Recently I have been watch the Star Trek Phase II fan productions and I would like to write a few have been produced by the team and they are remarkable in the fact that they are in some ways better than some of the actual Star Trek productions that have been made for television.
The first couple of productions were a little rough around the edges but once the performers had got their teeth into the parts it all started to gel together and they ended up turning out fine productions which would pass muster as canon episodes of the show.
The first one produced Come What May introduced all of the familiar characters Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekhov, Scott, Uhura as well as some of the more minor characters such as Rand (who is now a fully commissioned officer), DeSalle (who appeared only a couple of times in the original series not that I can remember), Kyle (the same as DeSalle) and Nurse Chapel.
In general the cast are pretty good and do a good job in their roles and after a while it doesn’t seem odd seeing different people playing the roles that the original cast played and even if they are subtly different to the way the characters are normally portrayed they don’t really veer too far away from the characters making them unrecognisable either. Jeffrey Quinn who plays Spock seems to be the closest to the original performance of the character.
James Cawley who plays Kirk, and is the driving force behind the project, is quite good as Kirk, but in this episode he does seem to be a little stilted and very Elvis like. The fact that Cawley is an Elvis impersonator by trade is probably the reason behind this and it was a bit weird expecting Kirk to break into song at any time and do all of the usual Elvis trademarks. That was a bit of a distraction at first but it soon wore off.
The rest of the cast did a good job with their roles giving reasonable interpretations of the roles true to the originals. Dr McCoy was a bit grumpy and had very prickly relationship with Spock; Scotty had just as rubbish a Scottish accent as usual; Uhura sat in the background looking pretty and had the occasional line and Chekov had bad hair and an even worse Russian accent.
The plot of the episode is a very typical Star Trek plot with the Enterprise responding discovering to a distress call from the colony Primus IV who is under attack from an unnamed invader. Later on the crew encounter a strange alien being calling themselves the Onabi who are able to produce visions of future and past events in the ships crew.
The main villain of the episode was a vastly powerful being who was more mischievous than malevolent, much like Q was in Star Trek The Next Generation.
The production was very much a fan production with lots of references to both future and past events in the Star Trek universe and some flash forwards to events in the Star Trek movies such as Spock’s future death in the movies; a time when Spock and Nurse Chapel marry; events in the mirror universe.
Basically this is a fan production with superior production values (the special effects are comparable with modern day telvision effects work, the sets and all costumes were lovingly and painstakingly recreated) and better acting than you would usually find in fan productions which just goes to show what fans can achieve if they really want to.
You can download this from here
After seeing the production for one of these in the movie “Trekkies 2″ I’ve really wanted to see some of these, I can’t believe they got some of the actual actors in there.
They are very impressive for fan productions it has to be said.