Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Written by Harve Bennett
Directed by Leonard Nimoy
Release date: June 1, 1984
Stardate: 8210.3
Captain’s log. We open by watching Spock’s death and funeral again from The Wrath of Khan, as well as Spock giving the “space, the final frontier” monologue before the credits, which run over the Genesis Planet and Spock’s torpedo on its surface.
The Enterprise is en route to Earth, its battle damage repaired, most of its cadet crew reassigned. The ship has a skeleton crew—including Chekov, who has to reluctantly take the science station at one point. Kirk is more than a little beside himself over Spock’s death.
Elsewhere, a Klingon woman named Valkris has purchased the Genesis data on the black market and delivers it to a Klingon captain named Kruge. He then kills her by destroying the vessel she hired for the rendezvous, as she has seen the data.
Enterprise arrives at Spacedock, passing by Excelsior, a.k.a. “the great experiment,” a transwarp drive vessel about to go out on its shakedown. As they dock, Chekov receives a security alert that someone has broken into Spock’s quarters. Kirk investigates to discover McCoy—but speaking in Spock’s voice, asking why Kirk left him on Genesis. He wants to go home to Mt. Seleya—which is on Vulcan. Then McCoy collapses.
Admiral Morrow arrives to inspect the crew, and he has several surprise announcements: Scotty has been reassigned to Excelsior while Enterprise is to be decommissioned. And Genesis has become a galactic controversy, and no one in the crew is allowed to discuss it.
Kruge and two of his crew, Maltz and Torg, watch the same presentation we saw in Wrath of Khan, but with Kirk narrating rather than Marcus, for some reason. Kruge views this as the key to absolute power. He diverts his ship to the Mutara sector, though it’s not clear if this is an official mission of the Klingon Empire or Kruge himself making a power grab—either way, though, he wants Genesis.
The U.S.S. Grissom has been assigned to investigate the Genesis planet. Saavik and David have been assigned to Captain J.T. Esteban’s ship, and they discover numerous climates within an hour’s walk—and also life form reading near Spock’s tube, which appears to have soft-landed. There isn’t supposed to be any life on the planet. Saavik and David urge Esteban to let them beam down to investigate.
On Earth, Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura gather in Kirk’s apartment to toast absent friends. Scotty is off on Excelsior and McCoy is home, having been diagnosed with exhaustion. Their gathering is interrupted by Sarek, who requests to speak to Kirk alone. After Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura leave, Sarek asks why Kirk didn’t do as Spock requested and take his body to Vulcan, along with his katra. Kirk is confused, but after Sarek and Kirk mind-meld, Sarek realizes that Spock’s katra isn’t there; Sarek assumed that, since Kirk was with him when he died, Spock would have mind-melded with him. Kirk points out that Kirk and Spock were physically separated, so he couldn’t have mind-melded—but there’s McCoy, who’s acting weird and Spocklike. Maybe Spock left his katra with the good doctor?
Kirk and Sarek go to the archives to look over the Enterprise security feeds, and they see Spock neck-pinching McCoy and briefly mind-melding with him and saying, “Remember.”
Sarek informs Kirk that the only way for McCoy and Spock to find peace is to bring McCoy and Spock’s body to Mt. Seleya on Vulcan.
On the Genesis planet, Saavik and David beam down to find clam-sized creatures that David identifies as evolved versions of the microbes that were on the tube when they shot it from Enterprise. Saavik wonders how they evolved so fast.
But they’ve got bigger problems: the tube is empty, save for Spock’s burial robe, which has been folded neatly. They also hear a scream just as an earthquake hits.
Kirk meets with Morrow, who refuses to let Kirk go to Genesis to retrieve Spock’s body to bring it to Vulcan. Leaving aside any other considerations, Genesis is quarantined to everyone save for the Grissom. Kirk pretends to acquiesce, then informs Sulu and Chekov that he’s going anyhow.
McCoy goes to a bar to meet with a courier who can get him a ship—but the courier balks at the destination, as Genesis is forbidden. After the deal falls through, McCoy is arrested by Starfleet security. (Twice McCoy channels Spock, once to chastise the server for suggesting he order poison, once to try to neck-pinch the security guard. The latter is not at all successful.)
Kirk and Sulu break McCoy out of prison, with Kirk revealing to McCoy what’s going on (“That green-blooded son of a bitch—it’s his revenge for all the arguments he lost!”) and Sulu taking out the guards and their console. Scotty sabotages Excelsior from his position as their new captain of engineering, after which point Chekov beams him onto the Enterprise. Uhura got herself assigned to a backwater transporter station, and beams Kirk, Sulu, and McCoy to the Enterprise also (she’s forced to lock the junior officer assisting her in the closet). Scotty reports that everything’s automated and that a chimpanzee and two trainees could run her. Kirk dryly says he’ll try not to take that personally.
Kirk gives the others a chance to back out—he and McCoy need to do this, the others don’t—but they take their stations. Scotty manages to hack into the doors to get them open, Sulu backs them out, and Excelsior‘s attempt to pursue is stymied by Scotty’s sabotage.
David and Saavik proceed to a wintry portion of the Genesis planet, following traces of the second life form reading. They hear someone crying in pain, and they find a Vulcanoid boy shivering in the cold. Saavik informs Grissom, but their attempt to contact Starfleet is being jammed by Kruge, who decloaks and fires on the Grissom. The ship is destroyed, to Kruge’s annoyance—he wanted prisoners, and kills the gunner for his screwup—but Torg reports three lifesigns on the planet.
Kruge beams down with two of his subordinates. They come upon Spock’s tube, and now the “microbes” have become huge snakelike creatures. Meanwhile, Saavik confronts David over all the things that have gone wrong on Genesis, and David admits to using protomatter in the matrix. Protomatter is unstable (and also illegal and unethical to use) and is causing all the tectonic instability and the super-fast evolution.
They take refuge in a cave. Saavik is concerned about Spock’s rapid aging, in particular that he will experience pon farr. Sure enough, he starts to experience it, and so Saavik walks him through it, which probably isn’t weird and creepy.
Right after that, Kruge captures David, Saavik, and Spock. Saavik tries to convince him that Genesis is a failure, but it’s still sufficiently destructive that Kruge wants a piece of it.
Enterprise enters the sector, and Torg orders the Klingon ship to cloak and then informs Kruge, who beams back up. He gets close and then decloaks and fires, but Kirk sees distortion and is prepared for the possibility of a cloaked ship. Unfortunately, Scotty hadn’t expected there to be combat, so he can’t get shields up, and Kruge’s shot pretty much trashes the Enterprise right back.
Kirk tries to bluff Kruge, saying he’s giving him a chance to surrender, but Kruge thinks (rightly) that the Enterprise is in bad shape. He claims that the treaty violation he’s performed is as nothing compared to what the Federation has done by creating Genesis. He also threatens to kill his three prisoners.
Kruge lets Kirk talk to the prisoners, and Saavik is able to subtly reveal that Spock is alive, albeit “not himself.” David also tells him that Genesis doesn’t work. Kruge then proves that he is a man of his word by killing a prisoner—the Klingon on the surface is about to kill Saavik, but David jumps him and is killed in her stead. Kirk is beside himself, and Kruge makes it clear that the other two will be next if he doesn’t surrender.
Kirk asks for time to inform his crew, which Kruge grants. He orders Torg to form a boarding party with the remaining crew, leaving only Kruge and Maltz on board. Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov arm the destruct sequence. Torg and his party beam aboard even as Kirk and his people beam to the planet. Kruge realizes too late what is happening, and the boarding party is destroyed along with the Enterprise.
Sulu detects life form readings, and also says that the planet is unstable. On cue, another earthquake hits. Kirk and the landing party find the two Klingons, Saavik, and Spock. One Klingon has been knocked unconscious by a raging Spock, who is growing more ill as the planet tears itself apart, and Kirk shoots the other one.
McCoy’s examination confirms Spock’s rapid aging, and also that his mind is a void. “It seems, Admiral, that I have all his marbles.” Saavik says that removing him from the planet is the only thing that will save him—and the planet’s instability means that it’s the only thing that’ll save the rest of them, too—so Kirk contacts Kruge and taunts him. He tries to get the Klingon to beam them all up as the only way he’ll get Genesis, but Kruge instead beams down. He has Maltz beam Sulu, McCoy, Scotty, Chekov, and Saavik to his ship. Kruge won’t beam Spock back because it’s what Kirk wants.
Kirk and Kruge engage in fisticuffs. At one point, Kruge almost falls down a cliff. Kirk tries to save him, but Kruge tries to drag Kirk down with him. Kirk kicks him in the head three times, and Kruge falls to his doom. Kirk grabs Spock and impersonates Kruge on the Klingon communicator to get Maltz to beam him up.
Maltz is surprised to see Kirk, and he’s stunned enough that Saavik is able to grab his weapon. Chekov takes him prisoner while Sulu and Scotty manage to dope out the controls enough to fly them to Vulcan.
In the medical bay, McCoy tries to get Spock to talk, but he’s still tabula rasa—though he’s now fully aged to where he was when he died (which means he’s played by Leonard Nimoy now).
The Klingon vessel arrives on Vulcan, and lands near Mt. Seleya, where they are greeted by Sarek, Uhura, High Priestess T’Lar, and a whole mess of Vulcans. Because Spock’s body was restored by Genesis, Sarek is requesting an ancient ritual known as fal tor pan, to put Spock’s katra back in Spock’s body. T’Lar asks McCoy’s approval, which he gives despite the danger, and while grumbling, “Helluva time to ask.”
T’Lar performs the ritual, and it is, of course, successful. Spock is brought forward, and he recognizes Kirk and calls him, “Jim.” He also asks why Kirk did what he did, and he says, “The needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many.”
…and the adventure continues.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, David used protomatter in the Genesis matrix, which makes it unstable. According to Saavik, no reputable scientist would ever use it. How he blew this past his mother and all the other scientists, not to mention the people who approved their Federation funding after Marcus made her presentation, is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Fascinating. Vulcan tradition holds that when one is close to death, one mind-melds with someone close and deposits one’s thoughts and memories—the katra—so that it may be downloaded to the Hall of Ancient Thought on Mt. Seleya. That’s what Spock did to McCoy when he said “Remember” in the previous movie, but Genesis resurrecting his body enabled him to be reborn with the re-infusion ritual of fal tor pan.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy spends most of the movie with bits of Spock in his brain, causing him to speak in his voice on two different occasions and also use the science station. However, he’s unable to swing a neck pinch. McCoy also, as is his wont, gets most of the best lines.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu gets a great bit when they’re breaking McCoy out of prison. The very tall guard refers to him as “Tiny,” and when Kirk escapes with McCoy, Sulu throws the guard against a wall and then flips him, calmly declaring to his unconscious form, “Don’t call me ‘Tiny’.”
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura gets her own great scene, as she puts her transporter assistant in the closet. It’s not explained why she doesn’t then go along with the gang—instead, she just shows up on Vulcan when they arrive. (The novelization fixes this, having Uhura stay behind to jam communications to limit Starfleet’s ability to respond to the theft of the Enterprise. She then takes asylum in the Vulcan embassy.)
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty is made captain of engineering for Excelsior. Instead, he sabotages it and gets the Enterprise working well enough for a crew of half-dozen—not so much a skeleton crew as half a skull crew—to get it to the Mutara sector.
He also admits to Kirk that he pads his repair estimates by a factor of four to keep his rep as a miracle worker, which would become Scotty’s watchword going forward.
It’s a Russian invention. At the start of the film, Chekov is acting like he’s been the security chief of the Enterprise all along, not the first officer of another ship that was destroyed.
Go put on a red shirt. Kruge’s gunner destroys the Grissom with one shot. Kruge wanted prisoners, so he punishes the gunner by killing him. There are only about a dozen people on board, so this strikes me as not the best use of resources, but whatever.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. While David being Kirk’s son is front-and-center throughout, the existence of Carol Marcus is acknowledged only in a brief mention in the Genesis presentation, inexplicably now done by Kirk.
Channel open. “Gentlemen, your work here today has been outstanding. I intend to recommend you all for promotion—in whatever fleet we end up serving.”
Kirk to the crew after they depart Spacedock.
Welcome aboard. Robin Curtis replaces Kirstie Alley as Saavik, as the studio and Alley couldn’t come to terms on her return. Curtis plays the role as a straight, emotion-repressing Vulcan, showing none of the cracks Alley’s version did. Curtis will be back (briefly) in The Voyage Home, and also appear in the TNG two-parter “Gambit” in a different role.
Mark Lenard and Merritt Butrick return as Sarek and David, respectively, the former last seen in “Journey to Babel” and “Yesteryear.” Butrick will return in TNG as well, in the episode “Symbiosis,” while Lenard’s next appearance as Sarek will be in the very next movie.
Three actors best known at the time for their TV roles appear: Christopher Lloyd (Reverend Jim on Taxi) as Kruge, John Larroquette (Dan Fielding on Night Court) as Maltz, and James B. Sikking (Lt. Howard Hunter on Hill Street Blues) as Styles.
This movie has a kind of Robert Knepper moment, in that the late Miguel Ferrer was in this movie as the Excelsior first officer. I didn’t forget he was in it, but seeing him is sad, given his recent death. In addition, Phil Morris makes his second Trek appearance as a cadet, having played one of the kids in “Miri.” He’ll return thrice, twice on DS9 and once on Voyager.
Robert Hooks plays Morrow, Philip Richard Allen plays Esteban, and the great Dame Judith Anderson plays T’Lar.
Five different actors play Spock: Carl Steven, Vadia Potenza, Stephen Manley, Joe W. Davis, and finally Leonard Nimoy. At this point, six different people have played Spock, counting Billy Simpson voicing young Spock in “Yesteryear.”
Finally, we have the usual suspects of James Doohan, Walter Koenig, George Takei, and Nichelle Nichols. In addition, Grace Lee Whitney makes a cameo observing the Enterprise coming home.
Trivial matters: This movie is, obviously, a direct sequel to The Wrath of Khan, with the movie greenlit shortly after the previous movie came out. Harve Bennett’s initial outline was completed in September of 1982. Leonard Nimoy famously said he was looking forward to doing the next film after Wrath wrapped, which surprised everyone, since he only agreed to do the movie if his character was killed. Resurrecting Spock was part of every treatment Bennett did. The original outline also had Romulans rather than Klingons as the bad guys, and also featured a conflict with the Vulcans over Genesis.
This is the last appearance of this version of the Enterprise. It’s the first time the Enterprise is seen to be destroyed, though it’ll happen again with the Enterprise-D in Star Trek Generations and the Bad Robot timeline version in Star Trek Beyond.
Vonda N. McIntyre novelized this film as well, and her novel expanded a great deal of the story, in particular adding a lengthy prologue that included Carol Marcus recovering and identifying the bodies of the Genesis Project personnel whom Khan killed, a wake for Spock, a relationship between Saavik and David, Scotty burying Peter Preston, and also following up on Sulu being given command of the Excelsior, which she had included as part of the Wrath of Khan novelization. (He has the command taken, and given to Styles, because of his involvement with the now-classified Genesis.) She also gives a more scientifically plausible explanation for Genesis’s failure than the made-up protomatter (which David would never have been able to sneak past his mother and the entire Genesis team in any case). One character also comments that this is the second time that Admiral Kirk has taken the Enterprise on a mission, supplanting her captain, and both times that captain died (Decker in The Motion Picutre, Spock in Wrath of Khan).
The self-destruct sequence for the Enterprise is the same as that seen in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” although it’s actually completed this time.
Because DC had the license for a monthly comic, and because they’d been telling current adventures, the comic book picked up the storyline after this movie, with Spock getting his memories fully restored thanks to mind-meld with his Mirror Universe counterpart. In the end, Kirk is given command of the Excelsior, with Sulu as his first officer and Saavik as his science officer, as well as McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, and Chekov in their usual spots. Spock was given command of his own ship, the Surak. When it was time to set up for The Voyage Home two years later, Kirk’s senior crew went renegade to save Spock, whose crew was killed by a virus that destroyed memory.
This is the third appearance of the tribbles, several of which are in the bar McCoy visits, following “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” They’ll next be seen in DS9‘s “Trials and Tribble-ations.”
T’Lar is seen again in the novelization of The Final Frontier, and also appears in the novels Vulcan’s Forge and Vulcan’s Heart by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz.
Marc Okrand developed the Klingon language for this film, and the lexicon he created for this movie was put into book form in The Klingon Dictionary, which has been revised and expanded and adapted into many forms in the three decades since. It is also the basis of most of the Klingon language used on screen since. The movie also makes use of the Vulcan language he created for the previous film.
Along with the elderly Carol Marcus, the elderly Maltz plays a big role in the Genesis Wave novel series by John Vornholt, where the Genesis effect is re-created in the 24th century.
Kruge appears as a younger officer in the Klingon military in the short story “Though Hell Should Bar the Way” by Greg Cox in Enterprise Logs and in the My Brothers Keeper trilogy and the novel Faces of Fire, both by Michael Jan Friedman. An alternate timeline version of Kruge is in The Chimes at Midnight by Geoff Trowbridge in Myriad Universe: Echoes and Refractions.
This is the first time since “The Cage” that Nimoy’s billing is only in the closing credits. It will only happen again in Star Trek Into Darkness.
The Klingon unit of measurement kellicam is used for the first time in this movie. It will remain a standard Klingon unit of distance henceforth. We also see our first d’k tahg, a Klingon dagger, which will also be used as a personal dagger for Klingon warriors henceforth.
Leonard Nimoy makes his feature film debut as a director with this film, having previously directed a bunch of TV episodes and movies. He would spend the next decade or so directing movies before retiring from directing after lensing the pilot for the science fiction TV series Deadly Games in 1995.
