Although he had a television resume dating back to the 1970s, Robert Picardo‘s life changed after signing on for Star Trek: Voyager.

Part of the reason that Star Trek was so different was the fandom associated with it. “One of the odd things about getting a Star Trek role that doesn’t have anything to do with any other kind of television show is that the moment your agent calls and says, ‘Well, you got the part,’ you also got your first two convention offers,” said Picardo.

“I don’t know if it’s just science fiction fans, or specifically Star Trek (fans), that they like to meet the actors as well as just watch the show,” said Picardo.

But before the conventions and fan adulation, a show has to succeed first. “The way I used to describe it when they first started airing the Voyager episodes,” said Picardo, “and people who were loyal fans of the Star Trek franchise became accustomed to the new faces of our cast, is that there’s a certain amount of fear as to whether or not they’ll embrace the show, and like it, and stick with it.

“But once they do embrace it, you feel a little bit like you’re boarding a bus that’s already going eighty miles per hour. It’s kind of a shock to jump on, but then it’s a nice ride once you’re there.”

Of course, that bus can slam into a wall if an actor makes the wrong move, like dissing fandom. “What I’ve learned is you can make fun of yourself, and Star Trek fans react well to that,” said Picardo. “You can make fun of pretty much anything, except their interest in the show. You don’t want to belittle their interest in the show, because it means something serious to them.”

Picardo will be appearing this weekend at the St. Louis Science Center.

Just days after the news that The CW picked up Shelter, a pilot produced by J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk, comes the news that another Abrams pilot has been picked up by another network.

This time, the network is NBC and the pilot is Revolution, a dramatic thriller, to be written by Abrams, Bryan Burk and Eric Kripke (Supernatural).

In Revolution, a “group of characters” is “struggling to survive and reunite with loved ones in a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist.”

While an alien entity wreaks havoc with the station’s computer, Lwaxana Troi becomes romantically interested in Odo.

Plot Summary: A group of Federation ambassadors comes to Deep Space Nine to see the wormhole for themselves, but they all have complaints, ranging from the uncomfortable Cardassian beds on the station to the fact that Sisko has asked Bashir to look after the guests while he is busy in Ops. When Odo recovers Lwaxana Troi’s latinum brooch from a thief, the Betazoid ambassador becomes intrigued with the shapeshifter, whom she says is the first man she doesn’t have to mold and shape herself. Odo tries to avoid her. The ambassadors watch as the wormhole opens and an alien probe passes near the station, but when O’Brien and Dax try to download its data, the series of minor computer malfunctions that has been plaguing the station grows exponentially worse. Lights fail on the Promenade, the transporters refuse to work though there is no apparent malfunction, and Odo is trapped in a turbolift with Lwaxana shortly before he needs to regenerate. O’Brien finds that the computer is now more cooperative when he gives it orders yet it refuses to accept commands that would allow him to leave it running on its own, as if it had developed the personality of an eager-to-please child. He and Dax theorize that they may have downloaded an intelligent entity from the probe. Though Odo is at first annoyed to have to listen to Lwaxana’s nonstop chatter, he is relieved to find her sympathetic when he can no longer hold his shape. O’Brien tries to return the entity to the probe, but it resists, causing explosions and trapping Bashir with several ambassadors in a burning corridor. Guessing that the entity wishes to stay, O’Brien designs a subroutine to contain it and restores power to the station. The ambassadors consider Bashir a hero for protecting them during the fire and Lwaxana accepts Odo’s thanks for her discretion about his change of form, suggesting that she would like to see him again. Sisko is a bit alarmed to learn that O’Brien has adopted the alien entity in the computer but O’Brien assures him that it will be busy with his subroutines from now on.

