Star Trek Generations
Written by Rick Berman and Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Carson
Release date: November 18, 1994
Stardate: 48632.4
Captain’s log. A bottle floats through space and breaks on the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-B. Joining Captain John Harriman on her maiden voyage is a gaggle of press, as well as Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov. The trio look around and talk to the helm officer, Ensign Demora Sulu, Hikaru Sulu’s daughter.
After Kirk gives the order to leave Spacedock—which he only does reluctantly, and only after Harriman insists—they set course for a trip around the solar system. However, they pick up a distress call. Two ships are stuck in an energy ribbon and are about to be destroyed. Harriman tries to fob it off on another ship in range—but there is no other ship in range, so Harriman reluctantly sets course. Throughout all this, Kirk is practically jumping out of his skin.
When they arrive, they can’t get close enough to transport without getting sucked into the ribbon. The ship’s tractor beam and photon torpedoes won’t be installed until Tuesday, and the medical staff doesn’t report until then, either, which is why Harriman was reluctant to enact a rescue. They manage to beam 47 of the 300 people on the two ships away before they’re destroyed—and then the Enterprise itself is being torn apart by the gravimetric forces of the ribbon.
Since there’s no medical staff, Chekov and a couple of reporters take care of the refugees, one of whom, Soran, is beside himself wanting to go back for some reason. Another we recognize as Guinan.
Scotty thinks that an antimatter blast will disrupt the gravimetric field, but without photon torpedoes, that’s hard to manage. The deflector can be gimmicked to simulate a torpedo, though. Harriman is about to do it, leaving Kirk in charge. Kirk eagerly sits in the center seat at first, then thinks better of it, telling Harriman that his place is on the bridge of his ship.
Kirk goes to deck 15 to do what needs doing. Demora activates the deflector when he’s done, and they break free, but a backwash from the ribbon hits decks 13-15, including the section where Kirk was. Scotty, Chekov, and Harriman go down to find the hull breached, and no sign of Kirk.
Seventy-eight years later, a promotion celebration is held on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D, with a sailing ship—also called Enterprise—re-created and the crew in 18th-century sailing outfits. Worf is treated as a prisoner, the charges against him being performing above and beyond the call of duty and earning their respect. Picard then promotes him to lieutenant commander, “And may God have mercy on your soul.”
Worf then has to walk the plank and snatch the tricorn hat from a bit of rigging. Riker then “accidentally” removes the plank rather than retract it, and Worf falls into the water. Data doesn’t get the humor of the situation and asks Crusher to explain it. Her explanation inspires him to push Crusher into the water, which everyone in the audience thinks is hilarious, but nobody on the ship does for reasons the script never adequately explains.
The festivities are interrupted twice, first by Picard receiving a personal message that his brother and nephew have died in a fire, then a distress call from the Amargosa Observatory that they’re under attack. Everyone leaves the holodeck and the Enterprise-D goes to red alert.
When they arrive, there are no ships in the area and the observatory is in bad shape. Only five of the nineteen crew members assigned to the observatory have survived. Riker takes an away team over with Worf, Crusher, and a security detail. One of the people they rescue is Soran. They find two Romulan corpses as well, which indicates that they were the ones who attacked.
On the Enterprise, Data views his difficulty with humor as a reason to finally install the emotion chip that Dr. Soong made for him and that Lore stole. (Never mind that the difficulty was with everyone else, as what he did was funny! It was even the same kind of funny as what Riker did to Worf!) Meanwhile, Soran goes to Picard and insists that he return to the observatory to complete an experiment, but Picard won’t let him until the investigation is complete. Soran then says some crazy-ass things that would do absolutely nothing to convince anyone to let him do what he wants, which makes you wonder why he said it. He also avoids Guinan’s gaze for fear of being recognized.
Worf’s investigation reveals that the Romulans were looking for information on trilithium, even though that wasn’t part of the observatory’s remit. La Forge and Data beam over to try to find traces of trilithium, and they don’t find any, though Data does finally get a joke La Forge told seven years earlier. However, they do find a hidden door that Data gets open, revealing a hidden lab. Before they can investigate, Data is overwhelmed by his emotion chip—then Soran inexplicably shows up and ambushes La Forge and threatens Data so that now he’s overwhelmed with fear.
On the Enterprise, Troi checks up on Picard, who finally reveals that Robert and René died in a fire. He laments the end of the Picard line—because, apparently he’s sterile? I dunno. Anyhow, they’re interrupted by the sun imploding. A shockwave is going to destroy the observatory, and La Forge and Data are still on it. Riker and Worf try to enact a rescue but Soran fires on them, then beams to a Klingon ship that has just decloaked, along with La Forge. Data is cringing in fear, but he, Riker, and Worf beam back before the shockwave hits.
Soran is in league with Lursa and B’Etor, who are still trying to put themselves in position to rule the Klingon Empire. They stole the trilithium from the Romulans for Soran, which is why they attacked the observatory. He wants to figure out a way to destroy suns for his own reasons, and the Duras sisters are aiding him so they will have a powerful weapon.
Crusher has found Soran’s Wikipedia entry and discovers his connection to Guinan. According to Guinan, the ribbon isn’t just a spatial phenomenon, it’s a gateway to a place called the Nexus, a place of total joy. Soran has been trying to get back there, but Guinan has no idea how destroying suns would further that goal.
Picard and Data work through the problem, and they realize that he’s destroying suns in order to affect gravitational fields in the vicinity, which will change the ribbon’s course so that it will hit a planet. Soran plans to be on that planet—Veridian III—in order to reenter the Nexus. He’ll destroy Veridian’s sun, which will send the ribbon to the planet. Unfortunately, that will shortly thereafter destroy all the planets in the Veridian system, including the fourth planet, which has more than two hundred million people on it.
Soran has modified La Forge’s VISOR, and then gives Lursa and B’Etor the secret to the sun-killer before beaming down to Veridian III. Picard negotiates with Lursa and B’Etor to return La Forge in exchange for Picard himself as a prisoner—but only after he beams down to talk to Soran. They agree, mainly because they put a camera on the VISOR. Through La Forge, they’re able to find out the ship’s shield frequency and fire their torpedoes through the shields. Data, Worf, and Riker manage to figure out a way to remotely engage their cloaking device, which lowers their shields long enough for Worf to fire a torpedo, which destroys them, but not until after the Klingons have pounded the shit out of the defenseless Enterprise.
Picard’s attempts to talk Soran out of his destructive course fail, and Picard can’t get through the force field Soran has protecting himself. However, Picard does find a way under it, which he crawls under once Soran isn’t looking.
Meanwhile, the Enterprise took too much damage. The warp core loses containment. Riker evacuates everyone from the drive section into the saucer and they separate, but they can’t get far enough away from the drive section before the breach. The saucer is damaged in the explosion and crash lands on Veridian III.
Soran and Picard get into a fistfight on a catwalk. Soran wins and then the probe launches, destroying the sun and sending the ribbon to Veridian III. Both Soran and Picard are swallowed up by the ribbon and sent to the Nexus.
Seconds later, Veridian III and the Enterprise saucer are destroyed.
Picard finds himself in a beautiful Victorian house in the midst of a Christmas celebration with his wife and many children, nieces, and nephews—including René, alive again.
However, the twinkle of the ornaments reminds him of a sun going nova, and he knows this isn’t real. He encounters Guinan, dressed as she was when the Enterprise-B rescued her—in truth, it’s an echo of her from when she was in the Nexus. While he is reluctant to leave his newly discovered family, his sense of duty takes over and he insists he has to go back so he can confront Soran again.
Guinan can’t go back with him—she’s not really there—but there’s someone else who is there: Kirk.
Picard finds him chopping wood outside a rustic cabin in the middle of the mountains. Kirk is confused, as he sold the cabin years ago. To his surprise, his ex Antonia is there, and his dog Butler is there as well, even though he died seven years earlier.
Kirk finally realizes that he’s returned to the day he told Antonia he was going back to Starfleet. Picard tries to convince him to return to Veridian III with him. Kirk, though, has been informed that history believes him to be dead, and who is he to argue with history?
He goes to bring Antonia her breakfast, but instead of telling her he’s going back to Starfleet, he’s going to tell her that he’s going to stay with her—
—except that doesn’t work. Instead, they both wind up at Kirk’s uncle’s stables, which is the day he met Antonia. He rides off to do so, and Picard follows on another horse. Kirk makes a jump with the horse that he made dozens of times, and it always scared him—but this time it doesn’t, because it isn’t real.
Kirk decides to join Picard. They come out of the Nexus. The Enterprise crashes again. Soran goes to the catwalk again.
And this time he’s confronted by both Picard and Kirk. Soran manages to get away, and they give chase. Fisticuffs ensue, and Soran manages to cloak the launcher—but then he drops the controller. Kirk runs to the catwalk that the controller fell on, and Soran shoots it. Picard helps Kirk get off the catwalk safely, then they split up. Kirk goes for the controller while Picard goes for the launcher. Kirk manages to snag the controller and decloak the launcher, enabling Picard to clamp the launcher in place. When Soran chases him away from the launchpad, he runs to it only to be blown up when the launch sequence completes and the thing can’t fire.
Picard goes to where Kirk has been crushed by the fallen catwalk. Picard assures him that he helped save the day. Kirk says it was fun and then dies. Picard buries him, then is rescued by a Starfleet shuttlecraft.
Casualties were light in the crash, but the Enterprise isn’t salvageable. Three Starfleet ships rescue the crew and they head back home.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Even though they had to evacuate the ship once to get rid of trilithium resin, Riker and Worf talk like trilithium is a new thing. It will be seen as an explosive moving forward, and I guess it’s 50% more lithium-y than dilithium…
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty, of course, manages to beam some of the El-Aurian refugees away despite the temporal interference, and also comes up with a way to get the Enterprise-B away from the ribbon. He also takes great joy in tweaking Kirk.
It’s a Russian invention. After (re)introducing Kirk to Demora, Chekov insists that he was never that young. Kirk puts a friendly hand on his shoulder and says that he was younger.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu apparently had time for a family. This rather shocks Kirk.
Thank you, Counselor Obvious. Troi notices that Picard has had an emotional whammy as soon as he gets the e-mail that his brother and nephew are dead, but it takes her a bit to get him to actually open up about it.
If I only had a brain… Data implants his emotion chip. It doesn’t go so hot.
There is no honor in being pummeled. Worf gets a long-overdue promotion to lieutenant commander, a rank he’ll keep through the remaining films as well as his tenure on DS9. In honor of this, he finally gets a chair at tactical.
Syntheholics anonymous. Guinan spent some time in the Nexus after she was rescued following the Borg attack on her homeworld. She helps navigate Picard through it.
In the driver’s seat. Two different officers are seen at conn, but when the ship is crashing, Troi winds up taking the helm. Many imbeciles have used this as an excuse to ding Troi—ha ha, the counselor flew the ship and it crashed—but it was gonna crash no matter what. While she was flying it, the ship landed somewhat safely with what Picard described in his log entry at the end as minimal casualties. That’s actually good piloting.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Picard goes on at some length to Troi about how the Picard line ends with him. No news on when Picard got the vasectomy…
Channel open. “Just imagine what it was like—no engines, no computers, just the wind and the sea and the stars to guide you.”
“Bad food. Brutal discipline. No women.”
Picard being romantic about sailing ships, with Riker being a bit more realistic.
Welcome aboard. Back for more are William Shatner, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig, starring alongside Sir Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Patti Yasutake, and an uncredited Whoopi Goldberg, the latter nine reprising their roles from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Alan Ruck—probably best known as Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, though his resumé is far more extensive—plays Harrisman while Jacqueline Kim—probably best known as Lao Ma on Xena: Warrior Princess—plays Demora. The rest of Harriman’s crew is played by Jenette Goldstein—probably best known as Vazquez in Aliens—and Trek veterans Tim Russ (Tuvok on Voyager, as well as guest roles on TNG‘s “Starship Mine” and DS9‘s “Invasive Procedures“), Thomas Kopache (TNG‘s “The Next Phase” and “Emergence,” DS9‘s “Ties of Blood and Water” and “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night,” Voyager‘s “The Thaw,” and Enterprise‘s “Broken Bow” and “Harbinger”), and Glenn Morshower (TNG‘s “Peak Performance” and “Starship Mine,” Voyager‘s “Resistance,” and Enterprise‘s “North Star”). In addition, one of the journalists is played by John Putch, who played two different Benzites in TNG‘s “Coming of Age” and “A Matter of Honor.”
Barbara March and Gwynyth Walsh make their final appearances as Lursa and B’Etor, following TNG‘s “Redemption,” “Redemption II,” and “Firstborn” and DS9‘s “Past Prologue.” Brian Thompson plays their helm officer; he appeared as various other aliens (including another Klingon) in TNG‘s “A Matter of Honor,” DS9‘s “Rules of Acquisition” and “To the Death,” and Enterprise‘s “Babel One”/”United”/”The Aenar” three-parter.
And finally, Malcolm McDowell plays Soran, the man who killed Captain Kirk. Lucky him.
Trivial matters: Famously, this movie went through a major reshoot of the ending when test audiences very much disliked the way Kirk died. It was re-shot at the last minute. The original ending can be found in J.M. Dillard’s novelization, which had already gone to press when the re-shoots were done. Dillard’s novel also included additional prologue material with Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov, as well as appearances by Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura. The movie also had a YA novelization by John Vornholt and a comics adaptation by Michael Jan Friedman & Gordon Purcell.
The prologue of this movie takes place about a year or so after The Undiscovered Country. As promised at the end of the previous film, the Enterprise-A was decommissioned, and this is the launch of the Enterprise-B. The main body of the film takes place about a year after “All Good Things…,” the final episode of TNG.
We finally get the missing Enterprise, as it were. “Encounter at Farpoint” established Picard’s ship as the Enterprise-D, with The Voyage Home having set that precedent with the Enterprise-A. The Enterprise-C was seen in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” and we at last get the Enterprise-B here. The Enterprise-E will be established in First Contact.
This is the final appearance of William Shatner, Walter Koenig, and James Doohan as Kirk, Chekov, and Scotty, though Scotty’s next chronological appearance is in TNG‘s “Relics,” which aired in 1992. The characters will next appear in the 2009 Star Trek, played respectively by Chris Pine, Anton Yelchin, and Simon Pegg.
When Scotty is rescued from the Jenolen by the Enterprise-D in “Relics,” he posits that Kirk himself rescued him, which is at odds with Scotty being present for Kirk’s “death” here. Ronald D. Moore has said in interviews that it wasn’t worth trying to reconcile them, and he’s right.
When TNG wrapped, the studio always intended to bring these characters to the screen, with The Undiscovered Country having been the final outing for the original crew (at least in this timeline). Rick Berman wanted to do a passing of the baton, as it were, from the original series, and commissioned story pitches from several TNG past and present staffers—former show-runner Maurice Hurley, current show-runner Michael Piller, and current staffers Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga. Piller declined and the studio preferred Moore & Braga’s notion over Hurley’s.
Earlier drafts of the script called for the entire original crew, and later it was simplified to three, originally intended to be Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, with Kirk later interacting with the TNG crew. Both Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley declined, so instead they got James Doohan and Walter Koenig, with Spock’s lines given to Doohan’s Scotty and McCoy’s to Koenig’s Chekov.
The studio’s first choice for director was Nimoy, but he declined to direct a Trek movie he had no say in the story of. Instead, they turned to veteran Trek TV director David Carson.
Internal dating on the movies themselves indicate that there’s roughly a decade of time between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. (The former was two-and-a-half years after the end of the five-year mission, the latter fifteen years after “Space Seed,” which was early in the 5YM.) This movie establishes that, for part of that time, Kirk retired and lived with a woman named Antonia. She’s seen in the distance, and played by stuntwoman Lynn Salvatori. In her honor, the character was given the last name of Salvatori when she was seen in tie-in fiction, particularly the Crucible trilogy by David R. George III. She’s also referenced in Christopher L. Bennett’s The Darkness Drops Again (part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries) and Dayton Ward’s Elusive Salvation.
The backstory for Demora was provided in Peter David’s novel The Captain’s Daughter, which also did a certain amount to redeem the character of Harriman. Harriman, Demora, and the Enterprise-B were further seen in David’s short story “Shakedown” in Enterprise Logs, David R. George III’s Lost Era novels Serpent Among the Ruins and One Constant Star and his short story “Iron and Sacrifice” in Tales from the Captain’s Table, Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin’s novel Forged in Fire, and in the comic books Alien Spotlight: Klingons by your humble rewatcher and JK Woodward, Captain’s Log: Harriman by Marc Guggenheim & Andrew Currie, and Spock: Reflections by Scott & David Tipton, David Messina, & Federica Manfredi. Demora will next be seen as a child in Star Trek Beyond.
Several works of tie-in fiction deal with the fallout from Kirk’s apparent death in the prologue, among them the novels Vulcan’s Forge by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz, The Ashes of Eden and The Return by William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Engines of Destiny by Gene DeWeese, and the aforementioned The Captain’s Daughter, the novella Its Hour Come Round by Margaret Wander Bonanno (part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries), the aforementioned Crucible trilogy, and the aforementioned comic book Captain’s Log: Harriman.
Up until this film, TNG and DS9 were filmed as if starbase personnel wore the turtleneck uniforms seen in DS9 while starship and headquarters personnel wore the TNG uniforms (as evidenced by Sisko switching to a TNG uniform when he was assigned to Earth in “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost“). However, Starfleet personnel in this movie wore the TNG and DS9 uniforms interchangeably, and Voyager would have everyone assigned to that ship wearing the DS9 uniforms. So not confusing at all.
Neither Jeremy Kemp nor David Tristan Birkin, who played Robert and René Picard in “Family,” were used for the photographs Picard looks at. Instead, uncredited actors played the two roles.
The El-Aurian refugees found by the Enterprise-B are fleeing a Borg attack on their homeworld, which was previously referenced by Guinan in “Q Who.”
Data’s emotion chip first appeared in “Brothers,” and Data acquired it in the “Descent” two-parter. Despite this movie establishing that the chip is permanently fused to his neural net and unable to be switched off, he will switch it off in First Contact and remove it in Insurrection. It isn’t even acknowledged in Nemesis. The evolution of the emotion chip is dealt with in the short story “Friends with the Sparrows” by Christopher L. Bennett (in the anthology The Sky’s the Limit) and the novella The Insolence of Office by William Leisner (part of the Slings and Arrows miniseries). Leisner’s novella also deals with La Forge switching from the VISOR to optical implants, done in part due to the VISOR being used against him in this movie.
In “The Chase,” Picard is given a Kurlan naiskos by his mentor and father figure, Dr. Richard Galen. He goes on at some length about how rare it is and how honored he is to be given this amazing gift from a person to whom he was truly closer than his own biological father. So it’s rather disheartening to see him casually toss the naiskos aside in the wreckage of the Enterprise-D…
A cut bit of dialogue establishes that Guinan’s sensitivity to temporal mechanics, as seen in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” is because of her time in the Nexus.
In Lursa and B’Etor’s previous appearance in “Firstborn,” Lursa was pregnant with a son. That son’s fate is unclear, though the Star Trek Online game establishes the son, named Ja’rod after Lursa’s father, is alive and serving the empire.
In the tie-in fiction and Star Trek Online, Picard and Crusher marry some time after Nemesis, and they have a son, named René. So not the end of the Picard line after all…
To boldly go. “I hate this! It is revolting!” When I first saw this movie in 1994, my first thought was that it was a promising first draft that was rushed into production. This is mostly because it was a promising first draft that was rushed into production. Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga wrote this in about seven-and-a-half minutes, at the same time that they were writing the (much much better) “All Good Things…” and then the movie was slammed into production right after TNG wrapped production as a TV show.
This rushed nature is seen most obviously in the visuals. The sets and costumes and props were all designed to be seen on a small screen—and this was before the days of high-definition TV, remember—so despite David Carson turning all the lights down all over the Enterprise, they still look chintzy. So does La Forge’s VISOR (I still remember chortling twenty-three years ago during the discussion of Data’s emotion chip when you can see LeVar Burton’s eyes blinking through the slats of the VISOR in closeup).
But the main place it’s seen is the script. There are good themes here, ones involving emotions and how you handle them, of the passage of time and how it affects one, of life and death and loss. Precisely none of those themes are handled well. Data’s journey through his emotion chip should have been linked to Picard’s grief over his family instead of being relegated to an idiotic low-comedy subplot. (It didn’t help that the whole thing was inspired by Data apparently not getting humor even though he did something incredibly funny! C’mon, pushing Crusher into the water was fucking hilarious!)