To boldly go. “To absent friends.” I have an odd relationship with this movie. I consider Vonda McIntyre’s novelization of the film to be brilliant, one of the best Trek novels ever written. I actually read the novel before I saw the film—it was common up until about a decade ago or so for novelizations to be released a few weeks ahead of the film’s release to help build interest and also cash in on the anticipation—and I loved so many things about it.
It was, therefore, very disappointing to find that most of my favorite scenes in the novel weren’t in the film—or were radically different. I was so looking forward to seeing Scotty taking Preston home to his family to be buried, to watching Uhura use her communications skills to help the Enterprise escape Spacedock, the identification of the bodies of the Genesis team, Spock’s awkward and unpleasant wake, the Saavik-David romance, and so much more that wasn’t there.
Mind you, this movie was released the year I turned fifteen. I didn’t know about actor availability or about budgets or about other things—or about the fact that novelizers have to add material in order to make the page count. A movie only has a short story’s worth of actual story in it, so when you make a novel (as I’ve done a few times myself) you’ve got to put in extra stuff. I also know that McIntyre wrote the novel likely expecting Saavik to again be played by Kirstie Alley and played the same way. Even if she was aware of the recasting with Robin Curtis, she had no way of knowing that Curtis would play the role completely differently.
Still, that disappointment lingered for years. So did one other aspect that, unfortunately, still sticks in my craw today. Kirk’s response to David’s death and the destruction of the Enterprise and his fisticuffs with Kruge were all, in McIntyre’s prose, wrenching and emotional and gripping. But Shatner’s performances of those three scenes are dreadful. His “You Klingon bastard, you killed my son” recitation sounds like a high-school student trying to sound emotional, his “My God, Bones, what have I done” is flat and lifeless. Heck, I would’ve settled for him Shatnering the heck out of the latter line, but instead he goes too far in the other direction, underplaying it, and it doesn’t work. Then, after a really poorly choreographed fight with Kruge, we get the Shatneriest Shatnering of them all with “I (kick) have had enough (kick) of you (kick and fall off cliff).”
Watching it again now, I find the movie to be an odd mix of delightful and horrible. Parts of the movie are fantastic. I can watch the McCoy in the bar scene, the McCoy gets broken out of jail scene, the Sarek-Kirk discussion about Spock (though that, too, was better realized in the novelization, elevated in the movie by the performance of Mark Lenard), Kirk and Scotty’s miracle-worker conversation, Uhura putting “Mr. Adventure” in the closet, and the discussion among the Klingons of the Genesis device all the live-long day. Just in general, this movie is a great vehicle for DeForest Kelley, who is at his best here, McCoy’s suffering combined with his curmudgeonliness to make for a superlative and hilarious performance.
On the one hand, we see the loyalty this group of people have for each other. They’re willing to risk their careers to save Spock. Which is awesome, and also has the unintended side effect of at least saving one member of the Grissom crew as well. On the other hand, you gotta wonder why this was necessary. Sarek is a high-ranking Vulcan ambassador, with enough juice that he can get to look at the now-very-classified Genesis presentation. So why can’t he make a demand of the Federation Council that they allow Kirk to retrieve his son’s body? Instead, we just get Kirk asking Morrow and the latter making a dismissive, and borderline racist comment about how he never understood “Vulcan mysticism,” never mind that it all involves telepathy which is a well established part of Vulcan physiognomy and culture. Yes, Genesis is a hot potato politically, but Sarek should have more political clout than Kirk, so he should be the one to be making this happen. And Morrow needs to have a better reason than “Vulcans are weird.”
Plus, as I’ve stated elsewhere, this is the movie that pretty much singlehandedly created the notion that Jim Kirk is a rules-breaking maverick who goes his own way and does what he has to do, orders be damned. Which is completely, totally, thoroughly wrong, both in the context of Kirk in general and in the context of this movie. The only time in the original series that Kirk truly disobeyed orders was in “Amok Time,” and he’s doing it again here, and both times it was for the same reason, the only reason he would even consider such a thing: Spock’s life is at stake.
Yet, thanks to this damn movie, which contrives an excuse to heist the Enterprise (and then destroy it), the book on Kirk has been that he’s a devil-may-care renegade who thumbs his nose at authority, which both flies in the face of the evidence and contravenes the point of this movie, which is that he was willing to go to an extreme in this particular case. For it to be his default position henceforth misses the point that it was an extreme.
Also the heist itself is, shall we say, less than convincing. That’s another case where I still prefer the novelization, since McIntyre addressed that problem by having Uhura stay behind to work her magic. As it is, there’s no reason, none, given as to why Uhura doesn’t go along, except maybe I guess ’cause she’s a girl and girls don’t get to go on adventures. Sheesh. But at least that explains how it’s even possible that, in the heart of the Federation, at Starfleet frikkin Headquarters, there’s only one experimental ship available to chase them down.
The movie also suffers from a poor antagonist. I am abject in my love for Christopher Lloyd, but while he has his moments, he doesn’t quite cohere as a strong Klingon in this one. The bit where he, Maltz, and Torg discuss Genesis and its implications works well, as do a few other bits, but mostly he’s just shouting a lot and brings none of the nuance that John Colicos and Michael Ansara—and later David Warner and J.G. Hertzler and Michael Dorn, etc.—would bring to their Klingons. I find myself wishing for a casting switch, as John Larroquette does much more with much less as Maltz than Lloyd manages.
Having Genesis be a failure makes sense from a universe perspective, as that’s the only way to put that particular toothpaste back in the tube, but man does it not make sense. Somehow David snuck a horribly illegal and unethical thing into Genesis that none of the huge team of scientists (remember, the ones we saw in the previous film were just a skeleton crew; David specifically said that most of the team was on leave when Khan struck) noticed. Sure, I buy that.
Then again, the movie acts as if David was the only person who worked on Genesis. I can understand (if not actually approve) of the rest of the team being wished into the proverbial cornfield, but what about Carol Marcus? Her existence is not even truly acknowledged past one line of dialogue in one of the items that contributes to the removal of her from the story, to wit, having Kirk be the one to narrate the Genesis presentation rather than her (which, by the way, makes nothing like sense). Combined with marginalizing Uhura’s role in the whole thing, it casts an appalling sexist pall on the entire endeavor.
The recasting of Saavik is a disaster, with Curtis making the mistake that is common to far too many actors who play Vulcans: mistaking suppressing your emotions for having none. Her Saavik is flat and boring and completely uninteresting. The movie grinds to a halt every time she’s on camera, which is particularly bizarre when they try to write a half-creepy sex scene with her and teenage Spock, which just fails on every level. They would’ve been better off not even acknowledging pon farr. (It doesn’t help that Saavik mentions it as if it were common knowledge, even though it was sufficiently verboten to discuss that Spock has to be practically put in a headlock to talk about it in “Amok Time.”) One wonders if this, as well as Shatner’s poor performance, can be attributed to a director who’d never been in charge of a feature film before…
Honestly, though, the worst sin this movie commits is to negate two important elements of the previous one. One of the most powerful aspects of Wrath of Khan was Spock’s sacrifice, and the effect it had on the crew—one that carried over at least to the opening bits of this movie. And then we spend an entire movie on reversing that sacrifice. Along the way, we also spend the entire movie making Genesis an irrelevancy. And in the end we have the unintended side effect of warping Kirk’s character to a degree that influenced all portrayals of him in the three decades since.
Warp factor rating: 4
Next week: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also writing about Wonder Woman this week. Check out his look back at the Lynda Carter series and the 2009 animated film.
It also helped create the idea that even numbered Treks were great, and odd numbered ones awful.
For Trivial Matters: The trilogy Prey by John Jackson Miller deals heavily with Kruge’s associates and the fallout of his scheming and death.
A trivial matters question: Was the “transwarp” thing ever explained in the books, etc? My own headcanon explains it away as a warp scale classification issue; that “transwarp” to TOS-era is the same thing as the Warp 9 scale in TNG-era. But that’s just me…
One of the many things I love about this movie is what a scrub Kruge is. He’s a total zero on the villain scale who just manages by pure luck to catch Kirk on his worst day. He spends the entire movie thinking he’s a badass when really Kirk could have wiped the floor with him and his dumb crew any other time. That’s what makes Kirk’s final line to him so great. Movies always want a villain that’s the equal of the hero and that’s understandable dramatically, but Kruge works great in this movie. I can’t think of another movie villain quite like him. He just keeps rolling sevens until he’s suddenly wiped out.
“(It doesn’t help that Saavik mentions it as if it were common knowledge, even though it was sufficiently verboten to discuss that Spock has to be practically put in a headlock to talk about it in “Amok Time.”)”
Given that this movie is set over a decade after TOS, the “taboo” on Pon Far may have lessened. Societies and cultures change. In ours, a decade ago you couldn’t marry someone of the same sex. Look at it now.
This is the movie where I lost of respect for the Klingons. They gave this clown Kruge command of a warbird. Even for a Klingon he’s unbalanced. He must be someone’s nephew.
Chris: possibly, but I don’t actually have the bone in my head that makes me care about the minutiae of Trek‘s made-up technology. I figured transwarp was like warp only more so. Or something. *shrug*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Keith, you left out one of the actors who played Spock. The vocalizations of the regenerating Spock — credited as “Spock Cries” — were performed by the great animation voice artist Frank Welker (aka Fred from Scooby-Doo, Ray and Slimer from The Real Ghostbusters, Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget, and about a million other roles over the past five decades). This makes Spock one of two roles shared by Leonard Nimoy and Frank Welker, the other being Galvatron from Transformers.
Meanwhile, in addition to dubbing a couple of McCoy’s lines in Spock’s voice, Nimoy did a computer voice in the film, using the pseudonym “Frank Force.”
This film has all sorts of conceptual problems surrounding Genesis, as much as its predecessor did. And its plot is pretty much a by-the-numbers exercise in reversing the ending of the last movie. I guessed how this movie’s plot would unfold practically as soon as I heard they were making a sequel to TWOK — heck, possibly even before I’d finished watching TWOK. My memory is very unreliable, but I have a vague impression of talking with a friend or someone else in the theater while the end credits of TWOK rolled and speculating about how the next movie would involve Genesis reviving Spock’s body and McCoy carrying his consciousness. So the whole thing was very predictable — particularly since the destruction of the Enterprise was given away in the trailers. And even more than TWOK, it feels like a TV-grade production, stagey and low-budget.
Still, I like TSFS a lot better than I like TWOK. A lot of the plot may be predictable and implausible, but Harve Bennett’s dialogue is beautiful. There are so many lines that are lyrical or just very funny. “This time we paid for the party with our dearest blood.” “The word is no. I am therefore going anyway.” “May the wind be at our backs.” And so on. I was never really that impressed with Harve Bennett’s work before this (The Six Million Dollar Man was the main thing I knew him from, and that was mostly pretty cheesy), but this script is full of very well-written dialogue and I really enjoy listening to it.
I’m in the camp that prefers Robin Curtis’s Saavik ot Kirstie Alley’s, but that’s largely because I got sick of Alley’s character on Cheers after a while and it soured me on her generally. I also think Christopher Lloyd did an excellent job as Kruge, though now that I think about the possibility of John Larroquette playing the role, I suspect that would’ve been amazing, since he’s a truly brilliant actor. Then again, he would’ve deserved a role with more depth.
@3/TorChris: “Transwarp” has been used in several mutually contradictory ways in onscreen Trek, never mind the books. I tend to assume it’s a catchall label for any faster-than-warp propulsion system. The general assumption seems to be that this version of transwarp was a failure, which is why the Excelsior has conventional warp drive three movies later.
So, I don’t know if this really helped, but…
After the second movie came out, I wrote a letter to Paramount, asking them to put tribbles in the next movie, as I liked tribbles. Imagine my surprise when the tribbles made a cameo. Ever since, I’ve taken credit for this, even though no one at Paramount ever wrote me back. :-)
— Michael A. Burstein
I’ve kind of only seen a few eps of the original series, but have seen most of the trek movies (I think I missed the first one) in theaters. I enjoyed this movie, but yes, if you break it down, it doesn’t really stand up, but movies are not house of cards, and I guess I am not enough of a Trek nerd to be bothered by illogical moments.
Is the story of why Nimoy changed his mind public knowledge? My memories of what I thought between Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock are rather fuzzy now, but I recall my mother saying, “Of course they’ll bring him back,” even though she wasn’t a Trek fan. I think that I wasn’t terribly surprised at his return, and at the time I thought that the third movie rounded out the trilogy nicely. I was 12, not terribly discerning, and Star Wars had trained me to expect trilogies.
I didn’t recognize Christopher Lloyd when I first saw it, as I think Taxi was off-limits to me at the time, and I hadn’t seen Back to the Future yet. When I later watched Search for Spock on VHS, I couldn’t believe I’d missed it.
This is my favourite Star Trek film. (I still don’t like it as much as my favourite thirty or so episodes, but that’s a different story.) The science is bad, the Klingons are weird (but at least there are Klingons), and some scenes are trashy. But it repairs everything the previous film broke.
Starfleet does science again (science vessel Grissom), it is about helping, not about killing (okay, Kirk kicks Kruge into the abyss, which is not my favourite scene, but they spare half of the Klingons, and it’s all about saving Spock), there’s more diversity (Uhura and Sulu get great scenes for the very first time in the film series, we get to see aliens, even if they aren’t in Starfleet, Esteban isn’t a British name, and Morrow is a black man who doesn’t die). In TWOK, Spock calls Kirk “Admiral” when he dies. That sounds just wrong. This film, on the other hand, ends with: “Jim. Your name is Jim.”
It has never bothered me that Uhura doesn’t accompany the others. Possibly because her one scene is so great. But it also makes sense to me that someone would stay behind to keep in contact with Sarek, and that this someone would be the communications officer, because on a trip like this, this is the person they need the least. A little thing I love is that in the beginning, when they see the Excelsior, it’s Uhura who admires her. It’s so rare that lines like this are given to females. She wears a skirt again – I like it when she wears a skirt. And in the end, we meet her again on Vulcan, and Kirk hugs her. It’s so sweet.
I like Curtis as Saavik. I can see emotion beneath her calm demeanour. I find the Pon Farr scene very touching. And they even got the eyebrows right.
I love the dialogue. There are so many good lines. “How many fingers do I have up?”, “I’ll try not to take that personally”, “Step into my parlour”, “I’m sorry I’m late”.
Perhaps this film is responsible for Kirk’s reputation as a rulebreaker, although I would argue that that started in TWOK with the Kobayashi Maru and the Kirk/Saavik banter about regulations. Kirk is much more recognisable here. He asks for permission first, and when he doesn’t get it, he saves Spock anyway. And McCoy alternating between his own and Spock’s behaviour is perfect. “Where’s the logic in offering me a ride home, you idiot?” Wonderful.
The only criticism I have for this movie is the ending. I really wanted Shatner to look into the camera and say, “Found him!”
Roll credits
Yeah; well since Morrow got his ass fired after this and was replaced by Cartwright (which would have consequences in another couple of movie’s time) by the time the next movie rolled around, Morrow was totally in the wrong. Maybe it was just the timescales that worked against Kirk and Sarek. Both felt (correctly as it turned out) that there was a ticking clock and it just took longer to unseat Morrow and get the okay than they had.
I think that as well as the criticism on Kirk’s reputation, there is another gripe we just have to let go. The constant criticism that Starfleet doesn’t have enough ships. I think, after the entire TOS where the Enterprise is always dashing around like a blue arsed fly to combat the plague of the week or intercept the whatever of the week, and three movies on the trot where it is the only ship in range, that Starfleet is just a much smaller organization than we want it to be. It has few ships and a lot of space to operate it in. It has never had large numbers (and never did until Deep Space 9, another mark in the black books for Battlestar Trek 9) to play with.
I do hate that people (and TNG script writers) take Scotty and Kirk’s banter over repair estimates so literally. It was clear to me that it was not a literal exchange and it was two friends having a bit of light hearted (or at least gallows humour) rapport. Why must so many SF fans, and Trek fans in particular, be so damn literal every single time? #ConstantIrritation
However, I love this movie and everything in this. I even liked Kruge. I wish there had been more of Uhura (and I even kinda wanted her to convince Mister Adventure to team up with them-and for him to apologize for being such a jerk to her) but that aside, I cannot find it in my heart to have any ill feeling towards the movie.
@14/random22: “I do hate that people (and TNG script writers) take Scotty and Kirk’s banter over repair estimates so literally. It was clear to me that it was not a literal exchange and it was two friends having a bit of light hearted (or at least gallows humour) rapport.”
Agreed. This is so obviously the two of them joking, it baffles me how anyone can take it literally.
I always took “transwarp” to mean, you could set the ship for any warp speed, without the inconvenience of getting through the lower warps first. So – conventional warp 4: the ship accelerates through warps 1, 2, and 3, finally reaching 4; Transwarp 4: the ships starts off at warp 4. And so forth.
Just my take :D
krad may not like Shatner’s line delivery on the death of David Marcus, but the bit where he then tries to sink heavily into the command chair and misses works somehow. It’s a small note and I’ve never been convinced of Kirk’s emotional connection to David, but it’s well done.
I always felt the protomatter explaination was a load of hand waving tosh. Genesis was still experimental. Why couldn’t it have unexpected weirdness? All they needed was to have Savaak observe how the experiment wasn’t going to plan, and have David respond (in possibly a very whovian way) “I know! Isn’t it amazing?!”, then run around taking lots of tricorder readings.
Uhuru’s are the best part. I always thought she stayed behind to cover for them.
@18/ Not to mention Genesis was set off in a nebula, rather than being deployed on an existing planet, as was originally intended.
@12/Jana: I also dislike Kirk kicking Kruge, but at least his first impulse was to offer his hand and try to rescue Kruge. That counts for something.
They didn’t spare half the Klingons, though. Maltz was the only survivor.
