Revisiting Star Trek Continues...

[CmdrJoe]

I love Continues, especially the way it perfectly bridges TOS with TMP. I see it as the best fan-made production out there, not the Vic Mignogna show. That said, Vic's portrayal of Kirk was quite good. Todd Haberkorn as Spock was outstanding. And Chris Doohan playing the part his dad made famous is icing on the cake (I love Scotty! And cake. Cheesecake, specifically.)

 

[Bixby]

Falling behind on my re-watch, I'll deal with Lolani later this week, Warped.

You can feel the compulsive fanboying happening in this episode by the needless linking of the Tantalus field weapon with the Tantalus 5 penal colony from Dagger in the Mind.

My biggest gripe with this episode is that despite an interesting premise, following up Mirror Mirror with a sequel seen from the other side, the showmakers just didn't seem to understand the characters. In Mirror Mirror, the alt-universe characters are supposed to be uncontrollable and wild "animals", near-psychotics. The way the actors portray them in Fairest of them all is far from the original portrayal. For example, early on when Kirk refers to Kipleigh Brown as Jones and she mumbles "the name is Smith, sir" might have seemed to the cast as a fun callback to Smith's only original series appearance, but the Mirror Mirror version of Kirk would have savaged her for even this small reply.

The same for Marlena Moreau: in Mirror Mirror Barbara Luna played her as confident, icy and calculating, but all of a sudden in Fairest of Them All, she's constantly nervous, twitchy and submissive. Actress Asia Demarcos looks very similar to Barbera Luna apart from the height difference, but she wasn't playing her the same way. This was not just limited to the women, many of the male actors just weren't displaying the needed amount of viciousness.

One of the perplexing things in OG Trek was how its corridors were often shown as either filled with crewmen racing through, or other times when they would be completely empty (just how many people would be walking by with a crew complement of 400 inside a gargantuan ship?)

That same problem happens in Fairest, which to the STC crew's credit they were ambitious in the many locations across the ship during this episode, with film extras in uniform walking through or standing while listening to the Captain's intercom message...There probably was about 15 to 20 extras during this episode alone...However, this just emphasized how ridiculous it looked in their bridge scenes with a maximum of 3 crewmen handling this most vital command center during a battle scene. On the one hand, they needed to keep the bridge crew down to bare numbers during the 3rd act's mutiny scene, or else there would have been many casualties during this power grab...but it made no sense to have so few people there during a space battle.

Same thing during the resolution: only enough Empire loyalists to fill one tiny shuttlecraft went with Kirk? I know many of them would have been cheesed off at him for his dismissive speech, but it's odd to think that they would have been so easily swayed to Spock's side...

i guess by this point the STC gang hadn't yet decided what producer Steven Dengler's character was going to be in the series going further (he only appeared at the very end in the shuttlecraft bay)

Anyway, this episode was pretty well executed, despite some glaring logic holes. I could have done without the reusing of a lot of Mirror Mirror's sick bay battle against Spock in the briefing room dustup between Spock and Kirk, but what can you do...

 

[Kor]

Instead of a 1980s pop psychology type of therapist as a regular character, I think there should have been occasional appearances from a psychiatrist with a doctorate similar to Elizabeth Dehner in TOS or Sidney Freedman in M*A*S*H.

Starfleet as depicted in the 1960s was still somewhat more along the lines of real-world armed forces of the time, with the worldbuilding taking some cues from producers' and writers' experiences in the navy or other branches of the service.

Kor

 

[Warped9]

Instead of a 1980s pop psychology type of therapist as a regular character, I think there should have been occasional appearances from a psychiatrist with a doctorate similar to Elizabeth Dehner in TOS or Sidney Freedman in M*A*S*H.

Starfleet as depicted in the 1960s was still somewhat more along the lines of real-world armed forces of the time, with the worldbuilding taking some cues from producers' and writers' experiences in the navy or other branches of the service.

Kor

Yes, agreed. If they had done this with McKenna it would have worked better, but as is every time she appeared we’re reminded of them injecting TNG era ideas into TOS.

 

[Richard Baker]

One thing Doug Drexler did differently with the ship shots was instead of having a large ship being filmed by a virtual camera like a full scale setup, he scaled the Enterprise to the size of the original miniature and then created a virtual lens which duplicated the one used in the original sfx shots.
When planning the camera moved he tried to keep within the bounds of how they filmed things in the sixties instead of getting overly dynamic

I think this approach really contributed to giving this series the same feel of TOS, even more so than the official remastered editions

 

[Warped9]

One thing Doug Drexler did differently with the ship shots was instead of having a large ship being filmed by a virtual camera like a full scale setup, he scaled the Enterprise to the size of the original miniature and then created a virtual lens which duplicated the one used in the original sfx shots.
When planning the camera moved he tried to keep within the bounds of how they filmed things in the sixties instead of getting overly dynamic

I think this approach really contributed to giving this series the same feel of TOS, even more so than the official remastered editions

Yeah, I remember him talking about that. He also advised on how the ship should flyby in the opening credits, noting the Enterprise should sorta “slide” out of the distance rather than come right at you.