#the secret star trek episode

[cookieroll]

Captain, I’m afraid we may have beamed down to the wrong side of Barbie Land.

[spockvarietyhour]

Hoshi knows exactly what's she doing and she's milking T'Pol on this for all she's worth

[spirk-trek]

so i just watched the first episode of the animated series

that was fun as hell. scotty went flying at one point and it was the funniest shit ive ever seen. they replaced my boy chekov with some random alien. jim fully elbowed mr kyle out of the way to use the transporter console. also kyle has a moustache now???

10/10 media experience

oh yay!!!! i love tas, you're in for so many good times!!!

can't wait for you to watch yesteryear adshbgfhjg. i really like bem and the albatross too. oh, and you get to meet the special pink tribbles!!

tas is like double the whimsy of tos :') they have so much fun with the planets and aliens since they don't have to build them out of foam and paper mâché anymore lmfao

[allegriana]

Paramount, I'm desperately clutching your leg and begging for a bonus musical episode set entirely on the Klingon ship.

[bcbdrums]

for the fanfic asks: 5, 23, 28!!

from this list

5. Quote one of your fics out of context

"This...I admit," he said, "I have longed for since first I met you." --Sarek to Amanda, The Logical Thing

23. Where do you usually write?

Either at my desk or in bed, on my laptop, in Microsoft's Notepad. No exceptions. It must be Notepad. And I do all my html for AO3 manually. This, I have found, is the only way to get formatting correct the first time. It also forces me to spell things correctly (although with Windows 11, Notepad does now fix a few typos automatically which is annoying but at least it's not as bad as I've heard Google Docs is, but I digress...). Yes yes, Notepad is the only way. In a small vertically rectangular window that takes up a very small portion of the screen, 4 1/2" x 6" precisely. And...on the rare occasion I'm out of the house and can write (usually I'm out for busy purposes so not writing) I'll write to myself in either an email or messenger app so that when I get back on the laptop, it's right there for me to copy-paste and reformat in my beloved Notepad. Plain text foreverrrr!

28. Which fic is closest to your heart?

Ohhhh boy... I have approximately 324 published fanfics (published under two usernames, and counting individual fics in anthology collections much like @blackbloodteeth's Ramble Room) and I know I have over 300 WIPs and unpublished fics as well, some in the 50K+ word count range. I did not look at all of them when considering this question, but there were some I went to automatically. I'll give one honorable mention, and then the one that I thought of first. Honorable mention because I'm just so proud of what I did, is a fic called The Letter (BBC Sherlock). This fic was written to address what immediately became a fandom trope - John's letter to Sherlock after Mary's death, the contents of which we never learn. So the story is ultimately about that, but it isn't revealed until the end. Instead it's a series of flashbacks from John's POV of events in their lives about their relationship, how it developed and grew, with Sherlock using music to tell John how he feels about him. I have audio links embedded in the fic, timed as well as I could to an average reading speed so that you're hearing something as a character comments about it. The story has humor, angst, love...everything. And I am so, so, so proud of my work on this. I even studied how to waltz for weeks because I wrote about Sherlock teaching John (another fandom trope) and I have to do things correctly, so....I had to learn first before I could write it. So yeah... This one is extremely dear to me and would be in my list of top recommended fics if I wanted people to read my work. I have a very great many stories I'm proud of, many that I just enjoy reading for their own sake because I find them that good/they scratch that particular itch just right for me (after all, don't we write for ourselves?). But ultimately, the story that first came to mind and stayed there as I scanned through the rest of my fics is.... The Logical Thing (Star Trek, Sarek/Amanda). I think my first, legitimate, serious romantic ship in any fandom is Sarek/Amanda. I don't know why either. Perhaps because of their obvious importance in Spock's life, because of their embodiment of IDIC (the Vulcan philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) by being a human/vulcan couple, and supposedly the first interspecies couple for either species (or at least the first we know about*), the challenges their relationship must have faced, the challenges they must have had raising a bi-species son... And Spock being one of my all-time favorite characters too... Yeah. I dunno. But something about those two has always called to me, and I've been desperate, desperate, desperate to tell their story. Which is the plot of a massive unfinished fic I started posting (forgive meeeeeeeeeeee I will return I promise) and the subject of so many WIPs.... So many WIPs.... But anyway, that's not the question. I needed to write them getting together finally. The Logical Thing is simply, Sarek entering pon farr and well...if you know vulcan biology, it's mate or die. But vulcans are also extremely private about intimacy and they are fiercely monogamous, and Sarek is a widower. So what is he to do? Well, then there's Amanda, with whom he has become friends over the past two years and who is secretly in love with him though she tells herself she's trying not to be... And this story is what happens next. I should clarify, no, there is nothing nsfw in the story. It's their relationship that called to me, and that's what I wrote, and what I will continue to write... I love, love, love all the headcanons I've developed for these two. Star Trek will always be the fandom of my heart, and I do think, ultimately, out of my many hundreds of fics, this one is closest to my heart.