And you make a good point about TWOK setting the stage for the idea of Kirk playing fast and loose with regulations — not just in his interplay with Saavik, but in establishing that he cheated on the Kobayashi Maru. That’s the real genesis (err, so to speak) of the idea of Kirk as a Rebel Who Doesn’t Play By the Rules.
@14/random22: I agree, it was a mistake for later productions to treat Scotty’s repair-estimates joke as literal fact. That would be completely incompetent and fraudulent behavior if he actually did that. I also don’t like the tendency to back-project the “miracle worker” line onto the TOS-era Scotty, as plenty of tie-ins have done over the years. Not only was it a joke, but even if the reputation did exist, it would’ve taken decades to accrue it.
Maybe another reason Morrow lost his job was because he couldn’t count. His line “The Enterprise is 20 years old” was written to acknowledge the 20th anniversary of ST, but it doesn’t work in-universe, since the movie is at least 28 years after the events of “The Cage” (13 years from “The Cage” to “The Menagerie” plus 15 years from “Space Seed” to TWOK). That line was aggravating to fans right from the start.
@18/WillMayBeWise: I always felt that the idea behind the protomatter thing was to give David an atonement arc — that his sacrifice of his life was his repentance for the act of hubris that created all this mess in the first place.
Both Robin Curtis and Leonard Nimoy have stated that Nimoy wanted Saavik played as a pure, emotionless Vulcan. Curtis does well in TNG, so I put most of the fault for the portrayal of Saavik here down to a stylistic choice on the part of the director.
Funny, I thought when i heard you were doing the movies ‘ahh here comes some high scores’. Wrath and Search are my favourites of the originals and its not just rose tinted glasses I watched them all last year when they were put on a special ‘trek’ channel on TV.
I liked Kirks reaction to his son’s death. I felt it was real, and watching his beloved ship burn up above his head, he was in such a state of shock that his comments had to be numb. At least that’s how it felt to me.
Not sure if its said enough Keith, but love love your rewatches, every wednesday at work i load up TOR to see if its up. It’s been part of my life for what – 4-5 years now? Thank you for all the effort you put in to these. Just bummed you won’t be doing Voyager, as thats on TV right now here in NZ and I keep thinking ‘ I wonder what Keith’s take on this will be?’
Come on now, if Kirk and Sarek had gone to the Federation Council with their plea, by the time they made a decision Genesis would’ve been long destroyed. This is a government you’re talking about.
One odd thing I noticed about this movie. Why didn’t Kruge simply beam up David, Saavik and Spock to his ship rather than beam down and then walk a looong way over to them? Silly Klingon. Guess he needed to stretch his legs.
Other than that, I find it an enjoyable, if not great, movie. For a first time film director, Nimoy had a great sense for building up the drama and suspense of things, as seen in the stealing Enterprise, decloaking, and self-destruct scenes. Also, the Bird of Prey landing sequence was beautifully done. Well done, ILM and James Horner.
Dreck. That is all. This film was almost a DNF for me the first time I saw it, for the reasons brought up here, and so many more. I sincerely doubt I will ever watch it again.
Something that always bothered me about this in addition to Sarek not being able to pull strings to retrieve his son’s body despite being a very important Federation figure is why did Kirk shoot Spock’s body into space in the first place without speaking to Spock’s parents first? I get that it’s based on the naval tradition of burial at sea but shouldn’t he have asked his parents if they had any special arrangements they would like for their only son’s burial?
John: as I said when I reviewed First Contact, I do not think Trek is a franchise suited to movies. Never has been, never will be. Movie Trek will always be inferior, to my mind.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@26, I assume that they have wills in the 23rd century, right? Kirk had a whole “what to do if I bite it” video back in TOS (Tholian Web) that Spock and McCoy had access to. I find it very extremely hard to believe that a guy like Spock doesn’t have a will on file with the Starfleet legal office, as well as his own “what to do if I bite it” video/will that Krik and McCoy would pretty much have to know about. Hell, I live in the 21st century and I have a will and a letter to my family with final instructions and I’m not a superintelligent logical guy like Spock.
@12/Jana & @20/Christopher: I’d argue Kirk’s loose treatment of starfleet regulations began in The Motion Picture when he pulled every available string to take command of the Enterprise for the V’Ger mission (going over Admiral Nogura’s head even), despite Decker being the more qualified CO. Add in Kirk’s rash and impatient treatment of the crew when pushing for warp speed ASAP, wormhole and all and I’d say we already got a glimpse of maverick Kirk prior to ST3.
As noted earlier above, my Star Trek: Prey trilogy focuses on the House of Kruge, which is an indicator of how I regard this movie, its faults acknowledged. Peter David wrote a long time ago that where (early-season) TNG was about Starfleet, TOS was about family — and it was moving seeing the crew give up the former to protect the latter here. I’m also a sucker for a caper scene, and the moment with the busboy in the restaurant staring, after-hours, at the Enterprise on the move is one of my favorite Trek film moments. And, of course, the Bird of Prey is also one of the coolest ships committed to celluloid.
So there’s a lot of good parts there — even maybe a minute of extra time would finesse some of the rougher points. Which as KRAD notes is what the adaptation does.
In Prey, by the way, I rationalized Kruge’s actions here by suggesting he was already a great war hero by this point, and member of a house that specialized not just in building attack craft like the Bird of Prey, but also in securing technological edges through any means necessary. This addressed why he was so secretive — he fears rival Klingon houses — as well as why the ambassador was willing in the next movie to go to the mat for someone who otherwise seems off on a rogue operation. Kruge’s acts were likely unsanctioned, but he’s still their guy.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare this so often with the novelization. It’s a very rare thing that any movie is better than the novel. So, I would have enjoyed reading this review better if contained fewer references to the novel, and longings for the movie to match the scenes and characterizations in the novel. But, I’m probably biased as well. I’m apparently one of the few for whom this is one of their favorite Star Trek films, liking it in some ways even more than the famed Wrath of Khan. And as such, I disagree with most of your negatives.
@24/Cheerio: “Why didn’t Kruge simply beam up David, Saavik and Spock to his ship rather than beam down and then walk a looong way over to them?”
I’d assume that the Klingons had a hard time picking their life signs out of the chaotic background noise of all the quick-evolving life forms and shifting environmental conditions of the Genesis planet. Torg did say he’d detected life signs that were “perhaps the very scientists you seek,” but that “perhaps” suggests that the readings weren’t entirely clear.
@26/Mike: I’d imagine that the interstellar security implications of the Genesis Device were a big enough deal to override the desire of a Federation ambassador to retrieve a dead family member. The Federation didn’t want any ships going there other than the Grissom, because they didn’t want to make it look to the Klingons or Romulans that the UFP might be trying to develop Genesis as a weapon. One guy, however important, getting his son’s body back was not important enough to risk triggering an interstellar war.
@29/Eduardo: There was nobody above Nogura’s head. He was the top dog in Starfleet at the time, according to the novelization. What Kirk did was convince Nogura to give him the Enterprise back — and I assume that Nogura required Kirk’s demotion back to captain as the price he had to pay for that permission. If Nogura had said no, Kirk would’ve been out of luck.
And that wasn’t about being a maverick; that was about being obsessed with getting the Enterprise back. Which is in keeping with his established characterization in TOS, both his deep devotion to his ship and his potential for obsessive behavior.
I agree with Keith on the awesomeness of McIntyre’s novelization. The way she deals with the crew’s homecoming, particularly Scotty’s, is on the level of “Family” in TNG, and I consider her version of Saavik is so much better than what ended up on screen. I don’t think it’s entirely padding, either. Her novelization of TWOK is only 220 some pages, and that has a lot of extra material about Peter Preston, Saavik and the scientists on Regula I, but The Search for Spock jumps to 300 pages, which makes it longer than many of the regular Star Trek novels of the period.
@Christopher – “The word is no. I am therefore going anyway” is one of my favorite lines in all Star Trek, second only to Decker’s “This is how I define unwarranted.”
I would also say I think this film is a necessary precursor to VI, in that (in addition to giving Kirk motivation) it re-establishes and reinforces the wretched state of relations between the Federation and Empire. Genesis is not a weapon, Kirk has no ability to give it to Kruge, and the thing doesn’t even work — and yet he will accept no evidence to the contrary, not even a disintegrating planet, if comes attached to words from someone from the Federation. “Because you wish it” is the key: whatever Kirk wants must naturally be antithetical to Kruge’s interests. He’s a pure Cold War-era paranoid, and thick on top of it; he’s got to be detached from the ankle like a rabid dog. For a movie released in 1984, this doesn’t feel out of place.
So I think this does set the table for the political elements of VI, and some intrigue from a villain with more on the ball. Even folks who only knew the movie-era history will have seen that, yeah, if Kruge is at all typical of what this conflict has produced, Spock’s going to have his hands full.
Agreed about the top-notch novelization. The Hall of Ancient Thought is either entirely McIntyre’s invention — and much-needed, because otherwise the plot of the movie makes ZERO sense — or got cut from the finished film. There is NO reason Kirk and Co. should be taking Spock’s body back to Vulcan. Sarek’s line as is on screen – “You must bring them to Vulcan” – is completely out of the blue. Why? Why doesn’t Kirk ask why? No telling. It’s a huge problem with the movie — which I quite like just the same, and have seen umpity-ump times. It’s my Trek comfort movie: Not much nutritional value, but sweet and satisfying.
@@@@@TorChris I don’t remember exactly where this came from (i don’t have access to a lot of my books right now), but there was an explanation in some book years back that transwarp technology had something to do with using transporter technology to shift part of the warp field ahead of the vessel in order to increase speeds.
Again, it was a long time ago, so I can’t remember exactly where I saw this. Possibly “Scotty’s Guide to the Enterprise”? Although I kind of doubt it. It might have been from FASA’s old Star Trek Tactical combat game.
@17/DemetriosX: If I had only met my adult son for the first time, and then he is killed, I would be devastated too. I found the way their relationship is portrayed in this film believable. I’m having problems with the whole “I can never forgive them for the death of my boy” in TUC, though.
@20/Christopher: Ooh, there was only one Klingon left? I simply assumed that they had a bigger crew complement than that. Okay, that shows how I watch my films.
“I also dislike Kirk kicking Kruge, but at least his first impulse was to offer his hand and try to rescue Kruge. That counts for something.” – Yes, absolutely. And Kruge hardly left him a choice. I guess I mostly dislike that he says: “I have had enough of you”. And, of course, that the writers didn’t allow him to rescue Kruge.
@23/John: I agree that Kirk’s reaction to the destruction of the Enterprise was played well. If anything, it was a strong reaction – after all, the Enterprise would have been decommissioned anyway. But he would react strongly because of his love for his ship, so that’s fine.
@35/Mike: “There is NO reason Kirk and Co. should be taking Spock’s body back to Vulcan. Sarek’s line as is on screen – “You must bring them to Vulcan” – is completely out of the blue. Why? Why doesn’t Kirk ask why? No telling.” – I’d say that Kirk doesn’t ask why because he trusts Sarek, he respects Sarek, he’s dumbstruck that he could have done the wrong thing, he’s excited that there could be a way to save Spock, and he’s busy thinking this through from a different angle – “If there was that much at stake, Spock would have found a way.”
As for why, it’s true that we aren’t told, but it makes sense to me. After all, in real life, minds aren’t separate entities. Minds run on brains. We’ve seen them separated in Star Trek before, in “Return to Tomorrow” and “Turnabout Intruder”, but in the latter case, the separation was volatile. The mind meld may have transferred Spock’s consciousness, but I can easily imagine that something else from his brain is needed to make it last. Of course, a human brain would have decomposed by the time they reach Genesis, but Vulcan brains may be more durable.
It’s worth mentioning that this is the first appearance of the iconic Klingon Bird of Prey which would find it’s way into the next four Trek movies and be used repeatedly throught TNG and DS9.
I think it’s also the first appearance of a Klingon Targ, which would also be repeatedly referenced during the 24th century series.
@38/Richard: The targ also started the trend to keep pets on spaceships, which continued with Data’s cat and Archer’s dog.
I appreciated the mentions of the novelisation – I tend to be a bit cynical about them, but clearly in this case I’ve been missing out! I will have to rectify that.
@34
“Genesis is not a weapon, Kirk has no ability to give it to Kruge, and the thing doesn’t even work — and yet he will accept no evidence to the contrary, not even a disintegrating planet, if comes attached to words from someone from the Federation. “
I beg to differ. Genesis may not have been *designed* as a weapon, but if you launched it at a populated planet it would sure as hell destroy it.
Kirk can’t give it to him? If he has the plans for it on the ship’s computer, he sure can.
It works fine. Maybe not as designed, but it will sure destroy a planet. Better than a fleet of starships in high orbit firing photon torpedoes until the planet cracks.
Kruge isn’t after Genesis to make new planets for the Empire, he wants it to hold it over other people’s heads in the same way the US held nukes over the Soviets in the 40s. He wants to use it as a weapon, which it is pretty good at.
@34/John Jackson Miller: “Genesis is not a weapon, Kirk has no ability to give it to Kruge, and the thing doesn’t even work”
That’s always been a plot hole for me, because if your interest is to make Genesis into a weapon, then it absolutely does work, as ragnar says. It fails at creating, but it succeeds at destroying on a planetary scale. So the “failure” that caused the planet to blow up would’ve made the Federation give up on it as a terraforming tool, but there’s no reason it would’ve made the Klingons give up on it as a potential WMD.
Perhaps the reason the Klingons lost interest in it was because protomatter was too unstable to be worked with effectively.
@35/MikePoteet: The Hall of Ancient Thought is established in the script, yes. It’s first mentioned by McCoy/Spock after the “climb the steps of Mount Seleya” line in Spock’s quarters, and again while the Bird-of-Prey is en route to Vulcan, with Saavik explaining that the katra ritual is only meant to deposit Spock’s consciousness in the Hall, that the Fal Tor Pan ritual is different and very dangerous, and that if the elders refuse to attempt it, then Spock will remain mindless.
@38/Richard: Of course, the reason the Klingons end up with a cloaked Bird-of-Prey in this movie is because the first draft was written with Romulan villains and then they just search-and-replaced “Romulan” with “Klingon” (essentially) without changing anything else. So that “iconic” Bird-of-Prey was pretty incongruous to fans at the time. Huh? How come the Klingons have a ship with a Romulan name, not to mention one that cloaks? It was salvageable thanks to the hint of a Romulan-Klingon technology exchange in “The Enterprise Incident” (and The Making of Star Trek‘s assertion of an alliance between the two empires to explain that exchange) and the mention of Klingon cloaking devices in TAS: “The Time Trap,” but it was still odd.
Also, it’s because of that Romulan-to-Klingon swap that we get the first mention of honor from a Klingon, in Kruge’s farewell line to Valkris. In TOS, the assumption had been that Romulans were the honorable ones while Klingons thrived on treachery. It was just a throwaway line in TSFS — Kruge’s actions never seemed particularly honorable — but when TNG needed to redeem the Klingons into Federation allies, it latched onto the “honorable warrior” trope as a way to make them seem more admirable.
Anyway, I’ve never liked the Bird-of-Prey. The original Matt Jefferies Klingon battlecruiser is a gorgeous design, elegant and sleekly menacing, like a dragon with spread wings. I love that design. But the BoP is an eyesore in comparison, clunky and awkward. It was designed to look from the front like a football linebacker (quarterback? something like that) with his head lowered to charge forward, hence the “shoulder pad” bulges on the top and the “chin strap” formation on the front pod. It’s all brute force and no elegance. It also doesn’t conform to Trek-universe ship design logic very well, since its engines are inboard rather than nacelle-mounted. Although that set a precedent followed by many later Trek ships.
Then again, the Grissom is an even more bizarre design. How the heck does anyone get from the saucer to the lower pod? The pylons look too narrow to fit elevators inside. And it has the same flaw as the Reliant in TWOK — no navigational deflector dish.
For a science vessel the Grissom does kinda work. I mean the two separate pods mean that you can do science stuff in one pod, and then when the science goes wrong and turns everyone into abominations of nature as happens in the Trek verse disturbingly regularly you’ve still got the crew in the other pod safe and sound. Okay you cannot travel between the pods at warp, but if you are in orbit as a mobile research station then having to either beam from hull to hull or take some sort of small shuttle, then it is a great way of enforcing quarantine procedures.
The deflector thing I can’t help on, but from the looks of a lot of other ships out there in the Trek verse, it seems that a frontal dish style deflector is more of an aesthetic choice than a direct necessity. Maybe the Grissom and the Miranda classes have an inboard system?
@19/Cosmotiger – your right. Hadn’t thought about that. There was obviously something weird in the nebula because the detonation of the Genesis device triggered a sun to appear for the planet to orbit – well beyond what the parameters of the experiment was supposed to achieve
@21/ ChristopherLBennett
If they wanted an atonement arc, why not have David experience survivors guilt? Khan killed a lot of his friends and colleagues in the previous film, and he couldn’t do anything to stop Khan.
In TWOK, David is a moralistic character, righteous in the arrogance of youth, who’s character arc is learning things aren’t so simple as he thought.
In this movie, the arrogance is still there, but in the form of a mad scientist, cutting corners, ignoring the rules, and to hell with the consequences. In changing the character like that, it weakens the whole film by introducing a load of plot holes
@43/random22: That’s my problem with ILM’s Trek designs and a lot of other later designs. They were too random (pardon the expression) in their design features. Matt Jefferies was a brilliant designer — every feature of his ships was there for a reason. The deflector dish was needed because the velocities of starflight are so high that even a speck of dust could destroy a ship on impact. The warp nacelles were out on long pylons to protect the crew from their heat and radiation. The hulls were smooth because it made sense to put all the serviceable components on the inside where the crew could get to them without needing to spacewalk. And so on. Even alien ships usually had these features — the circular opening in the front of the Klingon battlecruiser that TMP (and TAS, I think) interpreted as a torpedo tube was originally meant to be its deflector dish. These design features were not arbitrary, but were necessitated by fundamental principles of physics and engineering, in the same way that boats and aircraft need to converge around certain standardized designs in order to function. The ILM designs in the movies started the trend of abandoning that smart engineering logic in favor of a “because it looks cool” philosophy. Although I didn’t think it looked cool — I think most of ILM’s Trek-movie ship designs are ugly.