Soran has no bite to him as a villain. Malcolm McDowell does the best he can, but we don’t know what he went through in the Nexus beyond quick, cursory mentions by Crusher and Picard, and he’s just a guy being nasty. Snore.
Lursa and B’Etor are mainly there as a vehicle by which they can destroy the Enterprise and build a new one that looks good on a movie screen next time.
Picard’s Nexus experience makes absolutely no sense. It feels like it was inspired by Sir Patrick Stewart’s regular gig of doing a one-person performance of A Christmas Carol, but while a Victorian Christmas with a wife who cooks goose and a bunch of moppets might be a cute experience for Stewart, there’s nothing about it that says, “Jean-Luc Picard.” And why is he bemoaning the end of the Picard line? Why isn’t he using Robert and René’s death as the impetus to finally grab Crusher, kiss her on the mouth, and go make babies? Sheesh.
The one way in which this movie shines is in the prologue. The Enterprise-B launch-as-photo-op is very well done. Alan Ruck deserves a ton of credit here, as he’s obviously been put in a terrible position, trying to mount a rescue with a half-empty, half-finished ship. While it would’ve been nice to see Spock and McCoy alongside Kirk, Scotty and Chekov work just fine—the entire crew has been together long enough that it’s just as funny to see Chekov and Scotty snarking off Kirk after he says, “Take her out” to thunderous applause, and Kirk grumbling, “Oh, be quiet.”
In general, the interactions among the 23rd-century folk work beautifully. Shatner is especially good, amused by the whole spectacle, and then wanting desperately to take over when the crisis hits. Not to mention the moment when he stops Harriman from modifying the deflector, knowing that it’s Harriman’s ship, not his.
Also Kirk’s Nexus experience is interesting. There’s this big honking gap between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan when Kirk went from being back in the center seat to go exploring to a desk job with the Enterprise as a training ship with Spock as her captain. While lots of people have, unimaginatively, in my opinion, posited a second five-year mission for that timeframe (it just doesn’t strike me as being that interesting, to have them do exactly what they did before), there’s lots of things they could have been doing in that decade, and even if you do put another 5YM in there, that could have resulted in Kirk having the ship taken away again and him deciding to retire and live with Antonia for a while before the siren call of the center seat came back.
I also like Kirk’s advice to Picard about how the big chair is where you can make a difference and you should never give it up.
The final battle of Kirk and Picard vs. Soran is spectacularly uninteresting. Lots of people have complained that it was a lousy death for Kirk, but there’s no such thing as a good death, and at least he helped save a solar system that included two hundred million inhabitants. No, it’s just that the whole thing is just perfunctory and boring and full of middle-aged men flailing on catwalks and bleah. Shatner, at least, is having fun with it—”Call me Jim!”—which is pretty much all that’s memorable about it.
Speaking of things that aren’t memorable, man, do the Trek movies have trouble coming up with things to call their planet-threatening menaces. I mean, we start with “V’ger,” which sounds like a badly thought out comic book sound effect, then we have “the probe,” and now we have “the ribbon.” What’s next, the doily?
Also, if Picard could leave the Nexus any time, why not come back to Ten-Forward when he first met Soran, only this time come with a security detail and throw his ass in the brig? As it is, we never do find out how Soran managed to beam off the Enterprise to the observatory to capture La Forge without anyone noticing. Then again, nobody noticed that Soran put a frickin’ camera on La Forge’s VISOR, either…
This basic story could have made a good movie. The themes could have been tied together much better. We could have had a proper exploration of the Nexus as a place where your dreams come true, but it’s all hollow unless you embrace it. It’s interesting that the long-lived El-Aurians so totally embraced it while the much shorter-lived humans didn’t. There’s perhaps something to that that a script that actually had had some time spent working on it might have been able to do something with.
Warp factor rating: 2
In two weeks: Star Trek (2009)
Rewatcher’s note: We’ll be taking Independence Day off, returning with the Bad Robot TOS films on the 11th of July.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be the Toastmaster at InConJunction XXXVII in Indianapolis this weekend, alongside Guests of Honor Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon, Marc Gunn, Shonna Bedford, Michelle Mussoni, Kimberly Richey, and more. Check his schedule out here.
I was really looking forward to your re-watch articles. Unfortunately you’ve managed to pick apart almost the entire series with inane details and making mountains out of mole hills (for example the ridiculous paragraph above regarding turtlenecks…really?). Generations while by no means a great film deserves better than a 2. However that is an appropriate rating for your reviews.
I liked this film when I first saw it — the saucer crash in particular was breathtaking in the theater, and it was great that the producers finally let Dennis McCarthy write melodies again and really go all-out with his most unforgettable score — but there’s a lot that bugs me about it in retrospect. The Nexus makes no damn sense. If it orbits the whole galaxy in just 78 years — something that takes Earth 200 million years to do — then it should be moving far, far faster than light, which means it could never be moving slowly enough for its approach to be naked-eye visible from a planet surface. And why is it so hard to get into that Soran has to blow up stars, when his ship had no trouble stumbling into it by accident the first time around? Besides which, gravity propagates at the speed of light, and blowing up a star wouldn’t actually change the location of its center of mass anyway unless the explosion was very asymmetrical, so the supernovae should not have had an instant effect on ships and phenomena parsecs away. There’s another speed-of-light problem when Picard and Soran see the Veridian sun blow up moments after the torpedo launch. Realistically, they would’ve just had to stand there waiting for several minutes for the light to reach them — unless Veridian is a very tight red-dwarf system like TRAPPIST-1 with the planets a fraction of an AU from the star, in which case the visual lag would be maybe 15-20 seconds. But getting something as tiny as a red dwarf to go supernova would be even harder than getting a Sunlike star to do it.
But I disagree with a lot of the criticisms about the film. In particular, I disagree with the idea that Kirk’s death was somehow “unworthy.” Kirk wouldn’t have cared how glamorously he went out; he was just a guy doing his duty, trying to help people. He gave his life to save other lives, and that was certainly worthy. In particular, look at how it happens. He’s on a bridge that almost collapses. He comes within a hair’s breadth of falling, and Picard saves him. And then, without a moment’s hesitation, he strides right back out onto the bridge that almost killed him seconds before, because he still has a goddamn job to do and he’s gonna finish it or die trying. That is the most quintessentially Kirk thing imaginable. The moment is so throwaway that it’s easy to miss, but that very casualness with which Kirk climbs back into the lion’s mouth is exactly what’s so extraordinary about it. He made an understated, un-melodramatic, matter-of-fact choice to give his life for others, and that is absolutely fitting for the real James T. Kirk, as opposed to the nonsense caricature of him that pop culture has created.
Oh, and Keith, I share your contempt for the “Troi is a terrible driver” jokes, but what you leave out is that those jokes aren’t just about the counselor steering the ship — they’re about her being a woman. They’re based on the antiquated tradition of sexist jokes about “women drivers” and their alleged incompetence. And I find them utterly loathsome. You’re right — bringing that gigantic structure all the way down from orbit and landing it safely is an incredibly good job of piloting, particularly for someone who doesn’t specialize in the field. One can surmise she had a lot of computer assistance, but she still saved the lives of over a thousand people, and it’s obscene that so many people would rather twist that into an excuse for an outdated misogynistic joke.
As for why Picard couldn’t go back in time to an earlier point in the movie, my supposition has always been that the trips through “time” within the Nexus, like Kirk being in the cabin on Earth, were purely illusory, a reliving of memory, and that actually physically leaving the Nexus was only possible in proximity to its location at any given time. So he couldn’t come out of the Nexus earlier because it wasn’t close enough to a planet or ship until it reached Veridian III.
Movie begins with them rescuing Soran from the Nexus, which he entered aboard a ship, and then Kirk getting stuck there while aboard another ship. But the entire rest of the movie only makes sense if it’s impossible to enter the Nexus through a ship. How did that get past a first draft without anyone catching it?
I actually thought it was much better than I remember. Not exactly Trek at its finest, but all in all, it was a decent movie. I agree with you that no death for Kirk would have been a “good” death. He went out saving lives. What more could we ask for. Soran was a perfectly serviceable villain and I like the continuity with the series by having Lursa and B’Etor make an appearance. At least they decided to go with a selfish prick rather than the old revenge plot.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention that the effects shot of the Bird of Prey being destroyed was the exact same shot of General Chang’s ship from Undiscovered Country. That always bothered me a bit.
@3 I thought taking a ship into the Nexus had a decent chance of just destroying the ship. Fly into the Nexus and you might get total joy or you might get blown to pieces.
Parts of this are good but it doesn’t work for me overall. The shoehorning of Chekov and Scotty into Spock and McCoy’s parts is painfully obvious. (Doohan is an old trooper but Koenig must have badly needed the money.). The nexus makes no sense; does it take you back to your happiest moments, or does it create false happiness illusions, and why does it seem to do both at once, and is there some intelligence at work or it is just some random space phenomenon that causes illusions, and haven’t we been over that ground enough times before? How do you survive bodily inside a space energy ribbon thing, and if you can leave “at any time”, does that mean that Kirk bodily traveled thousands of light years to appear on the planet of orange rocks? The Data subplot does. not. work. at. all. Once again, “only ship in the quadrant” cliche. A first draft indeed. Although at least it didn’t turn the patient, thoughtful Picard into Rambo (yet).
Oh, I forgot to mention — I agree with Keith about Captain Harriman. The fan joke is that Harriman is incompetent, but I think he gets a bum rap. He actually makes a lot of very good suggestions, but he’s hampered by the fact that his ship is unprepared. And when it comes down to it, he makes the best, wisest decision he possibly could’ve made under the circumstances: He sets his ego aside and asks for help from the qualified veteran sitting next to him. That is utterly admirable. Harriman doesn’t deserve his reputation, and I’m glad the novels by Peter David and DRGIII have done so much to rehabilitate him.
There is a line in the movie that flying a ship in would be too risky.
And yeah, the Duras sisters’ ship getting destroyed did look an awful lot like recycled footage from #6.
I wanted to like this movie. I did. I just can’t. It isn’t that it is bad, exactly, just that it is meh. There is no sparkle there. Even the inhabitants of that planet they saved, what about them? We never saw them once, there was no impact here (apart from the one Troi made) and it never really felt like there was a threat. It is one of those movies that I’m glad I watched as a completist, and I did put on the shelf and I’m glad that it is there, just I very rarely take it off the shelf and watch it.
The sad thing is that this is the second best TNG movie. The TNG crew really got hosed on the movie department, all (except First Contact) suffering the same problem of having too many elements shoved into scripts that worked better as episodes rather than movies. I don’t know why that is though. It does make me glad we never got a DS9 movie though. I suspect it doesn’t help that movies were going through an effects revolution where a lot of traditional Trek effects (the Saucer crash, as example) looked as cheesy and old fashioned as a Ray Harryhaussen movie or a Doug McClure movie.
Something that I didn’t see in Trivial Matters – don’t Kirk and Picard end up on horses in the Nexus because Shatner was all “hey I like horses, I’m good at horses, you can ride a horse right Patrick, let’s go ride horses!”
No such thing as a good death? I’m too tired to list all the memorable deaths in screen history, but Kirk’s is way down on the list for me. A better death would be Kirk dying on the bridge of a ship, taking the controls with flames all around him like Picard in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” or Janeway in “Year of Hell,” with hopefully a better final line than “Oh my…”
Is what I just described fan fictiony? Yes, yes it is. Just like this movie!
Kirk and Picard meeting is total fan service, and besides a few cute moments it simply wasn’t worth the trouble. This should have been a TNG movie. The series had a huge fanbase by 1994. The TOS crew already had a grand farewell, riding off into the sunset. The torch had already been passed.
You got greedy, Star Trek.
Wow, a rewatch I actually mostly agree with. Yes, Data pushing Crusher into the water was funny!!
I like that Picard has the same romantic thoughts about sailing ships as Kirk in “The Ultimate Computer”.
More than emotion or the passage of time, I find that the film is about living in a fantasy world vs. living in the real world. That’s a worthwhile theme, and it was what “The Cage” was all about, so it’s a good idea to revisit it.
It’s nice to learn that Kirk got to live the other life he longed for in “The Naked Time” and “The Paradise Syndrome” for a while, but that he ultimately rejected it.
I know that people criticise Kirk’s death scene a lot, but I think it’s perfect. It’s heroic and somewhat silly and arbitrary at the same time, and that’s a great combination and makes it feel real.
From what I can tell, the other characters were not listening to the Crusher/Data conversation, so all they saw was Data pushing her off the ship for no reason. The moment is funny to us because we see the misunderstanding, but it makes perfect sense that the characters do not find it amusing.
@10 That is pretty much the same reasoning Stewart would use in Nemesis to get his car chase. Or so the story I heard goes, that Patrick Stewart only agreed to do the movie if there was a car chase in it because he loved dune buggies.
Keith DeCandido wrote:
It was even worse than that: during this period, the attention of the Trek production office at Paramount was split four ways — closing TNG (May 1994), this movie (November 1994), ongoing DS9 (premiered September 1993), and developing VGR (premiered January 1995). Source: Star Trek Voyager: A Vision of the Future (Poe, 1998).
Wouldn’t Trilithium be 50% more lithium-y than Dilithium?
So, what really stuck with me about this movie, that I really disliked, was the fridging of Robert and Rene.
I get where CLB is coming from in defending Kirk’s death as meaningful. I think my complaint is that he dies in service of such a crappy script. If you accept the whole premise of what is going on, then sure, he dies meaningfully. But when I watch it all I can keep thinking about is how none of it makes sense and they shouldn’t even be on that planet to begin with, and that’s what makes it seem to me that his death is stupid.
I seem to remember hearing Shatner once in an interview saying that on set whilst filming his death scene he cracked the joke: “bridge on the Captain.” :D
I never cared that much about seeing a Kirk/Picard crossover, but if it was going to happen, I wish it had been done in a better movie. This one was a rush job, and it shows.
By the way, I think that Picard’s decision to come out of the Nexus at that specific time and place makes sense, because it gives him a failsafe. If he fails, he’ll simply be swallowed by the Nexus again and can try a third time. The only thing that can go wrong is that one of them dies before the Nexus swallows them or that one of them dies while they are successful.
I forgot to mention one problem I had with the movie, but luckily I can just quote myself from a TrekBBS thread:
My biggest problem with the visuals of Generations is that it never gave us an introductory beauty shot of the Enterprise-D. They forgot that this was a movie instead of an episode and failed to adequately introduce the E-D to new viewers. The first shot of the ship was after the holodeck sequence and it was just a brief partial shot of the saucer from the rear, a standard angle from the series that failed to give a clear sense of what the ship looked like. Then there was a long stretch of interior scenes, then a brief, distant shot of the full ship by the observatory when the star imploded, then a quick shot of it warping away. We didn’t get an exterior flyby of reasonable length until maybe halfway through the film, and it was just a pretty standard flyby angle from the show, with an almost stationary camera pointing at the ship from behind as it went by. Then another quick warp-entry shot at the end of the following Stellar Cartography sequence, then a few shots of its arrival at Veridian and faceoff with the Klingons. But we didn’t get any extensive coverage of the ship exterior until the battle and crash sequences.
They should’ve introduced the ship after the holodeck sequence with a big, impressive beauty shot showing it off — nothing as lengthy as the TMP flyaround, but at least something like our introduction to the Enterprise in the 2009 movie, something to make the ship an impressive presence from the get-go rather than an afterthought. Maybe, after Picard leaves the holodeck, do an interior montage with the crew bustling about their business on various sets, treating it as a pullout that eventually takes the camera out through a window or shuttle-bay hatch and pulls out until the whole immense ship comes into view, giving a sense of its vast scale that we rarely got on a TV budget — like a reverse of the zoom-in on Picard in the observation lounge windows at the start of “Encounter at Farpoint.” And there should’ve been more establishing beauty shots of the ship in the first half when they cut to shipboard scenes from somewhere else. Not only would that have given new viewers a stronger sense of place in the first half of the film, but it would’ve let them identify more with the ship and raise the stakes for its eventual destruction.
@21 Yeah. I agree. The best Galaxy Class beauty shots had to come from DS9 in the last couple of seasons there. You’ll probably know this better than me, but I vaguely recall an article back when this came out saying they had trouble shooting the Ent-D model from a lot of angles which limited what they could do with it. That, I think is what it said, was why they wrote it out. Such a shame, good CGI was only a movie away and I’d have loved to see a Galaxy class ship perform on the big screen properly. We never truly got to see the full sense of power and majesty that a Galaxy class ship was supposed to carry with it.
@22/random22: It was the original ILM-built 6-foot model that was hard to shoot because of its bulk, but it was replaced late in season 3 with a more manageable and more detailed 4-foot model built by Greg Jein (with some altered proportions that I think made it less graceful as well as hard to reconcile with the original model, such as the rim of the saucer becoming 2 decks thick instead of 1, and the deflector dish becoming a bit more squarish). The 6-footer was hauled back out for Generations because it was the only one built with saucer separation capability.
What you say about the difficulty shooting from various angles would be something different, though. Physically, there’s no reason the model couldn’t be shot from any angle; both the 6-footer and the 4-footer were built with multiple mounting points, and while the 6-footer’s size might limit how much room the camera had to maneuver, that wouldn’t have been as much of an issue with the Jein model. So that might have been more about the aesthetics. There are only certain angles from which a ship miniature looks best, which is why you tend to see those angles over and over. I suppose the odd, organic contours of the E-D might’ve limited the number of “good sides” it had, so that could’ve been the reason for wanting a new design. I don’t recall if that was the case, but if it was, it wouldn’t have been something that CGI could fix.
Ah… This was the first Trek film I saw in the theatres rather than on TV / VHS and as such it still holds good memories for me, even with the warts.
Re: Picard’s lament on the end of his line. Much of what I’ve seen of Picard in TNG has convinced me he makes a better uncle than a father, and more to the point, he believes this himself. He’s never been comfortable being responsible for children (remembering his own childhood, perhaps?) a discomfort he’s had for YEARS. This is not something he’s going to adjust overnight, much less while grieving and dealing with a crisis situation.
I remember wincing when I saw Picard toss the Kurlan naiskos like it was random debris; I know that family album means a lot, but geez! I’m wondering if the script just called for Stewart to pick up some random thing and toss it, and the naiskos was just put in there as an easter egg.
Apart from that I agree with much of what’s been said; there’s a lot of good material here but it really needed a few more passes before filming began. My personal wish was that Kirk and Picard had met Soren in the Nexus before returning to Veridian III. If Soren had come to the same realization that the others did – nothing in the Nexus is real – then he’d also realize that he’d just killed millions for nothing. Maybe he could have given Kirk and Picard some key to defeating his younger (by a few minutes or hours) self, perhaps even setting his younger self on a path where he could finally heal. Or maybe not; maybe Soren was really too far gone by then.
Despite its bad spots, this is still a film I like to watch. It’s certainly better than the NuTrek films we’ve been getting lately, IMO…
How do we know Picard ever left the Nexus? There’s never any real explanation of how you can get out. Is Picard really the only person in the history of the universe that wanted to get out of the Nexus?
I always had a sneaking suspicion that Picard is still in the Nexus and everything Star Trek from the point that the Nexus hits the planet in Act 2 is just Picard’s fantasy version of Star Trek. The rest of the crew all died and Final Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis are just Nexus fantasies.
This also means that the rebooted Star Trek from 2009 didn’t happen, either. Just another Nexus created fantasy.
It’s the 24th century, and people on Earth still die in fires? Like someone mentioned above, it’s just fridging — killing off characters so a main character gets some development and emotional scenes.
Novelization note: the hardcover of Dillard’s novelization has the original ending; the paperback was revised to have the movie ending.
I liked this movie. But it had flaws, as you point out. And for me, one of the biggest flaws is that we are TOLD that Veridian IV has 200 million people on it who will die — and for a short time they do die — but we never see them! Even one shot of a thriving population on that planet would have made Kirk’s sacrifice more real.
— Michael A. Burstein
@10 I believe the horse Shatner rode was one of his Arabians. The scene where he rides around mounted Picard is a show off move on Shatner’s part. That took a lot of rider control just once. Being filmed over and over again. Wow.
Agreed on showing the Veridianites, Mabfan. I recall an interview where someone involved with X-Men said it was the one panel showing the “asparagus people” on the planet orbiting the star Phoenix ate, more than the fact of what she did, that sealed the character’s fate with Marvel editorial. The victims weren’t theoretical at that point.
KRAD: “While lots of incredibly unimaginative people have posited a second five-year mission for that timeframe (yes, that’s interesting, let’s have them do exactly what they did before)”
Whoa, Keith. I for one don’t appreciate being called “incredibly unimaginative.”
