Celia Rose Gooding on Delving Further into Uhura on ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds balances an ensemble cast of beloved legacy and new characters on the USS Enterprise. Chief among those known is the future Lieutenant, here an Ensign, Nyota Uhura, played to spectacular fare by actor Celia Rose Gooding.*

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Babs Olusanmokun on Playing Dr. M’Benga on ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds takes us back to the original Star Trek era where Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) led the Enterprise and her crew on daring missions to explore the vastness of Space and make new discoveries and advancements on behalf of the Federation. The crew of the Enterprise is has a vast range of experience and skill they bring to their mission, and one Dr. M’Benga, played brilliantly by Babs Olusanmokun, gets his own featured episode this week.

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Michelle Yeoh is the Starship Captain We’ve Been Waiting For

by Phil Yu | Originally posted at Angry Asian Man

Hell yes. Fellow Trekkies, rejoice. The first-look trailer for the new CBS All Access series Star Trek: Discovery has dropped, and the latest foray into the final frontier looks pretty damn awesome, not least because of one badass looking starship captain in the form of one Michelle Yeoh. MICHELLE FRICKIN YEOH.

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The Making of “Spaced Out” or, How I Learned to Subvert Mainstream Sci-Fi to a Beat

My friends Noah, Ian, and I were sitting in Ian’s garage studio, trying to figure out what to do that evening. None of us were big partiers, but having been friends for more than a decade on both sides of the continent, we felt like we had to mark Noah’s visit to town with more than a movie marathon. Since both Noah and Ian had been involved in emceeing and DJ-ing respectively for years, we decided to make a hip hop track, just for fun.

While Ian happily dove into his seemingly endless stack of records, I sat with some trepidation. I had started my spoken word career as a slam poet, the loud-mouthed step-sibling to hip hop. And as much as slam poets want to say that emceeing and spoken word are pretty much the same thing; seriously, they’re not. Riding a beat may be like riding a bike in that once you learn you never forget, but it’s a hell of a lot harder. So as Ian began sampling records, I concentrated on how to make sure I don’t embarrass myself on this track.

But the second I heard Ian’s beat, all of that flew out of my head. The outer space pulsations were a galactic siren’s call, drawing me further out into the stars. When I got up to record my part, I wasn’t worried at all. Partially because Noah and Ian were super supportive and patient, and because it was Ian’s studio, there was no pressure about going over on recording time.

But it was also because I realized I was home. Immersed in the sci-fi geekiness I had known since I was in the womb, and getting to pair that with my political analysis. Watching Star Trek is my first memory. I begged my mother to send me to Klingon language camp when I was in middle school, and when she wouldn’t, I set up a weekly tutoring session with my best friend and fellow geek Yvonne who had gotten to go.

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Why Starfleet?

[Ed. note: For Star Trek Week, we asked Will to re-post a piece that originally ran at WilliamBruceWest.com in 2011.]

ImageAs some of you may know, I’ve been a Star Trek fan for most of my life. Back in middle school, my friends and I had the Star Trek Encyclopedia, as well as any tech guide or manual that Simon & Shuster decided to put out. We were the ones watching all those Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns that used to clog up Channel 20′s schedule. As I got older, however, my pallet began to prefer more mature tastes, such as Power Rangers and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I gave up the ghost during Voyager, and I’ve only seen a handful of Enterprise. That said, you can take the boy out of Trek, but you can’t take the Trek out of the boy. My brain’s still full of a lot of useless 24th century knowledge, and every now and then I find myself trying to make sense of it. During an usual bit of insomnia last week, I found myself wondering why, exactly, a human would even want to join Starfleet.

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