@37/Jana – You make a good case for why Kirk doesn’t question Sarek at that point. But I guess my larger point is this: No one at any time ever stops to say, “Hey, why are we going after Spock’s body again?” I think this could have been remedied — as Ms. McIntyre did in her, again, excellent novelization — with some brief, explicit reference to how Kirk reacted when the Grissom’s message about locating Spock’s tube reached Starfleet.
Oh, well. The movie is lucky that it works so well on the level of emotion and gut feeling – “Of course we’ll help our friend!” – and the characters have so many good moments. Otherwise, it would just be a total mess.
@42/Christopher – Ok, I’ll give credit for the Hall to Harve B. from now on. :) But leaving it out of the finished film has just always really, really bugged me. And it is probably something that could have been easily rectified. Well, to quote the film, “c’est la vie.”
@45/Will – If you’re looking for survivors’ guilt, McIntyre’s novel has it aplenty. Both Marcuses feel it. McCoy feels it. Scotty feels it. It’s a real guilt-trip for the first quarter of the book or so. But it works. Not sure it would’ve played well on screen, but on the page, it works.
@46/Christopher: I love the TOS starship designs. They were the most beautiful spaceships ever. I always liked that they all have warp nacelles, but I didn’t know that about the deflector dish.
@47/Mike: What is the Hall of Ancient Thought?
@48/Jana: The Hall of Ancient Thought is where the katras are supposed to go — basically a repository for the knowledge and memories of departed Vulcans. ENT: “The Forge” introduced the idea of a katric ark, a vessel that preserves a katra; presumably the Hall is filled with a vast number of such arks (though it’s hard to believe it’d have enough to preserve the memories of billions of Vulcans, unless one ark can hold multiple sets of memory engrams). Actually this was explored much earlier in the novels, notably J.M. Dillard’s The Lost Years, IIRC; that established the existence of katra-storage vessels, which I always imagined as being like the globes Sargon’s people used in “Return to Tomorrow.” I don’t remember what they were called in the books.
Quoth Jana: “Ooh, there was only one Klingon left? I simply assumed that they had a bigger crew complement than that. Okay, that shows how I watch my films.”
Sulu explicitly said that a Klingon Bird-of-Prey has only a dozen crew. Two of them were on the planet, two more were on the ship (Kruge and Maltz), and Torg took the rest onto the Enterprise when it went boom.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Fun bit of trivia: I saw John Larroquette on a talk show years ago. When Search for Spock was brought up, he said while shooting the movie Christopher Lloyd liked to call him ‘Chocolate,’ as in Chocolate Maltz.
Cute.
On one hand, there are a lot of faults to this film. Kruge is a pretty underwhelming villain, despite Christopher Lloyd’s best efforts. There’s no reason for Starfleet to go full NSA top secrecy regarding Genesis other than provide an obstacle for Kirk and company. And it looks as if the film was brutally torn to pieces in editing, with several scenes missing (how did McCoy get to a bar to try and buy a ship if he was sedated and supposedly supervised? What was the meaning of Rand’s disappointed reaction at space dock?).
Speaking of space dock, did starfleet build this behemoth overnight? It sure wasn’t there last film. And what a waste of space. A brand new facility and only one other ship docked. I always wanted to see several ships parked at once. Of course, budget says otherwise.
This is another film that looks as cheap as a 1980’s TV special (the shot of the Bird of Prey destroying the cargo ship is easily the worst visual effects shot in all of the films, even Trek V). However, I do like the art direction and cinematography a lot more than in Wrath of Khan. Early Genesis shots don’t look so good. The ones when the planet’s coming apart later on look miles better. Even Horner’s score seems to fit the mood in this film better, despite a lot of it being recycled. And the newer music cues certainly deliver.
Despite its missteps, I still enjoy this film a lot. As mentioned, family and friendship are strong themes throughout. I love little touches such as Uhura asking about McCoy’s well being during the toast. And I love that each and every one of them are willing to follow Kirk in order to save their mutual friend, despite the consequences. Indeed, the needs of the one outweighs the needs of the many.
And that’s not even factoring in the sacrifice element. Losing David was one thing. Losing the Enterprise was on a whole other level. Not surprisingly, Gene Roddenberry was reportedly outraged over this plot twist. But it carries the necessary impact, especially when you consider it’s the very moment that ignites the demise of Genesis.
Plus, the last 15 minutes are worth the price of admission. Vulcan is beautifully brought to life. Dame Judith Anderson gives a stellar performance as T’Lar, we see the reactions of each character (Uhura’s reaction to Spock’s presence gets me every time), and we get Spock’s well-earned final line plus Jim’s reaction. This was worth the wait. It shouldn’t work with the plot holes it has, but Bennett and Nimoy make it work.
I also enjoyed this version of Saavik way more than Kirstie Alley’s version. I didn’t see Robin Curtis as playing emotionless at all. If anything, I thought she did an admirable job reacting to everything that happened from Spock’s plight to David’s death the way a vulcan would. I certainly didn’t see the Pon Farr scene as creepy. Horner’s best work is in this particular scene, and to me the actors convey the tenderness and nuances required for this union. A quiet little scene that sets the stage for act 3 and segues nicely into the Enterprise arrival.
At the very least, Search for Spock provides a solid foundation for Kirk’s Klingon vendetta, which is to be explored in Trek VI.
As for Nimoy’s direction, I can overlook some of the flaws. He was getting warmed up and would deliver a far more competent and confident entry with the following film.
I’ve pointed out before, there’s a fundamental flaw in the entire thing because at the point where Kirk is asking Morrow for the ship, he’s unaware that Spock’s body has been revived. Thus, there’s absolutely NO reason whatsoever for him to want to go to Genesis. Nor is there any reason for McCoy to want to get there, either. Because they (and Sarek) are all under the impression that only Spock’s katra remains, and it just goes into the Hall of Ancient Thought.
That’s a 10-minute movie with no conflict.
@49/Christopher: Thank you! But I don’t think that the film really needs this information. We know from the conversation between Sarek and Kirk that Spock could live on as a disembodied presence, but only if both his body and his katra are brought to Vulcan. I think Kirk would conclude from this that there is some kind of ritual involved. Kirk also knows that Vulcans are secretive, so that may be why he never asks.
@52/Eduardo: I agree about Robin Curtis as Saavik, and also about the Pon Farr scene. It’s beautifully acted and quite touching.
@53/Jason Hunt: Uh, no. Sarek tells Kirk that the body is needed too. As I wrote in comment #37, I find that believable.
@52/Eduardo: “how did McCoy get to a bar to try and buy a ship if he was sedated and supposedly supervised?”
The script didn’t say he was supervised, just that he’d taken tranquilizers and promised to rest. Evidently he didn’t keep that promise. Spock’s mind was driving him, and you know how stubborn Spock could be once he fixed an idea in his head — or in this case, in someone else’s head.
“What was the meaning of Rand’s disappointed reaction at space dock?”
I take her reaction as dismay at how badly the ship has been battered and how much has been lost.
As for Spacedock, okay, we didn’t see it before, but Earth orbital space is a very big place. The facility we saw in TMP was a construction dock, and the station nearby was basically the construction office. Spacedock strikes me as more of a general office complex/mall/parking garage for orbital traffic. TVH and TUC suggest that it handles construction and repairs for the new Enterprise, but it’s possible that the new facility came online sometime between TMP and TSFS (an interval of roughly a dozen years, going by modern timeline assumptions). The reason we didn’t see it in TWOK was because they were using stock footage to save money. As for the in-story reason, who knows?
Crashing the Enterprise does not ignite the demise of Genesis. Even if all the antimatter on the ship annihilated on impact, that’d be a mere flesh wound on the scale of a planet. I’ve often liked to think that the big eruption at the end was the antimatter bottles finally hitting the surface, but now that I think about it, it’s too big for that by far; at most, that explosion might’ve hastened a rupture that was already building up under the crust.
@53/Jason: ” there’s a fundamental flaw in the entire thing because at the point where Kirk is asking Morrow for the ship, he’s unaware that Spock’s body has been revived. Thus, there’s absolutely NO reason whatsoever for him to want to go to Genesis.”
This was clearer in the script, the novelization, and the comic adaptation, since originally, the Grissom arrival at Genesis and their detection of the intact torpedo tube was the first scene. In Kirk’s log entry, instead of “The death of Spock is like an open wound,” his line is “The news of Spock’s tube has shaken me.” In the final cut, that scene comes just before Sarek’s arrival, so it’s implicit that the Grissom notified Starfleet (there’s a line to that effect) and that the news is what prompted Sarek to come. But you have to read between the lines.
I like this movie, and I get what you mean krad about it being responsible for Kirk’s maverick reputation; it’s kinda the same as Batman ’66 being responsible for the still-enduring idea that all superhero comics are BIFF BAM BOOM silly. I still like this film, along with TWOK and TVH, for me, it’s all one single long film I enjoy. Again, I became a Trek fan with the films, so that’s why.
As for Saavik, not to defend Curtis, but why is her mistake only an actor’s mistake? Shouldn’t the director know better? Shouldn’t the director know the material better and know that Vulcans DO have emotions? And in this case, the director was the person in the world (until Tim Russ later) with the most ever experience playing a Vulcan?
@11 – Brian: I guess they offered Nimoy a chance to direct a feature film.
@22 – Ivan: That explains it. Still, Vulcans DO have emotions, they just repress them.
@23 – John: I will miss krad’s old Trek rewatches too.
@26 – Mike: Agreed.
@27 – krad: I always say that.
@31 – Mike: But this is not a review, this is one krad’s rewatches. The whole idea of the rewatch is that it is tinged by his personal experiences.
I have to admit I’ve always had a soft spot for Spacedock, just because it’s really big! Seems kind of impractical as I think about it now, to have an orbital structure with that big of an enclosed space to berth ships. But I still like it.
@57/MaGnUs: I wouldn’t agree with your use of Batman ’66 as an analogy, because that show didn’t create that approach to comics; it rather accurately captured the way comics had been done for the previous couple of decades, and if anything toned it down considerably from the reality. It’s just that its higher profile compared to the comics meant that audiences continued to see comics that way even after they’d changed into something massively different. In this case, the movies changed the portrayal of Kirk from what it had been before. The one commonality is that their high profile, and broader audience exposure (since casual viewers would be more likely to watch a few movies than invest in a years-long series), meant they carried more weight in pop culture.
@58/hoopmanjh: Spacedock is pretty small compared to a lot of the megastructures in science fiction and speculative engineering. From what I can find, it’s only 3.6 km tall, while the title station in Babylon 5 is 8 km long, and Rama from Rendezvous with Rama was 54 km long and 20 wide. An “Island Three” O’Neill cylinder, a type of space habitat proposed in the ’70s, would be 20 km long and 5 wide.
Still, I have always found Spacedock an odd design. I guess there’s some logic to an enclosed dock facility for protection from meteoroids and radiation, but why are the doors so tiny? There’s barely enough clearance for one ship. A Galaxy-class ship a century later would be too big to fit through those teeny doors. (They reused the Spacedock footage as a starbase in a TNG episode, but it required assuming the station was at least twice as large, scaled up along with the ship.)
I like to think Space Dock being a Space Dock is unintentional. Like they were going for some sort of orbital habitat and they realized that when they were giving everyone a view out the windows, they’d left a huge chuck of dead space inside so some bright spark said why not park space ships in the middle of it and give the people there a view too.
I realise that is impractical and kinda dumb, but I like that theory anyway.
The door size is a little more explicable. The Constitution Class is pretty much the widest and tallest vessel Starfleet would have had when it was built. The Excelsior class is longer and more solid but is more or less the same width and a bit shorter (I think, it can be hard working out scale at times) so they built the doors to the size they needed at the time. Can’t blame them for not knowing about ships that wouldn’t be built for another 70ish years.
@60/random22: I don’t buy that explanation. Just because the Connies were the largest Starfleet ships we knew of, that doesn’t mean they were the largest around. What about cargo freighters, or large passenger liners or colony ships? What about visiting alien ships? For that matter, why make the clearance so tight to begin with? Given how massive starships are, how much momentum they have, even a slight course error could cause significant damage if you don’t give a ship enough leeway. I just don’t see any reason for the doors to be that small relative to the size of the overall structure.
@56/Christopher: Regarding the Genesis/Enterprise correlation, I didn’t mean it literally ignited the planet’s earthquakes. I meant it as a thematic and visual coincidence in which the death of the Enterprise is swiftly followed by the death of the planet. Death is a recurring theme in the film.
Speaking of Genesis, there’s a scene that always baffled me and that’s the instant shift from day to night, witnessed by David and the Klingons. Does this mean Genesis was in accelerated orbit due to the proto-matter?
49/Christopher – You say, about the katric ark, “Actually this was explored much earlier in the novels, notably J.M. Dillard’s The Lost Years, IIRC” – Earlier than what? The Lost Years was published in 1989. Maybe I misunderstood, and you meant earlier than JJ Abrams’ Trek 09? That’s when I first heard the term “katric ark” (I didn’t read much Trek fiction from about the time of The Lost Years until about a decade later) – I didn’t realize it was a tip of the hat to Trek’s “expanded universe.”
Fascinating, as someone might say. ;)
@62/Eduardo: Orbit would have no effect on day and night, only rotation. Anyway, the script (which I linked to in comment #42) just describes it as a normal sunset, the day/night terminator sweeping across the landscape. I don’t remember how quickly it was shown to occur, but some planets just naturally have faster rotation than others.
@63/Mike: I said the concept of the katric ark was canonically introduced in Enterprise: “The Forge,” but the same basic idea was introduced in the novels decades earlier under a different name. ST’09 used the same term “katric ark” a few years after “The Forge” did, but used it differently, to refer to a place where the Vulcan elders were assembled. It wasn’t a reference to the novels, since the novels didn’t use that term.
The bird-of-prey does have some Klingon style as well – particularly the bridge on a long neck, and the weapons pods at the ends of the wings (similar to the front-of-engine disruptor mounts on a D7.) The feathers and name are more Romulan, but otherwise it’s plausible as a Klingon design with Romulan influences. Was the model work finished after the script switched the antagonists?
@41/RangarRedbeard and 42/ChristopherLBennett — I should have written “Genesis was not constructed as a weapon,” though what we see in TWOK makes me question how much use it would have been as a “torpedo,” since you’d have to fire well after the priming sequence was underway and then pray you could haul out of there at full warp. And since the Federation already has the technology, it’s already got a deterrent if it becomes that kind of war.
Which leaves plenty of other ways to use it, though most are — at least looking back now from the perspective of how TNG developed the Klingon ethos — not very Klingon. That’s why Preyportrays the 24th century Klingons’ view of Kruge as mixed: a patriot to some, a blundering paranoid to others.
I can’t imagine Genesis files of any kind were left on Enterprise’s systems while it was in spacedock awaiting breakdown, given how Starfleet was acting and what they’d just been through over it. Don’t recall if the novelization covers it, but I just never conceived it was possible. Regardless, Kruge is still demanding Genesis after Enterprise is destroyed, so I’m not sure what he expects to accomplish by that point. Maybe Kirk has it sewn into in his inseam?
The Search for Spock was the first Star Trek film I ever saw, when ATV aired it one evening either late in 1984 or early in 1985; I was 11 years old at the time, so I’m fuzzy on the exact date. I loved it when I saw it, even though some scenes went over my head (the Pon Farr scene, for example), and others would have made more sense if I’d seen TWoK first, and I still have a fond recollection of those early viewings, even though it was on a small black and white TV.
My approach to the films was wierd, partly due to the viewing order: TSFS, then TWoK, then TVH, then TMP, then Generations (the first time I saw a Star Trek film in the theatre, rather than on broadcast TV or VHS). I didn’t see The Final Frontier or TUC until late in the 90s, and by then I was on my own, and free to watch the films in the theatre as they came out. The only film since then that I “missed” was Nemesis.
Another part of my experience was that I never really hated any of the films everyone was “supposed” to hate. That came later, when I’d read reviews by Important Writers in the Genre, and heard comments by friends, and slowly came around to “hate” TSFS, Final Frontier, and Generations. Not sure I like what it says about me that I was willing to let my opinion be shaped that way, and there are days I would give almost anything to be able to watch those films in innocence again. Ah well.
One thing that’s occurred to me was just how honest was David when he mentioned the protomatter? Given his fears of Genesis being weaponized, and the fact that he and Saavik knew the Grissom had just been destroyed, perhaps he decided to “confess” to that detail in case he or Saavik was captured and interrogated. Spin a lie about protomatter being key, and downplay his mother’s role in Genesis. Since Vulcans have that reputation of “never lying” (even if the reputation itself is a lie), having Saavik believe the lie might add credibility to it. David could potentially throw a huge spanner wrench into any hostile power’s attempts to replicate the device.
Probably not what the screenwriters had in mind, I suppose.
@59 – Chris: Oh, I know the Batman show didn’t create this approach, or actually “change” it. But the higher profile is what caused me to compare this to the movies and Kirk. I agree with you.
To be honest, I’ve always seen this one as the biggest refutation of the odd/even rule, because it’s my favourite odd number film. I would disagree that Shatner’s underplaying of the reaction to the destruction of the Enterprise is wrong, I think he pitches it exactly right. (Can you imagine “My god, Bones, what have I done?”) Mind you, I will note that I prefer the BBC edit of the reaction to David’s death: No strong language Saturday afternoon, so it got cut down to a simple “Klingons… murdered my son.”
