The Next Generation

Casual Trek

84. TNG/Doctor Who: Assmilation Squared – The TARDIS Enters Data

Welcome to spooky season and we’re horrifying Miles specifically with a crossover between Star Trek and his favorite fandom! Can you hear the finger of a monkey’s paw curling? Assimilation Squared has been a threat on this show for a while, but why is that? Listen on and we’ll explain the story and the many questionable art choices.

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Casual Trek

81. Neelix’s Kitchen Nightmares

Welcome to Neelix’s Kitchen Nightmares you doughnuts! I’m Gordon Ramsey and we’ve got three meals for you to shove in your face from three questionable kitchens. Neelix’s kitchen’s covered in fluff and filth and seems to have been made in a large office meeting room. Will his food help Seven of Nine in “The Raven” or will it bring back dire flashbacks? I think we all know how it’s going to go. Next up is the unnamed chef of the Enterprise who actually has a full kitchen. Hoshi Sato comes in and takes over, does she think she’s me or something? She gets the job done, possibly a bit too much in “Singularity”. Also there’s some delightful nonsense with a chair. Finally William T Riker’s got the midlife crisis giant pizza oven out for a visit from his space dad, JL Picard in “Nepenthe”. Has he got what it takes, or will this episode and pizza both be undercooked? Whatever it is, it’s better than the replicated cake that gets thrown up all over La Sirena! (This is actually Charlie, I’ve no idea what Gordon Ramsey sounds like, I hope you enjoy the show!)

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Casual Trek

79. The Naked Time is Naked Now

Our brave Casual Explorers are showing their emotional age by watching the infamous ‘everyone gets drunk, horny and crazy’ episodes of Star Trek. We start with TOS’s The Naked Time where George Takei shows off his impressive sword, followed by TNG’s less impressive ‘The Naked Now’ where Charlie asks the most important question ‘if Data has no emotions, why did his creator build him to be fully functional, sexually?’ (and Miles asks the second most important question ‘Why have this as an second episode?’). Meanwhile, Guest-Star Cele from ‘Celeste is Best’ gets to talk about Lower Decks’ own ‘everyone goes drunk and crazy’ with ‘Empathalogical Fallacies’ and has no real important questions to ask except ‘why is this so delightful?’

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Casual Trek

73. Spock’s Pondering His Orb

Pull out your helmet with the torch on and your spelunking gear because we’re talking about Caves! Miles and Charlie go potholing for Star Trek episodes featuring caves and find a Horta in TOS’ ‘Devil in the Dark’, bid farewell to a member of the TNG cast in ‘Final Mission’ and do you remember when everyone got trapped in a turbo lift in Lower Decks’ ‘Caves?’ Always use the buddy system! Follow safety regulations!

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Casual Trek

72. A Piece of the Acting

Listen up, you palookas, it’s time for a Casual Trek about times people tried to copy humans. We’ve got a bona fide Mafia planet thanks to a discarded novel in “A Piece of the Action”, featuring some incredible Shacting. Next, those Next Generation goombahs find themselves in a casino inspired by another discarded novel in “The Royale”, a troubled script and a bad episode which is actually a fantastic time. Finally, those Prodigy kids just wanna do a Starfleet and find a culture inspired by the original Enterprise in “All the World’s a Stage”

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Casual Trek

67. Sarek – Vulcan as a Muthaf***a

Better lock up your familial issues and not talk about things with your parents as we delve into possibly one of the worst fathers in Science-Fiction (at least this one has an excuse for emotional distance) as we talk about the most Vulcan of Vulcans, Spock (and Michael Burnham’s and Sybok’s) dad, Sarek. Is he well-meaning, or, as Miles believes, has definately eaten one of his own children like a Goya painting?

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Casual Trek

65. Death by Ceiling Rocks

Quick, put on your secret black leather uniform and prepare yourself for moral dubiousness as we prepare ourselves for the upcoming film- ‘Star Trek: Section 31.’ With the film debuting in just a few days after this episode drops, Miles and Charlie prepare themselves by choosing three episodes tangentially related to the forthcoming film. In ‘Inquisition,’ we and Julian Bashir meet Section 31 and all Bashir wants are Scone and Jams, then in ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise,’ we slip into an alternate universe/Tasha Yar fixfic and meet Captain Rachel Garrett (who will apparently be in this movie) and encounter that most deadly Star Trek threat… WALL ROCKS. Finally, in ‘Saints of Imperfection’ Captain Pike meets the worst kind of secret operatives, catty drama kids who can’t shut up about how secret they all are.

Will any of this actually relate to the film? We don’t know, but we’ve assembled a team of our own to talk about it in this episode!

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