Thank you sooooooooooo much for the ask and for allowing me a chance to talk about these things!

[bagheerita]

"Inquisition" fails the DS9/SGA test that "Whispers" passed with flying colors.

[firstofficerkittycat]

i need carolyn palamas to call me bacteria rifht now

[thegeminisage]

i wasn't gonna trek blog on here bc i didn't want anyone to be able to figure out which fic i was complaining about last month but i just finished requiem for methuselah and my jaw is on the ground. was that a good episode? ehhh. but the final scene???? i quite literally stood up out of my chair. i went back and replayed it 7 times. i paced around my house for nearly 15 minutes going "what the FUCK was that" aloud. catnaps aside i haven't slept in 40 hours and i think it truly. TRULY broke me

[jonberry555]

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Under the Cloak of War REVIEW

My Review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2. Episode 8: "Under the Cloak of War." "Captain Pike and his crew welcome a Klingon defector aboard the Enterprise, but his presence triggers the revelation of some shocking secrets."

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

me accidentally watching The Die Is Cast for the first time on the day of the Succession finale 🤝 me accidentally rewatching The Wire on Father's Day

[labrats-and-clonetroopers]

Nothing gives me more delight than canonical crossovers. An actual alien failing to land a role on Star Trek: Enterprise because his performance didn't feel "alien" enough to Jonathan Frakes and John Billingsley is pure gold and I will never stop obsessing over that episode.

[jamdoughnutmagician]

Of course we know that Eddie is the big fantasy nerd, with his love of D&D, he was probably an avid reader of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and almost definitely made Wayne sit through numerous re-watches of The Wizard of Oz as a kid.

But when he gets together with Steve he realises that Steve 'the hair' Harrington isn't quite the meat-head jock that he remembers him to be in high school.

Eddie was flicking through the channels looking for something for them to watch when Steve comes in holding a bowl of popcorn in his hands as he scoots up close to Eddie.

"Hey, go back a minute, I think I saw something good." Steve says, tapping Eddie on the arm.

Eddie flicks back the channel and it lands on a re-run episode of the original series of Star Trek.

"Man, I used to be obsessed with this show as a kid." Steve says, throwing back a handful of popcorn. "Never missed an episode."

"Wait, you wanna watch Star Trek?" Eddie asked, raising his eyebrows at Steve's admission. His boyfriend was a secret geek.

"Yeah it's a good show. I think I even dressed up as Captain Kirk for Halloween one year. " scratch that Steve Harrington was a full on nerd.

"Sure, we can watch this." Eddie smirks, settling back against Steve.

"Hey, Eddie, did you ever watch that show about the alien in the time-travelling police box?"

It appears that the nerd-levels ran deep with Steve.

Eddie shakes his head at his boyfriend.

"Always watched that one too, actually, I still do." Steve smiles. "My grandma knitted me the long multicoloured scarf for Christmas when I was younger."

"Stevie, why didn't you tell me you were such a science fiction nerd?"

"You never asked."

Eddie might have been the fantasy lover between the two of them, but when it came down to it, Steve was most definitely the sci-fi geek.

[spockvarietyhour]

[tell-me-your-vision]

Remember- y’all remember that other time Spock lost control? Because the whole crew got taken over by that thing that basically made them lose all their inhibitions?

And Spock’s reaction to this was to have a breakdown and start crying because he can’t even tell his mom he loves her and meanwhile he’s having all these FEELINGS about Kirk?

still cannot believe Star Trek canonically made an episode where the plot was ‘Spock goes into heat and is going to die unless he has sex but then he rolls around on the ground with Kirk and pins him down and chokes him and after that he’s fine". 

Also this episode establishes that touching and sharing thoughts is so intimate that it is used to seal an arranged marriage pact…in the same episode where in an earlier scene Kirk just casually grabs Spock’s hand and Spock seems cool with it. 

Oh. And ALSO. After Spock has explained to Kirk that he is in heat and needs to have sex or die he’s all “Captain, there is a thing that happens to Vulcans at this time. Almost an insanity, which you would no doubt find distasteful.“ And Kirk’s response is to kind of raise an eyebrow and say “Will I?” in a way that suggests very much the opposite.

I just. This show was something else huh. No wonder it manifested modern fandom and fanfiction culture. 