Analysis: I’m of an entirely split mind about “The Forsaken.” It’s really not a good episode: the stories are disjointed and never really mesh, the Bashir plot feels entirely contrived to improve our opinion of him and smells a bit like a Wesley Crusher drama, and Sisko and Kira seem to have little to do despite the fact that there are ambassadors visiting their station and an alien entity controlling the computer. It’s rather boring and not very memorable. On the other hand, as far as I’m concerned, the final scenes with Lwaxana and Odo make up for pretty much all the rest – not only in this installment, in fact, but for a number of misdeeds committed by the writers against Lwaxana Troi, both before and after. The writers (of both DS9 and TNG) seem to believe that there is something innately hilarious about a middle-aged woman who believes that she’s attractive, has no inhibitions about expressing her sexuality, and expects men to be as interested in her as she is in them. They set Lwaxana up as the butt of jokes over and over, and the only saving grace is that Majel Barrett plays her as utterly unconcerned with what anyone thinks of her. As far as Lwaxana is concerned, the fact that she’s the Daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed – oh, and apparently an accomplished Federation ambassador, though it’s all too rare that we actually get to see her in that capacity – should far outweigh anyone’s prejudices about her age and flamboyant behavior. I keep expecting her to burst out singing “I Am What I Am” from Jerry Herman’s musical version of La Cage Aux Folles.

As Lwaxana demonstrates when she pulls off her wig to show Odo, she isn’t afraid of her age, being perceived as outrageous in her manner of dress (which Deanna has suggested is extreme for a Betazoid), nor the fact that even colleagues are put off by her pushiness. She loves being different. She doesn’t care if most of the people she encounters would find it absurd for a woman of her stature to be girlishly flirting with a security professional and she doesn’t seem to consider that for someone as different from herself as Odo, her behavior might border on harassment, which I might find more troubling if we didn’t have so many examples in Trek of male aliens assuming their advances will be welcomed by every physically compatible female in the galaxy. She claims that her interest in Odo is based on the erotic possibilities of being with a shapeshifter, along with a misguided guess that a man who can change his form must have a perspective on life’s joys that’s as flexible as her own, but she often seems as lonely as he does – her ongoing efforts to find a mate, whether it be Jean-Luc Picard or Minister Campio or the scientist Timicin, make it obvious that she’s not as self-sufficient as she likes to claim. We’ve seen her pull stunts that aren’t that different from the rambunctiousness of the alien who gets into the station’s computer, creating inadvertent jeopardy when all she wants is a little attention and fun.

It’s not a strong enough connection to make the episode gel – I suppose “The Forsaken” is supposed to refer to Odo, Lwaxana, and the probe entity, though it doesn’t really apply to any of the above – but it keeps the episode from being entirely forgettable or annoying. I like what character development we get for Odo; we already knew that he protested too much about humanoid romantic connections, though he’s quite funny he doesn’t get what cut flowers and bad poetry have to do with procreation, but to see how different and self-conscious he feels about his need to revert to a vulnerable liquid form is very moving (and it’s rather erotic when he literally melts into Lwaxana’s lap). Sisko seems a bit amused at first that Odo won’t even try humanoid romance, laughing about the fact that Odo is more comfortable around thieves and killers than a woman, but when Odo uses the phrase “diplomatic incident” it brings Sisko to his senses. Interesting that Lwaxana has such calm recollections of being kidnapped with Deanna aboard a Ferengi cargo ship and that Sisko can recall wryly how he once hit an ambassador who was annoying him…I guess diplomacy isn’t what I thought it was. No wonder humanoid behavior confounds Odo. I’m also surprised that he goes to Sisko rather than Kira for help with Lwaxana, both because Kira is a better friend and because, since Sisko’s preoccupation is the reason the Federation ambassadors have been dropped onto the rest of the senior officers, I would think she’d be in a better position to get Odo off Lwaxana Watch. My personal theory is that, whatever he may claim, Odo already knows that he has romantic feelings for Kira and is therefore already buying into humanoid binary gender expectations, though sadly we will never really learn how reproduction works for the Founders, let alone sexual desire. Again, no wonder Odo is confused.

When LeVar Burton couldn’t get a Twitter cybersquatter to release the Reading Rainbow name, he marshaled his Twitter followers to help him get the deed done.

