Star Trek: Hidden Frontier

As a counterbalance to all the 'Trek awfulness going around lately, let's look at Star Trek: Hidden Frontier.

Hidden Frontier is a fan-series filmed in one guy's spare room painted green with actual forays outside when the script calls for being somewhere than aboard-ship. This is about as effective as it sounds; it allows for a production with a null budget compared to Phase II's actual sets, and leaves a constant hue effect around pretty much every actor.

The first two seasons are pretty terrible. Most of the actors clearly aren't, and the writing is...let's just say there's a "special" episode featuring a ship (not even the main ship or cast) getting launched back in time and attempting to rescue the Titanic's passengers from time pirates. It's as bad as it sounds.

Of course, there's a reason this is in Antidotes. If there was ever a testament to the value of practice and dedication, it's Hidden Frontier. As the show progresses, the writing goes from awful to tolerable to better than the common cookie-cutter cliché driven recycled scripts used in mainstream professional television. The production value increases with every episode. The terrible and nonsensical episodic plots give way to an intriguing story arc that mixes enough familiar elements of canon with original ideas to remain grounded in Star Trek while exploring new ideas and telling a new story; the use of Insurrection's setting as an area of mystery, intrigue and ancient precursors is one of the best decisions they made, surely the best in the beginning long before the series had found it's feet. The consistency through the main plot is such that it would give Voyager-era Rick Berman and Brannon Braga a heart-attack over their old "continuity is bad" philosophy. Being grounded in familiarity is one of the series' biggest strengths, with things like the Excelsior as a Galaxy-class dreadnought refit like the future Enterprise-D glimpsed in "All Good Things," as well as several characters from canon like Shelby and Lefler who are fleshed out beyond the archetypes they served as in their one-off appearances.

Nearly the entire cast is made memorable in some way, from Aster, Ro and Zen being the first live-action gay Star Trek characters, to Naros' cryptic past and El Aurian nuance, to Siroc's villainous plotting, to Shelby's command presence. All of the characters grow into roles that fill the niches of a story without becoming caricatures of literary devices. For all of the neon signs Ro makes over being gay and conflicted, it's easy to see him as a real person with an actual life beyond singular issues, and this trait extends to most of the cast. It is this, above all else, that makes Hidden Frontier so enjoyable; the cast is extremely easy to care about, and dramatic tension often comes not from wishing to see what happens next, but wishing to see what will happen to the characters themselves.

Even the acting improves as time goes on, with many long-time cast members getting better over time, and those who come partway through bringing an increasing level of talent; Larry Laverne and Jim Davis as Naros and Siroc are clear standouts with spectacular performances. For my money, I like Hidden Frontier's Elizabeth Shelby better then the Next Generation original. The quality of special effects is also noteworthy, especially in exterior ship shots, and especially during combat. The epic battles the series goes through succeed in actually being epic, particularly during the last season when the show even gets some new music composed for it.

Hidden Frontier is unprofessional, but it goes from being unprofessional in mentality to unprofessional in budget, and a solid experience can be had from something unprofessional in budget when the creators know what they're doing. It won't win you over if you dislike fan-made endeavors anymore than Phase II's real sets would make up for not having the actual original cast. If you don't mind the nuances of a fan-production, Hidden Frontier is a well-crafted epic with a story arc worthy of canon, indeed, a story arc with far more depth and more memorable characters than the episodic nature of Voyager or the thinly-veiled political allegories of Enterprise's later seasons. By the time Hidden Frontier is over and you move onto the sequels Helena Chronicles and Odyssey, the production is on extremely solid ground and it only keeps going uphill.

Unfortunately, the show's download mirrors are currently offline, so the only current way to watch it at the moment is to check the episode list for the episode name you need and then clicking the "search these video's" button on the show's Vimeo page. If you take what I say about the atrociousness of the beginning to heart, it's entirely possible to skip the first two seasons and catch up with all the story-arc relevant things through context clues, even though you're clearly jumping in mid-plot. Season 3 has its share of crap, but it's where the plot starts to pick up and the production starts to solve its problems.

As someone who is collaborating on another Trek fanfilm project, I found myself nodding at your entire post. One thing, though: Rob Caves and his production staff have gone to the trouble of remastering the early episodes and doing their best to clean up the chromakey artifacts; the result looks faily decent. Unfortunately, last I heard they have now had to go back into the workforce, having run out of funds to continue their projects.

Many Trek fan groups have begun collaborating with each other: the cast of Intrepid (brought to you by the wonderfully offbeat Nick Cook from Scotland) have been in a few HF projects, and the producer of Dark Armada (Netherlands) is lending his voice to my full-CGI production.