Star Trek: The New Voyages - In Harms Way, Review

The other day I posted a news story about Walter Koenig appearing in a fan made Star Trek film. Well the story interested me enough that I thought I would visit the New Voyages website and download the first of the episodes, In Harms Way. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.

The central conceit of Star Trek: The News Voyages is that this is the fourth season of the original Star Trek. As a result we are presented with the original crew of the Starship Enterprise, played by different actors. In Harms Way attempted to be as faithful as possible to the original, with the Star Trek music and credits style.

In terms of the presentation, The New Voyages is remarkable. While the special effects don't compare with that of a modern tv series, they are in fact far superior to those of the original series. The computer animation used is of high quality, though it does occasionally remind you of a computer game. But considering the budget that this must have been put together on it is astounding.

Also impressive is the storytelling itself. This definitely had the feel of a Star Trek story from start to finish. Admittedly the story has several elements that really could only appeal to a Trek fan but then who else would download this to watch anyway? There was also an overkill of time-travel in a single story but still I can honestly say that storywise this was more entertaining than a lot of modern Trek.

If I have a substantial criticism of In Harm's Way, it's that the actors are all doing impressions of the actors who played their roles. Instead of simply playing Kirk, Spock and Bones we have people playing Shatner playing Kirk etc. The result is that I'm constantly reminded that these are not the original actors. I would rather that they simply played their roles without the impressions. It's also noticeable that several of the guest actors vastly out act those playing the main roles, but experience will do that for you.

All in all I'd strongly recommend taking the time to download this episode of Star Trek: The New Voyages and I plan to download the second episode that they have available. I hope that they will start to pursue less continuity laden stories as they continue with this series. But what it comes down to is that I enjoyed this episode of Star Trek more than anything I've seen since Deep Space 9 went off the air.

Link: Star Trek: New Voyages