Entertainment
Star Trek Just Ruined Its Best Alien Race, And The Explanation Makes No Sense
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
The fourth episode of Starfleet Academy, “Vox In Excelsio,” made some huge changes to the most famous alien race in all of Star Trek: The Klingons. The biggest change (and beware some spoilers the size of a warp core, this is your only warning!) is that the Klingon homeworld of Qu’onos has been completely destroyed because the Burn (introduced back in Discovery, Season 3) caused all of the planet’s dilithium reactors to explode. However, based on everything we know about dilithium from over 60 years of franchise history, this should have been completely impossible!
First, some context: since the days of Star Trek: The Original Series, we’ve seen starships traveling the galaxy thanks to the dilithium crystals that power their warp cores. After the crew of the USS Discovery jumped to the 32nd century, they discovered that both interstellar travel and the Federation had been devastated by an event called the Burn. The Burn caused dilithium throughout the galaxy to go inert, and this caused countless starships to explode because these crystals regulate the matter/antimatter reaction necessary to achieve warp speed.
Avoiding The Mistakes Of The Future, Today
Once the crystals went inert, the matter and antimatter collided in any ship with an active warp drive. This instantly caused the last thing any Starfleet captain wants to deal with: a warp core breach. Because of this, the Federation is still rebuilding by the end of Star Trek: Discovery, and Starfleet Academy is all about training the next generation of cadets who will make the galaxy a safer place as various planets and space empires continue recovering.
That brings us to the most recent episode of Starfleet Academy, “Vox Excelsius,” in which a reporter casually mentions that the Klingon homeworld of Qo’noS has previously been destroyed by the Burn. How did this work, mechanically speaking? The only explanation we get (aside from a dismissed conspiracy theory that “they blew it up themselves”) is that “the Burn caused dilithium reactors on Qo’noS and other worlds to explode.”
What The Experts Have To Say
At first glance, this probably makes sense. After all, we know that the Burn affected dilithium in a way that made starships throughout the galaxy explode. Dilithium is both mined and stored on various planets, so the reporter’s breezy comment might make you think that the dilithium simply exploded with enough force to either destroy the Klingon homeworld outright or render it completely uninhabitable.
However, the starships destroyed by the Burn were only lost because the dilithium going inert caused instant warp breaches. While Starfleet Academy doesn’t really explain what a “dilithium reactor” is, it’s fair to assume that the Klingon homeworld was not attempting to travel anywhere at warp speed. The reactor is presumably meant to be a power source for Qo’noS, but at no point in Star Trek history has matter/antimatter been used to power anything other than warp drive.
Therefore, it’s only logical (Spock would be so proud) to determine that Paramount ruined the Klingons because the writers forgot how the Burn worked, which was established in the show that Starfleet Academy spun off from. This isn’t a case of the writers forgetting some obscure factoid introduced in The Original Series or even The Next Generation. Instead, they are ignoring a major story element that was introduced just a few years ago, a mistake made even worse by the other logical problems of this bizarre plot point.
Almost All Klingons Died For No Reason
For example, even though the Klingons are canonically stupid, why would they rely on dilithium as a power source? Even if we were to expect the idea (that flies in the face of established lore) that dilithium works as a planetary power source, Discovery previously established that dilithium had started becoming super scarce years before the Burn happened, which is why the Federation was researching alternative methods of achieving warp speed without dilithium crystals. Facing that same dilithium shortage, the Klingons could have easily traded out their dilithium reactors to power planets with fusion or solar power, both of which the Federation was relying on nearly a millennium ago.
Now, before the Star Trek fanboys come for me, I’ll concede that Starfleet Academy might explain all of this away in a future episode. Maybe we’ll get a technobabble explanation as to how dilithium reactors work, or we’ll get an in-universe reason why the Klingons never switched to another, more convenient power source once dilithium got insanely scarce. Heck, we might even get an explanation as to why the Klingons had these reactors on every single planet of their empire, something which seems like it would be overkill for smaller, more remote colonies.
Right now, though, none of this makes any sense, which is effectively bad news for Star Trek as a whole. The writers just ruined the franchise’s most iconic race, and they did so with a plot point that proves even they weren’t watching Discovery. You should act accordingly, when this kind of narrative stupidity causes you to unsubscribe from Paramount+, don’t forget to write in “exploding warp reactors” as the reason you are leaving.
Don’t think the Skydance Corporation will believe it? Trust me: if they bought Paramount, these guys will buy anything.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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Frederik Andersen, Hurricanes look to shut down Senators in Game 2