Burton wanted to register the @readingrainbow handle at Twitter, but he found out that the name was already taken.

To add insult to injury, the person owning the name hadn’t posted in the last three years, and he (or she) didn’t answer Burton when Burton tried to make contact.

Burton, who has 1.74 million followers, posted the following tweet: “Dear @twitter I’m trying to contact the individual who’s sitting on @ReadingRainbow but he hasn’t Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks!”

Seven hundred of Burton’s fans retweeted the post, which finally caught the attention of Twitter, who sorted the manner. Twitter does not allow “name squatting” and in addition, reserves the right to remove inactive accounts.

“Thank you everyone for your help!!!,” tweeted Burton.

A pilot produced by J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk is one of three ordered by the The CW.

The pilots include the Abrams/Burk Shelter pilot, The Selection and Joey Dakota.

Shelter is “set in a historic New England summer resort where the new and returning staff attend to the practical, emotional and often comical needs of the guests while navigating friendships, rivalries and romances of their own.

Shelter, a Bad Robot Productions project, is written by Mark Schwahn (One Tree Hill) and executive produced by Schwahn, Abrams and Burk.

With filming under way for Star Trek 2, two of the newcomers, Benedict Cumberbatch and Alice Eve, are settling into their jobs, and a familiar face returns briefly to the Trek set.

While promoting his latest film, This Means War, Chris Pine spoke briefly about Cumberbatch and Eve. “They’re getting on great,” he said. “We have a really good, warm, inclusive group from the first one and I think everybody’s kind of getting the hang of things and fitting in quite nicely.”

Meanwhile, if his tweet today is any indication, Leonard Nimoy has made his visit to the Star Trek 2 set, as he announced that he would do last week. “Lots of hugs and handshakes,” said Nimoy. “Like being surrounded by family. So proud to be part of the Star Trek history. LLAP.”

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s Avery Brooks ran into a bit of trouble last weekend.

The police had received a complaint regarding a person “driving erratically near the intersection of Belden Hill and Seir Hill Road” in Wilton, Connecticut. That person turned out to be Avery Brooks.

The actor was arrested on Sunday in Connecticut on suspicion of driving under the influence after failing a sobriety test administered by the police. After being booked, the actor was released, with a court date set for February 9.

Thanks to James G. for the tip!

There will be five conventions, shows or appearances in February and March that feature actors of interest to Star Trek fans. This listing of conventions and shows features actors from four of the televised series.

February begins with Ithacon, which will be held at the Women’s Community Building in Ithaca, N.Y. on February 4. In attendance at Ithacon will be Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s J.G. Hertzler.

Next up is MegaCon, which will be held from February 17-19 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. In attendance will be Robert Picardo, Brent Spiner, Tim Russ and Arne Starr.

On the weekend of February 24-26, GalaxyFest 2012 will be held at the Antler’s Hilton in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In attendance will be Denise Crosby.

March starts off with WonderCon 2012, which takes place March 16-18 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. In attendance at Wondercon 2012 will be Wil Wheaton.

Wrapping up March is I-Con 31, which will be held from March 30-April 1 at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y. In attendance at I-Con 31 will be Nana Visitor, Casey Biggs, J.G. Hertzler, Daphne Ashbrook (DS9: Melora) and Trek authors Keith R.A. DeCandido, Glenn Hauman and Bob Greenberger.

While out promoting her latest film, The Words, Zoë Saldana spoke about returning to work on Star Trek 2.

In The Words, Saldana is playing the wife of an aspiring writer who becomes famous after finding an old manuscript which he takes and uses as his own work.

Saldana was as fashionable as ever at Sundance in spite of the cold weather. “I did bring warm stuff,” she said, wearing green suede shoes with stiletto heels instead of more practical footwear, “but I also bought fashion-y stuff. Come on. You’ve got to pay the price, even if it’s too cold.”

