Giant Freakin Robot

May has arrived, and with it a new batch of Star Trek retro episodic posters from artist Juan Ortiz! As much as I love these, each new monthly installment also makes me sad, because it means we’re that much closer to the end of the series. Still, there’s much to love, since this batch finally addresses the greatest Star Trek episode of all time: the gloriously idiotic “Spock’s Brain.” I may cry a little.

As always, we’ve included the images along with Ortiz’s commentary from StarTrek.com. This month’s posters include “The Menagerie: Part 1,” “Assignment: Earth,” “Spock’s Brain,” and “Requiem for Methuselah.”

With J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness looming on the horizon, it makes a certain amount of sense to revisit the original films in the family. One way to do that is by taking a few moments out of your day to gawk at these incredible new posters by artist Matt Ferguson.

Ferguson was commissioned by the folks at Crome Yellow to create a poster for each of the six original Trek films: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Do you know the song “Kiss Me,” by the band Sixpence None the Richer? It was friggin’ everywhere in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, one of those dittys that suddenly became omnipresent for no apparent reason, popping up on everything from sitcoms to commercials to movie trailers. Even if the name doesn’t ring any bells, I’d probably only have to hum a bit of it before it would become lodged in your brain like some sort of parasitic worm. Thankfully I won’t do that to you, both because I’m not that cruel, and because my humming doesn’t translate to text well. Hmmm hmm, hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm. See? Nothin’.

If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you probably recall the episode “Second Chances,” which revealed that a transporter accident some years earlier had created an exact duplicate of William Riker, then left stranded on a planet while the original Riker unwittingly went on about his business. While Tom Riker — the name the duplicate took upon reuniting with Will — later appeared in Deep Space 9 as a member of the Maquis, it turns out Next Generation could have had much bigger plans for Tom…and much more final plans for Will.

The folks over at Ain’t It Cool News have posted a look at the special features in the newly released third-season Next Gen Blu-ray set, and they’ve got a rundown of various cool factoids revealed in all the bonus material. One of the more intriguing is that “Second Chances” very nearly killed off Will Riker, and would have replaced him permanently with his teleporter twin Tom. As former Next Gen writer (and Battlestar Galactica rebooter) Ron Moore puts it, “It was a chance to reinvent the character.”

It makes a certain amount of sense. Riker was one of those characters who was always kind of tricky to manage, to the degree that his refusal to accept a promotion and leave the Enterprise became a running joke. Replacing him with Tom would have opened up all manner of story possibilities, most notably with Deanna Troi, who Tom was still very much in love with. It’s a sort of twisted love triangle that Farscape would later do exceptionally well with its story of duplicate Crichtons. At any rate, Michael Piller eventually nixed the Will/Tom death storyline, and Tom went on to serve in Starfleet and eventually pop up in DS9.