Season 7, Episode 12 "Star Trek Into Darkness" with Darren Mooney, Part 1

Batten down your hatches and realign your warp cores because we’re setting a course for “Star Trek Into Darkness”!

Author, critic, and podcaster Darren Mooney returns to the show this week for the first half of our discussion about your favorite Trek film to love and/or hate. A shocking series of terrorist attacks has rocked Earth and Starfleet sends the recently disgraced Captain Kirk and his crew to terminate the perpetrator. But before the dust settles, Kirk will learn that John Harrison is not who he seems and that the corruption of vengeance has penetrated to the very heart of the Federation!

With the breakout success of Star Trek 2009 under his belt, producer and director JJ Abrams and his team were presented with a riddle to solve: how could the brand of Star Trek continue its revitalization without drawing too heavily on the series’s past? Their solution was to rip the band-aid off and to let themselves be pulled into the gravity of one of the franchise’s most enduring villains: Khan Noonien Singh. But because this was an Abrams production, the presence of the classic foe was not only initially obscured, but also recontextualized for audiences in a post-9/11 world where senseless tragedy and eternal conflict were all too familiar. In our conversation about Star Trek Into Darkness, we talk about the “Khan-shaped experience” the film provides, the welcoming mien of the Kelvin films, the film’s audience-wide “icebox moment”, bumping Uhura into the trinity, “The Voyage Home” as an enduring touchtone for the franchise, trying (and failing) to make Trek a blockbuster, Star Trek as an extrapolation of American self-image, Khan as Kirk’s foil, looking for the quiet moments, and why Abrams was the man for the “remake moment”.

We also discuss the “death” of the movie theater, mixing up your Robs and Roys, the “hangover” period of modern TV, balking at “Blonde”, “redistributing” pop culture, getting Ron Howard to help you move, speedrunning character beats, the Khan singularity, the apathy surrounding Star Trek 4, The Wrath of Kirk, calling Brian Cox, light body horror, Bloodshot?, and a capitalization controversy!

How *dare* you have opinions!

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