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In which the X-Men cross over with two generations of Star Trek; your grandma invented slash fiction; Gladiator punches a starship; we designate a universe; Leonard McCoy gets bowdlerized; “Gary” is a silly name for a god; Elizabeth Dehner deserves better; a lot of things happen in space; Worf and Wolverine enjoy a brief but intense romance; the X-Men should have more to say about the ethics of “curing” mutation; and we successfully delay Onslaught by another week.
X-PLAINED:
- Cross-franchise creative footprints
- Collecting Star Trek in the ‘90s
- Secret origins of Tina and Jay’s friendship
- Star Trex
- Star Trek: The Next Generation / X-Men: Second Contact
- Star Trek: The Next Generation / X-Men: Planet X
- Delta Vega
- “Where No Man Has Gone Before”
- The Shi’ar (again)
- The relationship of Star Trek to the Marvel Universe
- Earth-1701, which may or may not also be Earth-200500
- Proteus (again)
- A dubious date
- First Contact
- The Borg
- Several temporal anomalies
- The Traveler
- Michael Jan Friedman
- Xhaldia
- Time Hooks and/or Chrono-compasses
- Prune juice
- Your new ship
- The Drakkon
- A simulated Charles Xavier
- A Highland sex ghost, apparently?
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Good episode! Now I’m wondering what an X-Men/Farscape crossover would be like. The X-Men have seen all manner of weirdness, though they might be put out by the sheer perversity of Farscape. John Crichton would be overjoyed to meet people from Earth. Even if it turned out to be an alternate Earth. They’d get all his jokes. He may try to hitch a lift home with them, depending on when it took place and if it’s *his* Earth.
In other news, I looked up Wolverine on Memory Beta, which is the Trek wiki for all the books, comics, and games. He and the other X-Men are there, but there’s no mention of which alternate reality it is. Trek doesn’t have some nifty numbering or naming scheme, though it should. https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Logan_(Wolverine)
I’m more of a Star Wars person, but I also love Star Trek. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise but I’ve seen all the movies and have the complete runs of OG Star Trek and Star Trek: Voyager (my personal favorite, blasphemous, I know).
I actually didn’t know there were two comic books, I just knew about the first one. The second one (Second Contact) sounds like they were combining Star Trek: The Next Generation and X-Men: The Next Generation (Giant-Size line-up plus Kitty). I’ve always been hesitant about getting into inter franchise cross-overs just because they don’t impact continuity. I do have the X-Men/WildC.A.T.s series but that’s as far as it goes. Having said that, these sound fun enough I might have to track them down.
As a final note, I think the only Star Trek novels I read were the Peter David ones. My personal favorite being Q-Squared which came out at about the same time he started his initial X-Factor run.
On a second listen, I was reminded of a Star Trek convention I attended in Sacramento, CA in 1991, after Gene Roddenberry died but before Star Trek 6 came out. It was actually my first convention of any kind. (Which probably ages me quite a bit).
The highlight was sitting in one of the rooms and getting to see William Shatner and Leanord Nimoy reminiscing about their days on the set of the original series. While most of the conversation has long since left my memory I do remember them talking about the pranks they used to play on Deforest Kelly. One incident in particular was when they hung his bicycle, which he rode to work everyday, from the roof of the studio and he spent hours looking for it.
I will say, about the invention of slashfic – there is serious debate over whether Man from UNCLE beat Star Trek to the punch (or the smooch), in the slash fic department (specifically shipping Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo).
As it is, Star Trek certainly is responsible for Conventions As We Know Them (until Creation bought out the exclusive rights to do Star Trek conventions, and slowly sapped them of any relevance – and down to one Star Trek convention a year, in Las Vegas).
As far as universe designations go, IIRC, the normal format would be to go by the date of the first issue’s appearance, so Star Trek would be Earth-669, and in the event of any future Alien crossovers (because Disney/Fox merger), that universe would be Earth-795.
Everyone talks about how it was inspired casting to have Patrick Stewart play Professor Xavier after his role as Captain Picard. Few talk about the missed opportunity of having Gates McFadden play Moira McTaggart who is so similar to her role as Dr. Crusher!
That’s kind of brilliant.
My first thought though was: Has she ever done a Scottish accent?
Then I remembered the plasma sex ghost, and that was pretty much a yes, though not in the way I perhaps first meant. 🙂
You can briefly hear her attempt to do a British accent at the very start of Hunt for Red October. It’s… not great.
Oh dear.
Still, she WAS Director of Choreography and Puppet Movement on Labyrinth, so I can forgive her pretty much any other weakspots on her resumé.
