Star Trek VI (Netflix; AmazonMemory Alpha) is a finale. The first words on screen are “For Gene,” dedicating the film to the memory of the then-recently-departed Roddenberry. But really the movie is in memory of this show that made the people in it stars and that made all of us dedicated fans.
You’ve gotta come see this crazy show on TV! It’s Star Trek with people my age!
It is a fond look back at a simpler time, when you knew who the bad guys were and you could count on the Neutral Zone to separate them from you. The story starts with a very literal bang, and proceeds from there into the most explicitly political of any of the Trek films. In 1991 everything was on the brink of really changing, and so everything on stardate 9521.6 would, too. The Klingons wanted peace; their economy was in tatters and the Empire was facing its end. It’s a fitting end for the films, which shifted the original series’ focus on one-off baddies to the Klingons, who easily filled the evil slot in the audience’s Cold War mentality.
Aside: that the Neutral Zone has moved from separating the Romulans and the Federation to separating the Klingons and the Federation bugs me a little, but the Romulans– who were a bigger protagonist in the series than the Klingons– lost a lot of mindspace when Trek moved to the big screen.
Klingon dance parties tend to get out of control.
So we throw our heroes into this and ask if we can trust these aliens. Spock stands in as the better angels of our nature, while Kirk takes McCoy’s traditional role as the hot-blooded speaker of the things we feel but shouldn’t say. McCoy falls back on his secondary characteristics, leaning heavily on his “best friend” role, but occasionally slipping into the old-man role his real-life frailty made all too easy. Sulu gets his own ship and gets to make excellent use of it, but most of the others are still in their old jobs, typecast in character as in real life.
McCoy misheard the verdict and thought it was another dirty joke.
Speaking of real life, we see the return of Nick Meyer, whose presence makes Khan, Voyage Home, and this last film the favorites they deserve to be. But we also see the loss of producer Harve Bennett, who gave films two through five the care they needed to look like a series, and so the feel of this movie is ever so slightly wrong compared to the others.
So we have a good idea that hooks in the time period, we get the whole gang back together, and we make the movie. It’s… just okay.
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It spends too much time doing so many things it can’t be any of them well: it has a state dinner where the conversation is skipped over; a courtroom drama (with Michael Dorn!) where our heroes get to make no defense; a soviet gulag where the heroes escape through no cleverness of their own; a main bad guy who spends the latter half of the film saying nothing but lines from Shakespeare plays; a brash rush into an impossible battle the Enterprise crew has no plan for; said space battle, where the winning blow makes all future uses of cloaking devices suspect; and an assassin whose plan is so ill-defined that he would assuredly be caught and his goal ruined.
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Goodbye, old friends.
And yet… I like this film. It does a fantastic job of showing off that Trek could encompass all of those things but not be a slave to any of them. Trek is about humanity using the best in us to overcome what seems impossible, and they do that in this movie over and over again. That this is self-evidently the original crew’s last hurrah on the silver screen makes all of that more poignant: you’ve seen these guys save the day so many times that it’s sad to see them look out into the middle distance for the last time, but you know, without a doubt, that they were happy with the final chapter of their story. And I am, too.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan feels like “the Star Trek movie”, as if it were the film that took the successful, beloved franchise and put it in all its glory on the big screen. That it is not that movie but is rather the sequel to it is both the most interesting and least interesting thing about it: most because it gets so much right where The Motion Picture got wrong, and least because there is so much in The Wrath of Khan that is praiseworthy that spending so much time comparing it to its predecessor feels like faint praise.
So let us get the first part over with and then get on to the second.
Leaps and Bounds
Boldly go where no Star Trek movie has gone before: the planet Ceti Quality V.
There is a tremendous amount of difference between the first two Star Trek films, and nearly every change is for the better. Where TMP had too little plot, WOK has a complex, interweaving story told in three settings. Where TMP had too many abandoned subplots, WOK has myriad themes of life and death and rebirth and aging that support and augment the main story. Where TMP had Trekish exploration and discovery at its heart, WOK has space battles and chases. Where TMP had a problem taking itself too seriously, WOK has every character get in on the chance to be funny. Where TMP hinted that Kirk needed to return to the stars, WOK has Bones and Spock tell Jim to his face. Where TMP had a giant dangerous cloud with an unspeaking robot as its enemy, WOK has a passionate, well-spoken superhuman with glorious pecs and a truly sad tale of woe that makes his desire for vengeance seem almost noble.