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Untold_Voyages
Based on the ending of TMP, it’s more than reasonable to assume that there was a second five-year mission, with everyone doing exactly what they did before (except for Chekov, who moved from the navigator’s chair to the weapons station). To be so harsh to people who buy into that train of thought really surprises me.
Meh. Not my favorite movie. Seemed to me that it was “OK, it’s OUR turn now (TNG), so let’s off Kirk.” Unnecessary and I hate it.
And hey, let’s kill Picard’s only family in a fire. Yay!
DeForest and Leonard were smart to opt out of this cluster*$#@@@@@.
@26, they die in fires if someone ties them to a chair and sets the room on fire after disabling the fire alarms and fire suppression equipment. Picard has enemies. Enemies with a loooooooong memory.
@26, @32, Or the fire suppression equipment / fire alarms failed that day. Machines do break from time to time, even in the 24th Century.
@24/Andrew: “Much of what I’ve seen of Picard in TNG has convinced me he makes a better uncle than a father, and more to the point, he believes this himself. He’s never been comfortable being responsible for children (remembering his own childhood, perhaps?) a discomfort he’s had for YEARS. This is not something he’s going to adjust overnight, much less while grieving and dealing with a crisis situation.”
You’re forgetting (although, to be fair, so did the show) that Picard lived for 50 subjective years as a father and grandfather when he was reliving Kamin’s memories in “The Inner Light.” That must’ve changed his attitude toward parenting — and in the novels, it has. I actually got to write the novel (Greater Than the Sum) in which Picard and Crusher decided to start a family. (By coincidence, I also happened to write the novel where Riker and Troi decided to start a family, and the novel in which Troi gave birth. I don’t know why it ended up that way.) Currently in the novelverse, Picard’s son Rene is about four, I think, and Picard seems to be handling fatherhood pretty well.
@25/Matthew: “How do we know Picard ever left the Nexus?”
Because being in the Nexus is like being immersed in constant joy and contentment. It’s safe to say that Picard’s experiences in the later movies don’t fit that description. Also, Nexus experiences aren’t linear — you jump around through time and memory in a stream-of-consciousness way.
@26/Steve Roby: “It’s the 24th century, and people on Earth still die in fires?”
Recall that Robert Picard preferred to live a fairly traditionalist lifestyle, without a lot of modern conveniences. You’d think he’d at least have a smoke detector, but sometimes that isn’t enough.
@28/MByerly: “The scene where he rides around mounted Picard is a show off move on Shatner’s part. That took a lot of rider control just once. Being filmed over and over again. Wow.”
Yes, that was very impressive. You couldn’t even see him give the signal to the horse — it was like the horse was responding to his thoughts. I guess he took his own advice from ST V — “Be one with the horse.”
@30/Glenn: I think Keith’s objection may be to the fact that so many people jump to the conclusion that every 23rd-century starship mission must’ve been a 5-year mission, even though we have canonical evidence for exactly one ship having one 5-year mission, and a single example doesn’t prove a pattern. With only one example, it could be the norm, it could be one option out of many, or it could even be a unique exception, the only 5-year mission that ever happened — there’s just no way to know which. It’s the failure to imagine other possibilities that’s the problem. Logically, there must be other mission profiles.
Still, there’s room to have it both ways. With over a decade between TMP and TWOK (12 years by novelverse chronology), there’s room to have a second 5YM and something else afterward. Peter David’s The Captain’s Daughter is part of the novel continuity (as mentioned, it introduced the Harriman/Demora characterizations used in later novels) and it establishes a post-TMP 5-year mission, but that mission ends seven years before TWOK. What I posited in Mere Anarchy was that when Kirk was re-promoted to admiral after the second 5YM, he arranged to have the Enterprise assigned as his personal flagship with Spock as captain, and to occasionally take it out on special missions (implicitly the events of TWOK were one example of something they’d done a number of times before).
(Sorry for the double post, but the board doesn’t let me post a message if it’s too long.)
Mark Magee: I’m sorry you haven’t liked the rewatches. The only thing I will say in response is that the inconsequential thing you cite is specifically in a section clearly labelled “Trivial Matters.” By definition, the stuff in that section isn’t important, it’s just fun stuff I want to share with folks.
Meredith: I didn’t know that about the horseplay. It doesn’t surprise me, though, and Picard was already established back in “Pen Pals” as an equestrian, so it worked.
Glenn Greenberg: My apologies for coming across as harsh. But it is, to me, pretty much the textbook definition of unimaginative to have the post-TMP Enterprise do what the pre-TMP Enterprise did. That’s why I prefer things like New Earth and the Crucible trilogy that posited more diverse missions for the Big E following the V’ger encounter.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5 & 8: Yes, there’s one throwaway line about why Soran can’t just fly a ship into the Nexus, but the problem is nothing we see on screen supports this. Everyone who goes into the Nexus on a ship either survives, or gets stuck there. There’s nothing apart from that one line to establish any danger.
And the line itself isn’t enough to make Soran’s plan make sense. Okay, so he can’t fly a ship into the Nexus. Why doesn’t he get a shuttle, sit it in the path of the Nexus, and then go EVA five minutes before it gets there?
@36 Keith looking back on my comment I sound overly harsh. And I apologize. Also you make a great point regarding Trivial Matters..haha. I guess it helps to pay attention ;) Let me also withdraw my comment about rating your re-watch articles. You are doing something fun and you are entitled to your perspective. All the best Keith, cheers :)
Kirk’s appearance here ensured that each of the Big 3 from TOS had canonical on-screen interactions with the TNG crew (none of which required ST‘s typical time-travel tricks!) which does seem like a notable Trekkie-Trekker connection even if TNG really didn’t need any legitimization by that point. Kirk was also written and portrayed here much closer the disciplined, admirable character from the series, rebounding from the more distasteful turns he had taken in the previous two films. Combine those with his heroic (if maybe somewhat anticlimactic) death and we receive a second chance (TVH being the first) to let go of Shatner-as-Kirk while the character was on an upswing.
I had not realized the writing and production were so rushed, but I think that aspect makes it all the more impressive how watchable the film ended up being. The acting and pacing were decent, and like so many episodes of the TV shows it all flows together in a satisfying way if you don’t subject it to too much scrutiny. Probably a decent brew-and-view flick in that regard.
@2/CLB: Astrophysics so bad it’s almost Not Even Wrong? Ha, that brings back some good memories! The movie came out late in my first semester of grad school, so of course I saw it in the company of fellow astronomy grads and postdocs. Hoo boy, did we have some fun snarking about the orbital mechanics of the Nexus, Soren’s star killer, and all the rest, ridiculous even by ST‘s low standards for accurate physics. But having recently sat through an exhausting final for the most demanding course I ever took, it was cathartic to laugh about those aspects of the movie and realize that we were privileged to still know far more about astrophysics than most people (even filmmakers with interns and research budgets). Good times. :-)
@35/CLB:
“What I posited in Mere Anarchy was that when Kirk was re-promoted to admiral after the second 5YM, he arranged to have the Enterprise assigned as his personal flagship with Spock as captain, and to occasionally take it out on special missions (implicitly the events of TWOK were one example of something they’d done a number of times before).“
And what I posited in STAR TREK: UNTOLD VOYAGES #5 was that Kirk agreed to return to the Admiralty as an instructor, instead of as Chief of Starfleet Operations, because he became concerned that the next generation of Starfleet officers were learning the wrong lessons from his voyages. He feared that they were starting to think that they could simply disregard the rules at will, seeing themselves as mavericks like the legendary Captain James T. Kirk. And the deal he struck with Starfleet Command was that the Enterprise would become a training vessel (to replace the Yorktown, which gets destroyed in my story). Spock accepts the offer to take over as captain, since he would be a teacher as much as he would be a full-fledged starship commander.
So to some extent, you and I were thinking along the same lines, even if the details differ.
CLB:
As for the timeline, I had felt that everything was pretty straightforward and clear until the Official Chronology came along and established (arbitrarily, in my opinion) that the years of the original 5YM took place exactly 300 years after each of the years in which the TV episodes aired. That completely screwed up the timeline, especially as far as “Space Seed” went. Throughout TWOK, Khan and Kirk say, separately, that their first meeting took place 15 years before. So it’s pretty clear, it’s 15 years later. That was the intent of the filmmakers. But the Chronology, to stick with its 300-years-after premise, says that “Space Seed” and TWOK are actually 18 years apart.
I don’t buy it.
Here’s how I see it:
We’ve never seen the first year of the 5YM in its entirety. Probably the only mission we saw from that first year was “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and I’d estimate that it takes place late in that first year. The first season of the show is probably set in the second year. Second season is the third year. Third season is the fourth year. The fifth year of the 5YM can be filled in by The Animated Series and the better comics and novels set during TOS.
TMP takes place 2.5 years after the end of the 5YM.
TWOK takes place 15 years after “Space Seed,” which, in my premise, happened during the second year of the 5YM.
So TMP happened about 6 years after “Space Seed.” So TWOK happened about 9 years after TMP.
TSFS takes place days (a few weeks at most) after TWOK.
TVH takes place three months after TWOK/TSFS.
And the launch of TNG takes place 78 years after TVH. The first year of TNG takes place in 2364.
2364 – 78 = 2286
From there, we can presume that TMP took place around 2277, and “Space Seed” happened around 2271. Which would place the first year of the 5YM in or around 2270.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. ;-)
I think this may be a little too harsh on this film. While I agree that the script needed some work, I still find it to be an enjoyable work; more so than the last six, certainly. They are all still the characters I know from the show, behaving in ways that make sense for them to be behaving. The biggest flaw, I think, is the over-reliance on familiarity with the characters and situations from the show.
I do have some specific problems with some of the review, though. First, randomly pushing another being into a body of water is NOT funny. It is abusive, bullying behavior. The reason it’s funny with Worf is because the entire point of their gathering is to promote him, then take the piss out of him, like a roast. What happens between Data and Crusher is another in a long line of “Data doesn’t understand” scenes being played for cheap laughs, but to suggest that what he did is funny in and of itself is reprehensible.
Second, I always thought Picard had actively decided not to pursue a family life, taking comfort in his line continuing through his nephew. Thus, his grief is about the both losses, and when someone is dealing with acute and pervasive grief such as this, much of what that peraon would say is likely based in foregone conclusions, such as, “My family line now ends with me.” As much as I would’ve liked to see a Picard/Crusher romance play out, he was 66 and she was 47 when this came out. While not impossible, that is not an ideal age to begin a family. This is actually the reason I haven’t pursued any of the continuation novels. I can’t reconcile the two of them becoming parents at 76 and 57, no matter how great 24th century medicine is.
Thirdly, the uniforms. I always took this as an evolution of the uniform design rather than a delineation of service, with TNG crew catching up to the new design. Voyager was the exception because they were stuck on the other side of the galaxy. It’s really only confusing when you start conflating behind-the-scenes reasons with story reasons.
Anyway, I still love the movie, despite its flaws, and I still love these rewatches, even when I disagree. Cheers.
KRAD: “My apologies for coming across as harsh. But it is, to me, pretty much the textbook definition of unimaginative to have the post-TMP Enterprise do what the pre-TMP Enterprise did. That’s why I prefer things like New Earth and the Crucible trilogy that posited more diverse missions for the Big E following the V’ger encounter.”
I gave up on New Earth pretty early on. And I have not yet read the Crucible novels, although I hope to do so in the near future. So I have no idea what makes its approach different from that of the 5YM.
What you wrote originally–and have now doubled-down on–is not just harsh, though, Keith. It’s really judgmental. And even though we’re friends, I can’t help but take it personally. Because, intentionally or not, it’s an attack on my work, and I remain very proud of that project.
@40/Glenn: Actually we agree on most of that. I had Kirk become commandant of Starfleet Academy, which is what had been established as his pre-TWOK job in some ’80s novels and it didn’t occur to me at the time that it wasn’t definitive. And yes, Spock did command the ship as a training vessel in between those special assignments with Kirk, for exactly the reason you say.
As for the timing, it’s not putting TOS in 2266-9 that creates the problem, it’s putting TWOK in 2285, something that there’s no onscreen justification for doing. The date on the Romulan Ale was only 2283, so they could’ve gone with that (assuming McCoy’s “a while to ferment” line was sarcastic). I’ve never understood why they put it later, given that the Chronology mostly went to ridiculous lengths to treat every onscreen date as an exact figure rather than a rounded one. I guess your “78 years before TNG” idea works, but I don’t see why TVH should be the reference point there. Sure, the publicity for TNG said it was 78 years after Kirk’s era, but there’s nothing canonical to pin that down relative to TVH, as far as I know.
I don’t think “Where No Man” took place during the 5-year mission. That doesn’t make sense. A mission to probe to the edge of the galaxy would take months either way, at least. It makes more sense for that to be a self-contained mission separate from the more general 5-year survey-and-patrol tour. Also, the ship clearly underwent a major refit between WNMHGB and the first season, something that’s more likely to happen between missions than in the middle of one, since it probably required months of downtime. So I think the ship went on that specific “edge of the galaxy” assignment early in Kirk’s tenure as captain, then underwent refits, repairs, and crew reassignments, and then started out on a 5-year general survey tour. (Which is interestingly similar to the way things went in the Kelvin Timeline, where Kirk formally gets command at the end of the first movie, but the 5-year mission doesn’t begin until the end of the second movie.)
@27/mabfan: I wouldn’t have liked to see the people on Veridian IV, because Kirk never sees them either and still acts to save them. It’s like reading about war or disaster in other parts of the world in a newspaper. People we never see are people too.
@42/shiznatikus: Data isn’t “randomly pushing another being into a body of water”. He had asked Crusher for an explanation for the scene he just watched, and instead of giving him one, she rather nonsensically tells him to be spontaneous and do something unexpected. That’s what makes his reaction funny.
@45/Jana: I dunno, I tend to lean toward the “not funny” column. Pulling the plank out from under a tough guy like Worf is one thing, but Data is physically much, much stronger than Crusher, so it’s a very different power dynamic there. Pushing around someone weaker than you is never a nice thing. Also, there’s a difference in consent. Worf chose to risk falling into the water by jumping from the plank, so he’d already given his consent for that to potentially happen, so that made it acceptable (more or less) for Riker to cheat and make sure it did happen. But Crusher had given no such implied consent for a dunking, and that’s what makes Data’s action inappropriate.
@45/JanaJansen
No, please, don’t misunderstand me. I know the context of what Data is doing, and that his misunderstanding is meant to be the source of the humor. As written, I don’t have a problem with it. My objection is to the suggestion that pushing someone into the water is funny, which it is not, but seems to be the pervasive opinion this far in the discussion.
@46/ChristopherLBennett
Thank you. I am glad someone else understands this. The only addendum I have is that Data’s action, while completely inappropriate, is forgiveable in context.
@34 Christopher: You’re right, I had forgotten “The Inner Light.” Still, he was suffering from grief, so I think we can forgive him for not immediately thinking “Oh yeah, I still can do something about the Family Line.”
And now I should look up Greater Than the Sum.
@37 Sean: I’m not sure that flying into the Nexus with a ship is such a guarantee one will enter it. When Scotty tried to beam them out, he reported the life-signs were “phasing in and out of our space-time continuum”. He was trying to beam moving targets in a sense, and some of them happened to be in the Nexus already. I think it’s possible that there were some people who were either halfway or who had the misfortune of reappearing in our continuum at the time the Lakul exploded, but before Scotty could get a lock on them.
Soren had eighty years to sit down and calculate the odds; he obviously didn’t like what he found.
@44/CLB
“I don’t think “Where No Man” took place during the 5-year mission. That doesn’t make sense. A mission to probe to the edge of the galaxy would take months either way, at least. It makes more sense for that to be a self-contained mission separate from the more general 5-year survey-and-patrol tour. Also, the ship clearly underwent a major refit between WNMHGB and the first season, something that’s more likely to happen between missions than in the middle of one, since it probably required months of downtime. So I think the ship went on that specific “edge of the galaxy” assignment early in Kirk’s tenure as captain, then underwent refits, repairs, and crew reassignments, and then started out on a 5-year general survey tour.”
You know what, Christopher? I can buy that. And I would be willing to adjust my thinking—and my own personal Star Trek chronology—accordingly. Thanks for the suggestion!
It would be a lot easier anyway to have the first season equal the first year, second season equal the second year, and so on. (And it leaves a lot more room at the end—two whole years—for the Animated Series and all the various novels and comics to fit in, particularly YESTERDAY’S SON, which, based on the narrative, was meant to take place in Year Five.)
“Sure, the publicity for TNG said it was 78 years after Kirk’s era, but there’s nothing canonical to pin that down relative to TVH, as far as I know.“
Since the publicity came right on the heels of TVH, which ended with Kirk taking command of a new Enterprise and beginning a new series of adventures, I think the assumption was that it was meant to be 78 years after TVH—still very much Kirk’s era, and as good a focal point as any. It was certainly MY assumption.
I remember vividly that when the TNG episode “The Neutral Zone” established that the year was 2364, I immediately did the math, and when I got to 2286, my first and only assumption was that it was TVH that took place in 2286–as did, most likely, TSFS and TWOK. The TVH was the latest adventure from Kirk’s time, so it only made sense to me that the 78-year gap would begin there.
Once you make that assumption, though, you can’t go with the notion that 1966=2266, 1967=2267, and so on. Which was fine by me, because I didn’t go into it with that notion. I never even thought about what year Star Trek took place in until that TNG episode aired and started doing the math.
n “The Chase,” Picard is given a Kurlan naiskos by his mentor and father figure, Dr. Richard Galen. He goes on at some length about how rare it is and how honored he is to be given this amazing gift from a person to whom he was truly closer than his own biological father. So it’s rather disheartening to see him casually toss the naiskos aside in the wreckage of the Enterprise-D…
My rationalization: Keeping such an artifact on board a starship is a really, really stupid thing to do, particularly given the astonishing frequency with which the Enterprise faces destruction, being stranded, captured by foreign powers, etc. After giving it some thought, Picard donated the real thing to a museum where it would be safe. He then just had the replicator make a replica as a memento of his dear departed friend Galen. Maybe not as “cool” as having the real thing, but much more responsible. But there’s also no point in rescuing a mere replica from a crashed ship; the next time he’s at a replicator, he can just have the computer make a new one. I mean, why not? It’s not like the replicator is going to run out of matter.
I know the writers didn’t have this in mind, but it does all make sense given what we know…
I never really thought about it, but there are some kind of funny in-universe implications from Kirk being unaware that Sulu has a daughter old enough to have completed Starfleet academy and been assigned to the Enterprise. Hearing about somebody having a kid is something that happens to people you’re even distantly friendly with! I guess Kirk and Sulu really weren’t that close, given that they apparently have not had a personal conversation with each other in oh, say, twenty years or so…
dunsel: Kirk was aware that Sulu had a daughter, but the last time he saw her, she was only a little kid. That’s completely natural. I see kids of friends all the time whom I haven’t seen in a while and am stunned by how old they are. Hell, I still have trouble processing that my cousin (whose birth I was present for) is an adult, much less in his 30s and married.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh dangit, I misremembered and then misread a line in the rewatch. My mistake! Not as funny as I thought. Ah well…
Glenn: I’ve edited the comment in the rewatch, and again I apologize. It was never my intention to diminish the excellent you work you did on Untold Voyages.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One thing I always wondered: Since the photon torpedoes, tractor beam emitters, and medical staff were all due to be delivered to the E-B on Tuesday, would Capt. Harriman have had to give them back if it was raining? ;)
I didn’t like the portrayal of Harriman at all. Yes, he’s deferring to a more senior officer on his bridge, but there was no confidence to the man at all. It’s as if he’d had no prior experience to take him all the way up to the big chair of the Enterprise, a ship where you should be the best of the best to take command (Pike, Kirk, Garrett, Picard).
Once again, more forced Star Trek humor, in particular from Data. While I’m sure Brent Spiner had a blast going all out crazy, the “humor” was more uncomfortably awkward then funny.
Perhaps a weepy Picard wasn’t the best cinematic introduction for the character.
I loved the lighting on the sets. But the sets themselves did feel very TV.
I thought the Enterprise-D looked beautiful on the big screen. Enterprise-E just looks bulky and lacks grace IMHO.
It was disheartening that the TNG movies basically became the Picard and Data show when the series itself had become so adept at showcasing the entire senior staff as family and usually giving them all something to do.
I enjoyed ILM’s digital effects.
The Enterprise-D being so thoroughly bested by an old Bird of Prey is beyond belief.
The crash-landing of the saucer section was a fun sequence. I thought that when it finally came to a halt that the close-up shot of the hull lingered too long though.
