Star Trek Magazine #29
3 min readStar Trek Magazine #29 will arrive both in stores and online tomorrow, and included in this issue will be an interview with Sir Patrick Stewart and details on the first title in a four-novel miniseries, Star Trek: Typhon Pact.
Stewart spoke about his pleasure in finding that Star Trek would allow themes to be explored that would encourage viewers to think, not just passively watch and be entertained.
“Gene Roddenberry was not a political man and he resisted attempts to politicize Star Trek,” said Stewart. “Although when Gene died, far too early into the great success of The Next Generation, we were able, under the leadership of our great producer Rick Berman, to work some storylines into it that went in a more overt political direction. Now that did make me very happy. My own political and charitable work has never been a secret and I believe, for example, in embracing difference and individuality. That was Jean Luc-Picard’s philosophy, Charles Xavier’s philosophy, and it also happens to be mine.”
One of these episodes that made viewers think was The Measure of a Man, featuring Data. “Whoopi Goldberg and I worked a lot on the story of The Measure of a Man,” says Stewart. “That was a great episode. It was about somebody who had arrived on the Enterprise. They were going to take Data back to Earth, disassemble him and work out how to clone him. Of course Data did not want to go and we did not want to lose him. So a trial was set up and the defense that we presented, and Whoopi Goldberg took great heart in this, was that what was being proposed was a form of slavery. So it was a happy accident to find myself, for seven years, in a series that was dealing seriously with issues like that.”
In Star Trek: Typhon Pact, A Cold War era has begun for the Star Trek universe after the defeat of the Borg. “More than forty per cent of Starfleet was destroyed while trying to hold the line and buy time for escaping fleets of civilian ships,” said author David Mack, author of Zero Sum Game. “Core planets of the Federation and its allies lay in ruins. Tens of billions of sentient beings had become refugees, having fled from homes since vaporized by the Borg. The resources of the UFP suddenly had become scarce, and in the months following the Borg Invasion, its once indivisible coalition suddenly began to sussurate with whispers of secession. At the same time, a new political entity began to take shape. Six interstellar nations with long histories of conflict against, and rivalry with, the Federation entered into negotiations to form an alliance: the Romulan Star Empire; the Breen Confederacy; the Tzenkethi Coalition; the Gorn Hegemony; the Tholian Assembly; and the Holy Order of the Kinshaya. On a world in the Typhon Expanse, they secretly forged a new astropolitical gestalt known as the Typhon Pact.”
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