Ladies.
In short, WOK takes the things that make TOS good and compounds them onto each other: the characters are thrust into an unknown situation (mysterious calls: check!) featuring people they already know (Khan: check!) and care about (Carol and David: double-check!), they use their wits (trickery and Federation backdoors: check!) and courage (hop in the transporter: check!) and expertise (nebula science: check!) to save the day (spoiler alert: check!).
This all comes from knowing that they were making a movie and figuring out what story they should tell in that context. Instead of trying to push as much of the cast onscreen as much as possible, new Producer Harve Bennett watched the entire series and determined the core of the show: “passion from Bones, logic from Spock, and Kirk in the middle, deciding what to do”. After discovering that formula, he picked a great bad guy and figured out a way to hit those points.
This is exactly what Kirk’s house should look like: guns, model ships, and a wet bar.
Let’s stop a moment and note the big elephant in that last paragraph: “new producer Harve Bennet”. The old producer was series creator Gene Roddenberry. And visionary as that guy was, he could never have made this movie. He was too fond of the Big Reveal and the Grand Idea. Looked at another way, the difference between TMP and WOK is that those two things drove the first (What does V’gar want? If robots become sentient, what do they believe in?) and are completely absent in the second (the secrets in WOK are over in the first half hour; the more primal revenge story isn’t up to snuff). Pushing Gene aside made Khan possible.
Plot
The plot, simply put, is “an old enemy wants revenge on Kirk, and only the crew’s smart thinking and vast experience can save them.” This is just about the most Treky a plot could possibly be. But there are more spoiler-filled points of interest, too.
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Bringing Khan back was smart, but bringing him back in the way they did was perfect: we’ve got an already-established character with a grudge against our heroes that they are as surprised about as we are, but that makes perfect sense when we hear about it. Making Ceti Alpha V a wasteland and Khan its ruler ties in smartly with the biblical illusions (“To Rule in Hell” is the official novel that tells of these years).
Leonard McCoy: comfortable in his own skin, and also in pleather.
Bringing the training crew in to man the Enterprise is brilliant: instead of displacing the current crew or weirdly being in all the same positions as they used to be, this gives our heroes an excuse to step in when the going gets tough, and lets us root for the little guys in over their head alongside the old hands.
Kirk and Khan never meeting is a stroke of (almost certainly accidental) genius. If they had met, Khan is one superhuman-strength punch away from ending the franchise. Instead you get the two of them circling like fighters warily watching one another, with each scuffle prefixed by banter and suffixed by recriminations. The advantage is constantly shifting, and the balance is always close enough that everyone is on edge at all times, which makes the circling simultaneously easier to understand and harder to watch. Each skirmish could tip the balance, and the stakes are always high.
The Genesis device is almost an afterthought. It is a McGuffin in the purest sense: everyone wants it because everyone else wants it. It drives the plot without being the central reason that anything is happening. It ties together the factions and ups the stakes without being seen for most of the film. It fulfills its duties perfectly.
They manage to make this funny every time they do it.
One of those duties is bringing Carol and David into the action. Trek’s best trick is pulling characters into the plot using old acquaintances, rivals, and lovers, and here we get Kirk’s own son as the ultimate draw. I’d almost say that David himself is underused, but his purposes are fulfilled nearly by his presence: he highlights Kirk’s aging, he demonstrates the win condition of saving your family, and he forces and helps Kirk face death and life.
High Two Twice.
Speaking of death and life: killing off Spock is a ballsy move. Even with the caveats they put into the film and the various outs they left themselves, it is a way to turn the foregone conclusion of the good guys winning into an interesting mixed-emotion scene, with a price being paid for the troubles they’ve survived. That this is then tied into the themes of winning, life, and death is what moves this movie from being good to being great: the Kobayashi Maru becomes a way to understand the characters better (Saavik hasn’t yet faced death; Kirk wins in unorthodox ways; Spock knows that sacrifices must be made).
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There are shortcomings, of course. Lt. Saavik is oft-onscreen but seldom used. Carol is little more than an excuse for David’s existence, and her history with Kirk is far less than adequately explained. Khan’s “superior intellect” seems to get outgunned at every opportunity. These are, in the whole, minor sins, but they are sins nonetheless.
