Out of Contreks

Ryan and Brady link up for our annual episode with Caitlin and Nicole of That's Not How Science Works. In this episode, we discuss the saga of Prodigy's availability on streaming networks and whether smells can get through space helmets. We also play a fun quiz at the beginning themed around the recently-ended best alien race poll with The World Cup of Star Trek. Can you beat Brady or our guests?

Probably not a good indication of Ryan and Brady's current feelings about Discovery that this recording is under 40 minutes and we spend the first several minutes of it discussing the old Rosetta Stone language learning software. Apologies for this episode coming out late; Ryan is moving and kind of lost track of things. The EV suits in this show look pretty cool, right? I used one as the episode image!

Voyager never did a Mirror Universe episode, but Warlord feels a lot like one. Ryan and Brady talk about a pretty fun episode that both allows Jennifer Lien a rare opportunity to show her stuff and contains a strange sexual undercurrent that feels straight out of Deep Space 9. 

Ryan and Brady discuss the best Tom Paris episode, the one where maybe... Tom is right???? In our continuing discussion from the last episode, join us as we discuss good in media res openings, cool sci-fi concepts, and our recurring belief that Janeway is Star Trek at its most Clintonite.

Ryan and Brady try to avoid talking about a very unpleasant episode of Picard by talking about anything else, including a lengthy digression into the current politics of a couple different Trek actors and William Shatner's Super Bowl commercial. We also talk about Allison Pill's bum rap in Hollywood... really, anything to avoid talking about what Ryan refers to as possibly the worst in media res opening in the history of filmed entertainment.

Ryan and Brady chat about a low-key (even for this show!) episode of Enterprise, compare it favorably to a famously boring episode of Star Trek Voyager, and talk about Enterprise's general unwillingness to take its perfectly good premises and give them a little juice.

For the first time in more than a year, Ryan and Brady are putting out a special on a new season of Star Trek, this one the initial outing of Starfleet Academy. But where does it rank in the annals of nu-Trek? Is the dialogue actually youth-oriented, or is it a bunch of millennials and Xers trying to sound young? Has Jett Reno ever done anything wrong? (No.) All that and more inside this piping hot mp3 file!

(Note: As this is a special, it was recorded the day before release and is such a little rougher, audio-wise, than our normal episodes)

Ryan and Brady look into a Voyager episode that examines the nuances of the Doctor's relationship with the rest of the crew. While we aren't entirely satisfied with the ending, the episode itself is a pretty interesting one, allowing us much fodder for discussion on how exactly the message of "Latent Image" can be mapped onto a real-world situation, if at all.

Quick production note: We try to keep most Out of Contreks episodes reasonably family-friendly, but this episode does have a lot of swearing in it, primarily inspired by the horrible events of Jan. 2025 that were carried out by government thugs in the Twin Cities, where one of the hosts lives. If you don't mind that, give it a listen, because it's a pretty fun and wide-ranging discussion after the opening 10 minutes, and even in the opening 10 minutes we come up with a variety of colorful terms to impugn Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, who are two of the dumbest and most evil people on the planet Earth (also, since we recorded this episode, Elon Musk's name has come up in the Epstein Files because he was begging to get onto the island).

It had been a while since either Brady or Ryan had seen Shore Leave, the famous, fever-dreamesque outing of the Original Series in which Bones is literally killed and then brought back to life -- an incident that probably isn't even the weirdest thing that happens in the episode -- and boy, had we forgotten some of the finer points. Join us as we discuss Trek's descent into madness, courtesy of the strange, brief Trek career of writer Theodore Sturgeon.