The Final Frontier For Now Begins

As a courtesy and reminder, tonight marks the premiere of the fourth and penultimate season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, as we begin the long voyage towards what may very well be the final days of this current Trek era. When the opportunity permits itself, I shall endeavor to give the season a watch and offer some brief thoughts, but I will probably reserve judgment until the season is over.

For now, let us all just be fans and enjoy the show.

On a related note, if you haven’t gotten a chance to do so, I would suggest giving IDW’s Star Trek: The Last Starship a shot. The premise is a little wild for some people’s tastes, but it is genuinely one of the few pieces of Star Trek media produced in the past decade that’s pretty damned good. Tells a good story, has some interesting characters and plotpoints, the art has been a constant highlight, whether it was the original artist or the one they’ve got doing the issues now. Good stuff. Highly recommended. The one comic that’s keeping my interest throughout and not letting me down… which is a rarity these days.

Lap.

Check Point (2017) – You Get What You Paid For

Came across this Check Point film a couple weeks ago and figured I’d give it a shot. Released nine years ago and starring Kenny Johnson and someone named *checks notes* Bill Goldberg, Check Point is your low-budget direct-to-video action schlock where a drifter who happens to be a former marine discovers a terrorist plot to overthrow a quaint American town and must convince some buddies to help him win back their country or something. Well, I know at least one group of people that might be interested in a film like this.

I am speaking of very patriotic Americans, of course.

I don’t know what you were thinking.

Check Point is one of those movies that would merit a short, quick review posting on IMDB and you’d move on to something else. To its credit, you’ve got some notable names on here including Kane Hodder (Jason in multiple movies), Tyler Mane (Sabretooth in X-Men), and William Forsythe (lots of bad guy roles). There’s also quite the playlist of licensed music from bands that I may or may not be familiar with that plays every so often because the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to make their own.

The issue isn’t that Check Point isn’t a bad movie, but rather it’s a bad movie that’s also boring. The plot is non-existent, the acting is rather atrocious, the special effects and action bits are so bad that even Asylum films would come across as Marvel spectacles in comparison, and by the end of the movie, you wonder why anyone even wasted their time with this film. There is a nice tribute to the Marine Corps, but given the movie around it, you may as well as pop in a copy of The Marine starring John Cena if you wanted a good marine tribute.

All in all… not a good movie. Why did I even watch this?

Yeah… Here We Go Again…

I know that I said I wouldn’t touch on this anymore until something concrete comes out of the whole Doctor Who tendering business, but sometimes, I can’t help but ask questions that I know I’ll never get answers to… but gosh darn it, I’m going to give it a shot here.

Why can’t Marble Mouth Davies shut the fuck up? Why does he continue to insist that he did a good job on his second tenure on the series and regrets nothing? Why does he continue to court controversy among the fanbase who rightfully criticized his flaky body of work in these past two years and dismiss them as “hate-filled” or “toxic?” Why does he continue to deflect any and all blame for the franchise being in this situation in the first place?

Okay, so you take umbrage in the fact that people claim Doctor Who has been cancelled when, in fact, it’s on tender. Okay, fine. Technically speaking, you are correct. Doctor Who is not cancelled. You did not plunge the franchise to its lowest lows and there will, in fact, be a Christmas special later this year that you will indeed produce to resolve your stupid little cliffhanger that you apparently didn’t have a script for… which, again, runs contrary to claims made in the past.

So for you to get any semblance of free pass here, the tender process would have to be quick, a suitor would be found to foot the bill and begin production, and then the Christmas special will be back on schedule, right?

Right?

Look, I’ve said my piece on this whole tender business last month and I’m not going to repeat myself here. I will also clarify that, yes, there is no Christmas special this year, but the BBC is looking to find someone – anyone – who is willing to pick up the pieces left behind by Marble Mouth over there and bring forth the next glorious age of Doctor Who. I will also remind people that this process can (and possibly will) take years and anyone who thinks that everything will be up and about by next year can take a long walk off the deep end.

Reality is that Doctor Who is off the air. It’s going to be off the air indefinitely. It’s going to be a good, long while until we see that blue box on new adventures. And yes, it’s probably a good thing that there’s going to be a long pause… but the reality is that we wouldn’t be in this situation of getting a pause if this latest relaunch had been a success, but it hasn’t and here we are. And people can point to “woke this” or “DEI that” or whatever the case may be. But sometimes, the simplest explanation worked best.

The show failed because THE SHOW SUCKED.

End of story.

There’s something to be said about letting people think you the fool and then opening your mouth to remove all doubt. RTD ought to take that lesson to heart. Every time he speaks on the matter, it becomes even more pathetic.

NOW… I can retire that banner in peace.

Hopefully, next time we talk about Doctor Who ’round these parts, it’ll be something positive for once. I’m tired of writing about bad news. Maybe I should take Stephen Moffat’s advice and watch the old stuff again. There’s plenty to go around.

Later.

Progress…

This week may have been one of the most productive weeks as far as progress in the video archive is concerned. Honestly, I’m shocked by how much was done this past week alone, which I didn’t think was possible. Regardless, I’ve got a report on the matter.

The 2012 and 2015 video reviews have been uploaded to Youtube in their remastered states… by which I mean, new title cards and some slight edits to improve on some things. But otherwise, these are the same reviews that were posted in their respective years. I’ve also re-uploaded some old Dailymotion material, including a few wrestling game matches and some of the old video specials… although these had to be edited down to avoid content claims.

Right now, I’ve started work on getting the 2013 and 2014 reviews up and about, although this will be slow going because a lot of the raw project files have degraded to such a degree that they’ve become unusable. The original VEGAS file still works, but the footage used has pretty much crapped out. So I’m either left to go back and re-rip the original footage used in the first place, or I’m going to have to replace it with new footage… either way, it’s going to require some work. (And for curious parties, this is the same problem that pretty much curtailed the restoration of the vintage commentaries.)

In any event, the priority is to replace the old Dailymotion embeds with fresh Youtube ones and that boils down to a handful of reviews at most. Once those are done, the rest will eventually follow. If everything works out in such a way that we can get the remaining reviews online before the year’s up, fantastic. But I also don’t want this project to get in the way of getting fresh material up here too, which would be preferable. Once the reviews are done, I’ll see about getting some of the other DM-exclusive stuff over in some form or fashion. Baby steps, though…

That said, there is some fun stuff planned in the months ahead. It’s going to be lightweight for the summer months, but hopefully September will be when things kick off in a huge way. I’ve already recorded a couple things specifically for the occasion and there’s at least two to three more big projects in the works that I’m hoping to get ready before the busy season hits again.

I’ll see about doing one of these things again in a couple months. Of course, any further updates will be listed in the monthly State Of The Blog updates at the beginning of each month. Until then…

DTM House Show – Red Ring (July 15th, 2026)

No Xboxes were harmed during the making of this image… but a litany of disasters were suffered nonetheless as we waddled our way through Castlevania on MS-DOS… and tried (and failed and gave up on) playing Mega Man on DOS because I’m much too tired.

Also, in case anyone cares, the first two reviews I ever produced will be available for viewing on the main Youtube channel. These are the new uploads from last year that you can watch on this here blog or via the 2010 playlist… but for those who don’t care for such things, I’m making them public… bit by bit…