[emilinqa]

star trek tos is deeply entrenched in its identity as a 60s tv show for better or for worse (both) but i think retroactively the city on the edge of forever ends up showcasing this more now since its set in a time we can now as 21st century viewers connect with being closer to the time it was produced, rather than the nebulous 23rd. it's interesting because for me i think the single episode informs the way i connect an imagined future to the actual real 1960s the show was written in, particularly in the language and the way relationships between characters are depicted in the way they speak to one another. in that single episode it suddenly feels that the coded language everyone uses, the subtext, the hints and euphemisms is a necessity of the world rather than a feature of the show. and suddenly (for me, at least) that totally shapes the rest of the way i view the rest of the original series. though the way they speak to one another doesn't really tangibly change all that much, when they're placed in the setting of the 1930s the way that kirk and spock speak to each other and about one another entirely shifts.

edith asks kirk in regards to his relationship with spock "I still have a few questions I'd like to ask about you two. Oh, and don't give me that 'questions about little old us' look, you know as well as I do how out of place you two look here." which. well. hello. and later when she asks "Why does Spock call you captain? Were you in the war together?" and kirk says "we... served together" its like yes the obfuscation of their identities and who they are to one another is a necessity of the plot and time travel reasons but i also can't pretend that particular response doesn't color kirks line 2 episodes later in amok time "you've been called the best first officer in the fleet, that's an... enormous asset to me" in a different light. the necessity of secrets and closed doors and frantically having to conceal themselves and their tiny little apartment with a pair of twin beds and ediths "you, by his side as if you've always been there and always will" and "'Captain'? See, even when he doesn't say it, he does" well i can't act like it doesn't change the way i see their enforced professional distance in other episodes, even when they're back safe in their own century. its why The conversation cut from the original harlon ellison script hits seriously i think. it's like a deeply personal confession of desire for a life that could never be: "On my world the nights are very long. The sound of the silver bird against the sky is very sweet. My people know there is always time enough for everything. You would be comfortable there" and a wistful acceptance ("All the time in the world...") in another time in another life in another place it could be but just not this one. spock's endless resignation. well it just changes everything for me. star trek is about the 1960s!!!!!!

[rootspiral]

Agatha All Along deep dive: episode 5 part 4

(Wandavision entries: [1][2][3])

(AAA entries: ep1 [1][2][3][4] ep2 [1][2][3][4] ep3 [1][2][3] ep4 [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][+1] ep5 [1][2][3][4][5] ep6 [1][2][3] ep7 [1][2][3][4][5][6] ep8 [1][2][3][4][5][6][7])

(this is a sad one, apologies in advance)

agatha just had the unimaginably traumatic experience of her mother's evil ghost possessing her body, so of course she cracks jokes. she's shaking like a leaf, but hey, coping mechanism gotta cope!

when evanora tried to execute agatha, stealing secrets or whatever was only an excuse, she was punishing her daughter for the sin of being born. whatever she says, her so called worry for these other witches is also an excuse. she's simply furious that someone has begun to think of agatha as a person rather than a monster. it's once again a selfless VS selfish paradox, evanora is always framing her actions as selfless and for the greater good, but her hatred for agatha is undeniably raw and personal. I would love to learn what evanora's life was like, who were her parents? what turned her into such a hateful mother?

(look at how angry rio already is. and alice always protecting the person closest to her by default.)

this is the ultimate humiliation for agatha, someone who has always kept her past and struggles so close to the chest. now one of her deepest traumas is laid bare for everyone to see and judge. she's always trying to come off as strong and unfeeling and formidable, but here she is, a sad little girl abused by her own mother.

btw I see you all have strong feelings about ghosts and billy's powers! lol I got so many comments. I see you, I see you! Granted I'm not actually super invested in my ghost theories, this being a made up marvel show and all, but here's what I think:

agatha says to wanda, "you have no idea how dangerous you are, you're supposed to be a myth, a being capable of spontaneous creation, and here you are, using it to make breakfast for dinner!" agatha, one of the most powerful witches ever existed, could not create food for nicky. like, the scope of wanda's powers (and billy's by extension) is the kind of scary that can reshape reality itself and truly and properly fuck up the Sacred Balance or whatever rio calls it.

when I say billy created a ghost evanora, yes it's a copy but in the same way a Star Trek transporter makes a copy, you know what I mean? whether the orignal stays behind or not, billy's evanora is the real evanora. and if you believe in souls, that gets even more complicated! did billy take evanora's soul from the afterlife and plopped her in here, or did it copy it too? and was wanda actually able to create billy's and tommy's or did she catch the wandering soul of stillborn twins?

