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By GustavoLeao / 00:13, 13 July 2008 / General Star Trek
Written by Troy H. Cheek
I'm a Trekkie. I love Star Trek. I was conceived around the time TOS (The Original Series) first aired, kept my pregnant mother up late enough to watch the first season for me, then watched the last couple of seasons myself when I'd refuse to go quietly to bed on certain nights. My mother tells me I especially liked watching Kirk do his little speeches, and I always giggled at the starships.
Entirely too many years later, I'm still a Trek fan. I'm also still losing sleep and causing others to lose sleep.
My current obsession is a fan-created video series called Star Trek: Hidden Frontier. This video series is set in the time of TNG (The Next Generation) and, more specifically, after the events as shown in the movie STAR TREK: INSURRECTION. In that movie, Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise save the inhabitants of a planet located in an area of dense gas, gravitic anomolies, and just plain weirdness called the Briar Patch. Insert standard Brer Rabbit joke here.
The premise of Hidden Frontier is fairly simple. The Federation wants to continue protecting said planet, plus maintain a presense in that area of space, plus explore the mystery that is the Briar Patch. Having learned their lesson with Deep Space 9, they don't do anything by half measures. They build Deep Space 12, a full-blown starbase, and deploy an entire fleet to guard it. Flagship of that fleet is the USS Excelsior, a Galaxy-class dreadnought, which looks a lot like the Galaxy-class starship Enterprise-D from TNG with an extra warp engine welded on the back and a few extra weapons wired to the front grill.
For me, the story was about a man named Ian Knapp (played by actor David W. Dial). He's the first one I really connected with in the early episodes, and it was always his character development that interested me. His dedication to the Federation, his clumsy but undying love for his daughter, his fight with the Grey, the way the Universe kept dumping him in bad situations... I just liked the guy.
Ian commanded a space station located in the Briar Patch. Well, the huge expanse of ionized gas and subspace eddies has an official designation, but Briar Patch is as good a name as any. Unless you're a rabbit, a briar patch is a bad place to be.
For seven years, Ian and his intrepid (and Intrepid) crew battled a mysterious and dangerous race called the Grey who had something to do with huge geometrical ships. All the great Star Trek races ended up making appearances: Romulan, Klingon, Cardassian, Breen, Orion, Tholian, Messnicks. Oh, and there were a couple of other unique aliens, too. One worked for the Federation and the other for himself. They were the rabbits in the Briar Patch. They knew the ins and outs of it, and they manipulated everyone else for their own purposes. They were instrumental to the entire series. I think the producers of Hidden Frontier intended for the story to be about them, but I liked Ian, so as far as I'm concerned, the series was about him.
I was glad that Ian survived. Not all my favorite characters did.
But enough about Ian. Let's talk about the series as a whole.
The Good
Over the course of the series, pretty much all the major characters had their characters developed. Some of it was interesting and entertaining, but even the bad felt more like actual development and less like padding. I will still admit to fast-forwarding through some of it, though.
Hidden Frontier wasn't afraid to kill off characters, destroy ships, render planets lifeless, etc. So many Trek shows or even science fiction shows in general like to reset things at the end of every episode. So many times huge things happen in characters' lives that are never mentioned again. HF seldom had that problem.
Characters got promoted and assigned to new ships or new responsibilities. This is much more realistic than having the same command crew in the same ship for, say, seven years.
The overall storyline progressed all the way through the seven years.
The acting was much better than you'd expect from people doing it for free.
Special effects in the space battles were on par with many professionally produced series.
Good music, although admittedly pretty much all of it is stolen from other productions.
The Bad
Sometimes, the character development seemed wedged in there just to have character development. I do not exaggerate when I say that I ended up skipping pretty much every bit of dialog in some episodes.
Sometimes, when they should have killed off a character, they didn't. I understand that not everyone can commit to playing a character for seven years, but I would end up confused about who the characters were and why I should care whether they live or die. If you're going to bring in someone who looks and sounds completely different and is going to play the character in a completely different way, why not just create a new character? And don't tell me that the viewer is already invested in the existing character, because I just said I couldn't tell who they were supposed to be.
Likewise, I understand that it's hard to come up with enough actors to fill every role, but I'd likewise get confused about which character was played by which actor in a particular episode. I would have solved the problem by having fewer characters, but that's just me.
The Ugly
I'm not entirely convinced that the big, sweeping, seven year storyline was actually intended to be a big, sweeping, seven year storyline. It seems like it started as one thing, went with that for a couple of seasons, shelved that, went in another direction for a few seasons, shelved that, went in an entirely new direction, then dug the original storyline back up in the last season, only to toss it away in the last episode.
Or maybe I'm just remembering wrong. I watched something like five seasons back to back, took a break of a few years, then watched the remaining seasons back to back, then had to wait a month or two before I found time to watch the series finale.
The Conclusion
I'll tell you what, just forget everything you read above. What it all boils down to is whether or not Hidden Frontier is a good series. It is. It is well worth whatever time and effort it might take to track down every episode and watch it. If part of some episode bores or offends you, well, that's why God created the fast forward button.
The hour-long finale was great. It really brought the whole series together for me, and tied the various plotlines together in a way that I really hadn't thought possible by that point. Sure, some of my favorite characters died and some of the characters I really didn't care about pulled off miraculous recoveries, but you have to take the good with the bad.
However, if there was ever an episode of Hidden Frontier that needed a "previously on Hidden Frontier" setup at the beginning, this was it. I loaded up the file fully expecting to get a recap. It never crossed my mind that there wouldn't be one.
But overall, I give Star Trek: Hidden Frontier two thumbs up. Stop reading and go watch it.
Troy H. Cheek is the editor of the Cheek.Org website
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