Lursa and B’Etor were fun villains. And their disparaging comments about Geordi never being in engineering and disgust over Crusher’s appearance were actually funny.
@46/Christopher: I’m not sure if I agree about the consent. I think what happens to Worf is a classic military initiation ritual – he doesn’t get thrown into the water because he’s a tough guy but because he’s being promoted. Is it really consenting if he doesn’t have a choice?
@47/shiznatikus: I agree that the scene is only funny because Data doesn’t understand what he’s doing, but IMO there’s an additional layer here. Data is often depicted as somewhat childlike, and when he asks Crusher for information and she’s so busy partying that she doesn’t even bother to tell him “Not now, I’ll explain later”, she’s like an adult who doesn’t take a child seriously. And I admit to gloating, but I just love that this attitude backfires for once.
@56/GarretH: There’s no accounting for taste. I prefer a weepy Picard to the big-gun-wielding Picard of the next bunch of films. And I loathe Lursa and B’Etor. Soran is a much more interesting villain because he only wants to be happy and is willing to destroy a whole planet to achieve this.
@42/shiznatikus
You’re right, it is absuive bullying behavior. Which is why I don’t find it particularly funny when they do it Worf, either. It’s practically a kind of hazing, which shouldn’t have place in the enlightened 24th century.
I was appalled to see the supposedly “advanced” humans resort to this sort of thing. It is not funny. And while Data pushing Crusher isn’t funny either, she can hardly complain: She already laughed her ass off when Worf was thrown overboard, and then actually had the gall to “explain” why this kind of abusive behavior is funny.
Indeed, I almost cheered the first time I saw Data pushing her. Feels different when you’re the target of the “joke”, heh doc? Not so funny now, is it?
It was – of course – still inappropriate for Data to do what he did. But that’s what you get by mimicing the inappropriate behavior of your human role-models.
As for the claim that the “power dynamics” are different in the two cases: How? Worf was just as helpless to defend himself in that specific situation.
@58/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: Yeah, that bothered me too. Although I still think it’s funny when Data does it, both for the reasons mentioned in my comment and in yours.
@57/Janajensen
I’ve just realized that it’s even worse then that.
Worf is a Klingon. I can easily see him consenting to a challenge which entails unpleasant consequences upon failure. There’s something really Klingon in that initiation scene with the hat…
…and then Riker does a juvenile practical joke on him, when Worf is completely unable to defend himself. How dishonorable and unKlingon is that? In five seconds Riker destroys the moment. Jeez, Will, can’t you at least supply a prank that allows the guy to fight back?
It’s a wonder how Worf managed to refrain from killing him later.
Keith —
Thank you, my friend.
:-)
@60 — It would’ve changed the tone of the movie significantly if Worf would’ve climbed out of the water onto the deck of the ship and, calmly and without saying a word, literally ripped Ryker’s head from his shoulders.
I find it hard to believe that Kirk’s idea of paradise is living in a cabin with Antonia and chopping wood. The man I saw in those 79 episodes LOVED being the captain of the Enterprise and was incredibly good at it. It’s clear just from looking at him that Kirk felt at his most alive when dealing with some crisis, prowling the bridge like a lion on the hunt and coming up with brilliant tactics whenever the pressure mounted.
And while he does have that “no beach to walk on … flesh woman to hold” moment in “The Naked Time,” that sounded to me like a captain who wanted a vacation, not a captain who didn’t want to be captain.
While Kirk certainly liked the ladies, he did have meaningful relationships on the ship; it’s clear that his relationships with Spock and McCoy are very deep friendships and far more meaningful to him than a transitory relationship with some woman we never heard of before.
In my opinion, Kirk’s idea of paradise would be to be forever 34 years old and captain of his ship. Chopping wood for his cabin? Really? No effing way.
@63 Maybe that is why he was able to shake the Nexus effect off so easily. Kirk, the guy who climbed that cliff on his own back in V and likes to think about walking on a beach and who let himself get promoted off his ship twice, he likes to think that he wants a cabin in the woods. He desires to desire it, IYSWIM, but when he gets it then it is unsatisfying. I can grok that. My romantic idyll is a cabin in the woods with a wood stove and a forest garden to tend too, the fact that when I house sat for a friend who actually does live that lifestyle I found it tedious and boring has done nothing to quench my desire for it. If I ever won the lottery I bet I’d find lots of reasons to never buy one but still want one.
@49/Glenn: “It would be a lot easier anyway to have the first season equal the first year, second season equal the second year, and so on. (And it leaves a lot more room at the end—two whole years—for the Animated Series and all the various novels and comics to fit in, particularly YESTERDAY’S SON, which, based on the narrative, was meant to take place in Year Five.)”
That’s pretty much the model we use in the Pocket novels. After all, VGR: “Q2” canonically put the end of the 5-year mission in 2270, so it makes sense that it started in 2266, which corresponds to the first season. There might be room for some missions before season 1, but it roughly works out that way.
“Since the publicity came right on the heels of TVH, which ended with Kirk taking command of a new Enterprise and beginning a new series of adventures, I think the assumption was that it was meant to be 78 years after TVH”
But assumptions aren’t hard evidence. If it isn’t onscreen, it isn’t binding. Many assumptions have been disproven by later canon.
@57/Jana: “Is it really consenting if he doesn’t have a choice?”
The point is, he consented to the risk. He knew that, by climbing out onto the plank and jumping to get the hat, there was a possibility that he might fall into the water. By performing the ritual, he agreed to accept that that might happen. And I’m sure he had the choice to decline the ritual if he hadn’t been willing to take that risk. It may be “classic,” but we never saw it done in any other Starfleet promotion ceremony, so clearly it’s optional.
Although I agree with OThDPh that it was a pretty jerky thing for Riker to do that.
Re: Riker’s plank prank: Agree it was a jerk move, but it’s also in keeping with how we’ve seen Riker interact with his crewmates (see also: Captain Picard Day). He does seem to have a bead on his crewmates and how far to push things with them wihout going *ahem* overboard. The others also have Riker’s bead, and I think they subscribe to the notion of “don’t get mad – get even” (see also: Picard’s ‘Commander Riker Day’ threat).
I suspect that the next time Worf invited Riker to his holodeck calisthenics program, there’d be a little proportional revenge waiting for Will…
@63/Corylea: The way I see Kirk, he would have loved to have a wife and family, but ultimately his job – doing the thing he was good at and being useful – was always more important to him, and he couldn’t have both. But the thing about the captaincy is that it doesn’t last. The Nexus catches him after his retirement and immediately after he has met Sulu’s daughter. At this moment in his life, he longs for the life he didn’t have. The fact that we have never met Antonia doesn’t matter because Kirk has met her, and even lived with her for two years.
@65/Christopher: Which other Starfleet promotion ceremonies did we see?
@67
We saw Tom Paris’ (re)promotion in Voyager. He came to work and found a little box on his seat with a fresh pip in it. I assume it was done like that just to taunt perpetual ensign Harry Kim though.
JanaJensen: Besides the Tom Paris one random22 just mentioned, the only other onscreen promotion was Sisko to captain in “The Adversary.” All the other promotions on the shows (Worf from junior-grade lieutenant to lieutenant, La Forge from junior-grade lieutenant to lieutenant and from lieutenant to lieutenant commander, Dax from lieutenant to lieutenant commander, Bashir from junior-grade lieutenant to lieutenant, Riker from commander to captain, not to mention all the TOS character promotions between movies) happened off-camera and generally between seasons or between movies.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@69/krad: We also saw Tuvok’s promotion ceremony to lieutenant commander onscreen at the start of “Revulsion” early in season 4 of Voyager. As with Sisko’s promotion, it merely involved a speech and the pinning of a new rank pip onto his collar.
One other promotion that occurred, albeit still off-screen (although within an episode) was Counselor Troi from LTCdr to Commander in “Thine Own Self”. Data notes her promotion when he returns to the Enterprise after his ordeal.
My main problem with this movie was the nexus. It gets this huge build-up: It’s a paradise, a place of pure joy, once you go in there you’ll want to stay and not care about anything else, if you’re pulled out then you’ll do anything you can including genocide to get back. Then Kirk and Picard spend ten minutes in there, get bored and want to go home. Guess the nexus just has really good PR?
As a confirmed bachelor with a brother and nephews who hasn’t had a vasectomy, I fully empathise with Picard believing the line will end with him on losing his entire immediate family. The novels letting him have a child late in life with a woman who’s already got a grown-up son feels like the stuff of bad fan fiction. (No disrespect to anyone who writes novels or indeed bad fan fiction.) For the record, in my own bad fan fiction continuation of the series I did have Picard and Crusher marry, after he was promoted to admiral. Then I killed him. I also killed Riker and had Troi marry my clone and have a child with him. (I told you it was bad fan fiction…) But really, when even the novels make fun of Picard quoting this film every time someone points out he’s been a captain for fifty-five years and maybe his career should be moving on, you start to wonder if maybe there’s something unimaginative about him doing the exact same thing with all the senior staff who didn’t die or get transferred to another ship in the last movie, including the one who’d actually left Starfleet. (And how many novels until Data signs back onboard?)
I’ve never had a problem with Kirk’s death. I heard the complaints then watched the movie and went “What’s wrong with that?” I think Kirk would have been proud of it too. As he once said, “He gave his life in an attempt to save others. Not the worst way to go.” Actually, I’m more intrigued by his claim in TFF that he’ll die alone. As far as his friends are aware, he did…but we and Picard know different.
And yes, it’s no wonder Data’s having trouble understanding the human condition when his role models are a bunch of stiffs indulging in hypocritical humour….
My biggest issue with the Data subplot is that what Data did to Crusher isn’t significantly different than what Riker did to Worf. It just doesn’t track that one is uproariously hilarious and the other is met with stares of shock and disappointment. I remember seeing this in the theatre in 1994, and everyone in the theatre laughed when Data pushed Crusher into the ocean, and then La Forge is saying it’s “not funny,” and there’s a sussurrus of confusion among the audience, because we all thought it was funny, and here’s a character telling us that we’re wrong.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve always seen Riker’s use of “remove” instead of “retract” as an honest mistake. People forget how literal computers can be all the time. The unintended consequences are funny for a moment, so the people laugh. Riker does say “sorry” to Worf, and it seemed genuine enough to me. Seven years of Riker on the show prove that he is not heartless or a jerk.
Data trying the drink and hating it is one example of humor that hit the mark for me.
@72/cap-mjb: “But really, when even the novels make fun of Picard quoting this film every time someone points out he’s been a captain for fifty-five years and maybe his career should be moving on, you start to wonder if maybe there’s something unimaginative about him doing the exact same thing with all the senior staff who didn’t die or get transferred to another ship in the last movie, including the one who’d actually left Starfleet. (And how many novels until Data signs back onboard?)”
In the current novel continuity, the only TNG regulars still serving on the Enterprise-E are Picard, Worf (as first officer), Geordi, and Beverly. And there’s essentially no prospect of Data rejoining the crew anytime soon.
@73/krad: “My biggest issue with the Data subplot is that what Data did to Crusher isn’t significantly different than what Riker did to Worf.”
Like I said, consent can make all the difference in the world, even if everything else is the same. Tackling someone you’re playing football with is a completely different matter from tackling someone at random during a casual conversation. Worf consented to the possibility of being dunked; Crusher did not.
I was WAY too sidetracked by “wait what is this nexus and who made it? to care about much else. I mean I LOVED kirk but I knew they’d kill him and his death suited me as “Fine” Not bad not great. I know I personally would not have gone to any TNG movies if the orginal cast was still an option. So they had to kill Kirk and did
Stil I really want to know “Who built cosmic happy rays and why?
@76/roblewmac: I’m pretty sure the Nexus is supposed to be a natural phenomenon, not a construct. It strikes me as being similar to the Bajoran Prophets’ domain, a continuum where time doesn’t exist and past, present, and future are all one. Hence “temporal nexus,” as Picard called it — a link or crossing point between times.
I’m glad you hit on the silliness that is Picard’s ideal Christmas fantasy- Very Dickensian, but Picard is a 23rd Century Frenchman, and so its very Englishness is very ridiculous. Unless Piacrd has a Dickens CosPlay thing, and then it all makes sense. I still think that the coruscating glass ornaments on the tree were cool, though.
One more nit that you managed to miss – when Picard confronts Lursa over the main screen, he calls her “Lursor” (I think Patrick Stewart forgot the character’s name) and they never bothered to correct it. It’s always driven me nuts when I see it, and I tried to be charitable and chalk it to his English accent, but I can’t.
@75, does it influence your analysis if we accept Worf’s ability as a great/athletic warrior who would have been very unlikely to fall absent Riker’s prank? Say that there was a 99% chance that he would have succeeded. In some sense he consented to the risk, but it’s very unlikely. Merely by being “on” the holographic ship, Beverly is also accepting some risk that she’ll fall overboard into holographic water, which could happen either by somebody accidentally bumping into her, her own klutziness, or otherwise– which, who knows, might be roughly the same 1% risk that Worf would fail. I am not really seeing the sharp analytical difference between Riker and Data changing the bad outcome from a 1~% chance to a near-100% chance. Especially since the holodeck is completely safe and Crusher was never in any actual danger. Well, okay, it’s not completely safe but the characters ACT like it’s supposed to be completely safe, and “that’s not funny because there might be a holodeck malfunction!” is too tortured to get into.
But, accepting for the purposes of discussion that reasonable people can disagree on this topic, that still makes it a really bad choice for something to be the impetus for installing Data’s emotion chip. It should be something the audience should near-universally cringe at watching at. Perhaps some sort of prank that would occur shortly thereafter in screentime, but a while after in the movie so it’s too disjointed to be funny. Or maybe we can see the tail end of another failed “In Theory”-ish romance. Or maybe Data can be inspired by Picard’s loss that he wants little Data-lets of his own one day but wants to get the whole emotion thing squared away first. Pretty much anything would have been better than what we got. I also saw this movie in theaters and, like Keith’s audience, the reaction to the prank was laughter and then audible confusion when the characters were upset.
EDIT: Also, I’m not really sure this works.
“Tackling someone you’re playing football with is a completely different matter from tackling someone at random during a casual conversation. “
True, but Riker didn’t tackle Worf during the equivalent of a football game. What he did was the rough equivalent of tackling somebody who happened to be playing a football game– that is, if he was just a spectator, ran up, and blindsided the guy. What Data did is the rough equivalent of doing that to a spectator. Neither one would be accepted behavior at a football game, but I’m not sure whether one is “worse” than the other (and the analogy falls apart to some degree because a football tackle has a legitimate risk of medical injury not present here– it might be more like intentionally hitting somebody with a football rather than a good faith attempt at passing the ball or something. It might hurt or even leave a bruise, but very unlikely to be actually dangerous).
@72: The novels letting him have a child late in life with a woman who’s already got a grown-up son feels like the stuff of bad fan fiction. (No disrespect to anyone who writes novels or indeed bad fan fiction.)
I don’t agree with this, necessarily, but now that you mention it, talk about growing up under intense pressure. Suppose that their kid is strictly average or below average and becomes, say, a waiter in some ship’s version of Ten-Forward (like that awesome one-off character from “Lower Decks”). Bad enough that your parents are well-regarded Starfleet officers, but your brother is off exploring the mysteries of time and space with a higher being… oh, and he was also in Starfleet when he was a teenager. I don’t care how enlightened the 24th century is, you are in for some awkward holiday gatherings.
@19/cosmotiger – This is why I will never stop wishing they had adapted the book Federation by Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens instead of this story. I don’t think I’ve watched this film from beginning to end more than once.
@75/ChristopherLBennett: “In the current novel continuity, the only TNG regulars still serving on the Enterprise-E are Picard, Worf (as first officer), Geordi, and Beverly. And there’s essentially no prospect of Data rejoining the crew anytime soon.”
Exactly! If you discount Yar and Wesley, who both left the regular cast WAY before the movie era, the only ones not still there are Riker and Troi (since Riker was explicitly given command of his own vessel with Troi joining him) and Data (who was killed and that’s now been undone). You’ve got Worf there even though he left Starfleet to become an ambassador and I could have a lengthy analysis about which deleted scenes have been used as justification and which have been quietly ignored but I don’t want to bore everyone. The fact that they’re stuck in a rut (and have even had their character development reversed in a TVH way) is kind of underlined by the fact that people who served under Worf and La Forge as ensigns are now captains, while they’re still following the now octogenarian Captain Picard around.
Generations is the very first Trek film I saw in theatres. If there is something that gave me nightmares back then it’s the sight of the Enterprise D being torn apart, crashing and then being vaporized by the Veridian star’s shockwave. If anything, David Carson brings his expertise in staging kinetic action, in a way bringing the whole impact of Wolf 359 as seen in DS9’s Emissary and giving it the proper big screen treatment. What happens to the Enterprise in this film is almost payback for seven seasons of very restrained budgets in which you could never do explosions inside the ship (not unlike Wrath of Khan, in that sense).
Not that this film was much more expensive than previous TOS movie entries, but they squeezed every penny possible. I’d argue turning off a lot of lights helped to achieve a more moody and dramatic visual aesthetic. I’d argue Alonzo’s cinematography even informed Marvin Rush’s following work on Voyager.
And in terms of visual effects, the Nexus looked astounding back in 1994, as did the saucer crash sequence. And they also built the Ent-B set on a gimble, giving it a real sense of danger when the ship is struck by the barrier. Even little scenes, like Kirk resetting the Deflector dish look impressive with the lighting and smokes. As I said, they really spent their money well on this film.
Might as well get the big issue out of the way. The Nexus is where the movie loses a lot of steam and ends up serving as Deus Ex-Machina to the plot. It should never have been so easy to leave that place. The novelization complicates it when it tries to explain Guinan’s echo being there. According to the book, her, Soran and the other El-Aurians were partially living within the Nexus while their ships were being torn apart. Given Soran’s behavior during the rescue, that does make sense. But if that’s the case, why would the pilots even bother sending a distress signal for the Ent-B to receive?
A lot of the Nexus is left unexplained. And most explanations don’t satisfy. It’s the only method Moore and Braga could think of to bring Kirk and Picard together without resorting to time travel. Having Kirk and Picard meet was a studio mandate after all.
I do enjoy watching this film on DVD/Blu-Ray while listening to the Braga/Moore commentary. It’s by far the most enlightening track ever recorded on any Trek film, dissecting everything that works and everything that doesn’t. They’re surprisingly critical of several scenes, but mostly the Nexus. And there are scenes that work beautifully, such as the Stellar Cartography detective scene which also sheds light on Data’s condition.
Regarding Kirk’s death, I feel the movie got that very much right. As pointed out, there is no such thing as a good death. And it avoided going in a melodramatic fashion. Kirk did his duty, and jumped right back into a bridge of certain doom. In a way, Kirk always prophesized he’d die alone. He did have Picard for comfort in his final moments, thankfully. I also appreciate Kirk feeling that the galaxy owes him one, for a change, finally realizing just how much his career cost him in the long run. Sadly, Picard never gets the same meaningful development.
Regarding the score, it’s one of McCarthy’s better, more expressive pieces, and it thrives with surprisingly somber, melancholy tunes, not something I’d figure Rick Berman would go for in an attempt to reach a wider audience.
According to Moore and Braga, this wasn’t written in such a hurry. Several months, in fact. Their first meeting to discuss the film’s story with Rick Berman took place in February 1993. The problem is they still had to write regular TNG season 7 episodes during the development of Generations (one of the reasons I feel season 7 came with a few subpar entries). They were still rewriting the film when they were doing All Good Things, a masterpiece that was done in only three weeks.
So I don’t think this was a rushed first draft at all. It could have used more time being rewritten, but it had fundamental problems which were always present due to Paramount’s directive to do a transgenerational piece.
Overall, it’s a flawed film, but one I enjoy going back to every now and then. Easily one of Kirk’s better outings, with a fitting end for the character (even if controversial to many fans). As a TNG film, it’s a rushed one, despite solid direction and it falters with the Nexus before picking up with a serviceable climax.
@krad: I never found pushing either Worf or Beverly funny. One scene which also had the entire audience laughing out loud (to my puzzlement) was when Riker orders Worf to fire the Torpedo at the Bird of Prey. If there was a joke there, I missed it.
P.S. – the scene where Data celebrates the destruction of the BOP has a couple of really unruly extras, one who even imitates Data’s gesture.
The thing with Crusher is that the writers clearly have no idea how this sort of party humour works. If you are at the type of party where someone getting dunked is a possibility, then everyone laughs when it happens, and then a second person goes in the water…well everyone laughs again because it is that kind of gig. That is exactly the sort of party [Crusher] agreed to attend. Especially if it is on the holodeck where the water isn’t real and nobody can get hurt (in theory, holodeck episode joke here) because she is then just upset because she lost a little dignity. The majority of the audience knows what sort of party this is, so it is a bit of a disconnect where the writers and director clearly don’t. It was a bad decision.