Star Trek 2 is Saldana’s current movie project, and she spoke about her eagerness to work with those associated with the rebooted Star Trek again. “It’s wonderful because I’ve been dying to work with the cast again, to work with J.J.,” she said. “I love him so much. He’s such an amazing human being and such an amazing storyteller and a great director, so what more can I ask for? I start the year and I’m literally going back to a very familiar environment and being a part of a great story.”

Fans attending the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo in Calgary, Canada, this spring will be able to see nine castmembers from Star Trek: The Next Generation in the same place.

The Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo will be held from April 27-29 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

In attendance will be: Sir Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Wil Wheaton, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, Michael Dorn and Denise Crosby.

The TNG actors will be seen at various events at Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, including panels and discussions, autograph sessions and various photo opportunities.

On April 28, TNG EXPOsed will feature the entire TNG cast together on stage at the Stampede Corral.

Other guests at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo include: Adam West, Amanda Tapping, David Prowse, Robert Englund, Tom Feldon, John Noble, Hayden Panettiere, George Perez, Yanick Paquette and Dale Eaglesham.

Star Trek 2 Co-writer Roberto Orci explained why it took so long to get the Star Trek script finished and what type of changes will occur in the story during production.

Orci spoke, according to TrekMovie.com, to calm fans who were worried about changes happening so close to filming.

First, Orci explained the original delay in finishing the script. The reason the script wasn’t finished until recently is mostly for strategic philosophical reasons,” said Orci. “We were not willing to turn anything in until we knew for sure that we had a start date, based on J.J.’s availability. If we had written the script a year ago and it sat on the shelf, it would not have been current. Nothing messes up a script like it sitting on the shelf, because then everyone does get time to second guess and wonder, and then movies fall apart.”

Then Orci explained that evolving filming technology can cause changes in the script. “…the weirdest kind of changes comes from how J.J. wants to move the camera,” he said. “Thanks to advances in film making, we can move the camera around the ship in ways you couldn’t before — so sometimes lines will change or even who says them may change based on their position on the set relative to the coolest choreography of the camera moves. Keeps you on your toes as a writer for sure, but it is fun and worth it.”

When it comes to changes, there is nothing that should give fans reason for concern. “Finally, you should know the story hasn’t changed, the structure hasn’t changed, and the action sequences haven’t changed,” said Orci. “Most changes are minor.”

Star Trek 2 is due out in May of 2013.

Star Trek Director Cliff Bole didn’t start working right away on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine due to philosophical differences between Michael Piller and him.

Piller believed that Bole was not creative enough. “Mr. Piller and I were not in sync,” said Bole. “He thought I was a studio man and not creative, and I’d keep telling him, ‘Go back and look at The Best of Both Worlds.’”

Bole’s working hours were also an issue with Piller, who seemed to think that Bole wasn’t putting in enough effort. “He said, ‘Well, you don’t work late,’” said Bole.” I said, ‘I do my best not to because I don’t want to burn out the crew or my actors and, by the way, I know what I’m doing and I come in prepared.’ I was trained as a script clerk and an assistant. I’m a set rat, and have been on sets my whole life. When I was a kid I lived in the San Fernando Valley, and on Saturdays we’d go sneak onto all the back lots, roll around and watch what they were doing. So all that added up to I was very, very prepared. I’d had a couple of directors that I’d worked with over the years that I admired – John Huston and people like that – and I picked up a lot of experience. Michael Piller thought just because I wasn’t there for fourteen and fifteen hours a day that I was ducking creativity.”

Obviously, Bole’s work proved to be acceptable to Piller as Bole returned to direct more Deep Space Nine episodes, including Cardassians, The Collaborator, Equilibrium, Defiant, Explorers and Facets.

Bole went on to direct ten episodes of Star Trek: Voyager after his work on Deep Space Nine.

Crewmembers’ fantasies come to life – some silly and harmless, but increasingly disruptive – just as a spatial anomaly threatens Bajor.