I’ve always assumed Uhura stayed behind to work the transporter, we have seen them operated on time delay but there has to be a reason for transporter chiefs to exist. My only problem is that the film really does just fizzle out once they reach Vulcan. We get a mystic ceremony that seems to go on forever, devolving into a montage of Kirk pacing back and forth as if he just wants them to get on with it as well, followed by an unsatisfying “Spock’s back but he can’t remember anything, the end” as if they know there’ll be another film along in a year or two so they can just treat it as episodic.
@49/Christopher: IIRC, Sybok visits the Hall of Ancient Thought in the STV novelization (also by Dillard), and it is indeed filled with spheres (or maybe polyhedrons — it’s been decades since I read the book and I just remember him sneaking in to mindmeld with the ancients).
@70/SeanOHara: You’re probably right. I do have the impression that Dillard first used the idea in a novelization and then expanded on it in The Lost Years.
61. ChristopherLBennett – Seeing as the Excelsior, which is much larger than the Enterprise, fits through the doors, I put it down to dramatic licence to let the Enterprise JUST fit through. Either that or the doors are able to dynamically expand. After all, this movie also gives us a BOP that is much larger that the Merchantman and yet much smaller when they arrive at Vulcan. TNG just makes it worse when they bring out even more sizes of it.
This is the movie that pretty much cemented that fact that Kirk never should have gotten a ship again. I don’t care how much you do afterwards, you don’t steal a ship capable of destroying all life on a planet and not only not get punished but get rewarded (in the next movie) for it. Styles was right when he said “You do this and you’ll never sit in the center seat again.”
It would have made an interesting movie if Kirk really had to deal with the consequences of his actions. Imagine how the US Navy would react if the command crew of an aircraft carrier stole it out of the harbour with the intention of going to a place that’s been declared off limits. Since this is pretty much the first Trek production that carries on the story from the preceding installment, you’d think that consequences would be taken into account. But with this and TVH, the Genesis trilogy just ends up pressing the big, red reset button. Taken on their own, the movies are enjoyable but they’re weighed down with their on illogic. It’s Trek as a popcorn movie. Don’t think too much about it and you’ll enjoy it more. I wish I’d known that when I saw them.
Two meaningless, trivial things –
1) I always wanted to know more about Valkris, who was a good deal more elegant and, well, posh than your average Klingonne. Even Martok’s wife (Suralla?) wasn’t nearly as glamorous. Then again, this might just stem from my irrational fixation on one-off characters in trek.
2) Even in this movie, Nichelle Nichols still has her extravagant beauty. Them’s good genes.
73. LadyBelaine – Vonda McIntyre did provide a sort of background to valkris in Enterprise : The First Adventure. She introduces Koronin, a Klingon renegade who’s family line veil themselves. Koronin, being a renegade, wears the veil but refuses to cover her face, instead letting it hang from the side of her head. It’s not much but it’s obviously a nod to Valkris and a reminder that Klingons should have many different cultures, not just the usual Trek moncultures that we see most of the time.
Interestingly enough, the people with whom I disagreed most vehemently on The Wrath of Khan are the ones I agree with the most on the subject of The Search for Spock.
Star Trek III is one of my favorites in the movie series, and a strong argument against the notion that all of the odd-numbered movies suck and all of the even-numbered ones are winners.
I admit that it’s not perfect, and that there are a number of plot holes and some areas of disjointedness in the storytelling. Many of these flaws were created in post-production as the film was being edited. As others have noted above, in most cases, these flaws were not present in Harve Bennett’s screenplay.
Random thoughts:
* The protomatter idea was suggested by Roddenberry himself. At least, he took credit for it in a Starlog interview published sometime after the film’s release.
* In my opinion, Vonda McIntyre missed the point of what Harve Bennett was trying to accomplish when she changed the reason for the Genesis experiment’s failure in the novelization. The movie states definitively that Genesis doesn’t–and won’t–work as intended, period. Bennett’s goal, as the writer and the producer, was to take Genesis off the table as a concept. He felt its continued existence would upset the status quo of the Star Trek universe, and he wanted to basically “debunk” the concept and put the genie back in the bottle. By establishing that Genesis fell apart because the torpedo detonated inside a nebula, which it wasn’t intended to do, we’re left with the fact that Genesis CAN work, if it’s detonated properly. The implication, therefore, is that it remains in play, because the tech and the formula still exist, along with the woman who developed it. I side with Bennett. First and foremost, because it’s HIS story, and I feel his intentions supersede those of the person novelizing his work.
* Staying on the subject of the novelization, while it was interesting to get that extended prologue bridging the short gap between TWOK and TSFS, there were many things I didn’t like about it. It bothered me that McIntyre unraveled the more friendly relationship that Kirk and David were establishing with each other at the end of TWOK. And everybody was so ANGRY and BITTER and SOUR with each other. Kirk and David. Kirk and Sarek. Kirk and Carol Marcus. Kirk and Saavik, as I recall. Scotty and his sister. It was like, ENOUGH! I didn’t like spending time with these people.
* I also felt that in some places, McIntyre changed things arbitrarily, just for the sake of changing them or putting her stamp on them, leading to some confounding contradictions. For example, I HATED the part where she established that Valkris and Kruge had never even met, even though Valkris calls him “my love.” As I recall, according to McIntyre, Valkris calls Kruge “my love” because by enabling her to acquire the Genesis data for him, he’s enabled her to restore honor to her house, or something along those lines. I was like, BALONEY! That’s not in the script, and it’s so obvious that it wasn’t what Bennett intended. Those two Klingons were knocking boots, no doubt about it. I had to wonder why McIntyre would even go there. Why not just write the scene as Bennett had?
* I thought Shatner’s performance in the film was WONDERFUL. I consider it his most vulnerable, most sympathetic, most stripped-down performance as Kirk, rivaling the spectacular work he did in TWOK. The moment where he falls to the floor on the bridge, after learning of David’s death, elicited gasps of surprise and empathy from audiences back in 1984, and is still talked about today as a very effective choice on Shatner’s part.
* Kruge is one of my favorite Klingons. Incidentally, Nimoy wanted to cast Edward James Olmos, but was vetoed. I think Christopher Lloyd did a fine job.
* I prefer Kirstie Alley over Robin Curtis, but I don’t think Curtis did a bad job. There are hints of emotion in her eyes during key dramatic moments, and when David is killed, you get a sense that she’s barely containing her anger. Still, I wish Nimoy had been more faithful to the previous interpretation of Saavik, and allowed Curtis to base her performance more on Alley’s.
* I love the musical score. It was a very wise decision to have James Horner return. (Bennett pushed for it, Nimoy wanted Leonard Rosenman.) Appropriately, Horner provides tight continuity with TWOK by revisiting and expanding upon many of his pieces from the previous film while introducing several new themes, including a new one for the Klingons that’s not quite as memorable as Jerry Goldsmith’s, but effective nonetheless. (Heck, he’d use it again, almost note for note, in ALIENS!) I also appreciated how Horner continued to utilize Alexander Courage’s iconic “Star Trek Fanfare” from the original TV series, weaving it in and out of his own compositions seamlessly.
Interesting the number of hijacks, thefts and breakouts in these movies.
TWOK: Khan hijacks the Reliant.
TSFS: Kirk steals the Enterprise and a Bird of Prey.
TVH: A heist movie. Ocean’s 11 with whales.
TFF: Sybok hijacks the Enterprise.
TUC: Prison escape.
The Star Trek crime series! ;-)
@72/kkozoriz: Hey, Spock stole a starship in the show’s first season.
@73/LadyBelaine: I actually find Uhura more beautiful in this film than in the previous ones. It may be because of her hairdo.
#77 JanaJansen
Good point. And come to think of it, Spock disobeyed orders and withheld information and did all sorts of passive aggressive things much more than Kirk ever did in TOS, and yet Kirk gets the reputation for being a renegade.
And I agree. Nichelle looks lovely in this movie. And her scene putting Mr. Adventure in his place was just wonderful. I want an Uhura scene like that in every movie.
@75: If Shatner’s Star Trek Memories is any indication, his tripping down to the ground on the bridge wasn’t scripted at all – being in fact a complete stumbling accident. It was Nimoy who realized that could be used to ratchet up the drama and tension.
@76: Spock nerve-pinched a crewman and stole a thruster-suit in the first film.
@75/Glenn: I liked Lloyd in the role of Kruge, but Edward James Olmos would’ve been terrific too.
I have mixed feelings about Horner’s scores. Sometimes I love his music, but after a while I start to get sick of it because it’s always the same stuff, and it’s just so big and unsubtle that it wears out its welcome. But “Stealing the Enterprise” is one of the most thrilling movie-music cues I’ve ever heard and I can’t listen to it without pounding my fist to the beat.
Have to disagree with the criticism of Shatner’s acting here. I thought he hit the tone just right. Seems like Bill just can’t do anything right when it comes to some critics. For me, the “what have I done?” line when he’s looking up into the sky watching his beloved Enterprise disintegrating was perfect. If you were a fan of the show, that moment was almost as poignant as watching Spock die in the previous film – the Enterprise was as much a character as anyone else – Shatner worked that line just as he should have, letting the burning ship itself take the spotlight.
I think my favorite scene in the film is the confrontation between Kirk and Kruge on the Genesis planet. Kirk implores him to be sensible – the planet is imploding and they’re both going to die down there, and Kruge’s response is gloriously Klingon: “Exhilarating isn’t it?” Say what you will about Kirk kicking Kruge (say that 3 times fast) into Mordor, but it was pure popcorn-gobbling fodder, and I loved Kirk showing his wily ways in grunting Klingon into the communicator to trick his way back on to the Bird of Prey. That’s the kind of maneuver we’d expect from a shrewd, seasoned veteran like Kirk.
Lastly, while I somewhat understand the assertion that this movie is the one that makes everyone assume Kirk is and has always been a maverick – but I would suggest those seeds were planted earlier and his actions here it didn’t seem out of character to me. (Love the line about “he’s saved my life many times over, isn’t that worth a career?”) Krad mentioned Amok Time, and to that I would add his behavior in Obsession, where he loiters around to settle a score with a smog monster rather than obey orders to rendezvous with another ship to deliver urgently needed live-saving vaccines. (I never understood why he wouldn’t just do his duty then go back…) I do agree that it’s strange that so many tend to view Kirk as some reckless rulebreaker. He’s not, but it’s not out of character for him to defy regulations when loyalty to a friend or overriding guilt are factors.
In STAR TREK: UNTOLD VOYAGES #5, I established that Kirk’s growing reputation as a maverick, especially among young Starfleet cadets trying to emulate him, became of great concern to him, and is what ultimately motivated him to step down as captain of the Enterprise at the end of the second five-year mission, and become an instructor at Starfleet Headquarters.
I always assumed that the reason for the voice-over changing from Carol Marcus to Kirk between TWOK and TSFS was because Bibi Besch was not in TSFS and, even as a recording, they would have had to pay her if it had been her voice so they had Shatner do it instead. But I’m thinking it would have made more sense if it had been David narrating the Genesis simulation. I can’t see any recording with Kirk’s voice-over making it to the black market where Valkris could obtain one, but an older “draft”: with David’s voice that was made before Carol’s official proposal might have somehow made it there.
Quoth Glenn: “And everybody was so ANGRY and BITTER and SOUR with each other.”
Yeah, how ridiculous that people who just watched a ton of people die, including a bunch of out-of-their-depth cadets, the captain of a starship, an entire team of scientists, and finally a beloved friend and crewmate (whom they would later move heaven and earth to save), act angry and bitter and sour.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, rolling his eyes
@85/krad: I dunno, I kinda gotta go with Glenn here. Grieving characters can be written in an engaging and sympathetic way, or they can be written in an off-putting and annoying way. Whatever the characters may be experiencing, we’re still reading/watching their experiences in hopes of being entertained and moved, not irritated. I don’t remember the TSFS novelization all that well, but I do remember finding that McIntyre’s Trek characters in general did tend to be very gloomy sorts. I always felt her Sulu was completely out of character, because he was this perpetually insecure, brooding sad sack, nothing like the enthusiastic adventurer Takei played.
Heck, this was kind of the main reason for TWOK’s reshoot of the ending to establish that Spock’s tube had survived. At the time they inserted that shot, they didn’t specifically intend to bring him back in the next movie (even though it seemed obvious to me at the time that it would allow them to); they just found that the original ending made test audiences too depressed, so they inserted the new ending merely to offer a ray of hope to temper the sadness. Too much relentless gloom can be off-putting, but you can balance out the characters’ grief with some hints of hope or comfort and it won’t be as bad.
77. JanaJansen – Yes, yes he did. And committed fraud and assault and kidnapping. None of which ended up mattering. Just like here. The difference though, is that Spock was not the commanding officer. Yes, he should have been punished but it was all swept under the rug.
80. Eduardo Jencarelli – Fun fact – the airlock technician in TMP is the same guy in the “Don’t call me Tiny” scene here. Boy, his former crewmates really don’t like him.
Gary Faga – Memory Alpha
Two things:
One, I’m sure the reason Shatner re-read the Genesis proposal recording was so Paramount didn’t have to pay Bibi Besch for acting (or even voiceovers) in STIII.
Two, although I always liked this movie, it did set the distasteful precedent for destroying the Enterprise on a regular basis. The only thing that makes up for that travesty is the fleshing-out of the Klingons, so beautifully epitomized by Lloyd’s Kruge.
Steven_Lyle_Jordan: I get not wanting to pay Besch, but if you’re re-shooting it anyhow, why not use David, who actually, y’know, worked on it? Hell, the movie acts like he was the only one working on it, so wouldn’t it make more sense to use him? And he’s in the movie, so paying him to act in it is hardly an issue…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@88/Steven_Lyle_Jordan: The more problematical precedent, for me, is the one for undoing every major change in the movie series. This was a perennial problem for both the TOS and TNG movies — every attempt to make a lasting change was reset to status quo within at most two movies, with only the final movie in each series allowing any real change to happen. Saavik was introduced, and dropped two movies later. Spock was killed in one movie, revived in the next, and back to normal by the end of the one after that. Chekov got promoted to another ship’s first officer, but then ended up back as the Enterprise security chief and eventually back to his old navigator job. The ship was destroyed and then replaced with an identical ship. Only in the final movie in the series did we get a permanent change, with Sulu’s captaincy and the others’ retirement/reassignment.
The TNG films had the same problem, perhaps even worse. First, Data installs the emotion chip, goes through a major personality change, and is told that the chip is permanently fused to his neural network so he’ll just have to live with it for the rest of his life. Then, in the very next film, it’s established as a throwaway line that he can turn off the emotion chip at will, totally short-circuiting that character development and giving him an easy way out of what was meant to be a challenging journey. In the film after that, there’s a casual mention that he didn’t take the emotion chip with him — the chip that two movies before was permanently fused in — and there’s no indication in the rest of the film that he ever reinstalled it. And in the final film, there’s no acknowledgment that the chip ever existed. They had an opportunity for real character growth, and they chickened out and actually made Data develop backward from one film to the next.
That’s one of the points in favor of TMP. It’s just about the only film in the series that made a change that didn’t get undone: Spock’s epiphany leading him to be at ease with his emotional side rather than fighting against it. That serene, balanced personality remains in effect throughout all of Spock’s later appearances — he openly expresses friendship in TWOK, he says “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end” in TUC, and he told his younger self “Put aside logic. Do what feels right” in ST ’09. It’s actually a bit surprising that they didn’t use Spock’s death and resurrection to reset his personality, that they allowed this growth to remain intact — even if TVH did kind of show him having to relearn it.
@85/KRAD
Geez, Keith — snark much?
It’s not like you and I haven’t had this conversation before.
You were wrong then, and you’re wrong now. ;-)
As CLB wrote: “Grieving characters can be written in an engaging and sympathetic way”
Yeah—LIKE THEY WERE IN THE ACTUAL MOVIE.
@87/kkozoriz: If they’re supposed to be the same character, I can certainly understand his initial reaction to Sulu. Serving on the Enterprise and being knocked out by your superior officer would likely make you resent the crew and take a dull desk job as a prison guard.
Regarding Vonda McIntyre, I’ve never read her Trek novelizations (or any of the movie novelizations, for that matter, aside from J.M. Dillard’s take on ST: Generations).
I am familar with her writing, however. I’ve read her one Star Wars novel: The Crystal Star, written way back in the Bantam Spectra years. Although she has a good grasp on Leia, she completely mischaracterizes both Luke and Han Solo in her novel. She dials Luke’s naiveté up to 11, and somehow messes up his rapport with Han completely. It’s almost as if she’s trying to revert their characterization to A New Hope, ignoring the character development subsequent films, while at the same time getting their dynamic completely wrong.
As I write this, I’m reminded of the dreadful “Jedi kid” remark uttered by Han in one of the middle chapters. For whatever reason, it took Luke 14 years to get tired of being called kid by Han. And also, for whatever reason, Luke becomes akin to a drug addict in need of Waru’s healing powers. Not to mention Waru is one the weakest villains/plot devices conceived, not that Hethrir’s much better. The chapters with the Solo kids are passable enough, but not enough to save such a flawed novel.
@92/Eduardo: It’s worth mentioning that Vonda N. McIntyre is primarily known for her original SF writing, including the novel Dreamsnake, which won both the Hugo and Nebula in 1979, and the 1998 Nebula winner The Moon and the Sun. Tie-ins are very much the minority of her total bibliography, so I don’t think you can really say you’re familiar with her writing if you’ve only read one of her tie-ins.
92. Eduardo Jencarelli – There’s no reason that he can’t be the same guy. In TMP he doesn’t even have a line and TWOK happens years later. Nothing says the he is the same guy but there’s also nothing saying that it isn’t.
