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It’s that time of year again. The temperature is dropping, the days are growing shorter, and 2023 is drawing to a close. Which can only mean one thing: It’s time for Pop Culture Maniacs’ annual TV Top Ten list! This year in television was a tumultuous one, as it was for all of Hollywood, with […]
Now that is how you do a cliffhanger finale! Not since “Best of Both Worlds” have we gotten a finale that truly has real, complex stakes and characters we love in real danger. But, then again, what would you expect from the finest Star Trek series in decades? Once again, Strange New Worlds takes what […]
It was all Patti LuPone’s fault. After all, it was the use of a recording of her singing “Anything Goes,” the titular song of the classic Broadway musical, that started this whole singing ships conundrum in “Subspace Rhapsody” – a lovely twist that made this Broadway nerd chuckle. But would the episode turn out to […]
When I wrote about M’Benga’s episode arc in my review of the Strange New Worlds season premiere, I commented that I suspected PTSD and its impact might serve as a through-line for this season of the series. Of course, I wasn’t expecting the writers to dip back into that particular well with M’Benga once again […]
It’s rare that an episode of television can both make me laugh, freak me out with some really great horror elements, and make me tear up – all within the confines of an hour. But that’s precisely what the great “Lost in Translation” managed to do, all while also giving us a great Uhura-centric episode […]
What a string of episodes Strange New Worlds has churned out in the first half of their second season. And wow, what a hell of an episode “Charades” was. The trope of a half-human/half-alien losing their alien side isn’t new to Star Trek (Voyager had B’Elanna Torres split into two beings early in its run), […]
What’s it going to take to get Ortegas her own standalone episode? Because every time she – and by extension, actress Melissa Navia – was on screen in “Among the Lotus Eaters,” the episode went from a messy slog to a fun, tight race against time to save the Enterprise from certain doom. But when […]
No Trek series is ever truly a Trek series until they do a time travel episode*. So, Strange New Worlds choice to introduce James T. Kirk to the series by sending an alternate future Kirk back to the past with La’an – in an episode that also tackled the always interesting “What happens if you […]
In my previous professional life, I was a practicing attorney. Which means I can be pretty darn harsh on legal stories – in fact, I can almost never manage to watch shows that are all about lawyers because they are often so horribly inaccurate under the guise of making legal practice interesting (spoiler alert: being […]
There’s something almost soothing about watching an episode of Strange New Worlds. The episodic nature of the series is a lovely throwback to an earlier time of television writing – where the main antagonist of an episode is dispatched in a timely fashion, even if threads of an overall, serialized season arc continue tying episode […]