Plot Summary: While Bashir flirts with Dax and Odo warns Quark not to let Jake spend too much time in the holosuites, Sisko and Kira discover unusually high thoron emissions. A bit later, O’Brien tells Molly the story of Rumpelstiltskin, and shortly afterward the fairy tale creature takes solid form in her bedroom. O’Brien tries to summon Sisko, but just then Jake tells his father that the baseball player Buck Bokai somehow escaped from a holosuite program and is now in their quarters. Elsewhere on the station, Bashir is awoken by an amorous Dax, but when the two are called to Ops to analyze the strange events, a second Dax appears, revealing the first to be a fantasy of Bashir’s. The real Dax discovers that the thoron emissions are coming from a subspace rupture, and Odo’s warning of a snowstorm on the Promenade alerts Sisko that their visitors – whose bioscans reveal them to be alive, even the “holographic” Bokai – may not be as benign as they seem. Dax finds that the rupture is being amplified by the wormhole and warns that it could encompass Bajor if it doesn’t stop growing. Rumpelstiltskin offers to rescue everyone in exchange for Molly O’Brien, but Sisko realizes that the reluctance of himself, Bashir, and O’Brien to embrace fully the Bokai, Dax, and dwarf from their imaginations is confusing the entities and tells Miles to refuse. The command crew prepares a torpedo to try to seal the rupture, which is expanding at an alarming rate. The torpedo is unsuccessful and the station begins to shake apart, but from watching Rumpelstiltskin, Sisko guesses that the rift itself is a product of their imaginations and orders the crew to stop believing in it. The rift disappears and Bokai explains that they are members of a species traveling through space who are fascinated by the concept of imagination. Before disappearing along with “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Dax,” he suggests that they may return again.

Analysis: My family can’t be the only one that quotes Ghostbusters throughout this episode – “Don’t think about anything!” “It’s the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man!” Though, in fairness, we could just as easily be quoting the original series thoughts-are-real dramas “Shore Leave” and “Spectre of the Gun,” one of The Next Generation‘s fantasies-gone-wrong episodes, or the original holodeck story from the animated series, “The Practical Joker.” There are a couple of entertaining bits of ongoing canon in “If Wishes Were Horses” regarding Sisko’s love of baseball and Bashir’s not-so-secret desire to date Dax, but otherwise it’s one of the most derivative, least memorable episodes of Deep Space Nine. There’s not much to make it DS9-specific; the crisis could easily have happened on Picard’s Enterprise, with O’Brien’s concerns about Molly being exactly the same and Riker’s long-simmering feelings for Troi substituting for Bashir’s for Dax. Though Bajor appears to be threatened, Kira is more worried about evacuating the space station than warning her home planet; if she has so little faith that the scientists there could be of use in solving the crisis, wouldn’t this be a good moment to think about alerting the Prophets that their Celestial Temple may be contributing to the subspace rupture? It all feels very slapdash and poorly integrated into the series as a whole, even granting that this is the first season and we don’t know all that much about Quark except that he’d wish for more Dabo girls and more profit.

I’ve been trying to keep my rants about sexism in Star Trek to a minimum, mostly because this series has some of the best female characters in the history of television and the moments of misogyny are few and far between. But “If Wishes Were Horses” is one of the more egregious offenders. Dax is indignant to realize that what Bashir really wants is a version of herself who’s more submissive and needy, but she doesn’t nail him for the really unforgivable characteristic of the fantasy, which is that Duplicate Dax is stupid – that’s how everyone in Ops realizes she’s not the real thing just before the real thing arrives, because she can’t answer a technical question they’re all certain the real Dax would know. Yes, it’s delightful that we all take Dax’s intelligence for granted, but what does it say about educated 24th century men that they still feel safer around bimbos, or at least want versions of their women who aren’t very bright? Then there’s Quark, who in real life has Dabo girls depending on him for jobs, dreaming of…more Dabo girls! More appreciative Dabo girls! More erotically demonstrative Dabo girls! I understand that respecting the cultures of others might stop Sisko and Kira from telling Quark off about this on a regular basis, but the fact that scantily clothed women in service professions remain a staple of his bar’s environment – and we never see the male equivalent, though we know from Dax’s holosuite programs that she’s quite capable of enjoying a hunky male masseur – suggests that it’s still acceptable for humanoid males to demand female eye candy, whether they’re human or Ferengi or Bajoran or whatever.