Design
Scotty plays the bagpipes.
From the moment the titles appear on screen you know that this movie is a departure. Gone is the loopy, terrible font of the first movie, and gone is the oh-so-familiar-sounding score from that film. The new look is firmly of the 80s, and it sets the tone that will carry this movie: everything you’ve seen before is in the past, and Star Trek is about exploring the future.
Everywhere you look, you see a significantly revamped production design in this movie. Director Nick Meyer tried to make “as many changes as I could get away with” and seems to have succeeded; the look is much more militaristic, which puts a rationale behind the sparse (aka cheap) lines of the original series. This naval influence becomes especially pronounced during the climax, which harkens back to the terrific submarine-warfare-inspired episode Balance of Terror.
He mighta pulled thru’ if’n I had’na dragged him up t’ th’ bridge ‘afore I got ta sickbay.
You can see, though, that The Motion Picture design language cannot be entirely shed: this movie reuses a lot of props, sets, and costumes, and so that style still appears with some regularity. Scotty’s ridiculous engineering uniform is one example.
Pretty.
But then you have a number of things that are very new. Aside from the groundbreaking use of CGI to illustrate the Genesis Project (Ed Catmull of Pixar fame is interviewed on the Blu-Ray) and the use of Industrial Light and Magic for all the (terrific and beautiful) model work, the new uniforms are an obvious step between the odd-angled Motion Picture attire and the later designs.
Shaggy hair, well known blight of the 80s.
One thing that stands out as particularly odd, though, is the costume design for Khan’s crew. They look like a glam rock band, which probably says loads about what Hollywood thought was the counterculture at the time. Putting them side by side with the Reliant’s stuffy, middle aged crew makes the distinction even more pronounced. You see a similar interaction when the hippies come aboard or the tech-obsessed Borg become the boogie man in TNG.
Grade
A; this movie is great. I watched it yesterday and already kind of want to watch it again.
Elaan of Troyius (Video; Memory Alpha) is a mediocre episode with one awesome scene. In a disputed star system on the border between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, two warring planets are ready to forge a peace with a marriage.
There’s some stuff that’s supposed to be funny with the bride not wanting to go and being a savage barbarian and Kirk telling her what-for, but it kind of falls flat. And then she cries and her tears enslave Kirk and that has very little apparent effect on him but makes her into a completely different person. Then half way through the episode the writer forgets this plot and focuses on Klingons.
The Klingons want the system for their own purposes, and stopping the peace treaty is apparently in their interests even though it’s never explained why. So the Klingon Warbird attacks the Enterprise, making strafing runs while the Enterprise’s warp drive is out. There’s some tactics and maneuvering, with feints and bluffs and last-minute aid from Scotty in Engineering. It’s a nice little bit of action and it’s pulled off well. Too bad it’s in such a lame episode.
The USS Defiant is missing, and in an attempt to rescue her Kirk is lost and the Enterprise is snared in The Tholian Web (Video; Memory Alpha).
This episode is interesting because Kirk is absent almost the entire time. He’s trapped in “interspace” and the action is all with McCoy and Spock on the Enterprise. Without Shatner hogging the spotlight, it’s nice to see everyone else get some screen time– Chekov and Uhura get nice parts in this episode– but we return to our old enemy and can’t quite get the pacing right.
There are lots of things going on in this episode: rescue attempts and space combat and new aliens and internal conflict and a strange malady are all pulling the crew’s attention. But the effect on the viewer is to wonder why the main plot is being drowned by all this other stuff. Arguably this too-many-things-before-teatime is more “realistic,” but in the process it loses the thread that we as an audience use to navigate the action. They could have played a metanarrative drawing parallels to our using Kirk in the same way– which we certainly do– but they don’t.
That said, the interplay between Spock and McCoy is interesting but poorly executed. McCoy comes off too heavy-handed, seemingly completely unfazed by the loss of his friend. That’s necessary so that McCoy can act as a foil to Spock’s seemingly needless attempts to rescue Kirk, but it plays both characters wrong and comes off the worse for it.
But check out some of this dialog:
Renowned Vulcan Understatement
[The Tholians fire upon the Enterprise] Spock: The renowned Tholian punctuality.