It was my understanding that Kirk did the Genesis recording as part of his report to Starfleet following the events of TWOK. As such, it kinda makes sense for him to do it rather than David. He’s not doing it for a scientific review, but as background for the clusterf#*% their cadet cruise ended up being.
@95/Jason: On the one hand, you’re right that Kirk does explicitly say “To fully understand the events on which I report” at the start of the video, so that is undoubtedly what the filmmakers intended this to be — Kirk’s report to Starfleet Command about the events leading up to the Genesis detonation. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense that he’d re-record Carol’s own verbatim narration and edit himself into her presentation video, rather than just including her complete video along with his own report. That’s a case where it’s pretty obvious that real life (i.e. their unwillingness to pay royalties to Bibi Besch) is overriding in-universe logic.
I suppose you could argue that maybe he edited Carol out of the presentation in an attempt to insulate her from the consequences or something, but that doesn’t make much sense, since Starfleet would already have been well aware of her involvement, and he does mention her by name.
@81 – Chris: Oh, wow. Edward James Olmos would have been great. I need him in something Trek.
Jason: Yeah, that isn’t a report to Starfleet. It’s Carol’s presentation from Wrath of Khan word-for-flippin’-word.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@96 & @98, I agree that it is Carol’s presentation with Kirk doing the voiceover, but it is framed as a report, by him, to Starfleet. In that regard, it makes sense for him to do the narration. Kirk doing the report virtually word for word from Carol’s with the same presentation video is dumb. The concept of him doing it is sound, but the execution is…wanting.
Well, these movies did establish Kirk as someone who got through the Academy by cheating on a test. So at least it’s consistent that they show him plagiarizing a report too.
Yeah, they could have rewritten the text a tiny bit for it to not be as blatant.
In all honesty, I know this is the wildly minority opinion, but this is my favorite Trek outing. I love Kruge. I love McCoy’s identity crisis. In some strange way, the idea of going back to get Spock and what all go through to do it, and the lovely simple end – this was the western or even seafaring flick I wanted; Lloyd’s Klingon accent is priceless; first Trek I saw in the theater was Wrath of Khan – like Empire Strikes Back or Godfather II, it was my favorite (in this saga) for years – then I noticed III being popped into the VHS then DVD player more and more and more, and honesty wins out. There must be some visceral reason this film matters to me. I could pretend, but what is it when we watch something repeatedly? Alas, carry on, mates. At its heart, the theme resonates so sharply – this exploration of loyalty so rare. That and Shatner et. al., as always, simply embody who they are. Now IV was only okay to me.
It was a mistake, I believe, to kill off Spock. But it was a bigger mistake to reverse course and bring him back to life. The basic metaphor of the Spock character is a man divided into two halves, at war with himself. But with Search for Spock, the metaphor changes into one of death and resurrection. The entire meaning of the character is changed, and in a clunky, non-Roddenberrian ‘religious’ direction at that. Nimoy was a fine actor, a Method actor of the ‘50s mold, subtle, but Spock as a character came quickly to overshadow all else on the original show, helping to undermine the ensemble feel of the first few episodes, and, by the time of the decision to kill and then return Spock here (due to complaints from Wrath of Khan preview audiences, leading to the hint of return at the end of that film), a situation emerged in which three full Star Trek films dealt somehow with Spock’s resurrection. It makes one wonder about another dynamic, more Kirk-centric, such as might have occurred if the Phase II series had happened.
As for Nimoy’s change of heart, I remember reading somewhere that part of it was simply that filming KHAN had been a much more pleasant and satisfying experience than filming TMP had been, so he was more inclined to keep doing it than he had been after TMP.
Speaking of the title, we should remember that Nimoy was hosting IN SEARCH OF at the time, so I always assumed that was one of the inspirations for the title .
A memory: Nimoy spoke at my college not long before TSFS came out. I remember that he kept trying to talk about IN SEARCH OF, but the audience only wanted to ask him about STAR TREK. :)
@104/Greg: In Search of… ended its run in early 1982, so it was a couple of years gone by the time of TSFS. Still, it was fresh in people’s memory, and I’m pretty sure there were a number of people at the time who thought the title of the movie was In Search of Spock.
I never liked this one myself. Felt like a muddled mess. Too many ingredients thrown into the soup. And the stealing of a capital ship just stretched plausibility past the breaking point.
Hey folks, thanks to other deadlines, the rewatch of The Voyage Home will be delayed a day.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Sorry, folks, bit my laptop was being a pain in the patoots yesterday, so it took forever to get the Star Trek IV rewatch up and running. Hopefully it will go up today…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@11 Brian MacDonald – “I didn’t recognize Christopher Lloyd when I first saw it, as I think Taxi was off-limits to me at the time, and I hadn’t seen Back to the Future yet. When I later watched Search for Spock on VHS, I couldn’t believe I’d missed it.”
Assuming that “when I later watched Search for Spock on VHS” means that you first saw it in theaters, then it’s not at all surprising that you hadn’t seen Back to the Future yet….nobody had! It was released about 13 months after TSFS. :)
Apologies if someone else has long since pointed this out (I can’t be bothered checking the previous 109 comments to see), but I think it was actually in ST2:TWOK that the ‘Kirk-as-rulebreaker’ trope originated.
The Kobayaashi Maru test that was such a focal point there (and since) revealed that Kirk rewrote the rule book and got away with it. Admittedly, that did pay off in TWOK in that he had to deal with defeat/loss/death later in the film. But it was the first example of Kirk as loose cannon, and it’s been the specific focal point for a lot of Kirk hijinks ever since – it was front and centre in ST 2009, for example.
110. Matthew McKinnon I’d say the seeds of it came from all the times he violated the Prime Directive. Of course, they kept changing the defintion but it basically came down to, if the mention the PD, you know they’re going to be breaking it.
@110/Matthew McKinnon: I said that in comment #12, but it doesn’t hurt to say it twice.
@111/kkozoriz: I have a different theory. I think many people don’t expect a quirky, creative out-of-the-box thinker to be deeply rule-abiding at the same time, just like they don’t expect a rigid, logical guy like Spock to be a rulebreaker. If presented with characters like this, they ignore the bits that “don’t fit”. Public perception will always get complex characters wrong.
It happens in real life too – people tend to be surprised when a bookish guy with a natural history collection turns out to be an athlete too, or when a little girl likes cars and trains and also loves dolls, or when someone who’s good at maths has a lousy memory for numbers.
The idea that Kirk “violated” the Prime Directive is a myth, or at least an oversimplification. Indeed, most of the time he supposedly interfered, he was actually trying to stop someone else’s interference, whether Klingons or an ancient computer or a rogue Federation actor like Gill, Merik, or Tracey. In his own view, he was enforcing the PD, not ignoring or violating it. You do get into a gray area with something like Landru, where the population’s own ancestors created the system, and it’s fair to question whether it was really Kirk’s place to decide whether that system was healthy or not. But as defined in that episode and “The Apple,” the 23rd-century version of the PD explicitly referred to a healthy, growing culture. So if there’s a problem there, it would be with the lawmakers who defined the Directive. Kirk himself was faithfully obeying the Directive as he understood it.
JanaJensen: I get that all the time. People assume, based on what I look like, and what I do for a living, that I can’t possibly be athletic. My second-degree black belt tends to surprise them. :)
(In fact, I recall a message board somewhere that was ragging on me for whatever reason that refused to believe I knew any karate because I had long hair and a beard and probably lived in my mother’s basement. Yeah.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@114/krad: “People assume, based on what I look like, and what I do for a living, that I can’t possibly be athletic. My second-degree black belt tends to surprise them.”
Those people have obviously never gotten a good look at your knuckles.
I’m just gonna put this here………….
https://kenshikaiphotos.shutterfly.com/13464
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
113. ChristopherLBennett – How can the Klingons violate the Prime Directive? It’s a Federation or Starfleet regulation. TNG’s Angel One even says that it doesn’t apply to civilians.
The Corbomite Maneuver – Pre mention of the PD but obvious in retrospect that it would have applied. Kirk destroys buoy and presses on because he’s exploring, ignoring the fact that he’s exploring someone else’s space.
Errand of Mercy – Organians say to not interfere. Kirk ignores them and gets 5,000 Organians “killed” by ignoring the Organians wishes.
A Taste of Armageddon – Big “Keep Out. This Means You” sign. Fox says ignore it. Kirk shrugs and follows illegal order. Proceeds to totally disrupt Eminiar VII and Vendikar.
The list goes on.
And who appointed the Federation as arbiters of what a “healthy, growing culture” is?
@116/krad: Cool. I’m only the one with the lousy memory for numbers.
@117/kkozoriz: Who said that the Klingons violated the Prime Directive?
And how did you find out that Fox’ order was illegal?
118. JanaJansen – Christopher said in #113 “he was actually trying to stop someone else’s interference, whether Klingons “
In The Apple, Tyree’s planet is protected by the Prime Directive so Kirk decides to interfere in order to counter the Klingon giving the village people flintlocks.
@119/kkozoriz: True, but saying that Klingons interfered doesn’t mean that they have a Prime Directive they violated.
The way I understand it, the idea behind the Prime Directive is to allow technologically less advanced peoples to develop on their own, without potentially harmful outside influence. As soon as the Klingons enter the scene and exert their influence, the PD ceases to apply because the damage is already done. Instead of complying with the PD, our guys’ task then becomes to limit the damage.
Tyree’s planet wasn’t in “The Apple”, but in “A Private Little War”. “The Apple” features another computer-controlled population like “The Return of the Archons”. One of my least favourite episodes.
@120/Jana: You’re exactly right. It’s not about legalistic hairsplitting, it’s about Kirk’s state of mind and motivation as written in TOS. The myth is that Kirk willfully violated the Prime Directive. The fact is that he was consistently portrayed as obeying the Prime Directive as it was defined during TOS, as a rule saying that alien worlds should be protected from interference. Which meant that he didn’t introduce interference of his own, but if someone or something else was already interfering, he would act to negate that interference and then leave the culture free to develop on its own (and maybe leave some advisors to nurse them back to societal health until they were ready to be independent, a very ’60s Peace Corps kind of mentality).
TNG later defined the PD far more rigidly, as a simplistically absolutist and legalistic policy forbidding Starfleet from any contact whatsoever with a pre-warp world for any reason whatsoever, and there’s an unfortunate tendency to back-project that anachronistic interpretation onto TOS. That feeds into the myth that Kirk was a rule-breaking renegade. But that is very different from how TOS actually defined the PD, and by its original definition, Kirk was doing his best to obey it, not violate it. Certainly one can validly argue that his approach had an element of Civilising Mission condescension to it and that the TNG era’s more rigid approach is a reaction against that (though an insane overreaction if you ask me), but that’s a different debate. This is simply about the myth that Kirk broke the rules. It is misremembering or misrepresenting TOS to claim that Kirk made a habit of violating the Prime Directive. As written, he saw himself as obeying the Directive, at least in spirit if not entirely in the letter.
In The Return of the Archons, Kirk is looking for people that disappeared on Beta III over 100 years ago. He then proceeds to hide from the inhabitants of that planet by wearing a disguse. So far, so good. But when the Landru computer, which was constructed by the inhabitants of Beta III discover the deception, Kirk destroys the computer. His rationale? That they’re not “a living, growing culture”. He decides this after a few hours or days of being in contact with the inhabitants. Who appointed him to decide which cultures are valid? Would he do the same thing if he met the Bynars?
He uses basically the same thoughts in “The Apple”. Once again, we have a planet that built a computer to run their society. They didn’t force it on anyone else. They’re not a threat to anyone that isn’t trespassing on their planet. What does Kirk do? “These people aren’t living. They’re existing. They don’t create, produce, even think. They exist to service a machine… we owe it to them to interfere.”. Once again, setting himself as an arbiter of what these people should do with their lives.
Patterns of Force, one of the times that Kirk got it right. He was correcting a situation that was caused by a Federation official who used a culture as a petri dish for his own experiments. The Federation made the mess. It’s up to them to clean it up.
Contrast that with A Piece of the Action, where the inhabitants chose to model their culture on a book left behind by a pre-Federation ship. There was no effort by the crew of the Horizon to get the Iotians to change their culture and yet Kirk not only changes their culture by putting one gangster in charge, he ensures that the Federation will continue to have a say in how their planet is run by giving the Federation a cut of the planetary economy.
A Private Little War (Not The Apple as I erroneously said in #120) was covered above. However, what happens when the Klingons give the Villagers semi-automatic weapons? Then full auto? What about nukes and phasers? Where will the Federation stop? And doesn’t that give the Federation the right to do the same on any planet that has already made contact with another spacefaring culture?
Bread and Circuses gives us Captain Merik, who we’re told is part of “the merchant service”. This would apparently be something that was much more connected with the Federation that a mere merchant like Cyrano Jones. Therefore, the PD would apply to him as stated.
In Miri, they’re responding to a distress call, therefore they’re off the hook.
The Omega Glory gives us an excellent example of why the Federation should keep their hands off. Captain Tracey blows the PD right out of the water. But it also gives us this definition of the PD “A starship captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive.”.
Which brings us to A Taste of Armageddon. In which Kirk’s actions are in complete contradiction to the definition given above. The Enterprise was trespassing, even after being explicitly told to keep out on multiple occasions. Fox’s orders were, therefore, unlawful as soon as the crew became aware of the Code 710. Kirk’s wllingness to go along with an unlawful order puts part of the blame on him as well as Fox. What he does later, destroying the computers and totally upending the cultures of two planets, is his most egregious breaking of the PD that we’ve seen.
Kirk may not have been the rule breaker that some people claim but he was not the innocent that others claim either.
@122/kkozoriz: I don’t really like “The Return of the Archons”, and “The Apple” is even worse, so I don’t feel like commenting much on them. Only two points: I didn’t get the impression that the Bynars were mind-controlled by their computer; and Kirk might have left the planet alone if Landru hadn’t attacked the landing party and the Enterprise.
I disagree about “A Piece of the Action” and “A Taste of Armageddon”, but we already talked about those at length in the respective rewatch comment threads, and I don’t think either of us has anything new to say. Except for this:
“The Enterprise was trespassing […]. Fox’s orders were, therefore, unlawful […]. Kirk’s wllingness to go along with an unlawful order puts part of the blame on him as well as Fox.” – Actually, we don’t know that. We don’t know enough about Federation law. Perhaps they distinguish between offences of different degrees, and Kirk has to obey any order that doesn’t constitute a serious crime (something like killing civilians).
I love this movie. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but the theme of friendship and sacrifice are strong here. And I love it’s not just the Big Three, but all of our heroes. All of them are willing to sacrifice their careers, their futures, to get Spock back. It’s made clear here this is an ensemble, despite the original intent of the TV series, and I really appreciate that. It’s downplayed to a degree by STV, but it’s still feels like an ensemble for the remaining TOS movies.
James Horner’s score for this movie stands out far more to me than the previous film. Sure some of it is reused, but it really picks up here. The music for stealing the Enterprise, the Enterprise burning up in Genesis’ atmosphere, the bird-of-prey landing on Vulcan, just beautiful. That closeup on the Enterprise bride dome while the ship is in spacedock, with the Trek fanfare playing, gets me every time.
All the little moments make this movie. The scene in Kirk’s apartment, the Absent Friends toast, McCoy at the bar, Scotty’s “Up your shaft”, all just fantastic. The scenes with the Klingons are great; I didn’t mind Christopher Lloyd, as he’s to me menacing and comical.
“Step into my parlour, gentleman”, “I’m glad you’re on our side.” “That’s what you get for missing staff meetings, Doctor.” The dialogue is so much more natural here.
I enjoy this so much more than TWOK.
I do wish Uhura could have gone with the boys, though. I did figure she was staying behind to cover for them; after all, they were stealing a capital ship in the heart of the Federation, so someone would have to cover their tracks. And Uhura does get moments of awesome (finally). “Well you know what they say, Lieutenant. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.” Still, it sticks in my craw Uhura didn’t go with everyone else.
Despite its flaws, it captures the heart of Star Trek for me
I have only one small edit/correction to KRAD for his interpretation of Kirk’s last line to Kruge.
The line was “I (kick) have HAD (kick) enough of YOU (kick)!”, just FTR. (Not including pauses of course)
Is it just me or are other people stopped from viewing the new comments? My list stops at 75 no matter how many times I refresh the page.
Lou: There is a button under the 75th post that says “More comments.” Click on it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@127/Lou: Sometimes this site has glitches that keep it from displaying new posts. If hitting “More Comments” doesn’t work, try clearing your browser cache and trying again — that sometimes clears it up.
This is a science-fiction action-suspense thriller, make no mistake, and there are so many great moments I’ve all but lost count. Maybe it does start off a bit slow, but it gets into warp drive pretty quickly. The turning point, to my way of thinking, is the scene with Admiral Kirk and Ambassador Sarek—and I love the latter’s almost desperate request, “May I join your mind?” (the Vulcan way of asking permission to join in the mind-meld) as he realizes that Spock had never requested anything from Kirk, followed by the fact that poor Dr. McCoy had all of Spock’s marbles—which changes the entire picture. Then there’s the grand larceny starship scene, one of my absolute favorites in all of Star Trek, so hilarious that my sides still ache. You may recall that Scotty was reassigned to the Excelsior, but while performing his duties he had also made extensive repairs to the Enterprise, getting her in shape for what would most likely be her final mission, and in the course of events making sure that said Excelsior would go nowhere. “Best speed to Genesis” made me think back to a scene in the second-season “Amok Time” where Kirk said “Tell Scotty I want warp eight or better—push her for all she’ll take”; still another demonstration that Kirk was definitely not afraid of Starfleet. And to cap it all off, there’s the dramatic and electrifying fal-tor-pan—the refusion, performed on the altar of Mt. Seleya with high priestess T’Lar (and Dame Judith Anderson was magnificent) instituting the crucial double mind-meld with both Spock and Bones to restore the misplaced katra to its rightful owner. And the joyful reunion. Oh yeah—I have to mention the look on the face of Commander Sulu during the theft of the Enterprise: absolute ecstasy. He was in his element, at the helm of that mammoth starship, all ready for warp speed. There’s more, but these are a few of the highlights. In a word: VASKURIK (Vulcan for “beautiful”).