The moral of most wish-fulfillment stories is that you don’t really want whatever it is you think you’d give anything to have, anyway, and “If Wishes Were Horses” fits that theme fairly well, though I’m not clear why the first fantasy creature to appear is one who’s intimidating to both O’Brien and his young daughter – Sisko is much luckier getting to meet a longtime sports hero, and Bashir, though embarrassed, finally gets the closest thing to a passionate kiss from Jadzia that he’ll ever receive. If only someone had had a truly unexpected fantasy, rather than things right out of the series bible that we already knew about them…if Odo really had wanted the encounter with a female shapeshifter that Quark offered in a holosuite, if Kira dreamed up an invading force of Cardassians just so she could break their necks one by one, if Dax realized that her Inner Curzon always wanted to grab command from Sisko, if Quark pictured himself being a hero and saving lives instead of making money, if Bashir’s forbidden fantasies were not about Dax but about Garak. I can’t even imagine what Garak’s naughtiest fantasy might be but it would by definition be more creative than anything we got to see in “If Wishes Were Horses,” even if the spy really wishes he’d moved into his mother’s basement and watched the Cardassian equivalent of television through the entire war instead of being involved in espionage and winding up in exile. Odo’s pathetic order, “Please refrain from using your imaginations” – and Sisko’s follow-up, which, absurdly, works though Spock had to use a mind-meld to get the same results – might as well have been directed at the writers of this episode.

Patrick Stewart is taking a break from the theater to pursue roles in the film industry.

Stewart began his career with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but moved on to television and movies, including his seven years on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and his roles on the X-Men movies.

“I felt it would be a good time to see if I could kick-start a film career,” said Stewart. “I never really had a film career, I had a franchise career, so I’ve made a decision to take eighteen months off and see what happens.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s LeVar Burton is to be honored by Tufts University with an award on February 3.

The award to be bestowed upon Burton is the Eliot-Pearson Award for Excellence in Children’s Media.

“LeVar Burton is a natural choice as he is a true children’s literary expert,” said Julie Dobrow, director of the communications and media studies at Tufts University. “Through his exceptional career he has helped to promote reading comprehension in elementary- school-age children through the medium of television.”

Burton was the host of Reading Rainbow for twenty-six years.

Burton will receive his award on February 3 at 10 A.M. in the Distler Performance Hall. The public may attend the free ceremony.

Cliff Bole directed forty-two episodes of Star Trek; from Star Trek: The Next Generation through Star Trek: Voyager and he had an alien race named after him too.

Most of Bole’s Star Trek directing experience was with The Next Generation, where he directed twenty-five episodes, including the acclaimed The Best of Both Worlds: Parts I and II, and Unification Part II, in which Leonard Nimoy reprised his role of Spock.

Bole’s first job on Trek came courtesy of a Paramount connection. “I had a couple of guys up in management at Paramount who I knew and one of them, a fellow named Jeff Hayes, made a suggestion to Rick Berman that Rick use me,” said Bole. “I knew Rick from when he was over at Warner Bros. He’d seen some of my film and that’s how it happened. I went in for one and I stayed for almost twenty years.”

Being new to Star Trek meant not knowing about various characteristics of the Trek alien races, and Bole found out once that Vulcans don’t laugh, courtesy of Gene Roddenberry. “I did one episode with a Spock-like character in it, and this character laughed,” said Bole. “Roddenberry saw the dailies and said, ‘That was the biggest mistake you ever made.’ I said, ‘Well, I was only following the script, because it was written.’ Vulcans don’t laugh or smile, but it got by everybody. This laugh was kind of a broad laugh, but it was written. Anyway, we did a retake of it and it was fine, and it never happened again, I can assure you. But that was Roddenberry who picked it out.”