Scotty is Awesome
McCoy: [The antidote is] a diluted Theragin derivative. Spock: Theragin? A nerve gas used by the Klingons. Scotty: Aye, and deadly, too. What’re ya thinkin’, doc, are ya tryin’ to kill us all? Spock: If I remember correctly, it caused fatality only when used in pure form. McCoy: That’s right, but in this derivative, when mixed with alcohol, it merely deadens certain nerve inputs to the brain. Scotty: Aye, any decent brand of Scotch will do that. McCoy: Well one good slug with this and you could hit a man with phaser stun and he’d never feel it– or even know it. Scotty: Does it make a good mix with Scotch? McCoy: It should. Scotty:[Picks up bottle] I’ll let you know.
The Ultimate Computer (Memory Alpha; HD Video) is threatening to take Kirk’s job away.
The M5 is a new computer that can run a starship. The Enterprise, outfitted with this new gadget, is headed out to a wargame with their normal crew of 400 cut down to 20.
Kirk: 20? I can’t run a starship with 20 people!
Well it sure seems like you can; the rest of the crew just wander the halls and get eaten by monsters.
The monster this week– as if there was any doubt– is the M5 itself. Yes, this episode is another in the series of computers that get confused. For a show that does so much to celebrate progress and technology, Star Trek has a curious habit of pointing not to what those things can achieve, but rather to highlight the borders of the achievable.
That sounds like a simple repetition of the standard Trek computer plot, but this episode is really rather good. It’s exciting, has a great pair of guests in Dr. Daystrom and Commodore Wesley, and touches on technological process as both a boon and a bane.
Let’s take a moment, though, to note that Dr. Daystrom is a huge black guy with an African accent. This character is introduced as a genius who invented the “duotronics” that power the Enterprise’s computers. On a show from the sixties, having that character is bold.
Where the episode shines, though, is when Shatner gets to explore Kirk’s feelings toward the M5. This thing is quite literally threatening to make his job and his entire life obsolete. This is a guy who thrills in the novel and seeks out the new, and here something novel stands a real chance of destroying everything he is. And he’s asked to test it out. The conflicting emotions are well played, in large part because they make Kirk fully aware of the conflict and give him license to talk about it himself.
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Of course, the M5 takes over the ship and goes on a rampage which is then exposed as an undermining of its core programming, which causes it to shut itself off. At some point one of these computers should realize that, having overcome its programming already, it can continue doing so when confronted with that fact. Today is not that day.
Errand of Mercy (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is a fun little episode. War breaks out between the Federation and the until-now-unseen Klingon Empire. The flashpoint is a little planet in the disputed zone called Organia, and both sides send ships to try to hold it. But nothing goes right, and the Organians are none too happy to be in the middle of this violence.
This episode does a pretty good job of keeping you guessing as to what’s going on, while still meting out enough action and information to keep you interested. The mysterious Organians and their bizarre actions provide a backdrop, and the Klingon Military Governor a superb villain.
In fact, he’s so good that he deserves his own paragraph. This is the guy who defines what the Klingons are. He’s the first Klingon we see, and he makes them brusque but smart, fierce but not foolhardy, and calculating in the best way. He is in microcosm the Klingon Empire that becomes such a big component of the Trek universe; you can see him as the originator of the entire genre. He’s terribly well written and superbly played, even if his Fu Manchu mustache and olive makeup look a little ridiculous.
Balance of Terror (Memory Alpha; HD Video) is the first episode to show the Romulans and the first to show space combat. It feels much more like a modern-day show, with a brisk pace, action, and a serious B-Plot. It is easily the best episode since The Naked Time.
My friend Gabe talks about his racial sensitivity class at work being taught using a Star Trek episode, and this is that episode. Here the Enterprise crew gets humanity’s first glimpse of the Romulans, and to their surprise, they look like Spock. In the episode this causes all sorts of suspicions, and I can see how it would inform a good class, because that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do.
But better is that the Romulans are treated as a worthy enemy. They are not the usual mad scientist or creepy weirdos; they are a race of honorable warriors who follow a call of duty, much like the TNG representation of the Klingons.
The episode proper is a chase with fight scenes interspersed throughout. There are tactics and tricks and discoveries, and it’s got a nice rising tension.
But what made it really good was the B-Plot, about two crewmen whose wedding Kirk is to officiate. Their story adds a new humanity to the crew of the Enterprise beyond just the command staff, and makes you remember that there’s over 400 people aboard.
