advanced technology Archive

13

Star Trek: The Next Generation Re-Watch: “Contagion”

“Contagion”
Written by Steve Gerber & Beth Woods
Directed by Joseph L. Scanlan

Season 2, Episode 11
Original air date: March 20, 1989
Star date: 42609.1

Mission summary

Enterprise risks entering the Neutral Zone to rendezvous with her sister ship, the Yamato, which is suffering serious system malfunctions. As her dour captain Donald Varley tells them that he’s lost an engineering team and the Yamato is continuing to fall apart, Data downloads her ship logs and notices one tiny, insignificant hiccup in the process that probably doesn’t mean anything.

Read the rest of this entry »

24

Star Trek Animated Series Re-Watch: “The Slaver Weapon”

The Slaver Weapon
Written by Larry Niven
Directed by Hal Sutherland

Season 1, Episode 14
Production episode: 22011
Original air date: December 15, 1973
Star date: 4187.3

Mission summary

Spock, Uhura, and Sulu, commanding the shuttlecraft Copernicus, are delivering precious cargo to Federation Starbase 25: a Slaver stasis box recovered from the planet Kzin. The long lost Slaver Empire scattered these time capsules across the galaxy, which either contain perfectly preserved artifacts from the billion-year-old civilization or booby traps; apparently the Empire fell due to its unhealthy addiction to the game show Let’s Make a Deal.

One stasis box provided a flying belt which led to the development of artificial gravity fields on starships, thus they’re potentially very valuable, dangerous, and incredibly rare–the only way to detect a stasis box is with another stasis box or dumb luck. As it happens, Spock’s box unexpectedly points the way to another one on planet Beta Lyrae. Spock is skeptical that a stasis box could go undiscovered there for so long, but they can’t pass it by without investigating.

Read the rest of this entry »