Okay, first of all, I had to laugh at the end of the episode, seeing that I did
this photomanipulation in June of 2016, which, aside from the lack of battle damage, could practically be mistaken for a screenshot from Vic’s final scene. Not that I want to pat myself on the back too hard for my powers of prognostication. After all, Vic always said that the goal was to bridge the gap between TOS and TMP, so a newly promoted Kirk taking one last wistful look at the bridge of the soon to be refurbished Enterprise seemed like a fairly obvious/natural way in which to go out.
With the exception of Aurora, I have traditionally not been the biggest fan of fan films. Not that I’ve seen a ton of them and it’s not that I’m saying I can’t find them enjoyable on a certain level, but I’ve tried watching some of the higher profile productions in the past, and no matter how impressed I’ve been with the work that’s gone into them and how slick they look, even when they’ve attracted actual professional talent, they still managed to feel, to varying degrees, somewhat embarrassingly amateurish to me. Continues is the first live action fan production I’ve been able to watch where I was able to nearly forget that I wasn’t watching official Star Trek or at least wasn’t usually cringing through some bad performance or overly silly elements.
I’m not one of those people who was bothered when the series did stuff that you wouldn’t have seen on TOS in the 60s, but I did think that Continues was most successful when it was just trying to tell solid TOS-style stories, as opposed to New Voyages, which, from the little I saw of it, seemed to have this mentality of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into their episodes, in terms of fanservice, etc. So, here at the end, maybe Continues couldn’t help feeling a lot more fannish as it attempted to tie all these various threads together, but it’s still a better conclusion than what we got with “Turnabout Intruder.”
Here’s one nitpick I had, if you want to call it that: When the entire crew of the Enterprise is assembled for Kirk’s speech, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Were Uhura, Sulu and M’Benga the only non-white people on the entire ship?” Sorry if that makes me sound overly PC or whatever to some people – I’m willing to bet that a lot of those extras were people who worked behind the scenes on the production and/or were friends and family or whatever – but the lack of diversity just felt slightly conspicuous to me.