Star Trek Continues ”To Boldly Go Part 1” - Detailed Analysis & Review

Today, we're looking at "To Boldly Go Part 1", the first half of the Star Trek Continues grant finale. See how this episode ties back to the Star Trek pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before", how it sets up everything for the exciting conclusion, and hear some fascinating new insights into the episode from director James Kerwin.

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Transcript

Welcome to Nerd Heaven.

I’m Adam David Collings, the author of Jewel of The Stars.

And I am a nerd

 

This is episode 106 of the podcast. Today, we’re talking about the first part of the Star Trek Continues grand finale, “To Boldly Go, Part 1”.

 

I got an email a few weeks ago. It was from James Kerwin. Yes, that James Kerin. Writer, producer and director for Star Trek Continues, including director of today’s episode.

 

He reached out to me to say he’d been listening to the podcast and enjoying it. This was a huge thrill. It’s very humbling to find that one of the creators of the show has been listening to the podcast, so I want to give a big shout out and thank you to him, not only for his work on the show, but for his encouragement.

 

And he pointed out a few fascinating things that I’d missed.

Remember in episode three, I talked about how good the shuttlecraft exterior looked. It turns out, they didn’t build that from scratch that was the real shuttlecraft Galileo from Star Trek The Original Series. How awesome is that?

 

I’ve made mention of Nurse Chapel a couple of times, but that wasn’t actually Chapel. They made a conscious decision not to have Chapel appear on screen in this show because she should be off at Starfleet Medical getting her doctorate at this point in time, which makes a lot of sense. So it was always Nurse Burke, a character who had appeared in Star Trek comics and novels.

 

And Lieutenant Smith has not actually been on the Enterprise the whole time. But we’ll learn more about that in the next episode.

 

But here’s a big one I missed. The actress who plays her, Kipleigh Brown, was the writer of episode 9 “What Ships are For” I didn’t put that together, but I think that’s really cool.

 

The description on IMDB for today’s episode reads

To solve the utmost mystery, the Enterprise must return to where Kirk's five-year mission began.

The teleplay was by Roberty J. Sawyer based on a story by

Vic Mignongna, James Kerwin, and Robert J. Sawyer.

It was directed by James Kerwin,

And it first aired on the 18th of October 2017.

 

Robert J. Sawyer was the primary writer of this two-parter. He is a very famous Canadian author who wrote FlashForward, which was adapted for TV by Star Trek’s Branon Braga, and Man of Steel’s David S. Goyer.

 

When Star Trek The Next Generation was preparing to wrap and move to the big screen, they gave it a two-hour finale. This idea was pretty unheard of at the time. Lots of shows in the 90s had movie-length pilots, but not finales. TV shows tended to pitter out and end with a bit of a whimper. TNG changed all that.

 

But the original Star Trek never got a proper finale, like TNG, DS9, and Voyager. 

Even Enterprise got a finale of sorts, which I will partially defend, though not the feature length extravaganza that others got.

But things were different in the 60s. TOS had no ending. It was cancelled. Turnabout Intruder wasn’t intended to be the end of the story, it was just an episode.

 

One of the greatest things about Star Trek Continues is that it rectifies this. It gives TOS the ending it always deserved. And it’s done so well.

 

Much like “All Good Things”, it calls back to a lot of things from the past, but it specifically links us back to the very first episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

Even the titles relate, each is part of Kirk’s iconic phrase. The symmetry is beautiful.

 

But hold on, I hear you say. “What about the Cage? Isn’t that the pilot of TOS?”

Well, yes it is. Star Trek had an unprecedented  two pilots. But The Cage never actually aired in its original form during the run of the show. These days, I tend to think of The Cage as the pilot for Strange New Worlds. So in my mind, it makes a lot of sense for this episode to tie in with “Where No Man has Gone Before.”

 

Director James Kerwin gave me some interesting insight into the production of these episodes. They actually filmed this two-parter before they filmed the last episode “What Ships are For.” CBS/Paramount had implemented their fan-film guidelines, guidelines. 

 

Now a show like this would have needed some substantial changes to fit with these guidelines. They were required to be less than 15 minutes or