Here’s something else that just occurred to me. A lot of commentators have been griping and squawking and generally complaining about “rules” and “directives” and such and how they were constantly being violated, broken and such. I seem to recall how long ago a very fine musician, in a discussion of counterpoint (which has a lot of rules and directives and such), stated that the reason for having those rules is so you’d know what you’re doing when you break them! This is what we have seen all through Star Trek—the original series and the six fine feature films—Kirk and Co. knew the rules, and so when he would break them, usually with good reason, he knew exactly what he was doing…as did Spock, Bones and the rest of the crew. To deny otherwise would be—how shall I put it?—“danik riolozhikaik”—most illogical!
Except captains weren’t supposed to break the Prime Directive. They were supposed to give their lives before allowing it to be broken. Look at the quote from The Omega Glory, written by Gene Roddenberry himself.
“A star captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive.”
There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room there.
@132/kkozoriz: Written by Roddenberry as something Kirk says while thoroughly appalled, not necessarily as objective fact. I mean – he’s so agitated that he even mispronounces “starship captain”.
The 1967 writers guide leaves some more wiggle room: “It can be disregarded when absolutely vital to the interests of the entire Earth Federation, but the Captain who does violate it had better be ready to present a sound defense of his actions.”
What’s on the screen overrides what’s in the writer’s guide. And I don’t think Kirk was so agitated that’s he decide that there was a regulation that called for the death of himself and his entire crew.
@134/kkozoriz: That’s all very well, but we both know that this is not how the PD was usually handled. “The Omega Glory” is a badly written episode that revels in exaggerations. Assuming that the hyperbole is Kirk’s is a way to fix it. The writers’ guide explains much better what we usually see on screen.
@135/Jana: But as I’ve mentioned before, it’s misreading TOS to say that Kirk frequently broke the Prime Directive. By the anchronistic standards of the TNG version, he would be, but as defined in TOS, the Prime Directive allowed — and required — a captain to take action to correct interference by others. Most of the episodes where Kirk supposedly “broke the PD” were actually cases where he was obeying it by acting to free an alien culture from an outside influence that was disrupting or oppressing it, whether Klingon spies or an ancient computer god or a rogue Federation officer/historian. As he saw it, as 23rd-century Starfleet policy and law saw it, he was acting rightfully to correct harmful interference and restore a culture to a healthy and free path of development. What Tracy did in “The Omega Glory” was totally different, because Tracy was actively disrupting the society’s “natural” development for his own personal power and gain.
The 23rd-century Prime Directive didn’t indiscriminately ban all interventions, but differentiated between harmful ones intended to disrupt its “natural” path of development and helpful ones intended to restore it to that path. It’s like the difference between a mugger cutting into a body and a surgeon doing so. The former is against the law, but the latter is not. And the latter can be done to correct the damage done by the former.
@136/Christopher: Hmm, did the Prime Directive really require a captain to take action to correct interference by others? I’ve always thought that it was Kirk’s personal sense of responsibility that sparked his actions. Apart from that, I agree with you, but I do think that Kirk’s statement in “The Omega Glory” was over the top.
I like TOS Prime Directive episodes, because the way I see it, they take place on the border between helping and interference, and that’s an interesting place to be. “Return of the Archons” and “The Apple” are borderline cases because the ancient computers were not installed by outsiders. But they did prevent the people on the respective planets to lead their own lives. In “A Taste of Armageddon”, Kirk could have left without destroying the computers. But the Eminians would have been in trouble anyway because they hadn’t managed to kill the crew of the Enterprise, and that additional complication made destroying the computers the right thing to do. “Friday’s Child” was interesting because it showed how easily you can misjudge a situation in a different culture. It had a happy ending, but they had to kill some of the natives to get there, so it sent a mixed message.
In “Bread and Circuses,” Kirk told Septimus, “If Captain Merik is Merikus, then he has violated that law, and he must be taken away and punished.” So his duty did require him to arrest Federation citizens who were breaking the Prime Directive. (I know TNG: “Angel One” said the PD applied only to Starfleet, but that seems pretty useless as a way of protecting worlds from interference. And Merik was an Academy dropout who went into the merchant service, making him a civilian.)
As for non-Federation sources of interference, maybe it wasn’t required, but it seems implicitly encouraged. If your duty is to do nothing that would disrupt the natural development of a society, then deliberately sitting back and allowing someone else to disrupt it seems like shirking your duty.
We don’t know that in Vaal’s case. The whole world seemed primitive, with no trace of ruins of a higher civilization, suggesting that Vaal came from outside.
As for Landru, there’s the question of what constitutes an outsider. Did the entire civilization agree to submit to Landru? Or did one nation build it, whereupon it proceeded to conquer all the other nations against their will? And can the people 6000 years later really be said to be the same culture? Do you feel any sense of loyalty to Babylon?
As I see it, the Eminians’ attempt to kill the crew of the Enterprise was an act of war, and that suspended the Prime Directive for the duration. Kirk was within his duty to take whatever action was necessary to remove the Eminians’ ability to kill Starfleet personnel.
That’s the one instance where it’s hardest to defend Kirk’s actions. Capellan custom required Eleen’s death, after all. On the other hand, it’s vaguely implied that Maab’s coup was the result of Kras’s interference. Kras mentioned making a deal with Maab, and I suppose the idea was that the Klingons would help him take over in exchange for the mining rights. So in that sense, Akaar’s overthrow and Eleen’s death sentence may have been the result of Klingon interference, so Kirk was within his rights to try to save her. But the episode leaves it unclear. Maab might have staged his coup even without Kras’s involvement.
@138/Christopher: But punishing the culprit isn’t the same thing as repairing the damage. I’m not convinced that trying to repair the damage would be automatically encouraged. After all, an unsuccessful repair attempt can easily make things worse.
I agree that they wouldn’t treat non-Federation sources of outside interference much differently. If they want to protect alien societies, surely they’ll protect them from the Klingons and the Orions too, as far as possible. The borderline case is “inside interference” of a society’s development (e.g. ancient computers).
I didn’t see that you added some more sections to your comment, and I don’t have time to write a detailed answer right now, so I’ll only write about “Friday’s Child”.
I think the point of the story is that Kirk misjudged the situation. It seemed that Maab wanted to get rid of a potential rival, plain and simple (“You carry a child who would be teer”). Saving Eleen seemed like the morally right thing to do, even if it was legally dubious. Only afterwards does he learn that the situation is more complicated than that, that there was actually a custom that made Maab act the way he did. So was it still the right thing to do? Perhaps, because Eleen wants to live after all. Perhaps not, because they have to kill people to defend her and themselves. The episode raises some questions worth asking. It doesn’t really answer them, but that isn’t always a bad thing.
@139/Jana: “I’m not convinced that trying to repair the damage would be automatically encouraged. After all, an unsuccessful repair attempt can easily make things worse.”
That’s the TNG-era rationale, but my point is that you can’t assume TOS’s writers or characters saw things the same way. They still had more of a ’60s, Peace Corps-era optimism that it was possible to strike the balance, to do only what was necessary to help a disadvantaged populace get back on its own feet.
138. ChristopherLBennett – “Kirk was within his duty to take whatever action was necessary to remove the Eminians’ ability to kill Starfleet personnel.”
Really? What about in TNG Justice? Should Starfleet send in a fleet to destroy the guardian of the Edo? Eminiar and Vendikar clearly posted “Keep Out” signs, even posting them in a code that Starfleet understood. The Federation then decided to ignore that and then blame the Eminians for what happened. So even if your star system doesn’t want contact with the galaxy at large, it’s up to Starfleet to act as the police, whether the inhabitants of the Eminiar system agree with it or not? Is that Starfleet’s mission, to impose Federation values on the rest of the galaxy? That’s a very colonial attitude. The Federation as the British Empire, imposing “civilization” on the various brown people of the world.
And in Friday’s Child, why does Kirk & McCoy’s right to “save” Eleen from her choice to follow the laws and customs of her own world. Should Picard have refused to allow Timicin to beam back down in Half a Life? Should he force the people of Kaelon II to stop their ritual suicide because the Federation finds it offensive? Must human values override those of aliens? You could make the argument that Starfleet is within their rights in such actions for Federation members but neither Capella nor Kaelon II are members of the UFP.
@141/Christopher: Oh, I still think that it’s possible. Doing nothing for fear of making things worse is just as bad as assuming that you can’t go wrong if you have good intentions. Both are extremes.
Anyway, I wasn’t arguing from the point of view of the ’60s writers, and I wasn’t aware that you were. I was wondering what kind of guidelines a future exploratory organisation would actually issue for their explorers. I find that an intriguing question.
And please don’t get me wrong – I’m not criticising Kirk. One of the reasons why I like TOS better than TNG is because Kirk cares about everybody and always wants to help.
@143/Jana: I’m addressing the myth that Kirk had a history of violating the Prime Directive. My point is that that’s applying TNG-era assumptions that TOS’s writers weren’t using, and thereby misreading the text. The writers’ intention was to show Kirk obeying the Prime Directive by liberating cultures from unnatural interference, freeing them to develop naturally going forward. That only looks like violation by the standards of TNG’s rigid and legalistic take on the PD, the one so fanatically inflexible that it said you should let a whole species die rather than risk harming them through contact. I mean, how does that make any sense? (And we know for a fact that Kirk didn’t agree with that interpretation. From “For the World is Hollow…”: “The people of Yonada may be changed by the knowledge, but it’s better than exterminating them.” Which Spock agreed was logical.)
And I’m not saying there can’t be legitimate ethical questions raised about Kirk’s/TOS’s activist approach to interference. David Gerrold had a lot of critical things to say about it in The World of Star Trek in 1973, and the stricter TNG approach was presumably a reaction to the problems of the TOS version. My point is simply that the intent of the TOS version was not what people today tend to think it was. I’m not saying I agree with everything Kirk was shown to do, but I’m saying that the writers intended to portray him as following the Prime Directive, at least in spirit, rather than ignoring it. As Keith often points out, the modern view of Kirk as a rule-breaking maverick is a complete misinterpretation of the TOS character, who was written as a man driven by duty and discipline above all else.
But is it unnatural if it’s self imposed? Kirk shows up and decides it’s unnatural in a matter of hours or days? Who is he to judge? Would he have freed the Bynars?
And as far as a growing culture being natural, native North Americans had a very slow technological advancement compared to Europeans. Does that mean that they weren’t growing? The supposedly more advanced Europeans showed up and proceeded to commit genocide and force the natives into adopting more European styles of society. Giving up their religion, their culture and their language because they were considered primitive?
@145/kkozoriz: “Would he have freed the Bynars?” – Nope. The Bynars didn’t try to destroy the Enterprise or kill the crew. That’s always the key factor with Kirk.
I’m not sure where your second paragraph comes from. They don’t try to change “primitive” cultures in TOS. Remember the native North Americans in “The Paradise Syndrome”? Kirk didn’t want to change them, he envied them.
@145/kkozoriz: “And as far as a growing culture being natural, native North Americans had a very slow technological advancement compared to Europeans.”
That is ethnocentric and wrong. Many Native Americans had civilizations comparable in sophistication to anything in Eurasia at the equivalent time. It’s just that the two branches of civilization developed their skills in different directions. Eurasians were better at metalworking, animal domestication, and wheeled vehicles, for instance, while Americans were enormously better at agriculture, plant domestication, and anything involving organic materials. At the time of the first English settlement of North America, the native longbows had greater range and accuracy than the European firearms. They weren’t inferior, just different. And nearly 2/3 of all edible crops in use around the world today were domesticated or bred into existence by Native Americans, because their agriculture was more advanced than anyone else’s. Modern science still hasn’t figured out how they created maize (corn) out of its inedible forebears. And we’re only just starting to rediscover the ecological benefits of terra preta, the highly fertile artificial soil used by Amazonian communities for many centuries, as a better alternative to “modern” slash-and-burn agriculture.
And yes, agriculture is technology. That word doesn’t mean machines, it means, in the words of my college sociology textbook, “information about how to use the material resources of the environment to satisfy human needs.” (Lenski & Lenski, Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, Fifth Edition (McGraw-Hill, 1987), p. 42.)
The reason we think of Native American societies as “primitive,” aside from general ethnocentricity, is that most of the indigenous populations had already been wiped out by European diseases spread along Native American trade networks well before actual European settlers got to their territories. So the survivors had had to abandon their large communities, developed lands had gone wild, and great amounts of cultural knowledge had been lost. They didn’t develop more slowly than us, we just destroyed most of what they’d made before we even learned it had existed.
Aside from that, I agree with you that it’s Eurocentric to assume that a culture that isn’t growing at the same rate as ours is unhealthily stagnated. However, cultures that Europeans have stereotyped as “stagnant,” like Imperial China, have in fact still had a good deal of cultural dynamism in their own ways, growing and innovating in culture and creativity if not to a great degree in technology. They’re stable because they’re healthy the way they are and just don’t have an incentive for radical change, just more incremental development and refinement. I hardly think that’s comparable to the enforced, perpetual cultural paralysis imposed by Landru and Vaal.
Anyway, once again, my point is not to defend the morality of Kirk’s actions, merely to correct the misapprehension that the writers of the show intended him to be violating the Prime Directive. Right or wrong, his actions were intended to represent the upholding of the Prime Directive as TOS’s writers defined it. He was not a rule-breaking renegade, but a disciplined, dutiful officer. If he was flexible in his application of the rules, that was his prerogative as the sole Federation authority on the scene. Interpreting how best to apply the laws was part of his responsibility as a starship captain, not an abrogation of it. That’s another thing we misinterpret because we filter our perceptions through the assumptions of the TNG era, when interstellar communications were far easier and Picard could easily call up Starfleet Command to tell him what to do. (And yet, in practice, Picard was every bit as prone to be flexible in interpreting the Directive as Kirk was.)
The point I was making was that the Europeans saw the First Nations of the new world as backwards and primitive and set out to “civilize” them. And Kirk, just like his European ancestors, decides what is the “proper” way for a civilization to develop. The whole bit about “a living, growing culture” is pretty much the same justification that was used to take the culture and language from native tribes. And while the native longbows may have been superior in some ways, massed muskets and cannon fire goes a long way to tilting the odds back in the Europeans favour.
Europeans also saw natives as primitive because they weren’t building their buildings out of stone. That they, in some cases, we living a nomadic life. No “advanced” schooling, commerce or religion. No universities, banks or cathedrals. Note that I’m speaking primarily of North American native cultures. There were Central and South American civilizations that had large buildings made of stone but that’s a different but similar/related story.
What criteria does Kirk use to determine if a culture is living or growing? And how long does it take for him to make this determination? Days at most, sometimes even just hours. He walks in, does a quick look and determines that now is the time to totally upend a culture that has been in place for centuries. Sure, he has the power to do so but what are his qualifications? Spock would usually raise some weak defense about the PD but Kirk waves him off and does what he thinks is best for the natives, whether the natives agree with him or not.
Your comments about how “Many Native Americans had civilizations comparable in sophistication to anything in Eurasia at the equivalent time. It’s just that the two branches of civilization developed their skills in different directions. Eurasians were better at metalworking, animal domestication, and wheeled vehicles, for instance, while Americans were enormously better at agriculture, plant domestication, and anything involving organic materials.” just proves my point. The Europeans didn’t see things that way. They saw the natives of North America as savages who needed to be tamed or exterminated. And while many died from smallpox and other assorted diseases, many also died at the hands of the Europeans. Or are you trying to say that the Europeans saw and admired the ares where the natives were equal or more “advanced” to their own cultures? Without the large cities like London, Paris or Rome to support, native agriculture operated on a much smaller scale. What would be called farming, the Europeans saw as something closer to gardening.
It comes down to “who has the right to determine what is the best way for a culture to develop?” And the answer in the vast majority of cases is “The people of that culture”. But when, what David Gerrold calls the Cosmic Mary Worths” come calling, you can bet that their own interpretations of what’s right will be what they fall back on.
@148/kkozoriz: “It comes down to “who has the right to determine what is the right way for a culture to develop?” And the answer in the vast majority of cases is “The people of that culture”.”
That’s true. Of course, the problem in “The Return of the Archons” and “The Apple” is that the people can’t determine anything because their thoughts and actions are machine-controlled. That’s an interesting moral dilemma for helpful outsiders.
I’m basically okay with Kirk’s actions in “The Return of the Archons”. There is a resistance movement on the planet, and these people save Kirk and Spock first. So you could argue that the people on the planet (the ones that can still think) want the same thing as Kirk, they just don’t have the means to achieve it. Kirk only decides that “Landru must die” after Landru has attacked the Enterprise, imprisoned them and absorbed McCoy. At that point, Kirk doesn’t have the luxury of sitting back and examining the culture for a couple of weeks or years, he has to resolve the situation somehow. And he kills Landru by outarguing him, so Landru has at least a fighting chance.
None of that is true of “The Apple”. That’s just a stupid, badly written, awful episode. If I could remove three episodes from TOS, it would be “Wolf in the Fold”, “The Omega Glory”, and “The Apple”.
