These past couple years I’ve been spending more time on YouTube, exploring some real high quality content in a variety of fields. These days, YouTube has educational and documentary content better than most anything I’ve seen on broadcast or cable. Today, though, I’ll be covering some entertainment YouTubers I’m fond of, in particular Star Trek reviewers.
Steve Shives has a fairly versatile channel featuring politics, Star Trek, Poirot, Agatha Christie, Atheism, and even … conversations with stuffed animals? I’m mainly there for the Star Trek, though a political video headline jumped out at me once when Steve launched into a rant about a local (to both of us) state representative - fun way to confirm our politics are well aligned, and to realize that we’re within an hour of each other.
Like I said, I’m really on his channel for Trek content, though. He’s done a variety of videos on a wide variety of Trek related topics, though the mainstay are his “Retro Reviews,” small review series where he chooses a theme and then reviews a handful of episodes across all concluded Trek series that fit the theme. The Retro Reviews playlist starts off with “First Episodes” and if that doesn’t tickle your fancy I suggest skimming the list and jumping in at any point you like - there’s nothing lost jumping around.
He’s on my list of irreverent Trek reviewers because he’s quick to lampshade some of the dumber tropes that Trek sometimes leans on, but he’s on my list of favorites because not only is the humor on point, he gets serious where appropriate too, offering insightful thoughts both about Star Trek’s great social commentary, and semi-regular stumbles - often down to the era, but always worth acknowledging.
Unlimited Lives has less depth and breadth of content, but what he is producing is a lot of fun, with some excellent commentary. His review series launched as “Star Trek Reviewed by an Arsehole” but over time shifted to “Reviewed by a Pedant.” The latter is more fair than the former, and in reality it’s “Star Trek from a Nuerospicy POV.” The pedantry is mild and mostly limited to the more egregious faults of plot, storytelling, or canon consistency and he often manages to present insightful interpretations of a scene that may or may not have been intentional, but make the story all the better if you recognize the possibilities. Every Unlimited Lives review is littered with his own particular flavor of euphemisms, odd nicknames, and running inside jokes such as “… because, Tom Paris is a Dick” complete with title card that comes up every time the phrase gets used. Some of my other favorite bits are spinning the “Wheel of Names” to rename any significant one-off character something goofy like Commander Carbon, or the sponsored renaming of recurring characters that his fans do - giving us such gems as General Martok, Supreme Commander of the Ninth Fleet, and Chancellor of the Klingon Empire being renamed aptly to “Martok, Husband of Sirella.”
So far he’s got two major projects, a completed review series of Voyager covering key episodes of each season as well as seasonal recaps, and an in-progress series on Deep Space 9. The first few seasons of Voyager reviews aren’t up to later levels of detail and analysis, but they’re also more compact and breeze by quickly. I enjoyed watching the entire series for reminding me of stories I’d forgotten, filling in ones I’d missed, and a ton of commentary on things I hadn’t noticed along the way. Deep Space 9 was launched in the fully refined modern video style, and is up to Season 04 currently.