyone else; this forgetfulness is a chronic problem of mine both in film and real life (I’m told I may have prosopagnosia, but this doesn’t explain my inability to remember peoples’ names). I’m digressing. Point is, Captain Hunter is great. He is not a generic Starfleet captain cut out of a cardboard archetype; he is a complex man given to complex decisions. Cook conveys this wonderfully through convincing dialogue delivery, facial expressions, and… you know, acting, that classic weakness of fan films in an era when the power of CGI far outpaces the acting power of the players on screen. (For examples of this, see the recently-ended Hidden Frontier.) I’m happy to say that nearly everyone else put in equally convincing, or at least competent, performances, carried along by a sharp, natural-sounding script and, yes, delightful Scottish accents. Particular props to Steven Hammond as Merchant Captain Merik, who does a wonderful job conveying anger, shock, fear, and a whole range of other emotions that he could have easily overplayed, but instead got exactly right. The weak link for me was the Orion Commander, who took a number of gift-wrapped zingers and made them fall completely flat. Everyone else in the production was good enough to keep my suspension of disbelief going, and some were quite good. This is a rather shocking feat for any fan production, given the track record of the recent past.
Unfortunately, as was the case in “Heavy Lies the Crown,” certain production-side problems pull Intrepid down, and, taken together, I was tempted to pull my rating down by a half-star to an even three. The biggest among these problems was the sound quality. It’s improved considerably since “The Crown,” but every single one of Lieutenant Cook’s lines had a rather irritating sound artifact in the background that screamed “dubbed”—and dubbed with improper noise reduction, at that. In a twelve-minute episode, a single actor with a major three-minute scene can really pull down the episode overall. Worse, Lt. Cook was not the only one with problematic dialogue files, just to most immediately noticeable.
Set design, sad to say, was uninspired—I wish we had seen more of the Intrepid’s beautiful bridge and less of the Ariadne’s not-so-pretty one, though the way this episode was plotted hardly could have allowed for that. We had one scene in what was essentially a blank gray corridor, though, and I feel like the set masters could have done something to liven that up. That being said, this episode made me realize just how much I like physical sets; despite the uninspired design in this film, there’s something here about the natural light falling on these characters, casting shadows, or the way they so confidently interact with the world around them—even simple things, like putting a glass of wine firmly down on table—that makes this world resonate in a way greenscreen-based shows will never be able to do. At least, not in this generation of CGI. (Now, if only live-action work didn’t take so much longer than greenscreening, we’d really have something here.)
Speaking of green-screening, it’s been a year since I last saw “Heavy Lies the Crown,” and my memory is more than a bit foggy (I read the wikipedia recap before starting this review), so I could be wrong, but wasn’t the Intrepid bridge greenscreened a year ago? If so, then is it a physical set now, as it appears to be, or did Steve Hammond just do a brilliant job of directing that part to keep me from noticing? (Yes, I could probably learn the answers to these questions by just watching the behind-the-scenes reel, but I’m not going to.) If that was CGI, then it was really nice.
That’s why I’d be surprised, because, to be quite honest, the rest of Intrepid’s CGI work is barely so-so in the post Hidden Frontier world. The Intrepid exterior looks absolutely beautiful, but everything else—planets, Chiron Station, phasers, and especially the Ariadne—looked hurried and cartoonish. I found myself several times averting my eyes from the screen to maintain suspension of disbelief. But even my eyes weren’t fast enough to miss the Asteroid Field of Similarly Shaped and Colored Rocks That Abruptly Terminates on an Exact Imaginary Line. Eek. Fortunately, I don’t watch shows for the special effects. (Otherwise, I’d be quite the Galactica fan. Zing!)
However, one place where the production really shines is in the score. I don’t think composers get enough recognition for their role in creating the emotional underpinnings of good drama, so three cheers for David Beukes, whose music really set the mood for this episode, in action-y parts and in parts that were just plain dark. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about musical criticism, so that’s about as much as I can say. It was great. There was this really neat piano-and-string piece early on that was thoroughly memorable (yes, I want the score), and some pretty good battle music.
Lest this review get pulled down by my critiques of the production in this last page, let me say again: I loved “Where There’s A Sea.” It’s a tremendous reminder to fan producers everywhere—I’m looking at you, James Cawley, and your little “Center Seat” vignette, too—of what good writing and solid acting can make out of twelve minutes of storytelling time. It’s also a very promising bell weather for the future quality and tone of Intrepid, and it’s gotten me very excited for… for… whatever’s next. “Machinations?” “Next In Line?” Their website doesn’t make it clear to my feeble old brain. Anyhow, great twelve minutes, go watch it.
There is one more thing (of course there is): Admiral Prentice has this neat model of the 1701 Enterprise on his desk. Looking closely, I’m pretty sure it’s a Wrath of Khan toy, I believe made by Diamond Select, that lights up and shouts “Khaaaaan!” and other things when you press down on the bridge. I know this because I own the exact same ship; my girlfriend, who knows me only too well, bought it for my birthday this year. Great toy. Thing is, it comes with this great stand shaped like a communicator, and, after three months of trying, I have never managed to get it to balance on that stand. The instruction manual is unhelpful. Yet Admiral Prentice’s model is clearly not only balanced, but balanced in a really cool “swooping” position. Anyone from Intrepid able to give me a word of advice on this?
Until next time, remember: breathe, and count to a hundred.
Thanks, Intrepid. Job well done.
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