@149/Jana: My first vote for removal would be “The Alternative Factor.” It’s a totally incoherent, stupid episode, and it portrays antimatter in a way that contradicts what “The Naked Time” had already established and what every other Trek episode and movie since has been consistent with (that is, as the power source for starships, rather than something that would destroy the entire universe). Arguably it’s been implicitly ignored for decades anyway. It did contain the first use of the word “dilithium” (rather than “lithium” as in “Mudd’s Women”), but that’s the only thing from the episode that’s ever been referenced again onscreen, and it’s probably the one TOS episode that’s been least often referenced or followed up on in tie-ins. Aside from a couple of works borrowing the Charlene Masters character, the only direct followup to it I’m aware of is one short story in the Strange New Worlds anthology series.
@150/Christopher: Ah, then we have different criteria for exclusion. I want to get rid of the episodes that I find ideologically appalling, you of the one that’s incoherent and introduces major contradictions.
I wouldn’t want to lose the Charlene Masters character. She’s the only female engineer in all of TOS. Of course, Uhura has been portrayed as having a technical mind too, but that isn’t the same thing.
“[…] it’s probably the one TOS episode that’s been least often referenced or followed up on in tie-ins.”
I haven’t read all the tie-ins, but now I’m curious. Have really all the other episodes been referenced or followed up on? “The Man Trap”, “Catspaw”, “The Changeling”, “Spock’s Brain”, “And the Children Shall Lead”, “Plato’s Stepchildren”, “Wink of an Eye”? And as far as I know, “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “By Any Other Name” have only been followed up on in Strange New Worlds stories either. (The “Gamesters of Triskelion” story is great. It actually made me like the episode more.)
“The Man Trap”: McCoy’s relationship with Nancy is briefly covered in TOS: A Choice of Catastrophes by Steve Mollmann and Michael Schuster. The salt vampires have a cameo in my own DTI: The Collectors.
“Catspaw”: Briefly referenced in Greg Cox’s Assignment: Eternity. Pyris VII (misspelled as “Pyrix”) was mentioned on the galaxy map seen in multiple TNG episodes, but was illegibly small. (Honestly, I thought there’d be more references to this one.)
“The Changeling”: Oh, quite a bit. The Malurians appeared in ENT: “Civilization” and have been recurring players in my Rise of the Federation novels. “See No Evil” by Jill Sherwin in Star Trek: Constellations and “Communications Breakdown” by Christine Boylan & Bettina Kurkoski in Star Trek: The Manga — Kakan ni Shinkou both deal with Uhura’s recovery from Nomad’s memory wipe, with the latter story covering the aftermath of the Malurians’ extermination as well. Jackson Roykirk appears in The Eugenics Wars by Greg Cox and is mentioned in the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Nomad probes are mentioned in TOS: Prime Directive by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and Travis had a model of Nomad’s original configuration in his quarters on ENT. Lt. Singh has appeared in several TOS novels, including A Choice of Catastrophes, The Janus Gate: Present Tense by L.A. Graf, and Crossroad by Barbara Hambly.
“Spock’s Brain”: I briefly alluded to its events in my first novel, Ex Machina. Peter David’s New Frontier: Martyr has Admiral Jellico mentioning it as one of several of Kirk’s reports that he believes had to be fabricated because they were just so absurd.
“And the Children Shall Lead”: Gorgan appeared in Greg Cox’s The Q Continuum trilogy.
“Plato’s Stepchildren”: I mentioned in Orion’s Hounds that Alexander had become a Federation ambassador. I’ve long wanted to feature him in a novel, but have never found the opportunity. Greg Cox alluded to the episode’s events in The Rings of Time. Kironide is mentioned in the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual.
“Wink of an Eye”: In The Buried Age, I had Picard think of a hyperactive child as akin to “a Jacinnan racing cat on Scalos water.” Crucible: The Fire and the Rose by David R. George III mentions Starfleet working in the 2290s to relocate the Scalosians to another world, although I’m not sure that works, since the episode suggested there were only a handful left and they would’ve aged to extinction within weeks or months, most likely.
Come to think of it, I believe the Crucible trilogy made a point of mentioning every TOS and TAS episode at least once.
“Gamesters”: John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection mentions the Klingons selling slaves to Triskelion to supply their games. Vulcan’s Soul: Exiles by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz has the proto-Romulan exodus fleet from Vulcan running afoul of the Providers. Excelsior: Forged in Fire by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels mentions Spock meeting the new diplomatic representative from Triskelion, namely Shahna. The Triskelion logo appears on several cargo crates in DS9, implying trade with that planet is ongoing. Heather Jarman’s DS9: Mission: Gamma — This Gray Spirit mentions a beverage called a Triskelion Tidal Wave.
As for “By Any Other Name,” Worf said in DS9: “Time’s Orphan” that he had battled Kelvans twice his size — another story I’ve always wanted but never found the opportunity to tell. The Kelvans reappeared in SCE: Foundations Book Three by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, working with Scotty to adapt their engine upgrades for Starfleet in the pre-TMP period. A rather different version of the Kelvans was portrayed in Michael Jan Friedman’s TNG: The Valiant (showing how young Picard got command of the Stargazer). I never really cared for that version, since Mike portrayed the Kelvans as ordinary shapeshifters much like Changelings, whereas I’d always interpreted the episode to say that their transformation into human form was technological in nature (perhaps the same tech they used to change the crew into cuboctahedra) rather than innate. They spoke of being trapped in human form, suggesting they couldn’t casually change forms at will.
@152/Christopher: Great list, thank you!
I would love to read a novel about Alexander. He’s such a likeable character, I loved that they took him away with them, and I can see him thrive in his new life.
Not my favorite movie. I think it has a lot of good ideas and moments, but also a lot of stuff that doesn’t work for me. Mainly, I find it all a bit slow and dragged out. I don’t love Kruge, or his somewhat dimwitted crew, as a representation of the Klingon race, but I do sorta like his character, and I basically chalk up his actions to him being a psychotic madman. He seems more like the sociopathic leader of an outlaw band in the wild west, rather than an honorable warrior. So while I do find him an entertaining villain, I’m sure many Klingons would find his actions to be shameful and without honor. I also wanted to mention I like the idea of the katra. I always prefer when Star Trek is open and inclusive of different ideas and beliefs, including in regards to concepts such as the soul or spirit. There are so many examples of miraculous and inexplicable occurrences and beings in the Star Trek universe, that I think its disingenuous for anyone to be close-minded about such things in the context of Star Trek.
@42/Christopher: I like the BoP design from the film. I don’t think its ugly at all, but I do think it looks a lot nicer in cruise-mode with the wings up. I don’t know if there is any official fluff, but in the Klingon Academy manual, it mentions that the presence of the Nacelles stresses the hull integrity, and so that’s why most designs keep them away on pylons or wings. It goes on to say that when the nacelles are mounted directly onto the hull, then the hull must be reinforced to compensate for the additional stress.
@several: I always thought of the Space Dock as being part of Starfleet Headquarters. I kinda thought the HQ was split between the surface and the station out in orbit. And so the interior docking was more for convenience, rather than as the main dockyard or repair center.
In closing, there’s a lot I like about TSFS, but overall it doesn’t gel for me. And for some reason it feels low-budget to me in a way the first two movies didn’t.
@154/dakota_mike: This film was when “Klingon honour” was first introduced (“You will be remembered with honour”), so I guess you could see Kruge as a proto-honourable warrior.
I agree that it feels low-budget. As I said in comment #12, at times it’s positively trashy. I still like it better than the first two films because there, I didn’t quite recognise the characters, and I also found them both too self-important.
@155/JanaJansen: Other than when Kruge mentions the word honor, I’m not sure that I would associate it with anything else that he does. But maybe I missed something.
That is interesting that you like this movie better than I or II. One thing I love about Star Trek is how varied its fans and their opinions are. One person’s favorite movie or episode, is another’s least favorite. A big part of the strength of the brand I think, is its ability to appeal to so many different people, for different reasons. That’s something that can easily be seen just in these comments alone. The diversity of thought is nice, there’s rarely a consensus about anything Star Trek related!
@156/dakota_mike: “Other than when Kruge mentions the word honor, I’m not sure that I would associate it with anything else that he does.”
I agree. What I meant is that this is the first time the word has even been mentioned in relation with Klingons, sort of the first tiny speck of Klingon honour.
“One thing I love about Star Trek is how varied its fans and their opinions are. One person’s favorite movie or episode, is another’s least favorite. A big part of the strength of the brand I think, is its ability to appeal to so many different people, for different reasons. That’s something that can easily be seen just in these comments alone. The diversity of thought is nice, there’s rarely a consensus about anything Star Trek related! “
And I fully agree with that! I wonder if they will be able to maintain this strength in the future, though. I think it’s more difficult to do in serialised TV. For example, I was so angry at the Discovery writers for discarding the one hundred years of peace mentioned in TAS and TWOK, and many other viewers weren’t bothered by that at all. It seems that they now try to maintain some variety by creating different TV shows. Perhaps it’ll work.
Almost certainly this was done so the producers wouldn’t have to pay Bibi Besch for the use of her image in the Genesis footage. It’s ridiculous since when would Kirk have time to record it and why would he when a perfectly good presentation already exists? And it comes off as penny-pinching by the producers. But there you go.
Cee: agreed. As I said in comment 89, it should’ve been David narrating this.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
IMO, the Prime Directive in TOS is a plot device to create dramatic tension. Asimov created ( at J.W. Campbell’s suggestion) the Three Laws of Robotics for the same reason.
This movie is certainly not without it’s flaws, but it has some absolutely great Trek moments & some wonderful comedic scenes as well. I will say that, at the time, I was not enamored with the casting choice of Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon. That voice of his was so embedded in my mind as Reverend Jim from the series “Taxi”, it made it difficult for me to take him seriously. The passage of time, however, has allowed me to appreciate his performance & what he brought to the development of Klingons in the franchise. Mark Lenard, as usual, is just perfect as Sarek–so glad they continued to use him over the years.
I remember seeing the original Trek III poster at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood with that absolutely weird cut-glass relief of Spock’s face floating in space–I’m not sure what they were going for with that, but it didn’t bode well.
I do remember sitting in the Mann’s Chinese Theater and seeing the 70mm trailer for Trek III and that shot of the Enterprise flying through space on fire with the line, “Join us, on this, the last voyage of the USS Enterprise,” had the audience practically screaming with a combination of shock, disbelief & excitement! I would have bought a ticket anyway, but after seeing that, I just HAD to see this movie. :)
I always thought this one was pretty forgettable.
The good stuff: The music, the Bird of Prey, destruction of the Enterprise.
The bad stuff: It completely undoes Wrath of Khan. It makes Spock’s death kind of pointless but also ruins the ending where Kirk is content. At the beginning of this movie, he is suddenly depressed. Yeah I guess they had to bring back Spock somehow though. Not sure how they could’ve done it without ruining WoK. Robin Curtis’ Saavik is also really boring. I just like Kirstie Alley better.
The fistfight between Kirk and Kruge is also silly. The previous movie is about how Kirk is aging and now he’s fighting a member of a warrior race and I think he does a backflip at one point.
The rest of the story is fine. Kirk’s reaction to David’s death was nice. I liked Star Trek V more than this. Final Frontier is about something new: going to the center of the galaxy and finding God, despite how silly those things are. This one was about hitting the reset button: Spock comes back and the Genesis device goes away. I guess the Enterprise does get destroyed but they bring it back at the end of the next one.
@162/Tommy Tutone: “It […] ruins the ending where Kirk is content. At the beginning of this movie, he is suddenly depressed.”
This makes perfect sense to me. If you lose someone important, you can be happy or content for brief periods of time, but these will alter with periods where you are “depressed” for a long time to come. The ending of TWOK shows that Kirk still has the capacity to feel happiness; the beginning of this film shows that he’s still mourning. They complement each other.
“The previous movie is about how Kirk is aging and now he’s fighting a member of a warrior race and I think he does a backflip at one point.”
That isn’t a contradiction either. Aging people can still be physically active, and fifty isn’t so very old. You notice that you’re no longer twenty; then you notice that you are not yet old, either. As for the “warrior race”, from what I remember, Klingons in TOS weren’t portrayed as tougher or stronger than humans. Vulcans, on the other hand…
The most notable aspects of this film to me are undoing Spock’s death (one of perhaps two moments that classic Star Trek affected me emotionally and I don’t like having it undone so soon) and surprisingly poor acting from Shatner. Otherwise, it’s an all right movie, much like The Wrath of Khan before it; mostly inoffensive but I’m unlikely to watch it again.
In my opinion, this is the “least bad” (or perhaps the “best”) of the odd-numbered films. I actually had no problem with Spock’s return from the dead, because his sacrifice still cost something — Spock never returned completely to his “old self.” The fact that our Vulcan hero deserved a longer life doesn’t take away from the impact of his sacrifice, in my opinion, and it’s like the Enterprise becomes a hero too — call me weird, she died heroically not just for the 5 heroes on board but also for Spock himself.
On the idea of scotty padding his repair estimates. It makes sense to me, given how often he has gotten things working quicker then he said was possible.
@34 On Genesis not working. I think that’s kind of missing the point. Sure it doesn’t work the way it was intended. It doesn’t create planets. But it DOES destroy them very well. To quote someone far more talented then me “So saying Krug won’t want [Genesis] because it doesn’t work is like saying the military wouldn’t want a new super atomic bomb because it doesn’t leave behind the smell of freshly squeezed lemons.”
Edit: Ninja’d
On various things with the prime directive (not sure how that came up here) I will again leave it to someone much better at these things then me. The linked video is made by SFDebris and hosted by Richard Coveney.
@167/BenW: “On the idea of scotty padding his repair estimates. It makes sense to me, given how often he has gotten things working quicker then he said was possible.”
It doesn’t make any sense to believe that an engineer would deliberately lie about his repair estimates purely to boost his own reputation. That was obviously a joke in the movie; it would be incredibly corrupt and a dereliction of duty if anyone actually did such a thing for real.
Although Lower Decks found an interesting way to rationalize it with the concept of “buffer time” — asserting that padding a repair estimate is meant to give the crew the kind of flexible schedule they need to do their work the most effectively, since there are other, unpredictable things that could need to be taken care of between the main assignments, and just because the personnel need to avoid overworking themselves. So it does serve a practical purpose, rather than just being a lie to falsely inflate one’s reputation for speed.
@170 Personally I prefer the Babylon 5 take on this trope. There was an incident when a commander asked someone in engineering to get something done in less time (let’s s 5 minutes instead of 10, I don’t remember the exact bit, so I am paraphrasing. And the character who was asked this says “If I could get this done in 5 minutes I would have told you it would take five minutes.)
@170 – Not sure Scotty thought it was a joke because he encouraged LaForge to do the exact same thing in Relics,
Besides, I don’t think consequences were really a thing in the TOS era. In just one episode, The Menagerie, Spock falsified orders multiple times, assaulted Starfleet officers, illegally accessed the Starbase computers, kidnapped Pike, stole the Enterprise and refused to return control once Kirk caught up with him. Didn’t suffer a single consequence. Makes padding your repair estimates seem like small potatoes.
I’d forgotten how much Robin Curtis reminds me of Annabeth Gish.
The haunting scene of McCoy sitting in the dark in Spock’s quarters is among the most memorable in cinematic history for me. It’s beautifully staged. And DeForest Kelley is superb in this film with everything he’s asked to play.
I feel like something that’s forgotten in short-handing this movie is that it’s not just about the old bridge crew taking a gamble on getting their friend and comrade back. They’re fulfilling Spock’s father’s wishes and, implicitly at least given the sharing of his katra with McCoy, Spock’s own wishes, in accordance with Vulcan ways — entirely separate from Spock’s potential return in physical form. Plus, McCoy can’t go on like that, so they’re acting to essentially save his life as well.
Retrieving Spock’s body adds a major wrinkle, of course, and it’s possible that in fairly short order Kirk could’ve had an easier time simply bringing McCoy directly to Vulcan. It bugs me that Morrow’s dismissiveness towards Vulcan culture is both distasteful in-story and unlikely given two hundred years of Terran/Vulcan collaboration even accounting for how private Vulcans tend to be about certain affairs.
I’ve only ever seen it the one time back in 1984 on one of the local independent stations, but there was a TV special featuring Leonard Nimoy that aired shortly before the release of The Search for Spock. Memory Alpha says that it in certain markets it was added to the original series’ syndicated package.
Sure, this film only exists to clean up the mess left by the last film in the most predictable way possible, but I still think it’s better than The Wrath of Khan, because while both movies aren’t very intelligent (in The Wrath of Khan’s case, that’s putting it mildly), this one is still a good time, and if I can’t have a movie as beautiful and thought-provoking as The Motion Picture, I at least want to have a good time. Of course, this is the beginning of a trend that would continue into the next film, which is nothing but a good time, and then Star Trek V, which is at its worst when it’s trying to present itself as a good time.
A quick heads-up for UK readers: this is now on re-release in British cinemas to mark its 40th anniversary. (Seems to be pretty widely available: Vue and Cineworld chains at least, maybe others. My two nearest Vues have screenings on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday.)
Just before Spock goes through pon Farr, Saavik is awakened by… Somebody… tearing down a tree. It’s implied that Spock is the one to do it in his frenzy, but you can clearly see a Klingon uniform doing the deed. But the Klingons are still some distance away…
Looking at the script, it appears that the opening shots of Saavik being awakened by the tree falling were moved up from a later scene where she and Spock were in Klingon captivity.
http://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/scripts/tsfs.txt
The pon farr scene is 156 in the script, while the tree falling is from scene 215-16:
The death RUMBLINGS of the planet begin to INCREASE with each moment. The sky beyond occasionally lights with awesome flashes of electrical energy; the ground shakes in unpredictable spurts. Suddenly, a tree vaults upward, as if pushed from its place by a force below. The TREE GROANS AN CRASHES toward the ground, the Klingons leaping out of its way.They probably figured the shot of the Klingon went by too fast to see. I didn’t notice it until I freeze-framed the DVD.