This week, the Enterprise and Ambassador Davy Crockett explore a planet that’s all masks all the time. While Picard bunks with a new lady friend, Riker gets worried enough about the captain’s curfew to cruise the neighborhood looking for him, and along the way they all hope to rock out with the Almighty Slayer. Can Geordi and Wesley be trusted with the conn? What are Deanna Troi’s last wishes regarding body disposal? Today, we look at Masks, the book that would (never) be king.
“Light and Darkness” is the second part of the game’s major story arc, and it cuts right to the chase: there’s some kind of distress signal coming from Onyius II, go check it out. The economy of storytelling is impressive. No drawn-out space battles, no jibber-jabber—simply straight to the action.
Yesterday marked the celebration of Thanksgiving in America, and what better way to commemorate the occasion than to review the Star Trek film that features an unexpected family reunion? Spock’s half-brother abruptly shows up, and already he’s asking to borrow the car. It’s kind of a hoopty, but he’s on a mission from God, or so he says. Sybok’s campaign of feeling everyone’s pain is getting a lot of votes, and Kirk has to find a way to secure his incumbency before Sybok makes it to the center of the galaxy and rolls out his popular God-meeting agenda. It’s the week where I learned to stop worrying and love everyone’s least favorite Star Trek film. Will my credibility ever recover? I’d have to have some first!
Prerequisites: “The Squire of Gothos” (TOS S1E17), “Obsession” (S2E18)
For the game’s third mission, the Enterprise’s one-way ticket to Boredom Town, population 430 (scanning radiation clouds near Omega Corvus), gets canceled in favor of locating ships that have disappeared in the Delphi system. Upon arriving, Kirk encounters an old nemesis: Trelane, the omnipotent child that forced the crew to play with him in the first-season episode “The Squire of Gothos”.
Shore Leave is the non-Trek culture arm of the Deep Space Spines website, posted every other Tuesday and made possible by donations to the site’s Patreon.
Despite being a month since the last installment, not much has happened that I feel I can put here. I’m still really excited about Magic: The Gathering, and I’ve also set a goal (not quite in stone, but the prospect excites me) to watch every Coen Brothers movie, since given the nature and personal success of this site I seem to be into body-of-work-spanning projects.
One thing I did pick up, however, was Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, a biography of Larry Norman, the man generally considered to be the progenitor of “Christian rock” (though his approach was nothing like current trends in worship music and CCM). Larry Norman was a trailblazer who infuriated the religious establishment with his insistence on using rock ‘n’ roll to reach people and befuddled the secular world with his insistence on following God. The subject matter interests me greatly, because one thing I struggle with in my life is reconciling the (in my opinion) frequent blandness of worship music with the idea of musical talent being a God-given gift. However, I bought the book through a secondhand source and ended up receiving an uncorrected proof of the book rather than the final product, and for some reason this has put me off the book to the point where I find it almost impossible to pick up. It’s certainly no indictment of the book itself, which I very much recommend based on the 100 or so pages I’ve gotten through, but maybe there’s something about holding a finished product that either I’ve been taking for granted or never realized. Regardless, it’s evidently a very real and powerful feeling.
But really, outside of Star Trek, that’s it for me. We’ll see if I have anything else interesting enough to mention in two weeks.
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