Jamahl Epsicokhan Article & Interview

Over at SlipstreamWeb, our Andromeda sister site, we've put up two new features in our series on the Star Trek reviewers who will also be reviewing 'Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda'. This week, the articles deal with Jamahl Epsicokhan, reviewer at Star Trek: Hypertext.

The first article is Jammer's own Andromeda Preview, in which he talks about his main reasons for deciding to review Andromeda, why he thinks the show has promise, and how he hopes the show to turn out. In addition, there's an interview with Jamahl, in which he talks about the process he uses for reviewing episodes, his other writings, and of course Andromeda. Here's a snippet:

SlipstreamWeb: What's the general procedure you follow when writing reviews? Do you immediately take notes during your first viewing, or do you have a different method? Also, do you read the work of other reviewers?

Jamahl Epsicokhan: Strangely, my reviewing method varies from episode to episode. I usually view an episode twice, but it depends on the show. Awful shows, like 'Spirit Folk' for example, generally require just one viewing, thankfully. Sometimes if a show is really interesting and worth writing about in detail I might even give it a third view.

I almost never take notes during the first viewing. After that first view I'll usually go and type out my general impressions (in raw notes) and the opening few paragraphs of my review (in actual writing). Then I'll usually let it sit a day or two and, coordinating with everything else going on in life, I'll later watch the episode again to see if I missed anything important. I'll sometimes take notes during that second viewing if there are important lines or actions that I think I'll forget to mention. Other times I'll actually sit and type a review while I've got the VCR playing back the episode in the background. Also, I never write the last paragraph last. It's almost always done before many of the middle segments of the review. It's really a weird, disjointed, spur-of-the-moment process. I don't know how people wrote before the age of word processors.

I do read some of the other online Trek reviewers. I read Jim Wright's Voyager analyses (but not the synopses), I frequently enjoy Cynic's amusing (if cynical) take on things, and I read some of the other current online reviewers on occasion. When they were writing, of course, I also read Tim Lynch's and Ashley Miller's reviews.

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