Book Review: Warped
Picard and Worf find themselves trapped in a cave. Data and Riker are stuck in a DIFFERENT cave. Troi and Wesley? Cave.
— TNG Season 8 (@TNG_S8) March 8, 2012
One of the more magical things on Twitter are parody accounts – wit and brilliance and mockery beautifully condensed into 140 characters. @manwhohasitall highlights the ridiculousness of advice given to women, offering advice on ‘me time’ and conquering ‘daddy guilt’ for busy working dads. @broodingYAhero is the hot, manly YA love interest you know you want, while @YourRTEGuide is a delightful take on Irish telly.
A few years ago I discovered one of my all-time favourites – @TNG_S8, bringing the world the plots of the ‘unaired eighth season’ of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with a perfect blend of fondness and snark:
Wesley's dino experiment mistakenly mixes with Riker's beard DNA, creating the sexy-but-dangerous Velociriker. Troi's mom tries to marry it.
— TNG Season 8 (@TNG_S8) April 30, 2012
But now it turns out these episodes were, in fact, filmed, but never aired; it was “a season so un-airable that it would kill the show and allow everyone to finally get a full night’s sleep.” Assisted by quirky illustrations from Jason Ho, Mike McMahan delivers up full guides to these twenty-six episodes, with plots ranging from the deranged to the – well, even more deranged. Funny as the storylines are, my favourite sections are the ‘trivia’ and ‘mistakes and goofs’ notes that follow each description.
“When Data tours the Starfleet Academy campus, he remarks that the petunias are looking lovely. Viewers will have no problem seeing that the object being discussed is, in fact, a large rock with a sticky note on it. The note reads, ‘Darryl, please replace with SFX flowers in post.’”
It’s a funny, and incredibly silly treat for Next Gen fans – it provoked proper laughing-out-loud moments for me. As McMahan puts it, “It might not be the most important Trek book, but it’s definitely the one with the most Data and Geordi jokes.” Not to mention just the tiniest bit of shade thrown at other series in the franchise:
“The talking wooden dinosaur skeleton that Geordi befriends on Gift Shop Island was originally written to return with the away team as a potential new addition to the Enterprise crew, but budget limitations forced the writers to abandon the plan. They later brought the character back, with slight modifications, as Ensign Harry Kim in Star Trek: Voyager.”