I think it was also a poor introduction to the Next Gen crew for those that hadn’t seen them before. We’ve a clever and able guy in Worf, then a jackass frat-bro commander, a distracted Captain, a 2nd officer who clearly is an idiot who does not understand basic humour, a guy declaring jihad, an uptight female doctor who couldn’t see the obvious coming, and a vacantly staring woman who appears to serve no purpose. The only guy who comes out of it not looking like an ass is Worf. By the time you get to the end of the movie you really do understand why they needed to summon Kirk’s ghost to save them and also how they managed to crash a ship into a planet which was surrounded by empty space. Incidentally, who is running the ship when the entire command crew is down on the holodeck?
A more competent introduction would have made the movie a lot better. Instead of coming on the aftermath of an attack on a space station, couldn’t they have turned up to intervene in it and drive off the Romulan attackers, which would also make Malcolm McDowell’s character’s actions would then be a lot less nonsensical too. The Enterprise interrupting an attack and beaming people off to safety would make more sense in interrupting his plans, and not only give him a reason to sneak back on board but also have a narrative symmetry in that twice he had the nexus in his grasp and twice it was snatched from that grasp by being beamed away by the Enterprise. It would also give a bit more meat to having to have Kirk there at the end too, the symbolism of two Enterprise Captains finally foiling his recklessly homicidal plans. It would have given more momentum to the entire story.
@78 Picard’s always had a fondness for English Lit, so I’ll give them a pass on his Christmas fantasy. I don’t know anything about Belle Epoque French Christmases, are they noticeably different from the Victorian version?
Worf and Crusher got dunked in water–and not even real water! Oh the humanity.
@65/CLB
“assumptions aren’t hard evidence. If it isn’t onscreen, it isn’t binding. Many assumptions have been disproven by later canon.“
Not THIS particular assumption, though, given that the folks who put together the Official Chronology went with it too. :-)
@85/random22: As far as I know, Christmas as we know it was invented in Germany in the 19th century and imported to other European countries from there. So Picard’s Christmas fantasy isn’t particularly English.
@73/Krad: What’s funny to us as the audience doesn’t necessarily have to be funny to the actual characters in the story. It’s all about context. We as the audience find it funny because it’s Data yet again not getting humor. But to the characters in-story he violated someone’s consent and so is being scolded for it.
@15/Phillip Thorne – DS9 premiered in January of ’93. :o)
@57/JanaJansen – I guess we’ll have to disagree on villains – Lursa and B’Etor are funny and campy to me. Soran is rather one-note to me and there’s no appealing to his “humanity”. He’s so set on his mission and unwavering that he feels no emotional conflict at all. I think if there was at least a flashback to when the Borg attacked his home and deposited what he lost then us as the audience could feel some sympathy for him. As it’s portrayed, he’s just some jerk that needs to go away already.
And I myself don’t mind weepy Picard. I thought it was a bold and different choice. It’s just for the big screen debut of Next Gen and Picard for general audiences heretofore unfamiliar with him, that maybe it’s not the best way to introduce the main hero as some weepy guy.
*”deposited” should be “depicted
@78/Lady Belaine: “One more nit that you managed to miss – when Picard confronts Lursa over the main screen, he calls her “Lursor” (I think Patrick Stewart forgot the character’s name) and they never bothered to correct it.”
That line sounds to me like he actually said “Lursa, B’Etor” and for some reason the editor thought it took up too much time and cut out the middle two syllables. There’s some really tight editing in this movie. Although it looks like the scripted line is just “Lursa,” so I’m not sure anymore.
@79/dunsel: “In some sense he consented to the risk, but it’s very unlikely.”
Consent has nothing whatsoever to do with how likely an outcome is. It has to do with being willing to take the chance. Heck, many legal consent forms, like for medical procedures or business arrangements, are about acknowledging awareness and acceptance of unlikely risks. This isn’t about mathematics, it’s about state of mind, readiness to participate.
Look, consent isn’t difficult to understand — you just have to think of it in terms of how you would feel if you were the recipient of the action. If you’re on a sports team and someone dumps a bucket of Gatorade over your head, you’d react differently than if you were just walking down the street minding your own business and someone came up and did the same thing.
@82/cap-mjb: “You’ve got Worf there even though he left Starfleet to become an ambassador and I could have a lengthy analysis about which deleted scenes have been used as justification and which have been quietly ignored but I don’t want to bore everyone.”
It was Keith who decided to bring Worf back to Starfleet, for reasons that he spelled out in A Time for War, a Time for Peace, and I think those reasons made sense, though he’s the proper one to address that. I’ll just say that it’s very much not a case of Worf just going back to his old status quo, because being first officer has allowed him to grow in a very different direction, although some books have conveyed that better than others. (Dayton Ward’s recent Hearts and Minds offers a very good example of how Worf has grown.)
@85/random22: “Incidentally, who is running the ship when the entire command crew is down on the holodeck?”
The same people who run it when they’re off duty or asleep, no doubt. Naturally the crew works in shifts. We just usually never see the people in the second and third shifts.
@87/Glenn: Weren’t you the one disagreeing with the Chronology a few posts ago? No matter how “official” it is, a tie-in book is not screen canon and is subject to change. A number of dating assumptions in the Chronology were contradicted by later canon. I cited the Voyager episode giving a 2270 date for the end of the 5YM when the Chrono had put it in 2269. Also, the first edition of the Chrono put Cochrane’s first flight in 2061, but then First Contact put it in 2063. What’s in a book does not count. The canon is the shows and movies, period. The Chrono itself explicitly said that its dates that weren’t based on canon were merely conjectures. Every single conjectural date said “Conjecture” after it. But for some reason nobody ever remembers that part.
@88 Yeah it is generically Christmassy from the 19thC. That is five hundred years in Picard’s past. I’m sure if I was to recreate what I thought was a festival of the 15thC then I’d probably come up with something that was equal parts a melange and pastiche to someone from a particular region and decade of that era. I don’t have a problem with him wanting a generic Christmas hygge thing and having something that is a bit of mixture of countries and decades. Picard’s family look like the 24thC version of retro hippies, so he probably grew up with a ye olde typee Christmasse winter celebration as part of that.
@89 The character mood has to track the audience mood or risk losing the audience. That was the problem with that scene. The audience was always going to see Bev getting pushed into the water coming and find it funny. It is a classic slapstick gag. It comes all the way from Laurel and Hardy and before. The difference between the audience reaction and the character reaction is just too jarring. Especially when, IIRC, Bev falling also knocked Worf back into the water just as he’d almost climbed out.
They should either have cut right then and not had that moment of stunned silence, if they wanted the in-character reaction to be not funny, or had everyone else laugh too and just accept it was funny and have Data still not get it and hit his bemused by humour character beat that way.
@44,
“The date on the Romulan Ale was only 2283, so they could’ve gone with that (assuming McCoy’s “a while to ferment” line was sarcastic).”
I always took that line to be sarcastic. I remember my uncle buying military special bourbon that was aged two whole years and we gave him no end of crap about it. (it was also hands down the worst bourbon I’ve ever drank.)
Honestly, I was never sure whether the “2283” represented an Earth date, a Romulan date, or a stardate. I mean, really, why would Romulan ale, which is illegal and presumably had to be smuggled in from Romulan space (I presume the intended analogy was with something like Cuban cigars, something banned because of an embargo), have a date printed on it in the Earth calendar?
Though it occurred to me to find an image of the actual movie prop, and it has two stickers on it, an oval one with alien writing (presumably Romulan) and a smaller rectangular one reading “Vintage 2283.” So I guess the idea is that the smugglers, or the vendor they sold it to, added the label for the benefit of Federation customers, in which case it makes sense that it could be an Earth date — thought that doesn’t rule out a stardate.
@93/CLB
“Weren’t you the one disagreeing with the Chronology a few posts ago?”
I already explained all this before. I actually AGREE with the Chronology, with regard to setting the beginning of TNG 78 years after The Voyage Home. I did the same exact thing when I came up with my own chronology, years before the Official one was ever published. In that regard, the Chronology and I arrived at the same exact starting point.
But as I noted above, if you go with that premise, you can’t go with the notion that 1966=2266, 1967=2267, and so on. Because of The Wrath of Khan. Which takes place 15 years after “Space Seed.” Which means “Space Seed” happened circa 2270, 2271. Which would place The Motion Picture in or around 2277.
The problem with the Chronology is that the folks who wrote it didn’t want to give up the notion that 1966=2266, 1967=2267, and so on. So they decided they’d rather contradict TWOK and set it 18 years after “Space Seed,” despite all evidence to the contrary.
“The Chrono itself explicitly said that its dates that weren’t based on canon were merely conjectures.”
I might as well stick with my own personal one, then. :-)
@97/Glenn: As I said, the one canonical date we have is from Voyager: “Q2,” stating that the 5-year mission ended in 2270. That was actually spoken onscreen, so that’s the one immovable point we now have. It’s a “fact” as far as Trek canon is concerned. (I generally allow for the possibility that the speaker could be in error, but this was spoken by the ex-Borg teenager Icheb as part of a meticulously researched history report, so it can be presumed to be accurate.) So all our other calculations have to be based on that starting point. A 5-year mission ending in 2270 must have begun in 2265 or the start of ’66. TMP, two and a half years later, must’ve been in late 2272 or early 2273. TWOK, at 15 years after a late 1st-season episode, might be as early as 2281, but the Romulan ale bottle presumably sets ’83 as the earliest possible date. TSFS is no more than a couple of weeks later, and TVH is three months after that.
Regarding GENERATIONS —
The whole Antonia thing has always bugged me. I feel it screws up Kirk’s movie-era backstory, and kind of makes him out to be a bit of a schmuck.
Kirk meets Antonia at some point, and around 2283, he decides to “go back” to Starfleet. The Wrath of Khan takes place around 2285, 2286. It’s clear from that movie that he’s been in his then-current assignment for a while, probably a few years, long enough that he’s fairly miserable in it.
So basically, Kirk walks away from Antonia to go back to the Admiralty… why????
The only way this works, at least for me, is if Kirk commands the Enterprise for more than just a second 5YM after TMP. Which contradicts my own UNTOLD VOYAGES series, but whatever. The scenario would have to be that Kirk remains captain of the refitted Enterprise past those five years–staying on for at least another two or three years. It’s then reasonable to assume that at some point after that, he returns home, and he’s tired. Worn out. He needs time off. Maybe he’s coming off of a mission like the one I depicted in UNTOLD VOYAGES #5, where he realizes that some of Starfleet’s next generation have learned the wrong lessons from his career, and he needs to reassess his life and consider his next move. So he takes an extended leave of absence from Starfleet–not a full-blown retirement, but a long break. Then he meets Antonia, and has the relationship with her.
But then, as I showed in UV #5, Admiral Morrow calls him and tries to convince him to come back, in whatever capacity he wants. Morrow would love to have Kirk join his staff at the Admiralty. Kirk considers it, and ultimately decides that he’ll accept the promotion to the Admiralty, provided that Morrow meets his terms (which I described above in an earlier post). He wants to play a direct role in teaching and guiding the next generation. So he “goes back” to Starfleet with the best of intentions, thinking that this is a move that he really wants to make (instead of just going back to the Enterprise again).
Mind you, this doesn’t explain why this had to mean the end of his relationship with Antonia. I mean, he was going to be home on Earth all the time. No more galaxy hopping! No more having to choose between his ship and a normal human relationship. Pretty much a 9 to 5 job. What was HER problem? Did she want him ALL to herself? Did she want to start traveling the world and beyond, and he wouldn’t be able to join her because now he had these new responsibilities? I dunno. Antonia, for me, throws a real monkey wrench in things.
I don’t get why they just didn’t have Kirk’s fantasy life in the Nexus include Carol Marcus and David as a little boy. “My life that could have been—and wasn’t.” It’s all RIGHT there, in that one line! Bibi Besch was still alive, and as one of “Kirk’s women,” Carol was seen a lot more recently than, say, Edith Keeler. She was still pretty fresh in people’s memories. Not to mention the fact that Carol was in one of the Star Trek movies that non-Trekkies were most likely to have seen, so she wouldn’t be considered as “obscure” or as hard to explain to newbies as Edith. It was a missed opportunity, in a whole movie of missed opportunities.
@93/ChristopherLBennett: “It was Keith who decided to bring Worf back to Starfleet, for reasons that he spelled out in A Time for War, a Time for Peace, and I think those reasons made sense, though he’s the proper one to address that. I’ll just say that it’s very much not a case of Worf just going back to his old status quo, because being first officer has allowed him to grow in a very different direction, although some books have conveyed that better than others. (Dayton Ward’s recent Hearts and Minds offers a very good example of how Worf has grown.)”
Fair dos, although I think that was more a case of “The relaunch novels want Worf back on the Enterprise so you’ve got to do that in your novel” rather than something that grew organically. He might have a different post (in the same way Chekov is security chief rather than navigator in the second five year mission…) but he’s still back on a ship called Enterprise, along with three of the other six main characters who are all doing the same jobs they did back in S3, having only risen two grades in 20 years and only spent two years out of Starfleet. (For the record, I had Worf rejoining Starfleet a fair bit later, when the House of Duras took over the Empire and broke off diplomatic ties with the Federation. And ironically he ended up as Sisko’s first officer!) I haven’t read Hearts and Minds yet so can’t comment on that I’m afraid.
@98/CLB
Keep in mind, I never really watched VOYAGER, so if I ever knew about that canonical 2270 date before, I didn’t remember it. Doesn’t make it any less wrong. LOL!!!!!
But seriously–let’s go with 2270 as the end point for the 5YM. Then let’s go with TMP taking place in 2273. If “Space Seed,” being a late-first-season episode, took place in, say, 2267 at the latest, then TWOK, 15 years later, had to have taken place in 2282, or 2283 at the VERY latest. Now, we know the bottle of Romulan ale is from 2283. And McCoy says “It takes this stuff a while to ferment.” It does NOT seem like he was making a joke about that. Because if he was, a lot of people in the audience wouldn’t have understood. So, in terms of filmmakers’ intent, the movie was most likely set AFTER 2283. And yet both Khan AND Kirk, separately, specifically state that only 15 years have passed since “Space Seed.”
My only take-away here is that I feel even MORE strongly that the writers of the Chronology should have just dropped their “1966=2266” idea when they were putting it together, and that the writers on VOYAGER had a chance to fix things but didn’t.
Or are YOU saying that we don’t know FOR SURE about the years in which the TOS movies took place, because they were never spoken onscreen? (The 2283 date on the Romulan ale is a pretty strong indicator, though…)
CLB — Just looked back at one of your earlier posts.
Having the 2283 on the Romulan ale bottle be a STARDATE instead of an Earth year would certainly open things up considerably.
As someone who started watching Star Trek daily as a toddler & a loyal watcher of TNG as it ran while a young adult, the movie was odd. After years of Sir Patrick being the “real actor” who got to have monologues, etc., seeing him share the screen with Shatner was really jarring – because Shatner had so much more stage presence than Sir Patrick. Maybe that was the directing or the baggage of so much Shatner in my formative years, but it seemed to me & still seems now like Shatner was more compelling, more magnetic. Lots of reasons Worf and Kirk couldn’t be together, but I actually think Michael Dorn was the only TNG actor who could have matched Shatner for screen power.
Christopher and cap-mjb: I did not make the decision to bring Worf bank to Starfleet, the makers of Star Trek Nemesis did. I just came up with an explanation that the film never bothered to provide as to why.
As the person who did the most with Ambassador Worf, I thought putting him back in uniform was idiotic and boring and, er, unimaginative, but the movie saddled us with it, so we made the most of it. It’s actually worked out well, as his arc as first officer has been a strong one.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My problem with Picard’s fantasy life in the nexus was that his wife was some woman we had never seen before instead of Beverly. It was a missed opportunity to give Gates McFadden a larger role in the film.
Michael: Yeah, having it be Random British Woman was also a missed opportunity. I mean, at least Antonia was retconned into Kirk’s life. Random British Woman didn’t even get that — just as Kirk should’ve been with Carol Marcus or Edith Keeler, Picard should’ve been with Beverly Crusher or Janice Mannheim.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Pish, Posh, Krad. If it wasn’t going to be Beverley, it should have been Vash!
@106/krad: Or maybe Nella Daren? Or Vash? Or Eline from “The Inner Light?” Heck, he was with her for 50 subjective years.
Anyway, these decisions were probably more about actress availability and budget limitations than pure storytelling choices. Maybe they made up Antonia and Random British Woman because they couldn’t get any of the familiar candidates.
I like Antonia because I like that Kirk had a girlfriend later in life. And I think it fits his character that his fantasy life is about a choice he made – about a woman he left, not about a woman who left him, as Carol Marcus apparently did.
As for Picard’s fantasy life, an imaginary wife goes well with imaginary children. Giving him an imaginary wife accentuates the aspect that his fantasy is about family, not about marriage or love or any specific person.
@109/Jana: Good points.
#109
But isn’t Picard’s nephew in the fantasy too, not just fantasy children? And then there’s Guinan popping up for some reason, so specific people are there. They’d might as well given us his brother and the other people we recognized, like Eline or Beverly, while they were at it.
Wouldn’t have hurt the narrative. I think would’ve made it more achingly heartfelt when he chose to leave the fantasy world, like in the episode–I forget the name–where the boy has to leave the fantasy world of his dead mother still being alive.
But the movie drops Kirk and Picard into sickly sweet Hallmark cards and asks us to care. And I can’t.
@72: Same PR as the One Ring? :) Everybody either getting tempted or corrupted by it, yet Faramir couldn’t care less about it? (Book, not movie)
@111/Cheerio: I didn’t mean that there could be no specific people in Picard’s fantasy, only that an imaginary wife made sense because this was about family, not about love. Seeing his brother wouldn’t have hurt, though.
And I kinda agree with “sickly sweet”, at least with regard to Picard’s fantasy. Leaving it behind for Kirk’s log cabin in the woods was a great relief. (I’m rather outdoorsy.) I rewatched the film many years later, after I had children of my own, and liked the scene a bit better then. But the 19th century setting was still too much.
krad/@104 and @106: Yes, that’s what I thought. Personally, given that the relevant dialogue was cut, I think there’s enough ambiguity in Worf being back in uniform to say that he isn’t back in Starfleet, but I’m guessing there was a collective decision to run with it.
And Picard is obviously indulging his secret passion for Janet Brooks!
@111:
Guinan isn’t a part of Picard’s fantasy any more than Picard is a part of Kirk’s, she’s just intruding in it.
The 2283 Romulan Ale could have been bootlegged too. That could account for the lack of aging.
Also, I think the saucer separation scene is a little off. In the movie, we’re shown kids hustling to get out of the drive section and into the saucer section. Wouldn’t they already be in the saucer section where the families live? The same goes for the sickbay. Memory Alpha has sickbay located in the saucer section, so why are they dragging patients into the Jeffries Tubes to get there? Its just a little weird.
Keith, I’ve been reading and rereading your Star Trek posts since about the time you were at the seventh season of TNG. I rarely comment. Mostly because I’m always playing catch up to the rewatch, but mostly because i’m not big on commenting online at all.
I’ve been reading the comments section for the TOS movie posts and I have to say you’re very patient with readers digging into things you’ve said and finding unintentional insults. Your patience with us is fantastic. I don’t always agree with you and that’s a completely natural thing to happen, but I always enjoy your perspective.
Thanks for years of quality work on these rewatch series. I hope you keep it up and complete the last two series you haven’t touched!
Have you ever written about Star Trek novels? I’ve read a couple dozen of them and i’m always looking for recommendations for more.
@111/Cheerio: Guinan wasn’t part of Picard’s fantasy, she was actually there. Because the Nexus is timeless, anyone who was ever in it is there simultaneously and exists there for all time, which is why Guinan had a “remnant” of herself left there in 2293. This was the real Guinan from 2293 making contact with the real Picard from 2371.
@116/Jason: They said Romulan ale is illegal, so it pretty much had to be smuggled. Or are you using “bootlegged” in the sense of a locally made counterfeit instead? If that were the case, I’m not sure it would’ve had that alien-script label. Although, well, we don’t know for sure it was Romulan writing on the label.
@116 The evacuation scene is there just to have an evacuation scene.
I suppose you could try to explain it as there being auxiliary sick bays as well as main sick bay, and they were in the engineering hull (I suppose having at least a first aid section down there would make a kind of Health and Safety sense).If that was the case then those would have to be evacuated upwards quickly, assuming escape pods, shuttlecraft, and transporters are not available.Why were they not available again?