Well, but would we condemn poor Ms. McFadden to have to do the accent? Because you’re not going to have a Moira McTaggart in an X-Men film and not bother with the Scottishness. That would be crazy.
And, damn, IconUK beat me to it and had a much better comment on the same theme. Curse you, IconUK!
It does seem a bit of a shame that, if Excalibur characters were available, that we didn’t get to see Data meet with Douglock. Two yellow skinned, artificial-ish constructs, with the memories of other people, but still trying to find out who and what they are on their own terms, and what human triats they wanted to emulate, could have been very cute.
I hadn’t thought of the Borg being like the Brood before, given their more “Alien” Xeno-morphy triats) but I can see it, but they’ll always be a LOT more Technarch/Phalanx to me. (One reason I got this from JK Woodward, who’s done a LOT of Trek comics (including the Doctor Who/Trek crossover which had the Borg meet the Cybermen))
Trek-Reset-Button syndrome seems to be in place for the Transformed, the old rule that things had to be put back the way they were by the end of the episode and never mentioned again. This includes things like “The planet which has flower spores which will cure all ills, even to the extent of regrowing your appendix, and whose only drawback is sorted with a quick dose of adrenaline but which shall never be referenced again” or “The fact that McCoy can, from a standard medikit he takes with him everywhere, produce a compound which will grant any human the powers of telepathy and telekinesis for a short time, which he uses only once and then it never comes up as a plot point again”
Trek never really broke away from that until DS9, where watching Babylon 5 deliberately ensure that at least ONE thing from the over-arcing plot was moved forward eveery episode seemed to be getting more people interested in watching more episodes.
Good luck with the plasma sex ghost! (Which is not a sentence I get to type too often)
A cartoonishly war-like civilization where everyone is super into war and wars it up all the time as their one defining trait? Why, the X-Men would never! And certainly not have them as recurring figures…in nearly every comic…for the last year and change.
I will admit reading the first issue, my main thought was “Huh. An nigh omnipotent psi-entity in space that the Shi’Ar are interacting with. It must be Phoen–Proteus. Of course. Proteus.”
The Wolverine-Worf bromance sounds delightful, but man, we were denied the true Bromance that might have emerged between Sebastian Shaw and Qwark. Or Bishop and Odo. (Honestly, I could also see Qwark scheming something with Gambit and the other two having to obsess over their actions…)
I had a fun thought of this being a missed opportunity for Professor X and Captain Picard meet up (not just because of the obvious reasons but because they could have a stoic philosophical conversation while everyone else does the action stuff). It had to do with the era of the story more than anything else, so I thought about trying to pick a different era and end up with a fun combo. I decided to go with the JRJr era of X-Men (circa #180 before Storm lost her powers) and Season Three of TNG. Here’s the pairings I came up with from that era:
Professor X/Picard
Storm/Riker – Definitely a fun, flirty relationship where Storm wouldn’t take Riker’s shit at all
I’m going to make the pitch for Worf/Colossus as the stern, stoic, strong types. Plus, Worf’s foster parents are Russian so they can bond over that
That leaves Data with Wolverine, which feels like the fan favorite pairing
I cheated and picked Moira/Crusher because I think they’d be perfect together.
I also fast-forwarded a bit closer to X-Men #200 and ended up with Riker/Nightcrawler and Data/Rogue as fun combos. Also Rachel Summers/Troi, which is a less fun combo.
I favour Wo!Wo! as the Logan/Worf ship name. Is that enough engagement to shoehorn in the recent reprint of the Claremont-scripted Star Trek graphic novel, Debt of Honor? Hope so. Claremont does a nice job with the story and Adam Hughes draws good, both of them avoiding excesses I sometimes dislike. However, I am surprised that the creator of Dan Dare is called ‘Frank Hampton’ in Claremont’s dedication. Perhaps this was an error in the original, but the reprint has a reprint editor and a consulting editor (reprint). This probably just reveals my ignorance about what an editor does. However, Frank Hampson was a comics creator who created characters and stories that were very popular, but was poorly rewarded for the value he created. It seems possible given his lack of success in placing properties anywhere after he left The Eagle that he may have been black-listed for being insufficiently gracious (quiet) about being ill-used. So, let’s get his name right, at least.
I’m curious about the claim that Star Trek was responsible for SF conventions. The first worldcon took place in 1939, and except for a few WW2-missed ones happened every year, so they were definitely a thing long before Trek was a twinkle in Roddenberry’s eye. Is there some more specific idea that was being got at?