"Cupid’s Errant Arrow" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E05
Find yourself someone who talks about you the way Tendi and Rutherford say “Whoosh.” “Cupid’s Errant Arrow” is the first story I’ve felt fit within the duration of a Lower Decks episode thus far. While the other four entries into…
What You Control Can’t Hurt You: Fear, Victimhood, and the Dominion
Fear takes many shapes. From cowering victim to preemptive striker, from passive aggression to dedicated isolationism, fear leads both people and societies to pretty much every extreme of reaction. Still, perhaps the most unexpected result of fear is, paradoxically, an…
“I Don’t Want Any More Cracks About The Book!”: Insights for Interpreting Sacred Texts from Star Trek
Sacred books and texts loom large in human civilizations, past and present. Yet such books and texts are scarce in Star Trek. Memory Alpha’s entry on “Sacred Texts” lists exactly 16 examples from the entire franchise. Is this dearth of…
Trektember: Season 5 Preview
Welcome to the fifth season of Trektember! We’ve now run longer than Enterprise, and boy has it been a long road…gettin’ from there to here. When we first launched Trektember back in September of 2016, there was no Star Trek…
"Moist Vessel" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E04
Navigating interpersonal relationships is no simple task; even if you live on a technological marvel in the distant future, it’s not the stuff in deep space that will really get on your nerves, it’s the people on that technological marvel…
Who Killed the World? | Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
“Who killed the world?” This question haunts the now five-year-old masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. Though it is only uttered twice in the film, the state of Fury Road’s world demands it be asked. The barren desert landscape bears witness…
"Temporal Edict" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E03
One of the things I love about Lower Decks is how it shows us stuff we always knew had to be happening aboard Starfleet vessels, but had just never been shown on screen before. In episode 1, we saw the…
"Envoys" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E02
Encouragement is in short supply in 2020—make that the 21st century thus far. That’s a tough statement to argue with, even if you don’t find it a laughable understatement. In a world that feels like it’s falling apart, the worst…
"Second Contact" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E01
It’s not hard to make jokes at the expense of the Final Frontier. Saturday Night Live has done it. Futurama extended the idea to seven seasons and four movies. In 2013, Star Trek convention attendees ranked Galaxy Quest the seventh…
7 Questions for Reed Lackey, Writer of 40: The Temptation of Christ
I watched Douglas James Vail’s 40: The Temptation of Christ, and I had some questions. So I decided to ask the screenwriter. Reed Lackey is a friend of Reel World Theology; he’s one half of Christian horror podcast The Fear…