The kids though… I suppose, and this is reaching and again does not reflect well on Picard and Riker in their running of the ship, that with the chronic lack of separation between saucer and main hull over the years, that perhaps the allocation of family quarters and childcare/education facilities started to spread down the neck of the ship. Give the kids a window, type of logic, since many saucer based facilities would be completely internal and I can see parents kicking up a fuss and demanding that their precious little….darlings…always get a window view at all times. Parents are like that in every century. Where else are they gonna put them but down the neck section, and then say that at least it isn’t fully in the engineering section and they can be evacuated upwards quickly if necessary. It is dumb, but I suppose it is believably dumb.
swario: thanks so much! Very kind of you to say.
As for the tie-in fiction, I’d feel weird talking about them the way I do the TV shows and movies, given my direct involvement as either writer or editor of a big chunk of Trek fiction, not to mention the number of good friends I have who are involved.
However, in the eternal spirit of self aggrandizement, I heartily recommend that you read every piece of Trek fiction that I’ve written. ;)
—Keith R.A DeCandido
@119/random22: Okay, I just took a look at the TNG Blueprints, and according to them, the engineering hull contains engineering crew quarters and “contingency crew accommodations,” as well as various science labs. So I suppose that crewmembers who work in engineering or the labs would want their families quartered nearby.
The blueprints don’t specifically call out an auxiliary sickbay in the engineering hull, but there are duplicates of most major functions in the saucer. After all, there might be scenarios where the battle hull has to function as a separate ship for days or weeks while the saucer and the civilians are safely back at a starbase or something. (Hence the contingency accommodations, presumably for officers who normally live in the saucer.) So it stands to reason that there would be a sickbay down there. After all, the blueprints have some omissions. For instance, they show the big array of windows on the upper rear of the saucer that’s supposed to be for the arboretum, but there’s no arboretum depicted underneath on the corresponding deck plans.
Keep in mind that the Galaxy class was designed as a peacetime explorer, with combat as a last resort. And I think the intent behind saucer separation was that it would usually work less like “Farpoint” and Generations and more like “The Arsenal of Freedom” — the saucer and civilians get left behind somewhere safe before the battle hull goes into danger, so there’s plenty of time to relocate everybody.
As for why transporters weren’t available, maybe it’s the same reason you’re not supposed to use the elevator in a fire — too much risk of a power failure. And maybe leaving people to float in space in shuttles and escape pods was a bad idea with an imminent risk of the local star blowing up. At least in the saucer, they’d have a reasonable chance of being well-shielded and able to flee at high impulse (if the saucer hadn’t ended up unable to break orbit, that is).
Wow, a 2? Man.
This was the first Trek movie I had the oportunity to watch in a theather, and it was an amazing experience, even if the movie itself is not one of my favorites. I remember the movie theather was basically empty, and it was just me and two friends, at most a couple of other people.
Even if it’s not one of my favorites, it’s a good Star Trek movie, treating the TNG characters well, and a good send off for Kirk (unfortunately undone by the Shatnerverse novels). The plot might not be perfect, but it’s a pretty good Star Trek plot, not lacking in any of the elements we expect from Trek, and also having enough action for a blockbuster movie, but it’s not stupid action.
There’s no discrepancy in Scotty believing he was rescued by Kirk… he’d just come out of being in a transporter’s pattern buffer for seventy-five years, he’s allowed to have a little selective amnesia.
@2 – Chris: You’re right about Kirk’s death and his casually sauntering onto the death-bridge again.
@39 – Ian: I’d say the nexus IS a ST typical time traevel trick. :) But you’re right that Kirk here is written much closer to his TOS character, and not the reckless cowboy from the movies.
@24 – Jana: Agreed on “people we never see are people too”. I never needed to see the Veridian IV people.
@72 – cap-mjb: How is it bad fan fiction to have Picard marry the woman he was canonically shown to have feeligns for? How is it bad fan fiction to have him want to have a child with her, when he’s experienced the life of a father and a grandfather and might long for it?
@74 – BrandonH: I love Data loving to hate the drink.
@78 – LadyBelaine: People from one country are allowed to love stuff from other countries and times. Witness the thousands of Japanese culture loving people around the world, just to name one thing. Plus, as others have said, it’s just Generical 19th Century Western European Christmas (TM).
@83 – Eduardo: The El-Aurian pilots send a distress call because the ships are being torn apart and a lot of them were dying, even if a number of them were living inside the nexus.
I think Scotty is also allowed a little latitude on his wanting it to be Kirk because, they never found his body and he probably still believes that Kirk somehow wasn’t dead (he’s seen enough people come back from the dead even with a body, too). He was right about that though.
@101: Sticking rigidly to the “TWOK is 15 years after Space Seed” dating becomes problematic when you get to TFF, which appears to be significantly less than five years after TWOK, yet must be more than 20 years after Balance of Terror for a joint Federation-Romulan project to have been going on that long. So, best to take the dating as approximate and push TWOK a bit further back.
@116: Whatever Memory Alpha and the reference books they get their information from say, Sickbay was canonically established as being in the stardrive section during “The Arsenal of Freedom”.
@122: Can you say “shipper wish fulfilment”? I’ve no problem with Picard and Crusher getting together and getting married but having a child when they’re both, let’s face it, getting on a bit? I’m not saying it’s impossible (canonical evidence indicates that women do give birth much later in life in the 24th century) but it still seems like the sort of thing that only a fan would do. (And then Star Trek Online decided to establish that their son marries Riker and Troi’s daughter because of course they do.)
My friends and I really, really enjoyed this movie in the theaters. Not that we thought it was great or anything, but I’m pretty sure we we spent months laughing at/wondering why Piccard’s ultimate fantasy was to be surrounded by really annoying Charles Dickens characters, while Kirk’s paradise was to be chopping wood for eternity.
One detail I never realized before.
In Picard’s christmas fantasy, he meets again with his nephew René. However, this René we meet in the film is a figment from Picard’s memories rather than the actual René who died in the fire. Family took place in 2367. Generations takes place in 2371. In reality, René would be 16 or more, older than Jake Sisko, and probably taller than Wesley Crusher by the time he died.
Trivia bit: I rewatched the aptly named The Loss the other day. Just realized that Picard’s wife in Generations is played by the same actress who played Troi’s widow patient on that episode. She’s played by Kim Braden, who’s also David Carson’s wife.
@124/cap-mjb: “I’ve no problem with Picard and Crusher getting together and getting married but having a child when they’re both, let’s face it, getting on a bit? I’m not saying it’s impossible (canonical evidence indicates that women do give birth much later in life in the 24th century) but it still seems like the sort of thing that only a fan would do.”
Lately I’ve grown very puzzled by the pervasive impression that “fan” and “professional creator” are mutually exclusive categories. Come on, it’s a 50-year-old franchise with generations’ worth of people who grew up loving it. Most of its professional creators are fans these days. It’s a meaningless distinction anymore.
Although in this case, I don’t see putting Picard and Crusher together as being about fannish wish fulfillment. I see it as being about the fact that the books aren’t subject to the same restrictions at the TV show. The Picard-Crusher romance was set up from the beginning of TNG, but the producers resisted doing anything with it because they were working in an era when TV was still mostly episodic and they didn’t want to do anything that would shake up the status quo. And so they artificially kept Picard and Crusher from exploring their feelings, just arbitrarily kept them in a holding pattern where the feelings were there below the surface but neither of them ever did anything about it. But the books aren’t subject to the same restrictions. We’re able to explore possibilities the shows were unable or unwilling to, to free ourselves from their limitations and change the status quo. In some cases, that’s meant transforming things profoundly, moving characters forward in their careers or killing them off. But in others, it’s meant letting them pursue relationships that the tyranny of the status quo forbade them from pursuing during the series.
@125/MDNY: As we saw, the woodchopping scene was just the first time frame Kirk imagined when he reached the Nexus. Later on, the scene transitioned to two years earlier in Idaho, when he first met Antonia. He could’ve relived any happy experience from any time in his life — or, as we saw in Picard’s case, imagine an ideal future. (The novelization shows him reliving or imagining many happy moments with many people he loved, including Edith, Carol, and others.)
@121/CLB – We know from dialog that the Engineering Hull has a sickbay; in “The Arsenal of Freedom” after the away team is beamed back up, “sickbay” reports that Dr. Crusher will be ok.
@128/Jose: Plus it’s just common sense. The engineering hull without the saucer is also called the battle hull, i.e. the portion of the ship that operates as a battleship when it becomes necessary. The idea that a battleship would not have medical facilities is absurd on the face of it.
#118
I stand corrected. But ghost Guinan should probably be haunting Soran’s fantasies too. They did know each other.
Wait a minute, does that mean there are two Sorans in the Nexus now? The one from the Enterprise B and the one from later? And if other Nexus residents are aware of other arrivals, can’t Soran send copies of himself to stop Kirk and Picard? Or why doesn’t he interrupt their meeting in the Nexus? Bah!
[throws hands in the air]
To hell with this dumb movie.
@127/CLB:
Okay, yeah, I’m saying daft things because I’m writing in a rush again. I agree with you about Picard and Crusher’s lack of development in canon and I’m not even sure it can be excused with “Things were different then.” It seemed more a case of an even then rather out-dated view that giving characters a regular love interest (or at least actually letting them have a relationship with them) gets in the way of romances of the week. Voyager and Enterprise were written in much the same way long after the television environment had changed. (See Janeway and Chakotay. And then see the Voyager relaunch novels. Actually, the more I think about it, T’Pol and Tucker aren’t much different, for all the naked massage scenes.) TNG could shake up the status quo and leave plot threads dangling to be picked up later in a way that true episodic television couldn’t (the inconclusive downbeat ending to Sins of the Father seemed to confuse a lot of fans used to things being wrapped up neatly).
I don’t hate the idea that Picard and Crusher have married and had a child. I do appreciate the novels showing a different side to them (even if they are still captain and chief medical officer of the Enterprise, because you can’t upset the status quo too much). But it does feel more like something that’s been done in a hundred shipper fics rather than something that’s grown organically out of the characters we know and the place they are in their lives. Crusher has done her time raising a family. In a way, Picard has too: It seems more consistent with the character we see in this film and elsewhere for “The Inner Light” to be less something he wants to repeat and more his chance to live the life he’ll never have before going back to being a starship captain. It seems a waste in a way to ignore the passage of time and instead write them the same as Paris and Torres or as if it’s still the first season.
@130/Cheerio: Soran longed to be inside the Nexus. He certainly spends his time there living his fantasy life. He doesn’t expect Picard, or anyone, to leave tbe Nexus of his own free will, and therefore he doesn’t try to stop him.
@130/Cheerio: The duplicates in the Nexus aren’t really copies, and they can’t leave it. Remember, Guinan’s “echo” was left behind when she physically left it. As I said, the only reason they’re there at all is because all times are one within the Nexus, so if you’re in it even briefly, then you’re in it always. No matter when you enter the Nexus, you’re there at the same timeless moment as everyone else who ever entered it or ever will enter it. But that doesn’t mean there are two of you, it just means that the Nexus allows access to the period in the past when you were inside it, so it’s as if you’re still in it.
I think part of the issue with the dunking scene is that it is both funny to the audience (which witnessed the conversation between Data and Beverly and understands the context of the action) and not funny to the crew (who have no idea why the F the android just pushed the doctor into the water for no apparent reason). Also, Riker specifically points out to Picard that no one has ever actually managed to avoid the dunking, which I think is important because it implies a certain expectation of how the events are supposed to proceed. Riker’s remove/retract mistake is therefore obviously intentional: the promoted officer is supposed to end up in the water, dammit!
I agree that this entry is bad, but it is bad in a way that I find watchable (in the same way that I pointed out in the thread for V that it is bad and watchable in a way that many other Trek movies are not). The whole thing is rushed and you can pick apart practically every idea/scene/motivation/plot point/science in the entire movie, but I usually find myself defending this one as not being nearly as bad as some fans make it out to be. Still…
It definitely has a villain problem. The Klingon sisters are fun minor bosses, but it seems a little out of place to use villains from the series. As pointed out by others, the movie definitely has a problem in that it plays more like an extension of the series and less like a standalone piece of entertainment. And the D should have pasted an old Bird of Prey in two seconds. Soren is boring because his motivation is boring.
It has problems with the plot. The Nexus is ridiculous and stupid and nonsensical. It’s also boring and too poorly defined. Ugh. Both Kirk and Picard get ridiculous concepts for what they would find joyful. Picard’s family gets fridged just to give him some semblance of an arc. Data’s emotion chip (which the series said was unusable btw) robs him of the chance to show more natural growth (that I think the series was very subtle about demonstrating). Nobody else gets much of anything to do, and the tech speak gobbleygook is painful (why do we need this low level ionic pulse to trigger the cloak crap? Just fight! Come up with some strategy and tactics!)
It has a Kirk problem. Why make a movie about Kirk meeting up with the TNG crew, and then only have him interact with Picard for about three or four scenes? The writers were forced to come up with SOME way for Kirk to survive to the 24th century while ALSO appearing to have died. The Nexus was the best they could do, but why not have Kirk show up earlier in the movie? Have him actually get to do things? As an aside, I remember watching the teaser trailer for this, and for some reason I got the impression that Kirk and Picard were actually going to end up on two different starships fighting each other. And that would have been awesome! Miscommunication, brainwashing, I don’t care, the movie could have done anything to force that to happen and I would have been happy. (Interestingly enough, “Shatner’s” novel The Return starts out this way, with Kirk unaware who he is and at odds with the TNG crew).
It has problems with the humor. 13 year old me laughed quite a bit in the theater, but now I feel like the jokes were written for that target audience. Spiner hamming it up to 11 gets old pretty quickly.
It has problems with the sets and the visual effects. I like that they turned the lights down, but it’s painfully obvious that it was done simply to hide how poorly everything would look on the big screen if it was well-lit. And while I like the design of the D, it looks like crap from basically every angle except for two (straight on from the front and level, and from the side and level). Crash landing the saucer section was a great idea though, and they mostly pulled it off (I remember Data’s curse got a HUGE laugh in the theater).
Even with all those problems, I’d still rather watch this movie (which I’ve seen many times) than STID, Insurrection, or Nemesis. All of which I’ve seen exactly once and promised myself never to watch again.
@134/Drunken5yearold: Some of your problems are some of my favourite plot points.
I find Soran’s motivation interesting because he isn’t a run-off-the-mill villain who is after revenge or power. I like Kirk’s Nexus experience because it’s motivated by a desire he has expressed on more than one occasion in the TV show. And I enjoy that Picard and Kirk meet under unusual circumstances – not in space, not on a spaceship, but in a kitchen cooking eggs together.
Quoth Drunken5yearold: “Data’s emotion chip (which the series said was unusable btw)”
The series said no such thing. The emotion chip was designed for Data, but Lore stole it in “Brothers.” Data confiscated it in “Descent Part II” before Lore died, but then didn’t use it because he feared becoming Lore, never mind that it worked differently on Lore anyhow, as he already had emotions. But installing the chip was always a possibility.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Emotion chip” Data was definitely overused in this one. The bits that were meant to be funny just got annoying after awhile, although I thought the comedic timing in the “That’s it! I hate this! It’s revolting!” “More?” “Please!” scene was perfect. I will say that when the effects of the chip were played for seriousness, I thought Spiner did an amazing job of portraying Data’s confusion, fear and even anger. The scene where he makes his demand to Picard to deactivate the chip was really powerful.
Would also co-sign the comments about Picard’s family tragedy as being an unnecessary element to the plotline. I know the movie is called “Generations” and there’s this loose underlying theme about THE MEANING OF LIFE (which has been bubbling at the surface since TWOK) and turning over the franchise to the TNG crew etc.,but killing off Picard’s family offscreen like that just to try to set up the Dickensian Nexus scene later seemed gratuitous and heavy-handed.
But most of all, of course, I remember this as the movie where they killed Kirk. Twice. Rub it in our faces why don’t you? LOL
Oh, and I absolutely agree with krad’s take on the climactic scene as being uninteresting. The desertlike set with the catwalks etc just seemed lame; felt like they were re-using some props from a Road Warrior movie or something, and where’s the suspense in two legendary Federation captains sparring with some pleasure-seeking schmoe with bleached hair? Did anyone really think Soran was going to succeed? All he did was get Kirk killed, which again, really sucks. I’m not one of those who thinks Kirk should have been written to die in some glorious spectacular galaxy-saving conflagration with an unlimited special-effects budget, but this? Just a big “meh”. But I guess it’s kind of interesting that emotionless Spock died in what is arguably the most emotional scene in the history of the franchise, while Kirk just sort of checks out meekly in the dust, with blood trickling out of his mouth. One caveat to my disappointment, I LOVED his last line “oh my”… so many ways to interpret that depending on your faith or lack thereof…
@136/krad: Per Memory Alpha:
“The chip was removed from Lore after he was dismantled, but Data did not install it, both because the chip was damaged after he had fired on Lore and because he believed it to be too dangerous after what had happened, although Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge prevented Data from destroying it as he didn’t want Data to abandon his dream of experiencing emotions.”
I guess Data could have fixed it, but I always got the impression that it was damaged beyond his capability to repair (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the episode).
@135/JanaJensen: I think my problem with Soren is that he acts like your typical movie villain, hell-bent on acquiring MacGuffin X and to hell with other people. It’s sort of similar to the problems that people had with Khan in WoK. I guess I just prefer a setup more like Game of Thrones, where people can be villains but also gray and have reasonable motivations to secure more wealth/power/influence for their families. I did like that Soren basically can’t handle the loss of his family, the film probably should have used that angle to make him a little more multidimensional (I loved the scene when Picard points out how Soren’s actions will have consequences just like what the Borg did. And then the script basically has Soren just ramble incoherently in response).
@139/Drunken5yearold: The chip was damaged, yes, but Geordi stopped Data from destroying it, saying “I wouldn’t be very much of a friend if I let you give up on a lifelong dream, would I? Maybe someday, when you’re ready.” So there was still hope that it could be repaired. As a rule, series fiction rarely uses completely unambiguous endings for things like this — there’s always wiggle room just in case somebody comes up with a good sequel pitch later on.
So we just have to assume that in the intervening year and a half or so (1625 stardate units/1000 units per season), Geordi and Data worked to repair the chip in between episodes.
@139/Drunken5yearold: Okay, I agree with that. I like Soran’s motivation, but they could have made him more nuanced.
On the topic of Alan Ruck’s extensive resume, I got to see him as Leo Bloom in a touring production of The Producers.
Had to go back and rewatch this. I’d forgotten a lot of it. And with good reason apparently. It would have made an interesting 2 part episode of the TV show but as a movie it comes up short.
Regarding Worf. The idea was that he could attempt to grab the hat and face the possibility of falling if he missed. However, he got the hat and stayed on the plank. Riker was just being a jerk.
Apprently the Federation knows enough about the Nexus to know that it goes through this region of space every few years but don’t bother tracking it when it does, even though it get’s within a hairsbreadth of Earth when it does in this movie. It’s no wonder that Earth is always being threatened. There’s literally nobody keeping an eye out for things.
It’s too bad that Robert and Rene were fridged just to give Picard a dream sequence. Interesting characters and they’re just killed off with the stroke of a pen so Picard can have a Victorian Christmas with people we mostly have never seen before and yet we’re supposed to care about them.
Lursa and B’Tor are pretty much the same that they were on the show. Snarling and mostly ineffectual. No great loss when they went bye-bye.
And then there’s Soran. A great actor saddled with a ridiculous story with so many plot holes you’d think the film was sponsored by the Swiss cheese marketing board.
Poor Alan Ruck. He gets to be something that very few people have been, the Captain of the Enterprise and yet he’s such a joke that it takes the novels to basically recreate him from the ground up to make him likable and competent. And why does Kirk have to be the one to reconfigure the deflector? Wouldn’t Scotty make more sense, seeing as he’s the one that came up with the idea? The reason is, of course, was that they needed Kirk to be down there all by himself, even though Excelsior presumably has an engineering crew. Unless they don’t arrive until Tuesday as well.
The less said about the emotion chip, the better. This isn’t Data learning about what it means to be human. It’s literally plug and play. Blech.
I think Keith pretty much nailed it. a 2 is about right and perhaps a bit on the generous side at that. This needed numerous rewrites.
Oh, and in regard to Troi actually saving the saucer. She reports almost immediately that the helm is offline. Data is the one who says that he’s rerouted power to the thrusters to level their descent. Troi may not have crashed the ship but Data is the one who saved them from crashing.
It’s been a long time since I watched the series, but I remember Deanna and Worf being together for a while. Would that have been the current situation in the series when the movie was made, and thereby causing Riker’s jerkiness towards Worf?