see I don't think evanora was a ghost prior to this (again, I might be proven wrong in the future, but this is where I'm at right now). if that were the case, you know she'd been haunting agatha's ass, wouldn't have given her a moment of peace. maybe rio took extra care to send her to the afterlife, idk. now rio looks shocked and angry to see evanora, like this is a new development.

rio's voice is literally roaring with anger

like i cannot overstate how much rio hates and despises evanora for what she did to agatha

evanora zeroes in on rio, approaches. rio takes a whole step back and makes herself smaller. she's nervous. she says that ghosts are cheaters, but it goes beyond that, doesn't it? rio understands life and death, but a ghost is neither, or both. it goes beyond all her control and expertise, and for the first time since we've known her, she's at a disadvantage. ironic, isn't it, considering what happens to agatha in the finale?

agatha, who's been cowering in a corner, chooses this moment to approach. does she want to protect rio and billy and the others? or is she so desperate for an ounce of love and affection from her mother that she, coward as she is, actually wants to put herself in arm's way?

while everyone is focused on agatha, alice looks at rio. she is putting together evanora's words, agatha's terror and rio's hatred. jen is being selfish. alice, generous alice, could never be selfish

the last time agatha saw her mother she was still a kid. now she is a mother herself and the mere thought of not loving, not wanting to protect your child, of actually going out of your way to harm them? it's simply inconceivable to her.

the shock. the tears forming in her eyes. the same heartbreak she felt when she realized her mom was about to kill her at the stake. she's feeling small and wretched and unloved like only a parent can make you feel

it's the matter-of-fact tone she uses. it's worse than hatred. she despises agatha beyond hatred

there is a moment in a child's life when they see a parent clearly for the first time, their weakness and their flaws. this is especially true for an abused child, it comes a day when you realize that despite being called bad and evil and blamed for the pain happening, it was never really your fault. agatha knows what a parent's love should look like now. and this is not it.

rio visibly deflates. she is the only person in the room agatha opened up with about her mother. there is nothing she can do to spare her pain now. she has no power against evanora

alice has a blinding moment of shock, realization, pity. she knows only too well what generational pain and trauma can do to a person. but she still had a mother who loved her. agatha didn't.

jen, who used to be a healer, can no longer feel compassion. jen has had to learn to protect herself above all others. because evanora hurt agatha, and agatha hurt jen in return.

and when it's all said and done, agatha will always beg. all her power, her brains, her experiences are nothing. she regress to that girl at the stake. I can be good. please.

alice, who's always been the first to jump to everyone's defense, who always puts others before herself. she has seen agatha bare and helpless, she has seen that raw core that agatha has always hidden and, in her final moments, she's accepted agatha in her coven. it's more instinct than rationality, but alice has always been a heart over head kinda girl. if she can see the harpy, if she can see the pain, by GOD she'll do something about it.

“The Knight of Wands.” full of fire, fights bravely.

lilia's gut-wrenching scream. she knows what is happening. agatha already told her.

a succubus who hasn't fed in so long. I keep thinking, there was never anybody who loved her enough to teach her control, to seek alternative solutions to satiate her hunger. rio never could, rio cannot interfere with who lives and who dies. but could a coven together have fed her? could a big coven have donated power little by little, and kept her safe and valued and protected? nurtured her in every way? or was she always doomed from the start? was evanora right, did alice sign her death warrant the moment she chose to love agatha? I know what my answer is to all that, but what do you guys think?

and another question for you: billy casts around desperately for help, nicky answers. was nicky, or rather a shadow of nicky, created by billy too? or was the son of Death powerful enough and scared enough to reach out on his own, maybe with just a little push on billy's part?

a name was all it took for agatha to pass her trial, and look how much was needed to get it out of her. only billy's chaos could do the impossible: drag agatha's ravaged and wrecked heart to the surface. billy only wanted to help her heal, but he's a just a boy with the power to shape the universe. it took evoking ghosts and dredging up horrible trauma to make all of agatha's defenses crumble and raw-beat her into admitting her pain, into maybe, if we're lucky, starting on the road to recovery. oh, billy. you don't know how to handle things gently yet, with your big man's hands and your young, too young soul.

she stops IMMEDIATELY. she didn't know how to control her hunger, until now. the monster was human all along

by. as in, by billy, because he did it all. and also, good-bye. good-bye, mama.

oh, alice. there are no words.

and now they're no longer just numbers, just fools she conned and killed and abandoned on the road. now it's the girl with the big luminous heart, who sang the Ballad with her, who shared her same pain, the first human being in agatha's life who wanted to selflessly help her.

there is a moment, in a child's life, when they see a parent clearly for the first time.

go to episode 5 part 5