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20th Century Fox made me so happy this week by releasing the special edition Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World at the same time as the no-frills edition, meaning that I don't have to buy the movie on DVD twice and I can immediately watch the deleted scenes, documentaries and all the fun stuff they packed onto the optional second disc. Unlike the greedy creeps at New Line, who are attempting to milk every possible billion out of The Lord of the Rings by trying to get us to buy each movie three times - they've announced not only a standard release of Return of the King in the summer, plus the extended edition in the winter, but a set containing all three films with additional footage and bloopers to be released when they decide it's the optimum time to make more bucks off the fans - Fox has side-by-side displays of M&C on single discs with trailers and as two-disc sets with cast and crew interviews, special effects features, galleries and lots of other goodies.

I am utterly in love with the little film on "Cinematic Phasmids", the feature that shows how they composited the shots and used matte paintings and layering to make it look like a ship in a tank in Mexico was sailing around Cape Horn. And all the featurettes about how they chose and composed the music...finding appropriate duets for Aubrey and Maturin to play, teaching Russell Crowe to play the violin (he's a guitarist, as is Paul Bettany, and had taped frets onto the instrument), watching the actors urgently try to play in sync with the pre-recorded music by virtuosos...and then there was Peter Weir, talking about all his little yellow post-it notes in the Patrick O'Brian series, which I am reading now and also bookmarking to bits. Ohh, and the footage of the Galapagos that didn't make it into the film!

Lest this should sound like a gratuitous plug, I will admit my selfish reasoning: I want these DVDs to make millions of dollars because I desperately want a sequel to The Far Side of the World. There were twenty books; Peter Weir combined elements of several of them to make this movie, but lord knows there's enough material to make another movie even pillaging from the other nineteen volumes. If he got tired of making a sea-epic (which it doesn't sound like he did at all from the commentaries, but you never know), he could make an entirely different film, focusing on Aubrey and Maturin on land - a period piece of the Merchant-Ivory sort, about their wives and financial difficulties and social mores, or a historical spy thriller focusing less on Jack and more on Stephen and his mysterious past and secret dealings.

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

-Did Sisko's race affect DS9's ratings?

-Anyone else love the Starfleet novel The Best and the Brightest?

-Considering the flak that contemporary Star Wars gets, does anyone remember how bad Return of the Jedi was?

More topics can be found at the Trek BBS!

Trek Two Years Ago

These were some of the major news items from April 2002:

• Temporal War Could Have Been Separate Show
  Enterprise co-creator Brannon Braga said he liked the idea of a Temporal Cold War sustaining its own series, with the each episode switching eras and settings.

• Russ Reflects On Tuvok
  Voyager's Tim Russ said he thought that his character, Tuvok, became more "human" during the show's seven-year run, as living among them enabled him to reflect upon his Vulcan past from a new perspective.

• DS9 Future Lies In Books, Says Behr
  Deep Space Nine executive producer Ira Steven Behr said that he would return to the Trek franchise to work on a DS9 movie "in a heartbeat", but added that the chances of one being made were slim to none, and that he thought the future of the characters lay in novels.

More news can be found in the archives.

Poll Results

Below are the results of the most recent TrekToday poll:

Have you sent a letter in support of 'Enterprise' to UPN? No 53.3% - (600 Votes) Yes 24.2% - (273 Votes) 'Enterprise'? Letters? Support? 22.3% - (251 Votes) Total Votes: 1124

Please vote in our new poll and rate "Damage" after you have seen the new episode.

Today's Television Listings

Tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, UPN will show a new episode of Enterprise, "Damage". Here's the official synopsis of the episode:

The Enterprise, badly damaged in an encounter with the Xindi, finds a new ally in the Illyians; T'Pol reveals a secret.

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