@143/kkozoriz: “[…] and yet we’re supposed to care about them.” – No, we’re not, we’re supposed to care about Picard caring about them.
145. JanaJansen – A different way of saying the same thing. We know that they’re not real (Not in the same way that we know Picard isn’t real either). We’re just waiting to see how he discovers it for himself. And when he does, it’s so quick and simple it makes you wonder if Guinan has any idea what she’s talking about.
“PICARD: What’s the ‘Nexus’?
GUINAN: The energy ribbon that destroyed that ship was just not some random phenomenon travelling through the universe. It’s a doorway to another place that we call the Nexus. It’s a place that I’ve tried very, very hard to forget.
PICARD: What happened to you?
GUINAN: It was like being inside joy. As if joy was something tangible …and you could wrap yourself in it like a blanket. And never in my entire life have I been as content.
PICARD: And then you were beamed away from there.
GUINAN: Pulled. Ripped away. None of us wanted to go. I would have done anything, …anything to get back there.”
Maybe it’s different when you’re beamed out of it but neither Kirk nor Picard seemed to have any trouble deciding to leave and showed no remorse when they did. And that makes the fantasies of the captains that much less important.
@146/kkozoriz: There are two things that set Picard apart from everyone else in the Nexus: He knows about it when he enters, and he has an important unfinished job to do. That’s why he isn’t overwhelmed by the experience. Guinan only makes her appearance after he has already started to remember the real world on his own.
As for Kirk, I like to think that the reason why Guinan leads Picard to him and not to anyone else in the Nexus is that he is the only one who could overcome the Nexus experience, both because of his sense of duty and his sense of reality. And even then, it takes a while for Picard to convince him.
Here’s another thing about the two of them – they’ve both had a lot of unusual experiences that may make them more resilient to the Nexus fantasies. Kirk has been split into two halves, has spent some time as a disembodied presence and some more time in a different body, has lived a different life for a few months while amnesic, and has mind-melded with Spock more than once, among them one time when the whole point of the meld was to see realistic illusions as illusions. Picard has been taken over by the Borg, has lived an entire different life and has mind-melded with both Sarek and Spock. Those are experiences that make you see yourself from a distance and learn more about yourself, and that may be a great help when it comes to separating wish fulfilment from reality.
Picard does show remorse when his children call him for dinner and he decides to leave. I don’t like the Christmas fantasy, but I find this moment really touching.
Here’s a pretty glaring plot hole I haven’t seen mentioned (apologies it was and I missed it):
If the Federation (or some other affiliated humanitarian (anthropolarian…? humanoidarian…?) group) was helping out a bunch of El-Aurian refugees, HOW COME THEY HAD NEVER HEARD OF THE BORG until Q orchestrated it? Did nobody say “hey, so what are you guys running from, anyway?”
147. JanaJansen – But Picard barely convinces him of anything. Kirk himself notices when they shift from the cabin to the stables. And It’s Kirk who realizes that it’s not real when he’s not afraid of the jump. Guinan makes it seem like it’ll be the struggle of their lives to get out and yet both of them shrug it off with no real effort. It’s hard to believe that 5everyone else that has encountered the Nexus are trapped inside joy and these two shake off the effects in a matter of moments. I found the resolution much less than the set-up led us to believe.
I was thinking of a way to make it more believable and came up with something for Kirk. First, he’s attending the launch by himself. Scotty and Chekov are not there. Things play out much the same with Kirk encouraging more and more risky efforts. When the nexus hits, the screen goes white and the scene shifts to the TNG portion of the show. No mention of what happened to Kirk.
When Picard meets Kirk in the Nexus, he expresses surprise because he thought Kirk died with everyone else on the Enterprise-B. Yup, the ship was destroyed. When Picard tells him this, Kirk realizes that he failed the last time and this is his chance to make amends by stopping Soran and saving the people on Veridian Four. It makes his leaving the nexus more personal, giving him a reason to leave instead of just hearing about some people that we’ve never heard of before nor even met this time. Kirk realizes he screwed up before and he wants to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if in the intervening 70 plus years, Soran had figured out a way to use a ship to get into the nexus the same way that he did the first time. I’d imagine that there’s some other El-Aurians that would even join him. And for the cost of a transport ship, the Federation wouldn’t have lost the Amargosa observatory and the Enterprise-D.
That’s the big problem with this movie. It sets itself up so you have to totally ignore Occam’s Razor. Nobody even considers the simplest solutions. Sure, there’s this:
PICARD: That’s what Soran’s doing, …he’s changing the course of the ribbon. …But why? Why would he try to change its path? …Why doesn’t he just fly into it with a ship?
DATA: Our records show that every ship which has approached the ribbon has either been destroyed or severely damaged.
Who cares if the ship is damaged or destroyed, as long as Soran gets into the nexus before it is? The Lakul looked like a fairly old ship. Give him another one, pat him on his head and send him on his way. Roll credits.
@148/JacobH: Well, for one thing, Voyager‘s “Dark Frontier” established that Magnus Hansen and others had heard of the Borg as early as 2353, a dozen years before “Q Who.” So that plot hole is not unique to Generations. In fact, it’s inherent in “Q Who” itself — if Guinan knew so much about the Borg, why had she never mentioned them before?
But the El-Aurian refugees came from the Delta Quadrant, so they must’ve been traveling for decades before they reached the Federation. The Borg destruction of their world would’ve been something they hoped they’d left far behind in the past, and it’s possible that few of them wanted to talk about it except in vague terms. And the survivors would mostly have been people who, like Guinan, were away from the planet at the time of its annihilation, so they may not have had much in the way of firsthand documentation or even consistent accounts. Besides, even if some of them did tell the Federation what they knew, it would be about a threat that existed on the other end of the galaxy, so it would’ve been a purely academic matter, a bit of obscure trivia only of interest to a few scholars. Magnus Hansen was aware of the Borg only as a legend, an unconfirmed spacers’ tale that he was trying to prove.
Good points, but still not entirely satisfactory. I was never bothered that much by Guinan not mentioning the Borg, she’s just one person, who is a bit secretive anyway, so it seemed in character. A boatload of refugees, however, you would expect to get debriefed. “What happened to your home planet?” seems like it would be a pretty logical place to start.
@149/kkozoriz: My interpretation is that it would have taken Kirk much longer to realise that it’s not real if Picard hadn’t prepared the ground. As for your alternative plot, I would have liked that a lot less. I like that Kirk gives up his personal paradise once again in order to “make a difference”. It would have cheapened the story if he only did it out of guilt.
@151/Jacob H: Really, there’s nothing in “Q Who” that definitively establishes that the Federation has never heard of the Borg. Picard contacts Guinan very shortly after they encounter the first cube, and she gives them the name “Borg” then. There’s never any point in the episode where anyone says their computers don’t have information about the Borg; it’s just that, logically, the only information they’d have in the computer would be the anecdotal accounts of the El-Aurian refugees, and why settle for that secondhand account when you’ve got one of those refugees right there on the ship to tell you about her firsthand experience?
@149 kkozoriz: There’s a vital statistic that neither the movie nor later explanations provide, to wit: what is the success rate of entering the nexus by ship? We only have three examples in the movie: the Lakul, its companion transport, and the Enterprise B. Examining each in turn:
The Lakul had a total crew and passenger count of 150 – of which 47 were rescued. That’s 103 unaccounted for.
The companion transport had approx 250 people aboard – all lost / unaccounted for when the ship exploded.
Sources vary on the crew complement of the Excelsior class but it’s between 570 and 750 people. The Enterprise B went on its maiden voyage understaffed, so we’ll assume 400 – of which only one was lost to the Nexus.
Even if we assume everyone on the transports entered the Nexus successfully, that’s 401 out of 800 people exposed to the Nexus – a success rate of 50% . And that doesn’t take into account the relative sturdiness of each vessel, how shielded they are from the phasing effect, how long a ship has to be in the ribbon for phasing to occur, etc. The chances of successful entry get smaller if your ship has to stay in the ribbon longer than its hull can withstand the stresses, just to mention one possibility.
Combined with other recorded (but not shown) encounters with the ribbon, and we are left to conclude that Soren’s flying into the ribbon with a ship had a greater chance of him being united with a hull breach or an exploding conduit rather than reunited with his family.
Come to think of it; it’s not impossible that some of those other recorded encounters may have involved Soren in some way. He did say he spent 80 years looking for another way, and he may have tried experiments…
Also, touching on your comment @143 about the Federation knowing about the Nexus; they knew about the ribbon, and tracked it enough to know its path. But what more would they do about it? Space is big and the ribbon is relatively small; the chances of it hitting a planet are remote, and ships can simply go around it if they know about it in advance. It was probably easier for the Federation to track its movement and issue travel advisories when it passed through an inhabited sector.
154. Andrew Crisp – “Space is big and the ribbon is relatively small; the chances of it hitting a planet are remote, and ships can simply go around it if they know about it in advance. It was probably easier for the Federation to track its movement and issue travel advisories when it passed through an inhabited sector.”
Then what the heck were the two transport vessels doing so close to it? They’re carrying refugees and they decide to go have a look see? It’s not like they’re science vessels and even if they are, it’s not the time to go check out something that the Federation is tracking.
And who’s to say that the ribbon won’t be even more destructive to a planet or someone standing on it?
152. JanaJansen – Kirk only gave it up once he realized it wasn’t real. If it had been real, would Kirk refuse to help Picard?
The whole “It’s like being inside joy” is sold as this really, really hard thing to get over and yet Kirk and Picard shrug it off in a single conversation and never mention it again. It’s like being told the big boss at the end of a video game level is almost unbeatable and you take him out with a single punch.
@155/kkozoriz: Sure, if it had been real it would have been even better. But it’s still better than the plot you suggested.
Picard and Kirk never mention the Nexus again because they’re busy fighting Soran, and then Kirk is dead, and Picard isn’t the type to tell Riker about the strange experience he had.
In a way, the Nexus is like the ultimate drug experience. Eternal happiness in exchange for real life with real people and real consequences. This kind of thing isn’t equally attractive to everybody. A bunch of traumatised interstellar refugees may be especially susceptible.
@155 kkozoriz: Probably for the same reason why fishing vessels get caught in storms or airplanes get caught in downdrafts – bad luck. As you said, they’re transports, not science vessels — I doubt they have the sophisiticated sensor equipment or science officers to detect the ribbon (much less understand the danger the ribbon posed) until they were practically on top of it, and by then it was too late.
The Enterprise B encounter was probably the first time the Federation discovered that the ribbon even existed (recall that when they put the ribbon image up on the screen, not only did the bridge crew not recognize it, but three Starfleet legends with more experience than the Enterprise B Crew combined didn’t recognize it either). After this encounter, the Federation would have kept an eye on it, so by the 24th Century any starship tied into the Federation’s networks would know about it and when to stay away.
Is it possible the El-Aurian refugees were so willing to accept the artificial joy of the Nexus because they had come directly from the destruction of their planet and the assimilation of most of their race at the hands of the Borg? Logic dictates that a large number of them would be suffering from severe depression and survivors guilt, so the Nexus would help them forget that. Perhaps Soran was unable to save his family from assimilation and the Nexus gave them back to him. Regardless of how artificial they are, they would be all he has since he has proven that he cannot let go and move on.
@158/Jason: Well, they didn’t come directly from the destruction of their planet — again, they were from the Delta Quadrant, so it would’ve taken decades for them to make the journey. And they were in Federation ships at the time of the Nexus incident, so those must’ve been the latest of many different ships that had carried them along various legs of their long journey.
Aside from that, though, you’re on the right track — wandering the galaxy as refugees for decades, unable to find a home, would not be a very pleasant existence, so the lure of the Nexus — where they could relive their memories of their long-lost home and families — would be very strong.
@159 And judging from the way Guinan was acting in the Mark Twain episode, the El Aurians were galactic 1%ers. Can you imagine an upper middle class American family now living like Syrian refugees? The lure of returning to that level of social grace, even as part of an SF drug trip, must be overpowering. Who can blame them for wanting to just go live in Nexus land.
There has been some discussion about how easily Kirk and Picard resist the temptations of the nexus and I have to agree that it made the movie less compelling for me.
I mean, the scene between picard and Guinan was so good, With all of the “you’re not going to care about this ship you’re not going to care about anything except staying in the Nexus” yada yada. How long does it take Picard to want to get out of there, 20 minutes? And Kirk, all he needs to do is to be able to make a leap with a horse that doesn’t scare him, and hes out of there. I understand these are our heros, And I have read all the rationalizations from people as to why they would be less tempted, but again: For me the big tease of the movie is Guinan’s Ominous Warning. She knows Picard, and even she thinks hes not going to be able to resist what the Nexus offers. But again, both Picard and Kirk get there, and it doesn’t take them more than a few minutes to get over it. For me, that just makes the movie a bit meh.
@160/random22: I don’t think that follows. The average middle-class person’s standard of living in modern America would be seen as upper-class luxury to most peasants throughout history. By the same token, the average schmo’s standard of living in a post-scarcity interstellar society would be beyond the dreams of avarice to a 19th-century American. So you can’t assume that Guinan is “elite” by galactic standards just because she’s able to dress up for a party in 1890s San Francisco and hobnob with intellectuals. By her standards, that might be tantamount to trying to impress a village of medieval peasants. Heck, the greatest human geniuses of that era probably knew less than your typical warp-era citizen learns in grade school.
161. fullyfunctional – Exactly! Guinan makes it out to be this irresistible feeling and the big attraction is shrugged off like it was just a dream. And not even a “Boy, that was a cool dream. I’m going back to sleep so I can hopefully get into it again” sort of thing. It’s just “Oh, that was mildly interesting. <Shrug> What’s for breakfast?”
Apparently having a duty to Starfleet is the only thing that can break the spell of the Nexus. If you’re not a Starfleet Captain, good luck getting out.
157. Andrew Crisp – And yet Data says this –
“DATA (OC): According to our information, the ribbon is a conflux of temporal energy which travels through this galaxy every thirty-nine point one years. It will pass through this sector in approximately forty-two hours.”
That’s a little over three times a century. Surely somebody would have noticed it in the centuries that the various species have been toddling around. It would have been around about six times since Archer was Captain. And the Vulcans and others have been warping around the galaxy for centuries before that. And it totally slipped past everyone?
They needed it to be predictable (in order for it to link up with Kirk and Picard) and also unpredictable. Predictable so Soran could alter it’s path and unpredictable so it wasn’t obvious. It’s a Mcguffin and a fairly poor one at that.
Hey folks! I did two conventions in two weekends, both very exhausting, and I spent yesterday dead for tax purposes. The rewatch of the 2009 Star Trek should go up tomorrow….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@163 kkozoriz: Slipped past everyone? Possibly not. But… Astronomical discoveries can be screwy. Consider:
The first Kuiper belt object – Pluto – was discovered in 1930. The second Kuiper Belt object? Discovered in 1992. Also, while Clyde Tombaugh rightly got the credit for the discovery, Pluto had been observed by other astronomers at least 14 times between 1909 and 1930, with nobody realizing what they’d found.
The search of extrasolar planets is full of false starts through the 19th and 20th Centuries, with predicted planets at Barnard’s Star, 61 Cygni, Van Maanen’s Star, and elsewhere all coming to naught, until the the discovery of two rocky planets orbiting a pulsar in 1992, followed by a Hot Jupiter orbiting 51 Pegasi two years later.
SETI found several candidate signals for alien transmissions starting with the “Wow!” Signal in 1977. None of those signals ever repeated, and to this day, remain unconfirmed and likely flukes.
Now keep in mind that all of these examples deal with deliberate searches, with at least an educated guess of what to look for and where. When it comes to the unexpected, blind luck is sometimes your only guide. For example those same SETI searches yielded the discovery of pulsars, a then-unknown object and decidedly not the point of the search. There are probably a large number of other discoveries laying buried in already-collected astronomical data, waiting for someone to come along and look the data over from a unique perspective.
It’s easy to imagine the discovery of the ribbon likewise being obscured. A race detects the ribbon, say by telescope, but by the time said race can get around to looking for the ribbon again for confirmation, it’s gone. After all, with an orbital period of 39 years, that ribbon’s going to cover a lot of territory in a short period of time. A number of races probably have it listed a “Transient Energy Phenomenon” or something; a curiosity, but nothing special. It’s also helpful to remember that, especially before the Federation came to be, most races were not sharing data freely, which would further frustrate any chance of someone taking all of these observations and connecting the dots.
The Enterprise B encounter was probably the trigger for someone to perform a rigorous search; after all if it could almost take down a Federation Starship, it’s something that bears watching. This search would probably also include any archival data from member races and allies. After that, the ribbon’s orbital behavior – and very odd behavior it is, as nothing can orbit the galaxy in just 39 years – could be pieced together, and subsequent observations can fine-tune its trajectory.
(At which point, I’m sure someone will point out that Star Trek has super-duper sensors and warp drive and why doesn’t someone just check out those earlier sightings? Perhaps they did but lost their ships – and really, by the time we drill down to this level of nitpicking, it gets tedious.)
Actually, do they ever say it orbits the galaxy or do they say passes through this part of the galaxy? What Data says is “According to our information, the ribbon is a conflux of temporal energy which travels through this galaxy every thirty-nine point one years.”
It could simply be pogoing up and down through the disc.
The rewatch for the 2009 Star Trek should go up tomorrow. Technical difficulties prevented it from going up today.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
i was in my early teens when I saw first this movie. I hated it then and still hate it. It’s so full of plot holes, so rediculous in spots, that I wonder how it even got on the screen as is.
The way they killed off Jim Kirk? Back then all of us kids agreed it was a travesty. Granted we were very young, but we all shared a vocal, angry, and deeply outraged sense of injustice at the way Kirk was killed off. After everything Captain Kirk did for the Federation, he deserved better….
of course now I know that heros don’t always die grandly, or well, but the young me is still in there resenting that death of my hero, Captain Jim Kirk.
Ps. We all also agreed that the Nexus and the character of Antonia made no sense…I still think that.
Aweful movie!
My gripe about Kirk’s death has always been that it wasn’t spectacular enough. Kirk may have got the heroic death he deserved, but fans didn’t — especially considering it’s the climax of a major motion picture. Three old guys fighting on a catwalk might work for a 1960s TV show, but not a 1990s movie featuring the death of the (second?) most iconic character of the entire franchise.
@169/scottmiller: Different fans like different things. I would have hated it if it had been spectacular. One of the reasons why I like Star Trek so much is that it feels real, and its characters feel like real people. In real life, people just die. They don’t get spectacular death scenes. For me, Kirk’s death scene was perfect because it was heroic and down-to-earth at the same time.
@170/JanaJansen, You are correct that different fans like different things. But I think most fans at least want a movie to feel bigger than a TV episode, and they want the climax of said movie to be the biggest part of it. Generations went out with a whimper, which exacerbated the issue. Compare that with TWOK, in which Spock had a down-to-earth death during a spectacular climax.
@171/scottmiller: I’m with Jana. James T. Kirk was never meant to be a larger-than-life Flash Gordon space hero; he was meant to be just a guy doing his job. Look at the early first season of TOS and there’s a palpable feeling of mundaneness, a sense that these are regular people going through their everyday routine that just happens to be in space in the future. The idea was to de-glorify and de-romanticize SFTV, to get away from the larger-than-life cartooniness and take a more grounded, naturalistic approach, at least with regard to the characters if not the situations. The movies got too much away from that and embraced a more melodramatic approach, and the myth of Kirk as some grandiose figure of legend caught on in fandom despite the original intentions of the character. I was glad that GEN didn’t fall prey to that exaggeration, that it let Kirk be just a man.
I still say the biggest failure of Generations was failing to put any sort of human face (for want of a better term) on the inhabitants of Veridan IV who Kirk died to save. There was a cursory line of dialogue of it being inhabited, but where was the actual human connection with them? It almost felt like an afterthought them saying that there was an inhabited planet in the Veridian system at all, just to have an explanation as to why they didn’t let Soran just get on with it and pick up the Duras sisters later. If they were going to kill both Kirk and the much beloved Enterprise-D in the name of saving those people then they ought to have given us a connection to them.
random22: I don’t think that’s the biggest failure, because just the fact that the population of Veridian IV exists should be reason enough. (To give a counterexample, we never saw the Rigel colonies in “The Doomsday Machine,” but their being in danger was reason enough for the Enterprise and Constellation to try to stop the planet-killer.) I think the much bigger failure was in not putting a human face on Soran by doing such a piss-poor job with the Nexus. Soran’s willing to commit all manner of atrocities to get back to the Nexus, and we are never given any sense of why that’s such a big deal. That would’ve made the film more effective.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@174 From a moral point of view, yeah, totally that it exists is enough. And even on a tv episode it would be enough because you’re essentially dropped right in it and can run full speed at the problem before hitting the reset button for next week. For a movie, especially one which is killing two huge icons, there needs to be more. There needs to be a connection there, and there wasn’t. It was all a bit abstract.
