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by Rick Norwood
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| What to watch in January: | |
The big news is the new Babylon 5 tele-movie. There are also three new episodes each of
Enterprise and The X-Files. Enterprise continues to have high
ratings despite lackluster critical reception. I suspect that a lot of people watch it as a lead in
to The West Wing, which Voyager went head to head against and
lost. The X-Files seems to have turned its back on space aliens for more homey horrors.
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Rick Norwood is a mathematician and writer whose small press publishing house, Manuscript Press, has published books by Hal Clement, R.A. Lafferty, and Hal Foster. He is also the editor of Comics Revue Monthly, which publishes such classic comic strips as Flash Gordon, Sky Masters, Modesty Blaise, Tarzan, Odd Bodkins, Casey Ruggles, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Barnaby, Buz Sawyer, and Steve Canyon. |
Sunday, January 6
The next Enterprise, "Sleeping Dogs", a Klingon episode, has not yet been assigned an air date, but may air Wednesday, January 30.
The DVD of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is now out, and is very impressive. This will never be a great movie, but
this cut is infinitely better than the long, cold version originally released to theaters. It is also better
than the television and VHS versions, which restored a lot of the character bits. In the DVD even more
interaction between the much loved characters from the original Trek has been rescued from the
cutting room floor. In particular Doctor Christine Chapel has a slightly larger part. There
are a few minutes of new special effects unobtrusively inserted, and the old special effects,
mercifully shortened by a minute or two, stand up very well. I cannot think of a CGI spaceship
to equal the complexity of the huge alien spaceship model. William Shatner does some real acting,
justifying Gene Roddenberry's choice. I cannot imagine another actor playing Captain Kirk. People whose
image of Shatner comes from his hamming it up in too many B movies will be surprised at his
gravitas. All in all, this is a potent counter-example to the theory that only even
numbered Star Trek films are worth watching.
 
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