Bole knew that the two episodes of The Best of Both Worlds were “going to be great episodes. I knew it from the get-go, from the script, and I put everything I had into them. Everything. I remember that I had my wife read the script to me as I’m driving back from our place in Mt. Shasta, and then I said, ‘Do you mind driving?’ It was a joy and it was a fish-out-of-water story as far as Patrick [Stewart] was concerned, and he was into it. So it all gelled. I’m not surprised it’s well regarded because of all the work that was put into it.”

And what of that race named after Bole, the Bolians? “When it first happened I thought someone was pulling my leg, maybe Berman or someone else,” he said. “Then it became an iten. I was proud of it. To hear your name constructed into the name of an alien race, I thought it was great — and I still do. It comes up all the time. People ask me about it all the time. I’m amazed that people still follow the show enough to ask about it.”

For Mike and Denise Okuda, remastering Star Trek: The Next Generation means respecting the original work by those who first created the series.

Some fans might think that having Star Trek: The Next Generation remastered means that any mistakes will be fixed this time around. But according to Mike Okuda, that is not necessary so.

“For the most part, we find that people – for whatever reason – [mistakes are] part of the viewing experience,” said Okuda. “So to smooth over things they expect to see we find will disappoint some people. That being said, very occasionally there will be some minor tweaks. An example of that is in The Next Level, there is a shot where Picard orders the phasers to be fired at a low level to bathe the wounded space creature to bring it back to life. In the original version the phasers incorrectly came from the Captain’s Yacht. Having worked at Paramount at the time, the original ship’s designer Andrew Probert was very disappointed because that wasn’t where the phasers were supposed to come from. So we thought ‘let’s make Andy happy.’”

Others may wonder why The Next Generation is not being done in widescreen. “First of all, it is our very strong desire is to respect the original work by the original directors and cinematographers,” said Mike Okuda. “By cropping and letterboxing, we change the composition. You make things appear bigger and more crowded. It is true that in some shots – not all – but in some shots there is additional information on the film. But then again you are changing the original intention.”

The Okudas are still working on remastering the first season of The Next Generation. “We are excited that people are going to finally get to see what we have been seeing,” said Denise Okuda.

For fans waiting for next week’s release of Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Level sampler, some film clips are available for viewing now.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Level will include the pilot episode, Encounter at Farpoint, as well as Sins of the Father (S3) and The Inner Light (S5).

The two clips may be seen at StarTrek.com.

Leonard Nimoy has been offered what most Star Trek fans would love to be given, an invitation to visit the Star Trek 2 set.

“I’ve been invited to visit the set of the new Star Trek film,” said Nimoy via his Twitter feed. “Hope to do that next week.”

On February 2, Star Trek Online celebrates its second anniversary, and four days of celebration will take place in honor of the event.

The events will run from around 10 AM PST on Thursday, February 2, through the same time on Monday, February 6.

The master of ceremonies will be Q, and players are encouraged to “log in each day” to “seek out Q at Earth Spacedock or Qo’noS,” where he will find “silly things” for humans to do. Those completing Q’s tasks will win fun prizes.

Two new ships will be released in honor of the celebration. Starfleet command will commission a new Odyssey class cruiser starship. Players who are level 5 or above can obtain one of these ships by completing a mission on a shakedown cruise.

The Klingon Defense Force will also launch their own ship, a Bortas (vengeance) class starship at the same time. KDF officers who are level 21 and above can earn one of these by completing a mission on a shakedown cruise.

According to Star Trek Online, “These two ships will be free to everyone during the event, regardless of level or rank. The ships require you be level 50 to fly them in combat, so characters of lower level will find an item in their inventory that they cannot use until they reach level 50. After the event, these two ships will no longer be obtainable for a while. We have not finalized details yet on when they will return, but we will announce the details once we have them.”