[Edit to add:
Plus I don’t really think those colonies mattered in The Doomsday Machine either. The episode delivered based first on the mystery, then on the horror of the fate of Decker’s crew, then on the real threat of Decker having gone totally Janeway and putting the Enterprise in danger as he sought revenge. That was where it delivered its emotions. A better example is, of all things, from the Animated series with One of Our Planets is Missing where the colony is under threat from the cloud and Bob Wesley the commander there keeps updating Kirk on how screwed they are from the surface, how they are going to die, how they are trying to scrape up enough ships just to evacuate the kids and oh god please help us. It made the silly threat of the week a serious threat.]
I mean, imagine if the Veridians were more like mid 1960s humanity, that there was one of those first contact teams on the surface, that the Prime Directive was blown out the water by the Klingons and Soran arriving in the system, and that the contact team were delivering updates to Picard saying how there was mass panic turning to sheer horror as these Starships hung overhead and then their sun blew up and were wiped out, then Picard finds himself in the Nexus. Even have Picard see the explosions in the sky of the Duras ship and the Enterprise stardrive, and see the saucer fall. We’d have a link to Trek heritage in acknowledging its 1960s roots, we’d have a bunch of people we could sympathise and empathise with depending on our heroes, and we’d have a visceral reaction to all that death that happens on the first failed attempt. We’d understand the urgency behind Picard trying to gain Kirk’s help, we’d be almost begging ourselves as they raced the clock to prevent that launch again. We wouldn’t just know the stakes, we’d feel the stakes. We’d have a proxy for our own helplessness as the Veridians are helpless audiences in-universe just as we are in our seats.
I’d like to have more on Soran, but I’d liked to have felt more emotion during the climax.
@172/ChristopherLBennett, To each his own in regards to Kirk. I’m merely pointing out that not every gripe about Kirk’s death is in regard to how “good” a death it was. But I stand by my statements about general audience expectations for a relatively big-budget SFX major motion picture: it needs a powerful climax and Generations didn’t deliver. If it had, there would have been far fewer complaints about Kirk’s death, even if the circumstances didn’t change. The ending felt underwhelming, so Kirk’s death felt underwhelming, so plenty of fans felt that Kirk deserved more. I count myself among them.
@176/scott: I agree that a lot about GEN’s plot was underwhelming, but concluding that it’s because Kirk’s death wasn’t some huge explodey action-hero spectacle is misdiagnosing the problem. That wasn’t the part that needed to be fixed, certainly not in that way.
@@@@@177/ChristopherLBennett: “GEN’s plot was underwhelming, but concluding that it’s because Kirk’s death wasn’t some huge explodey action-hero spectacle”
My conclusion is the opposite of that. I’m saying that the climax needed to be “some huge explodey spectacle”…or at least spectacular in some way because we just watched the freakin’ Enterprise crash land on a planet and the climax of a story is supposed to top that! But it seems you are equating Kirk’s death with the climax of the film. The climax is when the conflict is resolved. The conflict was not Kirk’s life, so his death cannot be the resolution. The conflict is Soran’s attempt to destroy a star (and planet); Kirk’s death is merely a part of the resolution. But since the conflict was underwhelming and the resolution was underwhelming, it made Kirk’s death feel like less than it should have been (and let’s not forget that Kirk got lucky that the controller fell directly in his hand, or he would have died for nothing, which made it feel even less satisfying). I mean, imagine if Kirk ended up dying in some piddly-ass episode like Plato’s Stepchildren. What would it matter how appropriate the circumstances were? I think a lot of people would feel that did not do the fans (or the character) justice. Generations is not a big step up.
Consider that one of the reasons Spock’s death was so memorable was that it happened at the end of such an exciting film. And I believe (though I have no proof) that one big reason they ended up bringing Data back in the tie-in fiction was that, despite the heroic circumstance, Nemesis was unworthy of his death. Well, Generations was unworthy of Kirk’s.
@178/scott: I don’t agree that the climax of a movie needs to be the most spectacular part. It needs to be the most dramatically potent part, and that often means going smaller and more intimate and character-driven, after the big flashy spectacle is out of the way. Serenity is an example; Captain America: Civil War is another. Generations tried to do that too, to get the spectacle out of the way and then go for a more intensely personal climax. It wasn’t wrong to do it that way in principle; it just didn’t work out as well here as in those other movies.
Anyway, your position seems to be unusual. I was addressing the attitude many other people have expressed over the years that Kirk’s death itself needed to be more grandiose and melodramatic, the kind of heroic death he “deserved.” As if a worthy death were a matter of how flashy and exciting it was to watch rather than the motivation behind it.
I really like this movie. It’s not great by any stretch, but it’s a decent film overall.
I absolutely agree that Kirk didn’t need some “heroic” death. Death is not heroic, it just is. The actions that led to Kirk’s death certainly were heroic. And we certainly didn’t need to see the Veridian IV inhabitants to somehow justify Kirk’s sacrifice. Kirk didn’t need to see them; just knowing there were millions of people whose lives were in danger was enough for Kirk to act. If that’s not heroic, I don’t know what is.
Oh, and Data pushing Beverly into the water is…really funny. It’s just too funny, especially as Beverly knocks Worf back into the water to boot. Damn, Enterprise crew members, humorless much?
For me, the unforgivable thing this movie does is kill off Robert and Rene. It really upset me when I first saw this movie as a snot-nosed 14-year-old and it upsets me even more as an adult. I mean, I’m Robert the family man and my younger brother is Jean-Luc the adventurer. That relationship was so real, and I loved Jeremy Kemp’s performance in “Family.” And the writers kill off these characters for no good reason. THAT I’ve never forgiven in twenty-three years.
I was, and ever will be, confused by Picard saying that was the end of his family line. I mean, I get he’s a captain of a certain age, but there is no male equivalent of menopause. So he’s one hundred percent sure he’ll never, ever, ever decide to retire, get married and have some kids? Never ever? That scene is just a splinter to me, sticking out and hurting my brain
I keep saying this movie or that movie is “not a favorite.” I agree with krad, that Star Trek is just not suited to movies. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be Star Trek: First Contact.
@180/Dante: Picard never considered himself a family man. It was established from the start that he was no good with children. Before, he was able to reconcile that with his concern for his family lineage because he figured that Robert had the heredity thing covered, so Jean-Luc didn’t feel he was letting the family down by his lack of interest or proclivity for parenting. But once Robert and Rene were killed, that left him as the family’s only hope for continuation, and he couldn’t easily change his lifelong assumption that he was unqualified for that burden.
In the tie-in novels, he and Beverly are now married and have a son, but that happens 9-10 years after this movie. It took him a while to get to the point where he could see himself as a parent, even after living as one for half a century in Kamin’s memories in “The Inner Light.” (Indeed, I wrote the novel where Picard and Crusher decided to start a family, though that was at my editor’s bidding. Coincidentally, I also wrote the novel where Riker and Troi decided to start a family… and the novel where their daughter was born. Which has always struck me as odd, since I don’t consider myself much of a family man either.)
@181/CLB, I am so happy to hear Picard and Beverly put finally FINALLY get together. I don’t usually “ship” characters very much, but that was a union that needed to happen, if for no other reason than I want those two people to be happy. It’s another novel of yours on my list. :
@182. Yeah but then they break up when Bev is promoted to Captain of a ship that looks like a sex toy with warp nacelles, and Picard develops dementia like his ancestor Charles did.
@182/DanteHopkins: Well, Picard and Crusher actually got together a few books earlier in Death in Winter by Michael Jan Friedman. The novels skipped over their actual marriage — it took place between Peter David’s Before Dishonor and my Greater Than the Sum — but there was a later eBook novella that covered it, Q Are Cordially Uninvited by Rudy Josephs. And there have been a fair number of subsequent TNG and crossover novels over which their married life and parenthood has been explored. I think their son Rene is about 5 in the most recent novels.
@183/random22: The “All Good Things…” timeline was diverged from as soon as the E-D was destroyed in Generations, if not as soon as Picard told his friends about its events at the end of the episode. And of course there were further divergences in the movies including Riker and Troi getting married and Data being killed. AGT merely represented one possible future, and it’s not the future we’ve gotten in the movies and books.
Data’s uncontrollable emotions drive him to thoughts of deactivation, or a kind of suicide. Picard’s speech to talk him down is effective, until he starts barking about duty. A botched moment in the script, I thought.
Another observation about female drivers; the Enterprise B had Demora Sulu at the helm, and Troi held the wheel of the holodeck Enterprise. Neither of those crashed.
@185 Yeah the Ent-B ramming into a space-time whatsit was what kicked off this movie, I guess helm control skills skip a generation. I suppose Troi did manage to not ram anything on a stationary vessel in the open ocean, with a trained (holo)crew manning the sails and computer controlling the conditions anyway. Yay, empowerment.
Still, I suppose Troi only crashed the ship into something once.
I already commented on the other Star Trek Generations review but basically it’s a heavily flawed movie that was rushed into production, but since I first enjoyed it as a kid, I still enjoy it today.
The other thing I will note is that so much of the important stuff happens off screen. Picard’s family (who only appeared in 1 episode of the show) die off screen. Captain Kirk’s girlfriend that was never mentioned in any of the movies or TV shows doesn’t actually make an appearance in the film. We know nothing about the planet of 300 million people that will be destroyed by Soran nor do we ever see them.
Also, I agree that Riker did appear to make an honest mistake with Worf. And then Data was funny by pushing Dr. Crusher off, but for plot reasons I guess they had to make everyone pretend that it wasn’t funny. I think the emotion chip plot works. I don’t see why everyone hates it.
Apparently, one idea for the film early in development was to have a conflict between the crews of the original series and TNG. A Kirk vs Picard plot. But they couldn’t figure out a way to have them fight but both be correct (afterall you can’t have either side be the bad guy). So they shelved it and the best they could come up was this Nexus plot.
@150 and 159: Hi there, Christopher (or anyone else)—I’m wondering whether the El-Aurian homeworld was established (canonically) as being in the Delta Quadrant. Granted, I’m relying on memory of multiple rewatchings of the series, but I can’t remember any explicit mention of that. I remember Picard’s exchange with Guinan about her people’s having been in “this part of the galaxy,” referring to the area Q hurled the Enterprise to, near System J-25. I always assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Guinan’s homeworld would have been in that region of the galaxy, even though that 7,000-light-year distance surely wasn’t far enough away to be in the Delta Quadrant. Though if their homeworld really was in the Delta Quadrant, they’d probably have had to pass through the J-25 area en route to Federation space in Generations—so they had “been there” at least for a time, even if only temporarily.
I see some sources (Wikipedia and the Expanded Universe wiki) stating that the homeworld is in the Delta Quadrant (with Wikipedia giving DS9‘s “Rivals” as a source; I also flipped through that script and didn’t see any discrete mention of the Delta Quadrant. Have I forgotten something?). But neither Memory Alpha nor Memory Beta makes that assertion—both are vague on where the El-Aurian system is. That’s what makes me wonder whether it was ever stated on screen.
I’m woefully behind on the tie-in novels, and if that’s where that fact took hold, that’s fine. With the time since the Borg destruction of the El-Aurian homeworld, and their long life spans, it certainly could have been far away. But it makes me curious why refugees would then make a generational journey to Federation space instead of simply finding some place to resettle that was far enough away from the Borgified part of the Delta Quadrant without being all the way to Earth. I know the species was scattered across the galaxy, and maybe this is just another instance of that. Thanks in advance.
@188/Gabe: Hmm, you may be right. Star Charts does put System J25 in the Beta Quadrant, in a sort of local “island” of Borg territory well removed from their main territory in the DQ. So it’s possible El-Auria could be close to there.
@189/Christopher: Hey, many thanks for the reply. I need to get that book: I had never heard of it, and it looks to be a great resource.
I’m not sure why so many people are having a hard time understanding that there is a difference between something being funny in-universe and being funny out-of-universe. That distinction is not a difficult concept.
Let’s say I went to a birthday party in a park with a pool, and whoever’s birthday it was had to do a stunt on the diving board that risked him falling in. And let’s say he succeeded, and then you shook the diving board so that he fell in anyway. And then let’s say I just went up to a woman standing near the pool and shoved her in. Isn’t it really really obvious here that what you just did and what I just did aren’t the same thing?
@@@@@191/Daniel B, The problem is that we aren’t used to having to differentiate between in-universe and out of universe. It’s rare that we watch a comedic scene and a character says it isn’t funny. Sure, they may clearly think it isn’t funny. Their reaction is probably even a part of the humor. But the writers don’t get in the audience’s way of enjoying the humor.
If Geordi had said anything other than what he said — if he’d just shook his head, or asked Data why he would do such a thing, or whatever — I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.
I always think of this film as being like one of those silly Doctor Who stories where multiple Doctors meet up. They’re usually not the best-written stories, but they are fun just because you get to see two or more of your franchise heroes interacting. Other than that, there is admittedly not much here, but I thought it was fine overall.
From a purely slapstick point of view, Data pushing Crusher into the water was actually kind of funny. As for Riker’s miscue, I have to ask, how is “remove” the plank much different than “retract” the plank? If the computer retracted the plank, wouldn’t Worf be in danger of stumbling and falling into the water anyway? And for that matter, why did Riker suddenly decide to get the computer to auto-retract the plank. When he wanted the plank extended, he had the other crew members manually extend it, why the difference. But alas, I’m just nitpicking. I actually rather enjoy the sailing ship scene. The movie itself I’ve always rather liked too, despite its flaws.
@194/Thierafhal: Riker didn’t actually intend to retract the plank and say “remove” by mistake. That was just his facetious excuse for his prank after the fact.
@196/CLB:
Hmmm, I always thought that it was an honest mistake by Riker and that was part of the humor of the situation. But your clarification makes far more sense and makes Data’s miscue more brutal
But still funny
You wouldn’t retract the plank while someone was standing on it — more efficient to wait until they’ve walked back on deck — unless you wanted them to fall in the drink, so even if Riker did mistakenly say “remove” when he meant “retract” his intention was the same.
I get why the lighting was brought way down, and the moodiness is quite appealing in spots, but it’s so unbelievably dark at certain points like when Picard’s looking through his photos.
The funniest moment in the whole film might not have been intentional: Lursa says “Fire at will.” Smash cut to Riker on the bridge of the Enterprise…
It was neat to see Jae — she of the close-cropped black hair, played by Tracee Lee Cocco — at helm. Continuity of extras and bit players throughout the series and into the films was appreciated, even if more of them with dialogue would’ve been nice.
Just what kind of propulsion did Soran’s rocket have? Not only is the sight of the Veridian sun blowing up evident from the planet too quickly in terms of how long it would take light to reach their eyes, but time from launch to contact is ridiculously fast.
@197/Arben: “Just what kind of propulsion did Soran’s rocket have? Not only is the sight of the Veridian sun blowing up evident from the planet too quickly in terms of how long it would take light to reach their eyes, but time from launch to contact is ridiculously fast.”
See my thought on that in comment #2, first paragraph.
@197/Arben, Great point! One of my ongoing personal jokes whenever someone says “Fire at will” in movies is to think, “Gee whiz, what did Will do now…?!” LOL.
@197 & 199: If I recall, in one of Peter David’s New Frontier novels, the Enterprise-D crew guest stars, and there’s a whole plot situation that puts Picard and Riker at odds on different ships, all building up to the point where Picard must grudgingly give the order to “Fire at Will.” Knowing Peter, I bet he developed that entire plotline just to set up that pun.
@2. ChristopherLBennett: “See my thought on that in comment #2, first paragraph.”
I almost quoted that to springboard from as my question was specifically aimed at the rocket’s journey to the sun. Even with a distance of much less than one AU you really have to buy a missile of that size being capable of at least very-near-FTL speed and cheat the visual for drama. Which, you know, is not the biggest deal in Trek canon but still bugged me.
By the way, I finished The Captain’s Oath the other day and highly recommend it to anyone seeing this. I’ve only ever read a small handful of Trek novels, and none in at least twenty years, but this whet my appetite for more. While prose narration of a Trek story took some getting back into, Christopher / CLB / Mr. Bennett does an excellent job of capturing Kirk’s voice and mannerisms, and on top of reflecting many of the points he’s made about the man in comment threads here the story is just, well, quintessentially Trek. I would suggest reading it in chunks as large as possible, because for me at least the jumps among three distinct time periods were hard to follow when I returned after having to put it aside for life reasons.
@200: I seem to recall he does something similar in his contribution to the Double Helix miniseries, where Sela says something like “That is Will Riker. I have waited a long time to give this order. Fire at Will.”
@202/cap-mjb: That’s not just something similar, that’s the very thing I was trying to remember. You remembered it much better than I did.
Regarding Picard’s inability to carry on his family line, Q has a line about how the Borg are “neither male nor female”, so it’s always been my headcanon that he was sterilized during assimilation. I suspect that this headcanon is about to be refuted if certain rumours about the new season of Picard are true.
@200. ChristopherLBennett: “Knowing Peter, I bet he developed that entire plotline just to set up that pun.”
Given that he wrote Dolphin into Aquaman just to use the story title “Single Wet Female” — and let us not forget the brush with Death — it’s a good bet.
My kids and I just finished watching TNG for the first time (for them, obviously not for me) as go through Trek in more or less chronological order, starting with TOS. It’s been fun switching back and forth between TNG and DS9, and it probably will still be fun (though less so) to switch between DS9 and Voyager with the TNG movies interspersed.
This movie came out around my 7th birthday, and my parents took me to see it. By that point, I had watched STIII and IV on VHS probably several dozen times, and Kirk was my absolute hero. I was inconsolable when I left the theater, and for months afterward my older brother would use this movie to get a rise out of me.
All of that is to say that I hate this movie, I always have, but as an adult I have found new reasons to fuel my hatred that I think are a little more rational than my childhood trauma.
The biggest is that, as KRAD kind of said, Paramount apparently considered the movie an afterthought to the series finale. This movie should have been given the attention and budget that TMP got so that it could be made into a full crossover TOS/TNG film with both Enterprises working side-by-side to counter whatever threat they concocted.
That being said, even working within the framework of what we actually got, there are just a lot of failures to go around. I totally get that Shatner just wanted an excuse to do some horseback riding in this film, but I will never for one second believe that “being inside joy” for James T. Kirk puts him anywhere but the bridge of the USS Enterprise. It would have created a great throughline from the prologue where he’s on the bridge of the Enterprise-B, especially if you follow it to its logical conclusion and have him die on one of the bridges of the Enterprise-D. It’s where Kirk belongs, and where he is at his most heroic. You could keep most of the rest of the storyline intact with these tweaks. It also solves the problem of how Generations ruins one of the best moments of STV by having Picard there to witness Kirk’s death.
I have plenty of other criticisms as well (the music is like a good episode of the series, but is completely missing the actual TNG theme), but I think I’ve sufficiently demonstrated my dislike.
But it is funny to think about how Picard S3 made Jean-Luc’s reaction to Rene’s death kind of pointless in retrospect.
@207/Chase: “I will never for one second believe that “being inside joy” for James T. Kirk puts him anywhere but the bridge of the USS Enterprise.”
I don’t think that’s true at all. Kirk was driven to command, yes, but I wouldn’t say it made him joyful. It was often portrayed as a burden he wrestled with, a grave responsibility that weighed him down, isolated him, and left him deeply lonely. He struggled with the weight of having to decide who lives and who dies, and he was haunted by the many people who died under his command (at least when the show bothered to depict it). We saw as early as “The Naked Time” that in his heart of hearts, he yearned to walk away from the responsibility and find “a beach to walk on” with a loving companion. We saw that made manifest in “The Paradise Syndrome” — his time as Miramanee’s husband was the happiest we ever saw him. Also to an extent in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” where he fell in love while he was away from his command and was tempted to shirk his responsibilities in order to be happy. It was perfectly in character that he wished he had stayed with Antonia rather than going back to Starfleet.
Kirk found fulfillment in command, but he certainly didn’t find joy in it, not the kind of pure, Edenic, uncomplicated joy the Nexus offered. That was the whole point of the film, really, and the same point TOS often made — that when Kirk was offered a haven of pure joy and serenity, he walked away from it because of his duty to others. He sacrificed joy to be in command. It wasn’t something he did for his own happiness, it was something he did on behalf of everyone else, no matter how much it cost him.