Happy Monday, everyone! To celebrate the start of the working week, we’re looking at Star Trek episodes where people mess with the memories of our cast and put them through menial, awful work.

O’Brien must continue to suffer in Hard Time, where he’s lived through decades of prison time just for being a bit nosey. Can he deal with the mind-shattering prison sentence, or will he still be traumatised and we’ll never speak of this after the episode’s end?

Then our main feature is a two-parter where the crew of Voyager are brainwashed into factory jobs (apart from Paris who couldn’t even manage that). Watch the rivalry between the Emergency Command Hologram and Harry Kim! Janeway has a romance plot and there’s some bad CGI!

03:30 What Non-Star Trek Thing We’ve Been Enjoying: An anti-recommendation for Atlas Shrugged, recommendations for Bioshock, Charlie editing the Grand Comic Database

09:02 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Hard Time”

41:43 Star Trek: Voyager “Workforce”

Talking points include: Poirot’s facial hair, talking Miles down from reading Ayn Rand, Mark Morrison, No Gods No Mayors, a harsh burn from Miles, DS9 has a counsellor? What is Miles’ middle name anyway? A bee gets loose in Charlie’s room. Buffy. Farscape. Tek War. Isn’t it good that prisons aren’t run for profit in the real world? Prestige TV ghosts of the mind. David Cage wishes he could get this emotional. Bryan Fuller doesn’t get weird with it. Tom can’t even hack being a brainwashed labourer. Just be Janeway’s consort, Jaffen! Charlie’s upsetting second Voyager: Across the Universe playthrough. Anything can pull rank on Harry. Charlie got contacted by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Oh, and occasionally Star Trek.

Casual Trek is by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn and Miles Reid-Lobatto

Music by Alfred Etheridge-Nunn

Casual Trek is a part of the Nerd & Tie Network

https://ko-fi.com/casualtrek

Miles’ blog: http://www.mareidlobatto.wordpress.com

Charlie’s blog: http://www.fakedtales.com

Welcome to a classic episode of Casual Trek, featuring Matt Hardy!

Matt's upcoming project can be found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kryptothera-a-hunter/kryptothera-a-hunters-tale

We’ve got our first guest star in today’s episode as we get the nonstop machine of comics crowdfunding Matthew Hardy to join us in talking about the First Lady of Star Trek: Majel Barrett!

Majel’s been in so many episodes, hell, so many SERIES of Star Trek over the years, so there’s a lot to work with here. We’ve got shockingly little Majel in the TOS episode that ostensibly is a spotlight focus on her. Then we’re in to the wild world of Lwaxana Troi as she gets kidnapped by Ferengi in TNG and that version of the Ferengi are the absolute worst. Like Internet Guy worst. Finally we get a surprisingly nice pairing of Lwaxana and Odo stuck in a lift together as a weird life form from the Gamma Quadrant has got into the computers.

TOS: What Are Little Girls Made of?

TNG: Ménage a Troi

DS9: The Forsaken

Talking points include: Westworld (both flavours), Babylon 5, Only Murders in the Building, Righteous Gemstones, Adam X the X-Treme, Ahsoka, Classic Dr Who, FMV PC games, Charlie’s back on his Lost bullshit, From, Amnesiac City, Two time GLAAD award winner Peter Allan David, The Matrix, Terminator, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, The UK Office amount of awkwardness, Shoggoths, Tiny Clangers, The Prisoner, Legion of Super-Heroes fashion, Mario Kart-based declarations of love, Vampire: The Masquerade, The Mos Eisley Cantina Band, Lucille Bluth, Lwaxana Troi going full Mrs Bennet, Picard giving it all Shakespeare, More Classic Dr Who, Lord of the Rings for the SNES, Gilmore Girls, Tamagochi, War of the Worlds. Oh, and occasionally Star Trek. A surprising amount of Star Trek this time…

Casual Trek is by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn and Miles Reid-Lobatto, our guest star was Matt Hardy.

Music by Alfred Etheridge-Nunn

Casual Trek is a part of the Nerd & Tie Network

https://ko-fi.com/casualtrek

Miles’ blog: http://www.mareidlobatto.wordpress.com

Charlie’s blog: http://www.fakedtales.com

Pedant’s Corner:

• Gap-wise, the gap between TOS finishing & TNG airing was 18 years, the gap between Enterprise finishing and Discovery airing was 13 years

• “Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so” is the actual quote

• Charlie couldn’t think of the word “camper van” when describing From

• Memory Alpha’s reference to Lwaxana Troi saying she ‘made love’ to DaiMon Tog, has a link to an article on Oo-mox

Miles and Charlie have come down with a case of the ‘too British for Star Trek’ and are coping with it the only way they know how, by once more becoming Space Scamps and hopping over to Moonbase Alpha for three more episodes of Space 1999! We’ve an unintentional theme of guest stars here as ‘Force of Life’ gives us a young Ian McShane coming down with a bad case of heat vamperism while ‘Alpha Child’ gives us evil children, weird cosmic space incest with Julian Glover (he’s been in a lot of stuff) and then finally, ‘Missing Link‘ gives us a guest turn by Peter Cushing in a costume choice slightly more dignified than Christopher Lee back in Space Scamps II and Charlie asks us a terrifying question… why have we not watched any season 2 yet…

EPISODES MENTIONED: Force of Life (09:14) Alpha Child (28:58) Missing Link (50:53)




TALKING POINTS: The Abominable Dr. Phibes, New Classic Doctor Who, The Employees, The House on the Borderland, Sailing, Rhinestone Cowboy, a very young Ian McShane who to Miles’ surprise is NOT playing a scumbag, coworkers coming into work while sick, Space 1999’s production values ALWAYS impress, Sunshine is a great movie, is this incest? Maybe. Avengers Issue 200 style shennanigans, Julian Glover, the Man the Myth the Legend, Alpha Child does TNG’s The Child CORRECTLY, what the hell was TV Show ‘Swat?’ also… who is second in command on Moonbase Alpha? Space-Rationalists are the worst. Space 1999 is the wrong show to be doing Logic vs. Emotion, this is why we have a stunt crew, Space 1999 would have made a great season of The Terror, we feel sorry for Moonbase Alpha’s catering department